"You are on Janika's Home Page! Please read on..." janika's Profile

It is my greatest pleasure to offer you a World of travels on Virtual Tourist dot com.
I am trying very hard to share as much information with you as possible.

I like meeting interesting people from around the Globe and learn about different cultures and languages. My current home town is Ottawa, Canada, but my heart is in Budapest, Hungary. My favorite activities are Photography, Fishing, Travel, Computers and cooking. My favorite color is green. I am currently 210 Lbs and almost 6 foot tall (179-Cm). My favorite way of traveling is train. My favorite airport is Amsterdam International. Home of KLM. If you have any aditional questions, please don't hesitate to ask me in a message.

V I D E O S - V I D E O S ! ~ Please check out my newly added videos. More to come as time permits...

In the water at Rabbit's Island, Lampedusa (Italy)

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the VT members who viewed and rated my pages. I don't have a whole lot of travel pages yet but I am trying to update the existing ones.

We can never travel as much as we would like to. I understand that people have busy lives and they don't always have time going through pages and pages of info and images. I appreciate the effort VT members make to come here at all, besides their busy lives. I also would like to thank the people on my friends list. They do a lot for me and I never forget about them. Please inform me as soon as possible, when you have a new page up. I'll go and rate it at my earliest convenience.

Janika at the Zsolnay Fountain, in Pecs, Hungary

In case you are wondering how I rate your pages, here is a brief intro to my methods:

I like original pictures. If you have an original image with a description and a phone number or URL, I will rate the chapter 5 stars ( ***** ) Scanned postcards and borrowed images are ok as long as you specify the credit of the photographer. Picture alone with no description will get a 3 star ( *** ) rating. Brief, one paragraph description with no picture at all will also get a 3 or 4 star, depending on the lenght and content ( **** ). Well written paragraphs with lots of info, phone numbers, URLs will get a 4 or 5 star ( ***** ) rating if there is no picture present. The same description with an original and related image will always get a 5 star ( ***** ) in my book.
I also rate pages with remote locations high. Those are the places not too many tourists go and I know it is very hard to travel to those places. Countries like Africa, Middle East, Asia, like Mongolia, Siberia, etc.

If you write a negative comment about a place and you don't back it up with a good explanation and / or a picture, I will rate your chapter 2 stars, ( ** ).

I hope this overview of my rating methods will come handy to other, newer members at VT. Happy surfing! Cheers....

Standing by a giant in Nevada, USA

Pros and cons of the World, through my eyes. I've mentioned a few things I like in life in my first, intro chapter.
I would like to expand that in here, plus let you know about the thinks I don't like much.

Things I dont like:
#1 Injustice
#2 Discrimination
#3 Pollution
#4 Urbanization
#5 Crualty
#6 Being taken advantage of
#7 Violence
#8 Banks
#9 Insurance companies
#10 Corruption

Things I really like:

# 1 Traveling
# 2 Peace
# 3 Nature & animals
# 4 Quiet
# 5 Fishing
# 6 Cooking
# 7 Meeting new people
# 8 Art
# 9 Food
#10 Computers & Internet
#11 Comfort
#12 Sports
#13 Photography
#14 Classical music
#15 Nice cars

If you have any questions regarding the above list, please drop me a line. Hope to seeing you on my pages. Cheers!

Garden flower

Now here is something different.

I love nature, animals, plants. Including flowers. No matter if they are garden or wild flowers.

Thanks to Geisha-Girl and my love of nature and flowers, now I have a Hawaiian name: "Onaona Kaimi" The fragrant seeker)

My parents had a little garden last summer and I toke some flower pictures. I have posted some nice ones in the gallery below. They are at your disposal and feel free to use them for your home page or just a desktop wallpaper. That's if a lower resolution 640x480 pixels ok for ya. You still need a permission from me to use any other images from this account! To see more flower photos click Here

Canadian cash & a bank card

CHC = Cold Hard Cash or Plastic?! That's the question. What to take with you when traveling to other places? When you travel in North America, take plastic! No question about it. When traveling to any other place outside North America, take C A S H - Learn it from me... Take your credit card with you, but always, always take cash as an assurance. Cash is accepted everywhere at every time! I know plastic is convenient and safe in instances. Some folks swear by Traveler's Check. Out of the question. I just talked to someone who took travelers check to Romania and they wanted her to wait 6 weeks for the money. This was in a city where every block down the road had a foreign exchange office. Interesting eh?!

North Americans are spoiled by Credit and debit cards. At the same time banks make billions of dollars on interest and service charges! Don't give them the pleasure... They get rich on you and me. I also know that in some countries retailers accept cards and you find ATMs. Let's face it, you can not count on those ATMs! Even in North America you see more and more places with the sign "Cash Only" or for example the video store down the street from us "No Bank cards. Cash Only" My hairstylist stopped taking Interac too. They take Visa & cash only. No MC, no Amex and no Discovery. Is it a co-incidence?!

A few tips on cash: Never ever show it! Hide it on you and sort it out in your pockets. I usually have the largest bills in my pouch. Some bigger bills in one pocket and change in my other pocket. This way nobody know how much you have. Do not show Dollar, Euro, Pound or any other valuable currency in restaurants and smaller retail places. Have the country's own currency. In many countries it's normal to charge you more when paying with heavy currency like US Dollar. I take dollar with me and when I run out of the state's currency, I exchange 1 or $200- in a major financial institution. When I run out again, I exchange again. When I have any left over dollar, I bring it back. This way I am not stuck with tons of foreign money that might worth nothing in a few years. Hope I could help. Happy spending...

Dinner at Mangia restaurant, Ottawa, Canada

Here are the awaited images from the Ottawa meeting.

Date: August-16, 2003. We sure had some fun time! We met at the front yard of the Parliament Hill, right by the flame. (See picture in VT meeting album) We talked and toke some more pictures of the MP guy on horse. After this we just walked around downtown Ottawa and Hull. Laura found it very fascinating how quick we can get from one province to the next on foot. :) More picture takings happened at the Civilization museum. There was a wedding going on there. Actually two weddings. The girls pointed out the bride's made purple dresses. It was neat. After this we walked back to Ontario on the Alexandria bridge. Some more browsing on the Byward Market where we saw many interesting people and Laura had a chance to purchase some more post cards. Later on we signed those so she can send them out to other VT members. The store owner kept her in forever by talking to her. :D Brandon talked about life in Scotland and we learned how useful it is to dress like locals in Africa. Thanx for the great tips Laurie-Ann. Patrick and I noticed a lady guest at The Fat Tuesdays restaurant & pub with an instant veggie smiling right out of her jeans. (No picture of that) Some New Orleans style hospitality eh. :)) Brandon smiled as well. It was amusing while we settled in there for a well deserved drink.

After all this we moved over to Mangia where we had a reservation. Thanks for Brandon's hard work organizing the whole thing. Dinner came soon after and the rest of the members showed up one by one. Some members never showed and never called. Including some local folks. We still had fun. Lou kept us entertained at the end of the table and Mark had a lot to say at the other end. Ken was kind of going back and forth. For dinner we had these foods: Pasta, Clams, Chicken, vermouth, Beer, Coffee, Creme Brulee, etc. Yummy stuff. Laurie -Ann left early and shortly after Mark left with Andrea. They have children. On this picture you see on the right side in red: Lou, after her Laurie-Ann, than Patrick than Andrea and Ken in green. On the left side Janika, that's me. Besides me is Laura from Toronto. Thank you for the effort, coming up for the meeting and surviving the black-out of 2003. Besides her Brandon, than Mark at the end. The evening went well and we had some more fun after the restaurant.

Great experience. Thank you all for coming. I had a fabulous time and so glad we met. Looking forward to the next meeting. Check the VT meeting album for more images! Cheers!

Janika at Vorosmarty Plaza. Budapest, Hungary

This paragraph is not intended to fully expose my personal life in any ways, however there is one thing I would like to share with the rest of you.

Besides having a life and doing so many things, I also have to endure a condition called: Tinnitus. Some of you folks already know what I am talking about and some of you have never heard of it before. Tinnitus = ( T ) is a medical condition. It is a ringing, hissing sound in the inner ear. It is not contagious. Very uncomfortable and unbearable at times. T can be triggered by many things. It is very hard to diagnose what is the cause of one individual's T. Presently there is no know cure for T. There are many on-line resources on the Web where you can learn about it and there are many places where they promise a guaranteed cure for T. As I mentioned there is "No cure" for T! Those so called clinics and therapies are all phonies and most of them only provide temporary relief and no permanent cure for your T in exchange for your money. My T intensifies when I am under stress or at a noisy place. T can be in one or both ears. I only have it in my right ear. Usually T comes with some level of hearing loss and or vertigo. When T hit me in 2001 January, I also had a severe vertigo and I lost hearing in my right ear completely. The hearing came back in my ear but not completely. I am unable to detect high pitch noises like water flow or beeps or whistles. From a result of this my left (good) ear became over-sensitized and now has to do the job of two. The two ears (Left & right) are centrally connected in the brain. What does this mean. It means I have to keep my left (good) ear plugged in most of the time to avoid loud noises. My left (good) ear is so sensitive for high pitch noises, it can detect sounds I never heard before. For example crunching a plastic bag or thin-foil. Not to mention water flow with pressure out of a faucet.

As long as it is quiet around me, I can stand my environment without having my ear plugged in. You can read about Tinnitus and related facts here. This is Dr. Nagler?s Tinnitus Site and it provides many good tips and information on how to endure T and what kind of effect it has on one's life. I thank you kindly for reading this paragraph and understanding my situation. I am trying not to let T come between me and my love of life and travel.

"In the vast plain to the north I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever gone"