Mauritius

Being a flight attendant is a quite a cool job, says my friend Olivia who works as one. She can go to so many different places on the whole planet, spend some time there and earn money. What a dream! She works at Edelweiss, and there they don‘t just go to many cool locations but they can also spend a couple of days there. She invited me, only a few weeks ago, to join her to go to Mauritius, an island next to Madagascar in Africa. She has already been there once.

After an eleven hour flight to this small island, the whole crew went to our hotel called Tamassa Resort in Bel Ombre. It‘s a lovely place next to the ocean with lots of activities like watersports, a spa and a great buffet. But in the end we did not spend that much time there; we wanted to see more of the whole island. After a day of spa and walking on the beach nearly missing dinner, we hired a bike on the second day to go to Le Mourne, a mountain in a nature resort. It was about 1 1/2 hours with the bike one way. The landscape was really lovely, but the fact that the weather was not that nice and it rained every half hour for a short period of time made the whole trip far more interesting! It was a constant guessing when we could stop to take some pictures, even take out the drone to take some aerial pictures or if it was going to rain again soon!

The moment we arrived at a sports centre that was located it started raining extremely hard and we had to seek shelter. Whilst asking for some water by the locals who were working there they told us that the rain wouldn't pass that quickly, it could be raining for several more hours! 
And then we were asked by the guy who gave us some water if we would like to join him on a little boat tour because he had to drop his friend off at the other resort. So we had the free opportunity to get on a speedboat ride, which was totally amazing! The rain hitting our backs felt a little bit like needles though.
After cycling about half an hour we made it to a little restaurant by the road where we ate lunch. A local curry with chickpeas and some sweet fruit! Delicious!

For our last day in Mauritius, we were thinking about going to Port Louis, the capital city on the other side of the island. First, we wanted to take a bus, but that would take about two hours to get there and the buses were not that great, but then we stumbled upon a TripAdvisor link that leads us to a local cab company where one could hire a cab driver for an entire day for only around 50$.
I think it was the best idea we've had during our stay in Mauritius, because not only did he drive us around the entire island, he also showed us a lot of awesome places like this Hindu-temple in the mountains with a sacred lake:

He also showed us some lovely viewpoints and around the city!

Klangschaften

Yesterday evening I had my matura-presentation. The Matura-Project is the final project you do as a high school student and which counts like any other mark in your degree paper.

In the past weeks, I've worked quite hard on these two "Klangschaften". The word can be translated to "soundscapes", but that is already a thing. Klang means sound and the term "Klangschaft" should make an association with the word "Landschaft" which means landscape. The project itself is also restricted to two landscapes, one is my school which I attend at the moment "Kantonsschule Wettingen", and the other one is based on  Baden, the town I live in.

All the sounds, without any exception, are recorded at these two locations, then edited in the Music-DAW Ableton Live 9.

You can watch both of the projects in This YouTube Playlist.

And feel free to share them with others who might be interested in such projects.

Autumn comes to our school!

Last week I helped my school to get some cool drone recordings for their KSWE-News. They turned out really nice! You can watch the video here (It's in Swiss German, but you can watch some of my footage ;)

I also took some images of the yellow and orange trees. It just looked lovely!

More video footage of our school for the school-news!

Here I have another video with some drone footage of our school garden. Last week the news guys from our school asked me if I could take some shots for them:

Other than that there was not so much going on this week. I had some presentations in school and quite a busy week learning for exams. But soon we'll have summer holidays and I will have a lot of free time again :D

Creux du Van

A long weekend with a lot of stuff to do! Besides loads of schoolwork, my parents, a good friend and I went hiking to Creux du Van. We took an early train on Friday, first to Zürich to pick my friend up and then via Neuchâtel to Noiraigue. It's a really tiny but pretty village in the Jura, the mountains in the north of Switzerland.

There we started our hike, and we were not alone! Many others also walked up that mountain to see the spectacular view! It's a natural wonder, The Creux du Van is a natural rocky cirque. Many years ago it was created by natural water erosion from a local glacier and still looks magnificent!

I need to add that it was also the perfect place to take pictures with my drone! My friend also had a drone with him,  and we filmed a lot. I've still got some editing to do, but I'm sure that the video will be awesome :D

Dronin' around school!

I was asked by the school if I could take some more drone pictures. Of course I'd do that :)

So this wednesday on my free afternoon I took some pictures after I visited my friends from my internship at the university in Zürich which was really nice too!

I also took some cool pictures of the cool clouds today, it looked so cool! The immense contrast between those clouds and the bright, enlighted landscape was so lovely!

We also had a lovely barbecue with some friends one evening where we talked a lot, ate grilled marshmellows and had a really good time :D

Cookin' in Saint Ursanne

After the week I've spent in Ligerz singing all day long one might think "well, now he's clearly done enough camping for this holiday". Well, no. I went, again, for half a week into the Jura. It's a french part of Switzerland in the north-west. The camp was in St. Ursanne, a gorgeous small village in the middle of the mountains, but unfortunately the weather wasn't as gorgeous as it was in Ligerz. Lots of rain, snow and hanging around indoors. But it was a lot of fun too and I think I levelled up in chopping vegetables ^^

On Thursday our new music group "Upright" also had the first performance at a Royal Slam. Here's the Link to the videos ;)

And finally, yesterday, I went onto a little boat trip in Interlaken with two good friends of mine. It was a lot of fun, we talked a lot and had a great time :D

There, too, I took some pictures ;)

One week of Monteverdi!

Spring has sprung, at least during the past few days I've spent in the choir-camp of our school. It was such a blast! On one hand we had to practise our Monteverdi for nine hours a day which was a pain sometimes, especially for voice and back, on the other hand we also had quite some free time which we spent outside playing Frisbee, lying on the grass on the lakeside or jammin' on one of the many pianos which were just standing around in the house :)

One really early morning I went up the hill to capture the sunrise with my drone, the lighting was so lovely!

In the late evenings we often sat at the lake singing songs and enjoying the first warm nights in this year!

On Thursday, the day we went back home, me and two friends decided to take the boat back to Biel because we all have a GA (a card with which you can literally travel around in the entirety of Swiss trains, buses and boats). It was a great idea because the boat trip and the view on the lake and mountains were amazing :D

In Biel we wandered around for a bit and then sat down at the river eating some chocolate.

Oh and just a funny picture of a guy who was sleeping with the jacket over his head on our trip home ^^

Today I had another band practise for our concert next week on Thursday (which by the way I'm gonna film and share ;) and now I'm off to cook in another camp with some of my friends in Jura, the north-west of Switzerland. I'm sure I'll have lots to tell you and some cool pictures next post!