Once again, it’s almost spring by the time I’m posting last year’s flashback. A ton of things happened in 2019. One thing was that I did not do a lot of photography work, taking less jobs but also not really working on personal work. Mostly, because I was really busy with what has become a full-time job by now: sourcing, roasting and brewing coffee for the small coffee roastery I started with my brother Dennys: Drip Roasters.

We visited Paris during the record-breaking heat wave last summer. The day before we took the train from Bern to Paris, we received a reminder by email to bring enough water. We were pretty much boiling in the city when it reached an all-time high temperature of 42.6° celsius. Two days later, the temperature dropped by 20-ish degrees. Despite the heat, we had an amazing time, drank too much wine and Chartreuse and ate too much great food.

A few months ago, Seraina and I travelled to Istanbul. We had been looking forward to this trip for quite some time, even before we had planned it. I had been to Istanbul once before, close to ten years ago and I had really liked it back then. We stayed at an airbnb in the Cihangir neighborhood, which is situated between Taksim Square and Karaköy. The area was great, the apartment was beautiful and cozy, and good coffee was nearby. We were expecting great food in Istanbul and that was what we got.

Bombay was the final stop on our trip to India. Still recovering from food poisoning, we took a flight from Kochi to the megapolis. We spent a lot of our time in Bombay with our friend Priya, whose place we also stayed at. She took us to lots of street food (and other) places, which was challenging since we were still recovering and not feeling all too great. Yet, we were glad to explore new dishes we hadn’t tried or not even heard of before. Bombay definitely felt cleaner, more modern and also more Western than Delhi or most of the other places we’d prior visited.

Leaving Rajasthan, we took a bus to Ahmedabad. We had a flight to Kochi the following day and only had about half a day to spend in Ahmedabad. We used it to eat lunch at a branch of Swati Snacks, which was surprisingly awesome, drive around the city on tuk-tuks, visit the Gandhi Ashram, where we met lots of green parrots, and ended the day with a great Gujarati thali in a rather fancy setting. The next day we flew to Kochi and I got food poisoning.

On we travelled to our next two Rajasthan destinations: Jodhpur and Udaipur. Palaces and forts everywhere in both cities, this being the land of kings and all. Jodhpur, the «blue city», wasn’t as blue as expected, yet very nice. Except for a trip to Mehrangarh Fort and a visit to a market, we mostly moved about in a rather small radius around our accommodation, which was situated close to the Toorji’s Step Well in a really nice area with many shops, cafés and restaurants nearby.

We left Rishikesh a little too late, had to wait a little too long for the taxi to arrive and there was too much traffic, so we missed our overnight train to Jaipur. Stranded in Haridwar, we managed to find a travel agent who booked us on the next train back to Delhi and on the first train to Jaipur the morning after. So we ended up in Delhi one more time and got to spend the night at a hotel instead of a train, which wasn’t too bad after all. Jaipur was the first of our three stops in Rajasthan.

After Delhi and the Taj Mahal, we hopped on a train and enjoyed a comfortable train ride, followed by a rather uncomfortable and very scary nighttime taxi ride, to Rishikesh, a place that became very popular around the world when the Beatles joined an ashram here in the late sixties. Today, it’s known for its countless ashrams/yoga academies as well as a very spiritual place in general, lying next to the «World’s most sacred river», the Ganges.

We’d had the intention to travel to India for a few years and last December we did so. We stayed for a month and started our trip in Delhi, which, looking back on it, was probably the most chaotic and intense place we visited. Yet, we didn’t experience a huge culture shock. Many things like traffic, piles of garbage/plastic next to train tracks, bad air quality were a little more intense than in pretty much any place we’d been to before, but I guess we came prepared.

Another year has flown by and once again, I’m late with my flashback sort of post on here. I haven’t been photographing much lately. Instead, my focus was on another project-come-business of mine: Drip Roasters. I started a coffee roasting company together with my brother Dennys, which means we pretty much worked day and night to get our coffees to taste the way we wanted them to and to start a company and create a brand from scratch. But this post isn’t about the last few months only, it’s about 2018. And I did a good many other things in this crazy year, too. As anticipated, I did spend (much) more time traveling compared to 2017. A little too much, […]