CyrilHH's VirtualTourist Home Page

Lemme just cater to one of the common cliches about Germany: the u g l y German. He even made the headlines in the summer of 2003 when the Italian undersecretary for tourism spilled his guts and badmouthed about the fat ugly Germans infesting Italy each vacation season, thereby prompting our not so slim but verrrrrrrry handsome Chancellor to cancel his summer vacation in Italy. He spent it on "Balconia" (i.e. in his hometown Hannover) instead. Double self-punishment. Poor sucker. It tells you something about the low self-esteem we Teutons hold ourselves in .... (in the same vein: next pic!) but also confirms another cliche that we are commonly confronted with: no sense of humor!

Whether those stereotypes are true I will let you make up your own minds about. As with all cliches on national character (not just abot the Germans, mind you, think about cheap Dutch, dirty French, foxy Danes etc.), I guess they are true and false at the same time, so take them with a smile on your face and with a grain of salt if you can handle it. Of course an outright black or white cliche is so much easier to go by...

Hey y'all: Glad you made it through the above somewhat random intro (which, btw, tells you a lot about me, if you care to let your hobby psychologist talents play)

Since I dubbed this the "personal page", I guess this is the time to show myself off a bit: I will start with an untouristic pic of me. I stumbled over this cheerful graffito ("Germany: die!") in the northern town of Luebeck close to Hamburg - a beautiful hanseatic city filled to the brim with gothical brickstone-built churches and patricians' homes - and I really had to insist that my "openly" Germanophile friend Miguel snap a pic (Summer 2000, but in Northern Germany u can't always tell the season).

Real travel pics to come with time and on the travel pages.

Happy trails, everybody!

Well, this one takes us to a quainter setting and to more benign light: just a blissful afternoon at a not so adventurous destination: Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos in Castilla-Leon, Spain, where the monks do Gregorian chants every day (trip along the Camino de Santiago, Summer 2003, more of that: see my travelpage under construction).

Wonderful place - the trouble was that some of the local worshippers in church absolutely wanted to join in the chanting. Oh well, I guess their spiritual urge overrides my desire to listen to the real thing.

On a beach on Formentera Island, Spain, Summer 2000. Actually, that place was unique, since it had the sea on both sides of the beach, one side calm, one side with beautiful waves, just 50 meters apart. A perfect site to escape to from the subwoofers of Ibiza (not that those are so bad either, at times).

I just love those Mexican handicrafts (see intro picture). Actually, I love Mexico (see page in the making).

Mexicans show a great sense of humor in blending their strong catholicism with a very hearty paganism. Well actually, they seem to believe less in Christ than in the Virgin of Guadalupe - alias "Lupita".

I would love to return to Mexico on Dia de los Muertos, the fascinating pinnacle of this morbid folklore. Patzcuaro in Michoacan in South-Western Mexico is the place to go for the most authentic graveyards revelry, skull candies and paper-mache skeleton figures. I went there in 2001, but at the wrong time of year.