Kati | black.white.vivid.

My Suitcase Packing Tips

06/28/2014 by Kati | black.white.vivid. 1 Comment

I am leaving Monday morning for a two-week trip to Seattle and Vancouver. Usually around this time of the year I pack for a warm and exotic summer vacation. Since I now live in Hong Kong and we have reached top temperatures and humidity levels here, I have to re-think my packing process. Less summer dresses, more sweaters and long pants.

Thanks to my many travels I have a routine when I pack, no matter if it is only for a few days or a few weeks or even a whole year. I have traveled and lived in a few countries that I believe I know what is necessary and what is a nice-to-have item in my suitcase. So, I have compiled my best tips….

Travel Guide to Sydney

06/23/2014 by Kati | black.white.vivid. 11 Comments

Beginning of this year Felix and I went to Australia for 2 weeks. Coming from Hong Kong and haven’t been and lived in a western environment for about a year, Australia felt like a fresh breeze to us. We immediately feel in love with the fresh and warm (but dry) summer air and the healthy and oh so yummy food. Our journey was two-split. We spent a week in Sydney staying at a friend’s place and one week in Melbourne and surrounding. It felt like we saw half of Australia because each day was full of new impressions and crammed with sightseeing tours. In the end we realised that we only traveled maybe 5% of the country. It is a place where we will definitely come back to soon again as there is so much more to explore….

A Sunday in Hong Kong

06/22/2014 by Kati | black.white.vivid. 8 Comments

This is my first try for a video, so please bear with me. I promise the next videos will be better. I just wanted to share some moving pictures of Hong Kong on a Sunday today. I have to admit that today’s Sunday was fairly short. We didn’t get up until 1.30 p.m. as we stayed up to watch and support the German football team and that went on until 5.30 a.m.. Somehow I managed to be at the most inconvenient places time-wise during the previous two World Cups. In 2010 I did a summer university program in Seoul in South Korea and I live in Hong Kong now. The earliest game starts at 12:00 a.m. and the latest at 5:00 a.m., so you either stay up longer or you get up earlier. Anyhow, during the weekend this is not a huge deal but it requires some serious commitment during the week. But we should not talk about next week or Monday or any work day. Let’s enjoy the rest of Sunday!

Wanderlust // Myanmar Part II

06/02/2014 by Kati | black.white.vivid. 12 Comments

In one of my last travel posts I showed you some of my Myanmar photos that I took during a six-day vacation to one of the most amazing places in the world. I usually use two means of photography, my DSLR and my iPhone. Shame on me but I often prefer the small and handy iPhone version as I like to keep it in one of my pockets where I have easy and quick access to it. This way I can just snap a scene and upload it immediately to Facebook/ Instagram or send it to my family. So also in Myanmar when streets were extremely sandy or you just didn’t want to carry the extra weight at 45 degrees (Celsius) the iPhone came in quite handy. And even though good lighting is needed for the pictures to turn out well, it made some really nice quality shots of Yangon, Lake Inle and Bagan….

Wanderlust // Myanmar

05/27/2014 by Kati | black.white.vivid. 10 Comments

I have been looking forward to this moment for a few days now because this is going to be the first of a series of personal travel posts.
Since I got my new MacBook Pro last week, it is so much easier and faster to download pictures from my camera, sort them and edit them. The only difficulty left is the selection process. On my recent trip to Myanmar I already did some sorting on the plane and came home with only 150 photos. However I found it still difficult to pick my favorite ones for the blog. So I decided to show you a selection from my dslr as well as my iPhone. Today I would like to share the first part – the dslr selection – of my photos from Myanmar.

As Rydyard Kipling once rightly said: ” This is Burma. It is quite unlike any place you know about.” Having traveled to 50 countries I couldn’t agree more. Wanderlust is my elixir of life and I will never get bored of discovering new countries, exploring new places and meeting new people but with the addition that there are exiting and interesting travels. Myanmar does definitely belong to the exciting ones. We went to three different areas in Myanmar- Yangon, Inle Lake and Bagan. Todays post shows you a small selection of my dslr photos from Yangon and Lake Inle. Photos of Bagan will follow in a post with iPhone photos of Myanmar. If you do have any questions about planing a journey to Myanmar or if you would like to see this kind of information in a future post, please let me know my email/ facebook or in the comment section. In the meantime enjoy the first impressions of one of the most wonderful countries in the world, Myanmar….