The Taelemans´ Blog

After a week of seclusion from the internet, we’re back from a week of snowboarding in Kitzbühel, Austria, fully charged to face 2008. I must say, one thing we did not expect of Kitzbühel was the eliteness level. Half of the women were dressed in fur coats, the average car was a Porche Cayenne and only 1% of the people on the slopes were snowboarding…

During our visit, we stayed at Hotel Edelweiss which proved to be a very nice hotel, located about 500 meters from the Hahnenkammbahn.

As my last picture post of 2007, I’ll leave you with a panorama night shot of Hotel Edelweiss in Kitzbühel and the surrounding mountains/slopes. This shot was merged together from 6 different shots. I suggest you click the picture if you want to see a larger sized version of it (choose “all sizes” above the picture in Flickr), or click here the see the resized version (the original is 10026×2286, which wasn’t convenient to see through a browser…)

Have a happy new year!

Recently I realized I had never taken any pictures from the city where I actually spent most of my time, so I decided to take my camera this weekend to bring some change in this, but I didn’t manage to take a lot of pictures. I think I’m gonna try to go to Ghent somewhere in January just to take pictures so I can take my time

For now, enjoy this nighttime view of the Lys river, running through Ghent and a shot of the Friday Market featuring the Jakob van Artevelde statue.

On a side note, I decided to switch back to my Flickr gallery for image hosting/posting as Gallery2 seems to require too much maintenance and time to get it the way I want… Maybe I’ll try to do something with it later on, such as a “best of” or rather a “best try of”. Another reason for the switch back is due to the introduction of the Flickr Stats, which is one of the reasons I switched to Gallery2 in the first place.
The only thing I’m still missing in Flickr is the possibility to limit the maximum view size of guests to the large size, and make the originals only visible for friends, but I’ll have to learn to live with that for now.

Today I noticed that it has been more than a week since we wrote something… I hate it to visit blogs were nothing is posted for a very long time.

Since we will be in Austria next week, the blog will remain untouched for about a week.
This weekend we visited the Christmas market in Ghent, so pictures will follow soon.

Actually I’m looking forward to going on a trip to Austria. We planned to snowboard, to visit Kitzbühel, to celebrate Christmas Eve, to shop and to visit Neuschwanstein.

The Neuschwanstein castle is located in Germany, near Hohenschwangau and Füssen in southwest Bavaria. The palace was built by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as a homage to Richard Wagner, the King’s inspiring muse.

There is one things that not a lot of people know about the castle, it has served as the inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland. Besides that it was a finalist in the selection of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

I’ve been there before, but that’s a long time ago, and actually we are hoping to see the castle covered with snow.

After that, we will be going home to spend New Year’s Eve at home with some friends, and of course Freggels (who we will have to miss for more than a week).

Oh and because people asked us for more pictures of Freggels, here are some out of our archive.

Haven’t had a lot of time to post this week and I haven’t been feeling well lately, I guess the flu which is circulating at work finally caught up with me… So just a quick post before the weekend starts.

This picture shows the traditional wooden stalls on the Christmas market in Cologne, selling delicacies like various kinds of jam.

Have a nice weekend!

Yesterday we went to Köln together with some friends to visit the Christmas markets.

Each year, Christmas markets spring up around Germany in the weeks before the holidays, signaling the beginning of Advent. Every city in Germany has it’s own Christmas market, offering traditional German handicrafts, local delicacies and traditional products. You can find some useful information about the markets in Cologne on this page: http://www.stadt-koeln.de/en/koelntourismus/christmas/index.html.

This picture was taken right outside of the Christmas market at the Kölner Dom. Since I didn’t bring a tripod with me on the trip, I had to improvise. Luckily I found this great tripod-trashcan which allowed me to make a long exposure picture.