After landing at Narita at around 11:00 JST, I fumble around and manage to buy myself a sandwich and a Skyliner ticket. So far everything seems to be fine.

Then getting into town at Tokyo Station, I quickly find out none of the ATMs will give me money. I try a bunch of them. I try all my cards credit and debit.

Throngs of people rush past me as I walk around forlorn frantically trying things and coming up with scenarios. Mostly I’m just waiting for Germany to wake up. At the same time I continue to amass a stack of “issuer declined” notices from different banks and teller machines.

What is working:

• I took €150 out at BER airpport which I exchange for yen at random money exchange counters.
• I get on some public WiFi outside Tokyo station and buy a Shinkansen ticket online with my credit card. Their website is bad and hard to use but not broken enough thankfully.

What isn’t working:

• I have a hard time paying for stuff with my credit card. It seems I changed the PIN and forgot to put the new one into my password manager.
• I’m out of practice using a credit card. In Berlin I usually tap my phone at the terminal. In Japan phone payments are not widely accepted.
• I learn later that in Japan they don’t like to give cash out against a credit card generally.

The main choice now before me is whether to stay put here or get myself to my accomodation. My next five days of sleeping are already booked and I just bought a train ticket online. That means I still have most of the money I exchanged, but the part of Japan that I’m going to is very very rural.

I figure that if need be, €150 can last me for a week or more if I only eat FamiChicki and other convenience store foods. So I hop on the Shinkansen passing through the gates with the QR-code of my digital ticket.

At Nagoya station I try some more machines. Support at the German bank says they’ve reset a bunch of things. None of them work.

At this point I’m tired and fully resigned. I buy a train ticket to Iseshi and stare out the window for two hours. After I arrive, I get word from Germany that there’s been a payment system malfunction with my bank and that lots of people had issues with their cards.

That also means the malfunction is over. I rush to the nearest ATM and take out a bunch of cash. I’m super elated and with the money I just got I buy myself dinner twice, to celebrate.

I go back to the hotel and lie down on the tatami floor. Happy that it is over and that my real undertaking can start properly now. After six very stressful hours, I’ve arrived.

Major lessons learned:

• Bring cash on holidays. If I had brought twice as much, I would not have stressed out that much about this.
• Have more than one bank. This episode has made me regret closing my Dutch “real” bank account a lot.

I quickly walk over from the lovely Mizuhokan to the Ise outer shrine. The site is beautiful. I learn that the empty lot next to the shrine is where they build the building anew every 20 years. A tradition, shikinen sengu, I had heard about before but didn’t think it would be here. They started the 63rd rebuilding this year.

My inspiration for this walk—the amazing Craig Mod—gives his permission to skip this section, so I go to Iseshi station, grab some breakfast and wait for the train to Tamaru near the edge of the city. I’m walking Craig Mod’s GPS trail following it sometimes even including the exact road crossings. Having a ghost whose trail you walk in is uncanny but also the only way I can swing this in the first place. The wayfinding this provides and the research it saves are indispensable.

I drop by the Higashitokida shrine and am seriously impressed by the sense of space it creates nestled in the trees, accessible through its gated gravel path. Leaving the shrine feels like coming back to the real world.

The rain is a permanent fixture which could explain why I see so few people out and about. In my first hour of walking lots of kids cross my path on their way to school wearing their uniforms and helmets.

I take shelter at the local post office to wait out the worst of the rain. A jovial old man jumps out of his car and asks me where I’m going. Misedani he feels is beautiful but I’m too early because the leaves haven’t turned yet. It’s been way too hot this year. He goes in to do his business. I go on with my walk.

The Japanese weather forecasts report on the colors of the leaves. I wonder why Germany doesn’t do this given how nice autumn colors here can be.

Making my way from one provincial road to another, I arrive at the first pass, Meki-toge. It’s hardly challenging with just a couple of steep segments and switch backs. Moving off the road and making your way over the mountain is beautiful and feels secluded even if civilization is only a couple of hundred meters away.

At the guardian deity there is a box with a trail booklet. Even though it’s quite thin, it goes back years because there are so few people on this trail. The person signing in before me did so three days ago.

Then comes a long uninspiring stretch along the main road. At this point I’m hungry and sick of the rain and the cars. I cut around the route to make my way to Cafe de Touhenvoku which with its funky interior and pizza toast on the menu reveals itself to be a genuine Kissa. I order the Katsu Curry and scarf it down. How excellent it is to eat something warm after a whole day of walking through the rain.

I consider taking the train at Tochihara to skip to the end but my legs still being good, I loop back to the track and continue along the route. Good that I did, because otherwise I’d have missed a romp through the riverbed and a bamboo forest.

From what is already a quiet road behind the rail tracks I go down to the river. It feels like another portal into a different world. The trail carries me along the stream which is reduced to the point where a small makeshift bridge gets me over it.

Then I pass through a bamboo forest the likes of which I only know from movies. It’s dense, imposing and makes this detour from my detour well worth it.

A brief stop at bread and coffee in Kawazoe which true to its name sells bread and coffee, and children’s toys. From that point on the walk is an incessant plod along the road. My painful feet and the fading light sap my morale. Official sundown is at 16:45 but that doesn’t mean much if there’s a huge mountain between you and the sun.

I pass a bunch of derelict buildings and a very weird one which turns out to be a church/cult.

Mr Bear, the roadside stop pictured above, didn’t make it unfortunately. It’s one of many shuttered businesses along the road here.

The stretches of this walk along the road will not be appreciated much by hiking purists. In my treks through the Alps, any route that takes you on more than the absolutely necessary amount of tarmac—noticeable by the click-clack-ing of your hiking poles—is considered to be unacceptable.

By now I’ve walked for more than an hour along the road and will have at least another half hour ahead of me. My legs are increasingly feeling the weight of the 9+ hours I’ve been underway. I see on Google Maps that there will be a bus passing by in five minutes. Not giving it a second thought, I get on at the Shimo-Mise bus stop. The entirely empty bus takes me the rest of the way to Misedani station. I hobble the final steps into my hotel.

I’m staying at the Fairfield which is bougie and has a continuous stream of foreigners passing through. My shower today will not be in a communal ofuro. In town there aren’t that many restaurants open during the week. Many places are open during the weekend when there are more people in town.

I find a bowl of ramen and alcohol free Kirin at a “famous” ramen place where lots of kids with their parents eat. The ramen is nothing to write home about but the electrolytes and vegetables are very welcome. My legs come back to life.

The stats for the day say 33,53km and some 42k steps (strava).

Today was brutal but it established what the upper limit of my output can be. Walking here needs to have an exit plan at around 3pm before dusk sets in. It’s obvious now that I’ll not be able to walk to Shingu in five days. I retire to my hotel room and plan the next day’s steps.

I eat a pudding and go over the plan. After yesterday, today will be a lot more restrained. I’ll start with the first pass just outside of Odai, Misesaka though even that is a bit of a trek before I’m at the trailhead.

No rain today for which I’m very grateful. That means there are somewhat more people out and about than yesterday but still not a huge amount. Again not that many opportunities to wish anybody an ohayo.

To my delight and reassurance at the trailhead there is a box where you can borrow a bear bell and grab a walking stick. You then leave it when you get to the other side where there’s a similar arrangement. This is very considerate and something that I don’t think is possible in Germany.

Japan is in a bear frenzy at the moment and there’s hardly anything else on the news or on anybody’s lips. I can report that the bear bell works, because I didn’t see one. Or it could have something to do with how on Kumamap this part of Japan has very few bear sightings.

Walking the pass is much nicer without rain. It’s beautiful and just a bit of an effort. On the other side, Takihara shrine awaits. This is just before 10am and the monks are all up and about. They’re moving stuff around for some kind of event. At one of the buildings a group of monks are busy in the inner sanctuary.

Watching these men in full regalia doing their spiritual business is impressive even though I don’t know—nor probably will ever know—what they are doing. They wear beautiful hats with feathers which are a kanmuri with its ei.

As captivating as this scene is, that doesn’t change the fact that I have to catch the 10:25 at Takihara station. If I don’t, I’ll be stuck here for three hours.

Double timing through the town is not fun with legs as sore as mine, but I get there with time to spare. The train itself is manned by a single person acting as conductor, driver and ticket seller. I see him point at something when the train stops and don’t get it at first. Then I realize that he’s practicing pointing-and-calling which is a common practice in Japan.

I’d considered taking the train to O-Uchiyama but given how sore my legs are, any bit of walking that is unnecessary should be discarded. I get off at Umegadani and make my way to the trailhead for the Nisaka pass.

At Nisaka there’s a similar arrangement with the bells and now we also add another dangerous animal to our repertoire: the viper.

This is also where the stunning coastal views start. On the way down there’s the occasional choice between the Meiji and Edo routes, one meandering and the other straight and vertical.

I find myself fighting against the sun on the walk out in what is end of November. Next resupply will have to include sunscreen.

With lunchtime approaching I’m eager to make it into town where I’ve scoped out some restaurants. Being in civilization at a time when gastronomy is open is not self-evident on this walk.

I make my way around a small lake where I find Kappa Club, a mix between a beach club and a kissaten. Locals make their way to the lake here to relax and have some lunch. I treat myself to a well-deserved shrimp plate, nama (draft beer) and coffee while I watch several black kites circle over the water. This arrangement is so lovely I stay there for more than an hour taking in the view and the atmosphere.

A bit further along there’s a very promising coffee truck cafe kiihot which sadly isn’t open today.

I head into town to find my accommodation but not before stopping at the Cocokarafine to get trail care supplies. A Japanese big-box drugstore is something you have to see to believe. The variety of products and the sensory overload they provide are more of a marvel than many of the sights along the Kumano Kodo.

I walk to my guest house in the old town when the owner of restaurant Kappa runs into me on the street and takes me on a tour of a repurposed sento that’s now a fishery museum. The objects in the museum are an interesting jumble but judging from the pictures the place comes alive during the events they host.

I’m staying at Toyohisa tonight where I have an entire floor to myself. The host insists on making me dinner in a way that I feel I can’t refuse. She makes shrimp along with fried fish and sashimi cut from fresh local fish. I eat it while she sits in the kitchen eating hers and having a drink. We talk about Kyoto jazz cafes and bears and solar panels. My legs are happy they don’t have to walk anywhere anymore.

Except for these highly sketchy stairs I have to go down if I want to use the restroom.

The stats for the day say 26,86km and some 34k steps (strava1, strava2).

As I write this I find the video that Craig Mod posted about one of his days along the route. Part of it covers what I walked today and it’s a picture perfect match with how my day went: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QL5GB2vdS8

This has been a very full day with so many different experiences and small victories that it’s hard to take in. I can’t believe that this is only day two. More tomorrow.

My host offers to refund me the money (a trifle) for dinner because she felt she was too pushy. Of course I don’t accept. The food was plentiful, home cooked and she saved my legs. I eat the standard Japanese breakfast and get on my way.

The first segment is a stroll over a light pass with a sea view and then circle around the harbour, the coast and some of the local beaches.

The seaside here looks like it could be lovely. My Berlin barista told me he would come to Mie to surf back in the day. It looks like that could be amazing though it seems to happen more on the Eastern coast like at Koushirahama.

The passes themselves, Ikkoku-toge, Hirakata-toge and Miura-toge are short work but it is where I meet the first other people on trail so far. Two old geezers have driven here and are doing their morning sanpo (stroll) up the pass and back down to the car. The pass itself is short work with maybe 3-4 switchbacks.

In Craig Mod’s account it says the walking from Minose to Aiga is relatively miserable, so that’s a perfect excuse for me to skip it and take the 11:37 train. Catching that is essential because it lines me up nicely for Magose. Missing it would mean the rest of the day would be a loss.

At the Minose train station a team is re-roofing the shack. Nice to see infrastructure investment like that even in the most rural of places.

During the train ride I see some fellow hikers (also a first!). One Japanese woman in the train going alone and a Western couple at Funatsu station who don’t board. It looks like they are walking the entire thing.

Aiga has quite some stuff going on for it in gastronomy. I’m not very hungry so I stop quickly behind the train station at Cafe do Selecao for a strengthening coffee before the climb ahead. The coffee is good but the owner keeps trying to convince me bears are super dangerous around here. I’m not a bear denialist, but there’s no reason to be stressed about them in this part of Japan.

It’s a bit of a walk to get to the climb and walking up the stone path is somewhat strenuous. Still no rain which is good since according to the cafe owner Mie is the rainiest part of Japan. Even in the best conditions I clock at around 15 minutes for 100m of elevation. The 330m here takes the better part of an hour.

At the pass I catch some summit fever and make the ‘fantastic’ decision to push for the top. The trail consists of stairs but of the kind that make an Amsterdam apartment staircase look reasonable. Going up I catch myself thinking: “That’s steep! I wonder how I’ll get down.”, then I think to myself: “Can’t worry about that now! That’s a problem for future Alper to figure out.”

I go up and encounter a Western couple absolutely balling it down from the summit. To my amazement the man has a baby in a front carrier. I admire the show of confidence here but one misstep and that baby is toast. It is acceptable to carry kids up and down a mountain, but we’d only consider doing it using a kraxe, not an ergo baby.

The summit itself has a small clearing with a shrine enveloped by a bunch of huge boulders. Scrambling on top of one, I can look down on the entire city and look out over the bay. The view is as spectacular as the vertigo.

The true summit is the top of a huge boulder accessible through a very rickety metal ladder. I decide to save that for another day.

Going down I have to really take the descent step by step. My knee is definitely not happy with all of this and starts radiating heat. Back at the pass, a group of eight or so Japanese hikers are doing the Magose as well. They are fully decked out in outdoor kit and have a guide with them. Shouts of amazement greet me coming down that I’m doing this hitori (alone) when another guy comes jogging up from the Owase side and makes straight for the summit. He says he does this every day.

That’s more people on the trail today than I saw in the previous days combined.

The walk down is uneventful and leads me through a large and active cemetery. Walking into Owase proper I try to hunt down a bite and a coffee before checking in to my accommodation. It’s hard to find anything. Many stores are not up to date in either Google Maps or tabélog.

What does help me find a nice place, is just walking and looking around. I stumble on a coffee and wine place with a proper espresso machine. An “Apotheke” sign on the building betrays that this used to be the pharmacy and the inside has been repurposed to be modern and open. I get my cappuccino and see the young and creative people of Owase gather in the place.

People are doing interesting things, even in Owase, and it remains true that “new ideas, need old buildings”. I see a general theme of repurposing happening all over anyway. From the sento turned museum, to plots of land now being used as solar farms, to new semi-temporary restaurants and cafes popping up.

I check in without talking to a human into an empty family house in a residential area. The entire house, both floors, is mine for the night for a song.

For dinner I go to a place called Inaka which has a reputation as a fantastic family-run kappou restaurant. I have some trouble trying to figure out what to order, but fortunately they have a summary of their menu in English. After a long day of hiking I don’t have the mental fortitude to deal with very complicated food situations.

What they delivered is absolute art. Probably the best meal I’ve had so far. The variety, the care, the detail and the different platings are out of the world. You can see the people cooking are related in the familiar home-cooking way they do their work behind the counter. It’s somewhat pricey but I’m happy to pay for the food and the experience.

After dinner I make a tour of the city and Owase does not look at all dead to me. During the afternoon I saw lots of kids running around freely. Now the streets are empty, but it looks like every izakaya is more or less full and people are getting ready for a night of drinking at the local karaoke, sunakku, bar or ‘nightclub’.

Fun as that sounds, that’s an amount of being awake and drinking which my current schedule does not allow, so off to bed it is for me.

The stats for the day say 19.94km and some 34k steps (strava1, strava2).

For tomorrow I’m doing some more drastic replanning. I only have two days left and an awful lot of walk ahead of me. I figure that tomorrow’s mountain will be my Angstgegner as it was for many people before me. The time indications can be trusted and 5h would eat up my entire day for not that much distance gained¹.

Reading the end of Craig Mod’s report it seems both that assessment is true and that it’s possible to do the chunk after the mountain in two days. That would make it an obvious choice to skip it. I’m going to see exactly how to do that over breakfast tomorrow which I’ll take after sleeping in. The lack of sleep is wearing on me.

The train I have to catch this morning only runs after 9am so I take the opportunity to get a real breakfast for a change. Scale is as good as expected. People are lining up before opening time to get in on the action. I attack my plate like a wild animal and am well underway to the FamilyMart and the train station by 08:30.

The train to Mikisato it is. I can read it even without romanization because it’s just ‘three’ 三 ‘tree’ 木 ‘village’ 里. That means there’s probably two- and four- tree villages out there as well.¹

At Mikisato I see a man with a baby and his parents struggling to get on the train. On these single driver operated carriages, there’s only one door that opens to regulate the flow of passengers. After pointing out where to get on, I call out: “How did you guys end up here?” He says “he lives there” and the train takes off. How do you live somewhere and not know how the trains work?

The goal today is to get to Kumano since I read that it could be done in one day.

From Mikisato quickly I completely the double whammy of Miki-toge/Hago-toge. It rained a lot last night, so everything is quite slippery. On the trailhead they thoughtfully provide sticks again to ward off the bears.

I’m regretting not bringing my hiking poles an awful lot. I think calling this a ‘walk’ really threw me off². This is very much a hike and a fairly strenuous one at that.

I don’t really see very many shrines today which is worrisome. Their constant presence is a reassuring touch point on these walks.

I find another trail booklet and the people there also report zero bears but they do say they saw monkeys. I’m sad that I didn’t see any monkeys.

Then it’s down to Kata.

Kata didn’t have fishing rights historically. Weird how one town next to the sea would be able to fish and the next wouldn’t. Staying on the theme of rural infrastructure investment, they’re having a new bridge built here.

I take a break and eat some of the snacks I brought. There is no convenience store on this entire stretch which tells you something about how remote it is.

The next pass, Hobo-toge goes all the way up to 350m of altitude. That’s about as much as the mountain pass yesterday but it does feel a lot easier.

After hitting the pass, every time I think it’s going to go down, another section of climbing follows. Up and down it goes for a while after which I have to drop the entire 300m in very short order to get down to Nigishima.

On the way down it becomes obvious that my knee isn’t really having it and it takes about as long to get down as it took to get up. This knee had a new ACL grafted into it a couple of years ago. It’s healed well which is why I didn’t give it much thought, but now I don’t want to take any chances.

Timing myself, the three hours in the description for the pass are accurate. It’s after 2pm now so it becomes clear that doing another pass will only complete after dark and then there’s no way I’ll be able to push on to Kumano.

I drop that plan and stick with my already booked accommodation in Atashika. I confirm dinner and breakfast with the host—remember there’s absolutely nothing out here—and then wait for the train out.

There are worse ways to spend two hours than sitting in a gazebo in a tiny port town. Sitting around doing nothing is a welcome change from having to keep pushing on all the time. I buy some hot beverages from the vending machine, eat my snacks and chat with the people stopping by to use the facilities.

Not being high up in the mountains and walking along the train line allows this kind of flexibility. It’s possible to completely change plans and reschedule because there are 4-5 trains still stopping at even this super tiny place.

The train comes at 16:18 as promised and after a short hop to Atashika I make my way back up the hills to my lodgings. The sun has long disappeared and dusk is setting in. I FaceTime my kids while walking and by the time I arrive it’s really starting to get dark. Not a time when you want to be stuck on a trail or even a backroad here.

The guesthouse is run by a lovely septuagenarian retired woman who’s studying English and has traveled all over the world with her husband. I wondered why people would live in these tiny remote towns. She says they have moved here after retirement and from the hill her living room has a stellar sea view. I think I understand it.

My host cooks me a delicious nabe meal. The hot brorth and rice are great already for somebody who’s cold and has been walking all day. But she fills up the pot with an unbelievable amount of vegetables, mushrooms and meat. That’s the best meal I could’ve had right now.

The stats for the day say 15.94km and some 25.5k steps (strava1, strava2).

I turn in and spend way too long sitting on my room’s balcony taking in the view of the bay.

The last day and the final bit of hiking. After that, instead of walking along the beach for 25km, I’ll take a quick train ride to Shingu. It’s been an amazing couple of days but it’s time to wrap this thing up.

My host makes me a lovely and scrumptious breakfast with self-baked rolls and gives me rice and fruit for on the trail.

The first part is Hadasu-no-michi, the road to Hadasu, and it’s a breeze. At the top of a hill some animals come running at me which startles me until I realize it’s just a chicken coop. I almost miss the exit to Hadasu which features the oldest Kamakura era stone path.

Then the next bit, Obuki-toge, will be the real deal. The last ‘high’ pass with 300m of elevation. Not a huge amount, but still the equivalent of 1000 steps on the stairmaster.

The signage is scant here and the path is barely visible. I track along the stream trying to keep the GPS bearing. Down here between the trees it isn’t that accurate but I manage to find something of a path going up.

Then the overgrowth takes over and everything is covered by high ferns. I can’t even see the rocks on the ground two steps further, let alone anything that at some point of time may have been a path. I don’t know what else to do other than push in the general direction and bushwhack my way to the top. There the path picks up again and I see signs pointing to the pass.

From then on it’s a quick romp along a wall meant to fend off wild boars. This seems an odd place to do agriculture but otherwise these walls would not be there.

Walking is pretty easy by now. The trouble with hiking is that your body becomes conditioned after 5-7 days and from that point you want to do more and more of it. But usually the trip is over at that point and normal life kicks back in.

I come down at Odomari and am met by another amazing sight. The beach here is lovely and a dip in the ocean is a must. I strip and change into my swimming clothes on an entirely empty beach and plunge into the water. I brought my swimming trunks and a tiny towel specifically for this moment.

The water isn’t even that cold and the first waves hitting my poor feet feel divine. The waves are strong and pull at me but I don’t have time to go swimming.

I dry up, circle around town and get ready for the last trailhead and the Matsumoto-toge. This pass has 135m of elevation and no switchbacks. It will be over very quickly now.

I go up and down and before I know it, I’m in Kumano pushing along a grim—not even beachfront—straight road. I shimmy to the Mos Burger for my lunch, then to Chikotto in front of the station for a coffee. It’s a lovely place that has opened very recently.

My train leaves and I get out at Shingu so I can already buy the train ticket for the last fast train to Nagoya at 17:31. There are more than a few foreigners here, mostly from the other Kumano Kodo routes, and station staff to help them work the ticket machines.

I quickly walk to the shrine, stand in line to clap my hands and buy an ema with Yatagarasu on it. This shrine is big and very busy with people coming here from all over for all kinds of reasons. A family with children is dressed in traditional clothes receiving a blessing from the priest. Some Japanese people make a point of praying at each of the shrines. Tourists gather here to get their stamps and buy their souvenirs. But me, I’m done. Done!

Arriving in front of the shrine is a mixed feeling of accomplishment, being tired and somewhat elated and also of not really knowing what to do now. Walking here was something of a purpose and now that purpose is gone.

I walk around town a bunch but I’m not that hungry. I find a bakery, Megane, where they have a Marzocco machine and know how to use it. They serve me the best coffee I had so far on this trip and an incredible pastry. This place can stand the test with the best anywhere.

I try to find interesting souvenirs or a store where I can buy some fresh clothes, but come up empty on both counts. What is open is very sleepy and I’m done with walking. I find a cute takoyaki place, Paso, on the other side of the tracks and I call it a day.

The stats for the day say 14.32km and some 30k steps (strava1, strava2).

Sitting in the train to Nagoya then and seeing all those stations pass by that I walked through: Owase, Kiinagashima, Misedani. It makes for a weird mood. I’ve been at all of them over the course of days and now we roll the entire thing back in the span of a couple of hours.

The walk is done. I’m going on to Tokyo to complete this trip but I will be back. There is so much more Japan to be walked in my future.

Sports and Health

#

It was a year where I didn’t seriously injure myself and could continuously practice sports. That’s already a huge improvement.

I started going to the gym regularly in the evenings after the kids are sleeping. After some initial hesitance I started doing barbell exercises. The goal is to squat and deadlift at least my bodyweight of 75kg. I’m inching this up very slowly and am currently at 40kg.

Going to the gym is made possible by my Fitbod subscription. Exercising regularly is much easier, if I don’t have to think or plan what I’m going to do. That means either a human or an app should tell me what I need to do. Given that the gym is paid for by my work, I can justify the steep monthly cost of Fitbod (here’s a 14-day guest pass).

I’m doing winter cycling on the trainers at the gym while I debate whether I should get one for at home. That makes me one of those crazy people who wears a chamois to the gym.

It was a great year for cycling. I bought a proper road bike, the Bianchi 2024 Sprint ICR and I managed to join group rides (mostly those of the MAAP LAB Berlin) more or less weekly without having a single mechanical or crash. knocks on wood

But then during a solo ride in the last week of the year I managed to slip and fall over. More than the minor damage to my knee and my carbon frame, it was my ego that was bruised.

Studies

#

I read a bunch of papers (one write-up) around LLMs and found the field to be overhyped. I don’t think that single percentage point increases in performance and conversions of BFS algorithms into LLM prompts are worth writing up. Things are moving so quickly that you can’t sit around waiting for breakthroughs to make their way into the literature.

Learning Japanese continues and I’m now at Wanikani level 22. I’m not sure what my next goal is going to be. After my trip to Japan my motivation is somewhat on the rocks.

The main problem is that once you start studying Japanese, you cannot stop. I’m not stopping, but I’m dialing it down to maintenance mode.

Books

#

I already posted about how bad of a year 2025 was for reading. Not sure whether I’ll find the time to do better next year.

Movies and TV

#

I’ve moved the tracking of everything that I watch over to Trakt saying goodbye to Letterboxd.

Just like with fitness, I need an app that will tell me exactly what I need to do right now. Without it, I’ll very easily lose track of this. Trakt is excellent at this and offers it in the free version. I pay for premium to get some of the more advanced list management versions.

The movies I watched in 2025:

• Wicked
• Moana 2
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lilo & Stitch
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Encanto
• The Greatest Showman

Trakt tells me that’s 901 minutes spent on movies.

Wicked was lovely on the big screen. Of the kids movies I watched: KPop Demon Hunters is impeccable, Moana 2 was unnecessary, Encanto was strangely forgettable, Lilo & Stitch not as bad as I would expect. The Greatest Showman may be flawed but it is full of bangers.

The tv series I watched in 2025:

• Bluey S3
• The Wheel of Time S2
• The Bear S1+S2+S3+S4
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Dennou Coil
• Asura
• Cyberpunk Edge Runners
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1
• Heated Rivalry S1
• Kaiju No.8 S1

All of these were spectacular and interesting in their own way. The Bear really meshes with so many things I like and like to do. Asura is effectively just a very long Kore-eda movie. LotGH is peak.

Trakt tells me that this is 4567 minutes spent on episodes. It’s clear who’s the winner here.

Games

#

I don’t really track this anymore, but what I can note are the following.

Expedition 33 was a highlight. I saw it on Tiktok and immediately knew I had to experience it. Not having a console I played it via cloud gaming on my Macbook.

Playing a parry/dodge game over a cloud setup is pure masochism, but with difficulty set to easy, it was kind of doable. The gameplay loop is satisfying but after a while the level design formula gets a bit tedious. What stood out were the music¹, the writing and the major set pieces in the boss battles and in the environment.

Critical Role started their campaign 4 and having followed the online RPG scene through Tiktok clips for a while now, I decided to see what the fuss was about. The first episode together with the rest of the ouverture is spectacular. It’s a narrative victory of setup, emotions, reveals and backstabbing. I’m not sure if they’ll stick the landing, but for now I’m very much bought in.

I’ll have to delve into what makes this worthwhile. For now I can point to two things. There is an element of let’s play parasociality that you have with any game stream or impro podcast. Add to that a very meticulously brewed high fantasy setting that’s better than what we get on television: open ended runtime, infinite production values, no cancellation after one or two seasons.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was discounted and became the game we played during the Christmas break. I led exploring the city on Mount Qaf with my kids on a lower difficulty following right on my heels.

It’s a great game where the platform mechanics continue to layer on top of each other together with some very nasty puzzles bordering on the outright sadistic. I’m super proud to see the grit and skill my kids have shown because easy only affects combat, not the platforming.

Persia provides a vast and mostly unknown to us landscape of culture, artifacts and mythology to serve as backdrop for this game. A lot of it is undoubtedly historically not accurate, but that does not make it any less nice to look at.

Podcasts

#

The two podcasts I listen to most consistently are Ones and Tooze and Past Present Future. Those are both remnants of my Talking Politics period². Maybe I should add Helen Thompson’s podcast as well and have a full lid?

Other than that I semi-regularly listen to:

• The Adam Friedland show
• The Catskills Podcast
• Cortex
• Developer Voices
• Escape Collective (only during the Tour)
• Feminist Shelf Control
• KALT’ın Podacst’ı
• Oxide and Friends
• Podcast Filosofie
• De Shitshow
• Stavy’s World
• Vergecast

I more or less stopped listening to Trashfuture finding the jokes and the commentary repetitive and boring.

Travel

#

It was a much better year for travel than most years before this.

London was a work trip in spring and it was one of my best London trips ever. I stayed in Chelsea, I cycled everywhere, drank lots of great coffee, ate a ton of great food, went to a club, went to a play on the West End. I did so much and there’s so much left to do. I don’t know what took me so long to appreciate London like this.

Iceland was the first trip we took our kids on a plane and then round tripped the island on our way to the family horse farm. Iceland is lovely but empty. Not sure what would make me go back there other than to visit family or if I could do some hard hiking/cycling/riding.

Japan drove me crazy with reports from everybody and their mother visiting so I had to go. After missing the summer window, I booked for November not knowing that that’s one of the best months to visit Japan. I walked the Ise-ji for a large chunk and then I ran around Tokyo for a couple of days. It was even better than all the social media.

Iceland and Japan in the same year is low-key ridiculous but this was also the year at work where I get 20 consecutive extra holidays.

End

#

Lots more things to cover that happened in 2025 but for now this will have to be it. Despite some marked down periods, all in all it was a good year. On to a much better 2026.

(This update has been delayed for a week because I fell quite ill just as the new year came around.)

Health

#

I got on the neurodiversity bandwagon this year.

First I got myself a self-paid diagnosis for ADHD. This result should not surprise anybody who knows me. I’ve forced myself to be very high functioning throughout my life but it can’t be denied that there were always some underlying issues. I’m on medication from the end of the year and have gone off caffeine.

I also got myself tested for giftedness and got a positive result there as well.

Both of these results were validating if nothing else and put a lot of things that happened in my life in a different perspective.

For anybody who’s not sure whether they should pursue this, my recommendation would be: You will only know how differently you can feel if you do.

I got a mole cut out of my skin. It’s a nice scar to have.

I’m fully vaxxed against FSME and got a booster for COVID in November. That brings me to six jabs in total.

Sports and Injuries

#

It could have been a great year for sports. After having a great time on our yearly trip to the Alps, I came back to Berlin and badly sprained my ankle after falling off some stairs. I didn’t need any surgery, thankfully, but it did set me back some 8 weeks of physical therapy and having to build up to walking again.

That notwithstanding, I managed to participate in three road cycling group rides this year. MAAP opening up a store here and organising open weekly rides has been really cool. The cycling and the coffee were lit. 🔥

I cycled up the Brocken for my first ever mountain and clocked 4201km in 2024 on Strava.

It’s my goal to weigh 75kgs and I’m still as far away from that as I ever was.

Movies

#

Letterbox does a good job tracking this and it was a pretty good year for movies. I review all of them over there in detail but I can say the non-Potter kids movies we watched were nice and the Japanese cinema on the whole was excellent. I saw Evil Does Not Exist two times with the second time in the local theatre live scored by its composer Eiko Ishibashi.

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• Dune: Part Two
• Curious Tobi and the Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers
• Glass Onion
• Frozen
• Tangled
• Raya and the Last Dragon
• Shoplifters
• Luca
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Yojimbo
• Drive My Car
• Perfect Days
• John Wick: Chapter 4
• Evil Does Not Exist
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Harakiri
• Evil Does Not Exist
• Die Hard

Television

#

Trakt is doing a great job keeping track of which episodes of which television series I need to watch. It’s the only way I can possibly stay on top of this.

• The Last of Us
• Spy x Family S2
• Death Note
• Frieren
• Tour de France: Unchained S2
• Vigil
• The Peripheral
• Kaiju No 8
• Bluey
• Arcane S2

Looks like I’m turning into a weeb just like everybody else in the culture. I watch anime in part as light entertainment and in part as Japanese immersion. It’s very hard to find anime that has any kind of thematic depth. Frieren comes closest because of how it twists the standard fantasy trope into a story about loss and reminiscence.

Books

#

It was a fair though not great year for reading.

• Sheaf Theory through Examples, Daniel Rosiak
• Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
• Min kamp 2, Knausgård, Karl Ove
• Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller
• Arkada Yaylılar Çalıyor, Melikşah Altuntaş
• My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
• Kafka Connect: Build and Run Data Pipelines, Mickail Maison
• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Forugh Farrokzhad
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
• The Kubernetes Book: 2024 Edition, Nigel Poulton
• Kafka Troubleshooting in Production: Stabilizing Kafka Clusters in the Cloud and On-premises, Elad Eldor
• Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is on, Craig Weber

I’m continuing my trend of reading one Knausgård and one Mantel book each year. No reason not to do that again this year.

I picked up some poetry at Perdu during my visit to Amsterdam and have been enjoying reading that.

Every time I see Maria Stuart (which I got put on to by Past Present Future’s fantastic Great Political Fictions series) in the list, I think: “I need to read more Schiller.” but then I keep forgetting to get the files off Gutenberg. Germans sure knew how to write back in the day.

Trips

#

Besides the trip to the Alps, I went to the Netherlands once in 2024 for Kars’s viva and we took a trip to idyllic Hiddensee after my foot was healed. Much more travel is slated for next year!

Other Culture

#

I don’t go to exhibitions for lack of time. Besides seeing Evil Does Not Exist in the theatre I managed to burn a ticket to the opera and one to a dance show due to conflicting commitments and forgetfulness. I’m not sure whether I’m going to retry this.

I took the kids to see Ronja at an open air show which was fun.

Miscellaneous

#

I was a member of the Greens but I cancelled that because even if they’re the least bad political party in Germany, they have been doing a lot of things that I do not wish to support from the inside. I wrote about that here.

I continued to learn and maintain my Japanese level in preparation for my trip in 2025.

I learned a bunch around Kubernetes and Kafka but would have liked to do more programming. I refreshed my algorithms a bit and picked up Factor to play with.

I saw this thing called December Adventure though and that fits in nicely with my current push to release a major update for Cuppings. If I’m going to be programming until late this month, then I’d prefer it to be on something that I can release.

I can’t promise that I won’t do any AoC (Factor is looking mighty cool) but I won’t force myself to do anything. With that, let’s get going.

1/12

#

I started working on the map view which clicking around looked like it could be really annoying. I found some dead ends and was afraid I’d have to hack in Leaflet support myself but I found a dioxus example hidden in the leaflet-rs repository.

Yes, I’m writing this website in Rust/WASM, why do you ask?

That example required a bunch of fiddling with the configuration and a couple of false starts, but now I have a vanilla map view.

I can say that I’m amazed that in this ecosystem 1. an example exists 2. that example works 3. it works in my project with a bit of diffing and 4. it seems to do what I need.

I raised a PR to the project to advertise this example on its README just like it does the others so that others wouldn’t have to search like I did. That PR got merged:

https://github.com/slowtec/leaflet-rs/pull/36

2/12

#

Today I’ll see if I can tweak the map view to show the location of the cafe we tapped and get things to a point where I can commit the change.

To do this I need to figure out how to pass information along to a router when we tap a venue. That should be easy enough but the Dioxus documentation is between 0.5 and 0.6 now and a lot of it is broken.

A tip from the Discord said I need to put the data into a context from a parent and then get it out again in a child. It’s a bit roundabout and required some refactoring, but it works.

Done on time even for a reasonable bed time.

3/12

#

Turns out my changes from yesterday did not make it to the staging server. I’ll fix that and manually run the job again.

That’s these annoying wasm-bindgen version errors that keep happening and that require a reinstall of this: cargo install -f wasm-bindgen-cli --version 0.2.97 and the dioxus-cli. Dioxus which by the way is preparing its long awaited 0.6.0 release.

Yes, I build this on the same Hetzner box that hosts it. So here you go: https://staging.cuppin.gs

Other than that not that much will happen today since I spent most of the evening noodling around with Factor (despite my intention not to do any weird programming). It’s a nice language that’s very similar to Uiua which I tried out a while back but not being an array programming language makes it feel somewhat more ergonomic.

4/12

#

I can’t describe how nice it is to wake up and not have to deal with a mediocre story line involving elves and try to find time to attack a programming problem.

After today, I’m going to need that quiet morning, because I spent until 01:30 debugging an issue: Going to a detail view from the frontpage worked, but loading a detail view directly would throw an error.

There were two issues at play here:

Leaflet maps don’t deal well with being created multiple times so either we have to call ` map.remove() or we have to check whether the map has already been created and keep a reference to it somehow.

I solved it by pushing the map into a global variable:

thread_local!(static MAP: RefCell> = RefCell::new(None));

These are Rust constructs I would normally never use so that’s interesting. More interesting is that they work in one go and that they work on the WASM target.

Then the error was gone but the page was blank. Not entirely sure what was happening I poked at the DOM to see all the map elements there but simply not visible. Turns out that because of the different path, the path for the stylesheet was being added to the URL like this: http://127.0.0.1:8080/venue/176/main.css

It just has these two lines:

#map {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100vh;
}

But without a height the map is invisible.

Both issues are solved but not committed. I’ll see tomorrow whether I’m happy with the solution and how to package this up. Also I’m not sure how main.css is being served on production and whether the same fix will work there.

5/12

#

I couldn’t help but noodle on Advent of Code a bit. Here’s my day 1 part 1 in Factor: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor

I like Factor the programming language. It’s like Lisp or Haskell but without all the annoying bits.

The environment that’s provided with it, I’m not so keen about. It’s annoying to use and has lots of weird conventions that aren’t very ergonomic.

6/12

#

I’ve been bad and I’ve finished part 2 of day 1 of the Advent of Code: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor#L27

Not so December Adventure after all maybe. I’ll promise I’ll finish the mapping improvements I was working on tomorrow.

7/12

#

Went on my weekly long bike ride. Then in the evening I didn’t have that much energy for programming other than finishing Advent of Code day 3 part 1: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/commit/0a74c38e7641141e10b4c48203c9e414cc492e1c

(I looked at day 2 part 2 but that just looked very tedious.)

8/12

#

Got in a ton of commits on Cuppin.gs today. After fixing the map, I wanted to see what would happen if I would add all 2000 markers to the map.

Performance seems to be doable but this is probably not ideal for a webpage. Dynamically rendering the venues is something for later. For now I can probably get away with filtering for the 100-200 nearest locations by distance and dumping those into the map view.

Now I’m back debugging Github Actions. I’m splitting up the build and deploy of the backend and the frontend into separate actions. Compiling dioxus-cli takes forever which is a step I hope I can skip with cargo-binstall.

Iterating on Github Actions takes forever and there really doesn’t seem to be a better way to develop this or a better CI solution that everybody is willing to use.

10/12

#

Spent some hours massaging the data that goes into the app. I had to add all new venues and after that I wanted to check whether any place in our 2k venue set had closed so we can take them off the display. This is a somewhat tedious multi-step process.

I have an admin binary that calls the Google Maps API for each venue to check the venue data and the business status (CLOSED_TEMPORARILY and such). But to be able to do that you have to feed each place ID into the API. The only issue with place IDs is that they expire from time to time. There’s a free API call that you can use to refresh them.

That expiration does not happen that often. What happens more, I found, is that a place will disappear entirely of Google Maps. For some reason it will be deleted. I don’t handle that case yet so there my updaters break entirely and the quickest fix around it is to delete the venue from the database and restart.

The only data issue that I still have outstanding is when venues move their location to a different address. I have a place around here that I think is still showing on its old spot.

11/12

#

Tried to run Cuppings in Xcode to be met with some weird compilation errors. Turns out that there’s an Expression type in Foundation that’s overriding my SQLite.swift Expression. It’s a pretty silly reason for code to be broken: Expression - name space conflict with Xcode 16/iOS 18

Also still fighting with the frontend deployments which seem to need a -- frozen passed to them to not proactively go update package versions.

14/12

#

Love to have a crash on startup for the Cuppings TestFlight build and then sit down today to bake a new one and upload that and for that one to work. No clue what the issue was even though I took a look at the crashlog (that I sent in myself).

I’ve also automated building the iOS app to be done by Xcode Cloud which should making new versions (whenever the database is updated) a lot easier.

16/12

#

Upgraded the frontend to Dioxus 0.6.0 which just came out and has lots of quality of life issues. For my case, I did not need to change a single line of code, just change some version numbers and build a new dioxus-cli.

I hope that maybe solves the wasm-bindgen issues on the frontend deploy. The annoying part about the build is that it takes so long that it’s very hard to iterate on.

It’s too late even for me to see what this does. I’m off to bed. You may or may not get a new version of the website by tomorrow morning.

18/12

#

Spent some iterations running the frontend deploy and rerunning it but now it should be working.

22/12

#

I spent the evening doing manual data munging and correcting some venue locations that hadn’t been updated correctly through my data life cycle.

That forced me to clarify the two name fields the venues table has.

• name was the original name field and was pulled from the Foursquare metadata
• google_name is the name field that’s pulled from Google Maps and was effectively leading but not updated correctly yet when refreshing the data

So to figure that out I did a bunch of auditing in the list to see venues where there was a large discrepancy between the names. Something that happens is that a place will change its name but keep the same location and Google Maps place.

I also added a label to the iOS app to indicate whether this is a DEBUG build but that messed up the layout and I guess I might as well remove it. Sometimes I get confused what I’m running, but since it’s just me running DEBUG builds on their phone, I think I can do without.

I also started a rewrite that I’m not sure I’m going to pull over the line: I wanted to remove the search dependency on Alpine.js and replace it with htmx. For this I asked Cursor to do the translation which it did a stab at but ultimately rather failed to do even the basic steps for it. Then I did it myself and while htmx is super easy to setup, the data juggling I have to do with what I get from Google Maps is very fragile and needs to be cleaned up (which I may or may not do given that things are working right now).

23/12

#

Working with the backend was very annoying because every time the server restarts, it would log me out. To fix that I changed the persistency of tower-sessions from MemoryStore to FileSessionStorage and that fixed it without issues. There is now a .sessions folder in the backend which needs to be ignored for cargo watch but other than that it’s a drop-in replacement.

That means I will need to write a logout view at some point.

But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

• Feb 23rd, surgery
• Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
• Feb 27th, first outing
• March 9th, half weight bearing
• March 12th, 90 degree flexion
• April 10th, walking without crutches
• April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
• June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
• June 18th, first time road cycling

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

Cultural

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

• The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
• Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
• Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
• The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
• Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
• Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
• Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

https://www.gq.com/story/mount-everest-chaos-at-the-top-of-the-world

Picked the countries where 50% of the people speak a language where I have at least B level of skill.

This and clothes go into a Patagonia MLC bag.

Take knife off keychain

I’ve forgotten to do this more than a couple of times. What makes it weirder still is that TXL/SXF will allow me to fly out with a Swiss army knife but most other airports will not allow me to fly back with one.

Essentials

These are things that are irreplaceable and without which a trip usually cannot happen.

• Laptop Obvious. Macbook Pro 13".
• Power cable Without this the laptop is pretty worthless. Replacements if you can find them in a local store are upwards of €100.
• Passport Without this traveling isn’t really possible.
• Boarding cards / tickets You could get these from the airport but I print out everything I can at home.

Toiletries

• Sunblock At some point it becomes silly to buy new sunblock at every sunny destination.
• Toothbrush, paste Sometimes I don’t bother to bring any and buy them at the destination airport but it’s more reliable to pack. Often I also take the head of my electric tooth brush.
• Lipbalm I put this on there after I once needed it and paid €11 for a stick at ZRH.
• Assorted other toiletries This is a pain with only a carry-on. I try to usually depend as much as possible on what is available at my destination.

Getting around

These are particularly essential for the Netherlands where you need to bring a card to be able to prove your identity to the various transit systems around.

• Foreign SIM Often this means just my Dutch T-Mobile SIM. I often have SIMs for destinations outside of Europe but those are so short lived that they aren’t reusable.
• Foreign money / transit cards I have ziploc bags per country with the currency leftovers as well as any transit card (Oyster, Suica) or SIM that may still be usable.
• Power converters The US and the UK account for most of my trips where these are necessary. I put these in the ziploc bags with the currency.
• Paperclip I used to need one of these to do the SIM swap. Now I have an Apple SIM pin in the box with all my SIM cards.
• Keys Keys to my parents place in the Netherlands or any other home/office at the destination.
• Small backpack The MLC isn’t very practical to haul around town. I have a tiny Bach day pack that is super basic but fits everything you could need during a day.
• Canteen I usually don’t bother taking this because of weight and bulk, but it is useful for longer trips.

Office

• VGA dongle Trips usually involve some kind of public speaking and as a speaker you should be self-sufficient. Don’t leave this at the venue where you’re speaking.
• Pens I need to carry some quality pens with me. I usually have a four color box of Staedtler fineliners and a couple of Japanese gel pens.
• Index cards Always useful but don’t bring too many because paper is heavy.
• Business cards Trips are usually for business and people appreciate a nicely designed business card.
• Headphones with microphone The standard Apple ones will do for most calls.
• Noise cancelling headphones You need headphones with some noise cancelling effect for during flights. I used to travel with my Sony MDR-7506. They are bulky but if you fly an easyJet to Berlin with those on your head, everybody thinks you’re a DJ. Now I prefer to take my Sennheiser CX-300 II in-ears.

Special wardrobe

• Havaianas Bring if the destination is hot.
• Running shoes, pants Nice to be able to do some sports while traveling.
• Swimming trunks Always bring these.
• Sunglasses I always take my Moscot Lemtosh with me.
• Hiking shoes Whether to bring my decade old pair of Meindls is heavily dependent on the type of trip and the environment.
• Climbing shoes If there are climbing halls nearby, I’ll take these instead of/in addition to running shoes.

Things to check at home

• Washing machine faucet shut
• Gas turned off
• Lock door
• Fridge empty, leave door open

I had picked my hotel to be on the right side of the city to be off to a running start so I could visit places right from the very first day. So landed at Narita, got my Mifi and while waiting to checkin I made my way to.

Little Nap Coffee Stand

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I had a quick lunch and walked to the Little Nap Coffee Stand (checkin, tip) which I had seen a video of over at My First Coffee and was totally smitten with. As promised the store was beautiful and the coffee was excellent.

Fuglen Tokyo

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Then I walked over to this place recommended to me by Companion Coffee. This Fuglen (checkin, tip) is a sister to a store by the same name in Oslo ¹. This place turned out to be more of a cafe with an event program and cocktails in the evening and a diverse group of Japanese people and expats hanging around with laptops during the day.

The decorations are lush Nordic wood and the Kalita Wave pour over that I had was terrific.

Omotesando Koffee

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Then after some more walking around at the end of the day I finally hit the promised place: Omotesando Koffee (checkin, tip) which had been recommended to me by countless people and where Eiichi Kunimoto practices his craft. I had an iced cappuccino here because —what I hadn’t counted on— the weather was extremely pressing and it was rainy humid and very warm all day. It stayed that way for most of my stay.

The iced cappuccino at Omotesando is more of a milkshake like concoction with the espresso shot put into a blender along with some ice and milk, the result is poured out into your cup and sprinkled with —I think— cinnamon. Drinking this at that moment in the idyllic garden of Omotesando was a near religious experience and felt like the best coffee I have ever had. I returned to Omotesando a number of times during my visit for the coffee, the amicable staff and the quiet ambiance of its garden.

Bear Pond Espresso

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The next day I walked from my hotel to Shimokitazawa, a 20 minute saunter in the heat through the quiet residential area of Hatagaya. I don’t have any pictures of Bear Pond (checkin, tip) because of their policy but this was the other summit of my Tokyo coffee experience.

Katsuyuki Tanaka (and Eiichi Kunimoto of Omotesando) are very different and have a totally different style of coffee and shop but both elevate making coffee to a level which can only be called artistry.

The ambiance at Bear Pond is slightly forbidding but with the American radio playing it is rather easy to unwind on one of the stools and wait for your espresso to be served. That espresso when it comes out is one of the shortest shots you have ever drunk and probably also one of the most intense.

I ordered an espresso on an empty stomach which I normally never do because it gives me problems. But this espresso was so smooth that not only did my stomach not get upset, it was so delicious that I chased it with another one. With the reduced quantity it becomes something of an effort to get every last bit of taste out of the cup.

I brought back a bag of Bear Pond’s house blend ‘Flower Child’ and even when made in Berlin (by the heroes of Companion Coffee) after two weeks, it still had that characteristic deep chocolate like flavour.

Cafe Obscura

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The next stop was Cafe Obscura (checkin, tip), a somewhat out of the way place with lots of nice leather sofas and good siphons on offer. Obscura also have a laboratory which I skipped in favor of this place. The siphon coffee is expertly made and really good.

Nozy Coffee

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Then it was a quick visit to Nozy Coffee (checkin, tip) which is a small but very nice looking coffee place. I had a solid cappuccino and saw that they have lots of beans on offer. Unfortunately I had no time to come back and bring some of these with me, but this place is one to look out for.

Be A Good Neighbor (Sendagaya)

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The following day started out at the tiny Be A Good Neighbor (checkin, tip) store in Sendagaya. The cappuccino and the cake were both excellent and the barista was very helpful in offering tips about where to get more coffee. Especially useful was his pointer to Paddlers which I started the next day with.

Streamer Coffee Company Shibuya

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I then walked on to Shibuya to try the coffee at Streamer (checkin, tip). The type of coffee which they serve here and which I had is a latte. I normally don’t drink them but in the light of trying out the coffee as it is being served locally I had one. Shockingly this was the first place in Tokyo I encountered where the coffee was not fantastic.

What Streamer does do really well is to be a nice place to hangout. There were lots of people in the store with and without laptops having a great time and relaxing which is exactly what I did as well.

On the Corner No. 8 Bear Pond

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The last stop this day was the Shibuya On the Corner Bear Pond No. 8 (checkin, tip) take-out bar which is a beautiful store front with attached coffee bar where you can sit on a handful of stools and recharge your phone or as it seems to be the intention: take out your coffee. You get an expertly drawn coffee with milk in it and a no photo policy is in effect here as well, so I can show you the cup I drank it from:

I did not visit the restaurant and instead had an awesome burger around the corner at Whoopie Gold Burger.

Paddler’s Coffee

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The next day I trekked to the area around Sangubashi station in the morning and had a terrific start of the day at Paddlers Coffee (checkin, tip) a brilliant setup lunch place with Stumptown coffee on offer. I had a spectacular iced coffee in the stifling heat.

Cafe Kitsune

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I then made it out to Cafe Kitsune (checkin, tip) whose presence I had just been alerted to. This is a fashion store in Omotesando where they have a fabled Slayer Espresso machine.

Then it was off to Kyoto to see some sights and sample the coffee outside of Tokyo. This was something of a disappointment, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Specialty Coffee Unir

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In Kyoto I found it rather hard to get a coffee that I would term drinkable. Most of the local brews are very dark roasted and ridiculously over extracted to a point that I can hardly drink them even with milk and sugar (or gum syrup).

One exception to his in Kyoto was Unir (checkin, tip) where they make a very nice cappuccino and which I visited a couple of times because of this.

アカツキコーヒー (Akatsuki Coffee)

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Based on some research I found Akatsuki (checkin, tip) which is a nice place in a different part of town. This place gets the filter brew almost right and the shop itself looks beautiful.

Omotesando Koffee

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What I didn’t know until my last day in Kyoto and after my camera broke down is that they have a branch of Omotesando (checkin, tip)in the city on the main shopping street in a fashion store of United Arrows. The same impeccable Omotesando branding and the same fantastic coffee. I’m half glad that I didn’t know of it before because given the Kyoto coffee scene I would have been at this place all the time.

Hood Cafe

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Then it was off to Osaka to do the same. My experience here was a bit better than in Kyoto but not much. Hood (checkin, tip) is a very nice coffee shop which manages to hit all of the cultural paraphernalia associated with third wave coffee and also serves a bunch of different beans and methods but still it does not seem to hit the level of Tokyo. Still they serve very good coffee even without comparing it to the stuff on offer in the rest of the city.

Espresso Bar Millpour

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Next up was Millpour (checkin, tip) which is a tiny place in the city where they make a near perfect cappuccino.

After that detour it was time to get back to Tokyo and to finish this visit.

The Monocle Cafe

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I dropped by the Monocle Cafe (checkin, tip) in the basement of a clothing store and was disappointed by the coffee though the food was rather ok. The coffee is not terrible, but it does not have the quality that you would expect from Monocle which is more or less the same for the rest of the store.

Be A Good Neighbor Skytree

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Then I made my way over to the Be A Good Neighbor (checkin, tip) store in the Skytree. The Skytree itself is a pandemonium of commerce where people are screaming at you all the time to buy something. Finding your way through the mall to the exact location of Be A Good Neighbor is no mean feat, but finally having arrived there the coffee is as excellent as in their other store. I would only recommend going here if you’re already in the area or god forbid entering the Skytree but then it is a welcome place to rest.

Sarutahiko Coffee

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I also did a round of Ebisu and found two very nice coffee places in that part of town. Sarutahiko (checkin) is a small shop but it seems to have everything necessary and made a very nice coffee. Definitely worth a visit.

Hitinui Espresso Bar

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A bit further on is Hitinui (checkin, tip) which is a tiny place and also doubles as a Tahitian dance school. I couldn’t check out the dance, but the cappuccino was excellent and the barista very friendly.

Identity Coffee Bar+Gallery

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Identity Coffee Bar+ Gallery (checkin, tip) also in Omotesando is a rather nice store and has an excellent selection of both Intelligentsia and Handsome beans which they prepare perfectly.

That was the roundup from my Tokyo coffee experience. I visited a couple of the places several times and brought back some bags of coffee but I am extremely impressed with the coffee culture and I’ll definitely be back.

This was the week of getting a lot of things done and a minor John Boyd obsession. I read the biography by Coram and queued the PhD thesis by Osinga to read as soon as I finish Latour’s Aramis ¹ instead of the pop-sci that permeates everything.)). Frans Osinga is a rather impressive fellow if you look at his Ministry of Defense webpage. We were joking around that having a design event with him would be brilliant mind-expand. Unfortunately events take too much time to organize so that won’t be happening anytime soon.

One thing to keep in mind from Boyd’s tragic life is to make the decision to either Be Somebody or to Do Something. Most people I hang out with all want to Do Something, but it does pay to keep in mind how it will work out for you personally.

I made a brief stop in Aachen ² before heading to the Netherlands to catch up with local coffee, for some quality time at Hubbub HQ and meeting Amsterdam friends.

To prepare for that visit to the Netherlands I had to kill another two hours at the local Bürgeramt because the Meldebescheinigung I had was not recent enough for some stupid Dutch institution.

We got visits again from Peter Rukavina and this time Thomas dropped in as well to make it a proper Reboot reunion. I decided to join Peter (Bihr) to go to London in October to attend Playful and Mozilla Festival and potentially Gamecity too which is supposed to be an awesome conference in Nottingham. I’ve never been outside of London so that alone may be worth the trip.

I also had a visit of my old friend Bjorn who I worked with at a company that shall not be named but that was deep in the territory of the bizarre.

I spent the beginning of that week prepping for a client engagement which got me waking up on Wednesday somewhere before five o’clock to take a hellish cab ride into Tegel airport. You are never driven to Tegel in the same way twice, but I’ll definitely make sure never to take the highway again.

During the flight I also managed to spill coffee both over my clothes and my laptop and that was all before I even arrived in Munich. That was a rather terrible start of a day that turned out very well. That evening we celebrated our success with a Tsukemen ramen at a local Munich ramen joint ¹.

The next day we did another day at the client after which having been nicely friend I took an S-Bahn to the airport. Munich airport right now has the best feature ever. There is a beer garden in between the two terminals where you can cheaply load up on a local microbrew before you board your plane. Every airport should have this.

Then after having done all of this and with hardly enough sleep I dropped into our weekly Sheperditchi breakfast and then straight into a OpenGL ES course given by Stijn Oomes. Stijn has a PhD from my alma mater and we know many of the same people even though I didn’t have too many interactions with the computer graphics group at my faculty. We had talked earlier that year about his current pursuit of 3D vision and about the potential of such a workshop for iOS programmers. It was a thoroughly enjoyable day of pure learning with a lot of hands on and a knowledgeable teacher at hand.

That evening I joined the Berlin Critical Mass which is changing for the better and after that I watched Only God Forgives. A brilliant contemplative orgy of violence, shades of which I am seeing in Hotline Miami which I’m playing right now.

And the next day I got my first sailing lessons —which I had half forgotten I was supposed to have— and after that I finally had some time to catch up on e-mail. Pretty odd how something that was such a critical part of infrastructure in this part of the world is nothing more than a pass time for well off people at the moment.

That week we went into our Open State board meeting where everything is picking up in pace considerably. After that I just made it to the drinks of the Upfront UG which was a lot of fun.

We started ideation and building of an app for the piazza+social media platform which I’m rather excited about. More on that over on the Hubbub blog soon.

I will be speaking at the Retune conference in my hometown on the subject of games with a purpose and our creative process. It looks like a super nice conference and I would love to meet you here.

Our office landlords invited us to join them in a celebration on our building’s roof terrace. It’s been a while since I was on one of those and they look like mandatory facilities for anybody living in Berlin. I’m putting it my list of required utilities for the next KANT office.

Just to prove the awesomeness of Berlin, we just had a Korean food shack opening here (besides the already rather large offering of Korean cuisine that Berlin has). I had my first Kimchi Fries there, which I think is indeed best described as a Korean kapsalon.

On Friday I just handled a last bit of business for the week and then went off to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MeckPom) for a bit of kayaking and canoeing which is about all there is to do in that part of Germany. It is a state that is trying to cope with severe shrinkage and because of its sparse population lends itself particularly well to forays into nature. I saw lots of animals and their young and definitely learned the difference between a kayak and a canoe. Also: bringing an aeropress can make situations much more bearable.

Way back when this happened I was in the Netherlands for an appointment that was cancelled and because of that I had to fly to Munich from Amsterdam for a day of workshopping. The next night I flew back to Amsterdam to spend the rest of the week at Hubbub HQ in the Netherlands.

We did our strategic sessions about which I probably have written elsewhere already but this was as good a time as any to revisit this brilliant interview with Jack Schulze. They don’t make them like that anymore.

No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.

Advice to frame and put above your desk.

The last day I did a coffee tour of Amsterdam, which is in utter bloom at this moment with Third Wave coffee places opening up literally left and right. I paid a duty visit to BrunsNiks which is one of the best up and coming design firms of that city where most stuff is bullshit.

What is also brilliant are the new Hackers and Founders offices of the eponymous meetup group. My old office in the Volkskrantgebouw got evicted because they are turning that into a hotel (like pretty much everything in Amsterdam) so they got together with the neighbors of Bottlenose and some other friends and rented a nice floor smack in Amsterdam city centre. I can’t take any credit for what they did but still I’m half proud of what that turned into.

And that segued nicely into the speaker’s dinner for our Hack de Overheid event (which got a nice press release drop over at Wired thanks to Bruce). The event, the next day in City Hall, was one where all of the founders were present at one and the same location. That already was amazing. After the day was finished I spent the evening talking philosophy with Simeon.

And the next day it was back in the train to Berlin which has added a whole hour because the flooding has damaged a bridge and caused a large stretch of tracks to be dislodged. Deutsche Bahn says that reconstruction will take until December. That may be just in time for next year’s flooding.

Two weeks ago I headed towards Amsterdam where I’ll be the week after next again. I did a massive sprint on Cuppings and prepared my presentation for Sign of Times in Pakhuis de Zwijger.

I worked on a bunch of projects over at Hubbub on Tuesday and on Wednesday I was there again but then to prepare my presentation. That talk went really well despite the torrential rains of the day and I had a great time catching up with the people who had showed up.

I caught up with Daphne on Thursday and wandered around the city a bit looking for good coffe which I found at the newly opened Head First.

I finally ended up at the presentations of the Liquid Journalism masterclass and got to talk with Alexander and Laura.

On Friday Kars got married which was the other main reason I was in the Netherlands for.

Télescope already was nice:

But with the addition of Loustic, French coffee can finally be taken seriously again:

Most of these places seem to be run by English speaking expatriates and they are also mostly frequented by the same. This was something I also noticed at my coworking space in La Cantine. It seems that foreigners are a necessary mediator to introduce new things —digital or coffee— into French culture.

That Tuesday I worked at KANT and all of the people there presented roughly what they’re doing at the agency we sublease at Panorama3000.

I was thinking of writing a screensaver that does the live OSM viewer ‘Show me the way’, but it turns out there’s a way easier solution by plugging that URL into the WebView Screensaver.

That Wednesday I did a quick ignite for UIKonf on Beestenbende’s design aspects and the next day I was at Heimathafen Neukölln at 06:00 to help them with setup and registration. I managed to catch a bit of the conference and based on the content on stage and reactions in the room, it looks like it was a resounding success.

The next day I spent working at the office for most of the day, but in the evening I dropped by the UIKode hackathon to show the iOS project I had picked up again that week. More on that to be announced here soon.

On Thursday I managed to set aside a bit of time to go to the local multiplayer picknick at Amaze. The Amaze Indie Connect is the most fun event of the Berlin game scene and it always gets lots of very cool people to come out. Just sitting at the same table as Terry Cavanagh and Michael Brough left me a bit star-struck:

@ amazefest #dgt13 #AMaze2013 Thanks 2 all for that wonderful time. I wish u a successful year and hope seeing u 2014 back in Berlin.

— Thorsten S Wiedemann (@ST0RN0) April 28, 2013

It was also nice to see lots of old friends who I manage to see a couple of times a year. My highlight of Amaze was to be able to play Samurai Gunn. This game isn’t available yet and the video I’m going to post below does not nearly do it justice. It is one of the most gripping multiplayer combat games I’ve played to date.

On Friday I had breakfast at the Sheperditchi ¹ and then on Saturday it was off to Paris for CHI for the designing gamification workshop run by Sebastian Deterding.

I spent a full day with the team on Tuesday working on KAIGARA:

I drank very awesome coffee that Angelo had brought back from his road trip along the west coast of the USA:

We celebrated shipping some projects that night with Kars and Simon and the next day I was back at Hubbub for another day of work. That night it was off to the Open State offices in Amsterdam for a bit of envisioning with our new managing director. A very solid and constructive session, well catered by our in-house team of Bite Me:

My work setup at the brilliant Koko:

The Thursday I spent working at the Open Coop and preparing my Python programming course I gave on the now defunct Gidsy.

Friday I took the train back to Berlin and it was confirmed to me again that train companies are stupid. If I take a different train to Berlin I need to pay the difference in distance even if I start and end in the same place:

And Saturday I also managed squeeze out a long overdue Recess!.

So lots of stuff and more to follow.

That week also involved a one-day trip to Munich to present on the work we did for a client there. More on that on the Hubbub blog in due course.

Thursday I worked at the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering next door. I really love how Oranienstraße is coming together as a creative technological hub of import in Berlin.

The rest of the week was used developing Ripple Effect and with maintenance on GidsGame.nl.

Week 313 was spent in the Netherlands with a somewhat hectic visit. I spent a lot of time at the Hubbub studio and at the Open Coop.

And of course the inevitable five (!) visits to the Village who were serving only Coffee Collective coffees when I was there:

And that Friday was Free Bassel Day in remembrance of our friend who is still imprisoned in a Syrian prison:

And then it was an ICE back to Berlin already:

I did manage to get some good writing in those two weeks. First one piece about why levying a tax on data is not a bad idea at all: Taxing data is not crazy. And the week after that about Jaron Lanier who is a crazy person with some interesting ideas: Who owns the future?

TORREON should be about finished by now. And last Friday we also forcibly launched the German incarnation of Politwoops now with an accompanying Twitter account because the SPD chancellor candidate posted something he shouldn’t have.

Also I’m doing another bout of programming education for non-programmers in Amsterdam next week with a course and a meetup. More on that in a bit.

And I finished my Recess! post.