Travelog for: Yuki

Hey mommy.... (I miss you!)

See, I arrived save and happy in Chennai India, formaly known as Madras.

I had such a great time in Malaysia... wow..... that was such an amazing expirience and I want to thank Aliah for this oportunity..... A fantastic start for a tv ride, don't you think?!

I brought some nice tea with me for my new hosts and they told me, they really liked it.

Now - INDIA- ... I am wondering, how this will be?!

First I already found a new friend! His name is Godnatt Nalle and he is a totally nice guy....

And today we had our first mission!
He had to help Uli to find some new sun- and normal glasses (you know, I am expirienced with glasses! ) and so we drove with a yellow threewheeler to an optics shop....

It was fun and I saw a little bit of Chennai on our way....

It is quiet busy around here, cause my host is planing her vacations to Germany to meet all her family and friends....

But I have fun anyway, going shopping with her for souveniers and helping her filling up the fridge for poor Uli, who has to stay in Chennai and has to work in this heat.

But today, on sunday, we went to the very nice Park Hotel here in Chennai, which offers a very excusite sunday brunch and even has a sushi buffet.... mmmmmjammmi... that was soooooooo delicious.... I loooooove sushi!

And the desserts..... wow....

This sunday we welcomed a new colleque from germany, who now works with Uli and so Uli showed him and Mona showed me a little bit of Chennai.

This city was former known as Madras and 7.000.000 does live here, but it more feels like a very huuuuge village.

First we went to my host's favorit (and one of the only) cafés, The Amethyst, which is like a beautiful garden.

The weather in Chennai is very hot and humid all day year long and the worst months are may, june and july.
Also, it's getting dark between 6 and 7 pm all year, which is a little bit sad, because, it seems to be "night" so early every day....

Later we took a little walk and came along some really smelly river.... It smells, because everybody through his waste inside and there is a slum area near by. I never saw such a mess before.......

Then we were at the beach of Chennai City, which is the second longest of the world with 32 km.
The air there was really refreshing, but this is an absolute favorit place of the inhabitans, so there were thousands of people, but almost nobody went into the water, and nobody is wearing a bathing suits there, but normal cloths.

We also visited the part of the beach, where the fishermen and their families live. These are very poor people, and they were very hard hit by the big tsunami in 2004. Around 13.000 people died in the area of Chennai that time. But it filled my heart with joy to see the children playing chricket at the beach and the women sitting together and laughing.

Near by the beach there is there is also a beautiful church, called St. Thomas church....

That was really an interesting day.....

Hi Mooooooommmyyyyy....

I know, and I am soooo sorry, that you didn't hear from me couple of weeks and please don't spank my host....

Mona went home to Germany to meet all her friends and family after almost one year, so she was very busy runing from A to B to C etc., that she didn't had the time, to bring us to an internet café to make updates.....

But I will serve you some now, that you at least get some idea where I have been during that time....

First, we took a flight from Chennai to Dubai and I saw an amazing airport! From Dubai we took the next flight to Düsseldorf in Germany... It was a very long Journey, it took us 21 hours to come to Mona original home in a city called Aachen.

The very next day, we went into the citycenter of Aachen to go for a haircut, shopping and eating some FASTFOOD, which Mona missed so much for a very long time.....

Aachen itself is a very old city and it is the westernmost city of Germany, located along its borders of with belgium and the netherlands. In former times a lot of german kings were crowned in here.

After my host met a lot of friends and family members all over Germany ( I tell you, I found this sooooo boring, all this talking talking talking....aaaaaahhhhh), Uli also came by from India and we went to visit Monas parents, who lives at the german north sea coast, in a little town called Wittmund.

Wittmund is just about 15 km away from the sea, so one day we visited a nice little fishing villiage, called Neuharlingersiel and spent some hours at the beach.

Normally you have to be very lucky (or just look up in a plan), if you want to see some water infront of the beach, because this area is very famous for it's so called "Wattenmeer". Every 6 hours the water "comes and goes", the tides... and when there are the ebb-tides you can walk to some of the islands infront of the coast if you have some rubber- boots, because the water is totally goes back several kilometers.

As we went there, there was the flood at it's highest point and we could watch som shrimp-fishing boats coming into the harbour.

It was a chilly and windy day, but it was fantastic.

My host told me, that this kind of rough weather is the most perfect to be at the northsea coast, because after a nice walk on the dykes, the hot chocolate tastes twice as good.

Of cause, we did not want to miss Uli's parents as well.

They live in a small town called Gemünd located in the Eifel, which is a low mountain range in western Germany. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia and northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate.

Since 2004 about 110 km² of the Eifel have been protected as the nature reserve "Eifel National Park".

I really liked the landscape there and all the typically nice houses. In the town we found a shop, that sells stuff from Asia, especially india, I think this is called globalization!

And I met Anouschka, the dog of Uli's parents. She is about 3 years old and very hairy!!! She comes from a special breeding called "Elo" and she is really like a big teddybear, don't you think?!

Near Gemünd there is a place, hidden in the woods, which is quiet interessting.

The papers says, that this special place is famous for its power, that may come from magnatic fields in the earth.

Almost 2000 years ago, roman people came there to celebrate and worship there gods. They build temples there and a well.

Even still today sometimes ceremonies takes place there.

Supporter of "The new age" celebrates the cicles of the years, on, how they call it, this holy piece of earth, out in the nature at night, dancing around the fire....

And "New Heaths" prays to their "pre-christian" gods.

Or you can just come out here and enjoy the surounding....

But, no fun, something really weird happend, as we took some steps on the former inner part place of the basilika.
Some of us felt strange in the stomache and their hair in the neck stood up, while they got some goose skin.... uuuaaaahhh

Also not far from Gemünd, there are the Kakus Caves, where archeologies found out, people lived looooooooong ago.

Imagine, they found proofs for human colonies from the time of the last ice age!

We loved to climb thru the caves and explore the area, it was so much fun!

And look, here we are again on our way back to India... at our Stopover at the airport of Dubai.

Mona and Uli always fly this way with Emirates and now I know why. Because the stuff ist really really friendly and attentivly, even to toyvoyagers like me!

Oh momma, the last weeks back in Chennai were sooooooo extremely boring!

It was some kind of monsoon time, I guess, because it rained cats and dogs almost every day.

And very soon after we were back in Chennai, Uli and Mona, both, got sick. The doctor called it Dengue Fiever and they did nothing but sleep all day long....

zzzzz....zzzzzzzzzzz....zzzzzzzzz......

and so we didn't make anything exciting and I couldn't make any updates on my own... I really got upset, I tell you.....

But since few days my hosts have recovered more or less and we used a holiday to the way down to the beach of Mahabalipuram.

The Hindu People were celebrating Diwali these days.

Diwali (or Deepavali) is a major Hindu holiday, and a significant festival in Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Many legends are associated with Diwali. Today it is celebrated by Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs across the globe as the "Festival of Lights," where people light deyas (small clay pots filled with coconut oil and a cotton like string(wick)is inserted) to signify victory of good over the evil within an individual.

Diwali is celebrated on the new moon day (approx fifteenth day) of the month Kartika.

In Hinduism, across many parts of India and Nepal, it is the homecoming of Lord Ram of Ayodhya, after a 14-year exile in the forest and his victory over the evil demon-king Ravan. In the legend, the people of Ayodhya (the capital of his kingdom) welcomed Ram by lighting rows (avali) of lamps (deepa), thus its name: Deepavali.

So today, the people put out lights and candles, employees gets benefits and presents and also the children gets presents, in all the shops you get special Diwali Offers and in Chennai they burnt fireworks, 2 days, NONSTOP!!!!

It's unbelieveble, really!

So, WE escaped to the beach, away from the chaos.....

At the end of october my hosts had to got to Mumbai, former known as Bombay, for the registration as an expat.

So we tvs were very excited to see another indian city.... And WOW, what a city that is!!!

According to extrapolations carried out by the World Gazetteer in 2008, Mumbai has a population of 13.662.885 and the Mumbai Metropolitan Area has a population of 20.870.764 !!!

The population density is estimated to be about 22,000 persons per square kilometre.

So Mumbai is India's biggest city and surely one of worlds most expansive Real Estate areas.

Mumbai is so much of everything you can imagine.

It's unbelievleably dirty and ugly,
but beautiful and facinating.

You get every kind of Designer Shop there like Prada or Luis Vitton
and on every street's corner little children, holding Babys in their arms, coming to you sitting in the three-wheeler to beg some money.

You sometimes can hardly breathe because of the smog (people say, to breathe one day in Mumbai is like smoking one package of zigarettes)
and it is home of the worlds biggest film industry, called Bollywood, who produces 1 movie each day in the average.

Not only thousands, but millions of people (54% of the population) sleeps literally on the street or in slums built of carbage. They came from the villages on the surch for work and a little wealth and a better future for their children.

And everybody, who visited Mumbai once, wonders, when this city will collapse?!


We stopped at a true Landmark of Mumbai, The Gateway of India, which was built to commemorate the arrival in India, on 2 December 1911, of King George V and Queen Mary and was completed on 4 December, 1924.

Opposite of the gate, there is the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, that has hosted a lot of famous people thru all times.

We also visited one of Mumbai's beaches, this one is called Yuhu Beach.

This time is was furtunatly not as dirty as some month ago, when one of my host's friends shot the last picture.

こんにちは(kon-nichiwa, hello in Japanese)!
I've arrived in Japan finally! It's been a bit of rough trip The package has been torn open somehow but I finally made it to Japan.


I've met other TVs here. Beatritsche and Spots Leopard. They are pretty nice to me.

I will update more later. I'm going to sleep a little now. See you.

Hi! Sorry it's been a while since my last update. Internet here has been really weak

I've met all of kiskis' cats. They are pretty nice. They never try to scratch or bite me. I'm so relieved!

This is Momo. She's their first cat. kiskis' partner found her on their porch and fed her. After some days of feeding, she decided to go into their house and they decided to keep her. She's soooo beautiful and somewhat friendly. She has a son named Weasley. (I haven't taken photos with him so I'm going to try it later!)


This is Boots, their 4th cats. (They have 5.) They found him in the park where they used to go for a walk. He looked a lot like Weasley, their 2nd cat, and was really friendly. But he had lost most of his hair on his back and had a big hair ball on his back. He was pretty skinny back then. (He's now a bit too overweight.) He looked like he needed some help and they couldn't just leave him there so they took him home. After some visits to vet, his hair grew back. He still has a bold patch near his ear but it's really small. He was named after the puss in Shrek, by the way.

kiskis has been busy with her wedding. She's going to have Shinzen Kekkonshiki, shinto style wedding. She's buddhist but she told me that not much people have their wedding buddhist style. Of course, there are buddhist weddings but it's not that popular because there had been shinto wedding before buddhist wedding was first done. And Japanese people are comparatively tolerant of religions. Most of them are buddhist but they celebrate Christmas (in their own way) and visit shrines for New Year's Day.
It's been her dream to have her wedding shinto style.

She showed me the website of the shrine she's going to have her ceremony at. Just in case you want to know more about shinto wedding, here's the source.

She's going to visit the shrine to have some details discussed and she might be able to take me there
Well, I have to go by now. I will try to update more. See you!