It requires a crappy day to get great thoughts. Weird.

I don't have a digital camera. Well, I do have one in my mobile but it so useless that I don't feel like calling it camera. But at the moment I have camera with me. I took it from Finland while I was there for a holiday and now it is with me in Zurich.

It is a Minolta 7000i. It is heavy and it is around 15-20 years old. It used to have autofocus but that functionality has been broken many years. Luckily its range finder still works and gives information for manual focusing. I had it with me in Poland and colors of some photos taken in mountains were a little bit strange. Maybe I should have had a filter because it was extremely sunny on that day.

So far I have spent one roll of film here and yesterday I dropped it to be developed. Just for curiosity I wanted also have photos on CD. Perhaps that was the reason why the price of developing and making 24 prints with CD was around 40 CHF - 25 EUR. Huh! With those costs I can easily reason for myself buying a digital camera.

But the issue I haven't yet solved is storing of digital photos. At the moment I have most recent in iPhoto, something on CDs and I think some photos are just gone forever. Only long time solution would be to use some printing service to create paper prints. I don't trust my hard disk or CD-Rs that much as CD-R lasts with some luck 5 years and if stored and handled with care it might do maximum 10 years.

That is just way too short time as photos are supposed to last 100 years. But on the other hand the costs of traditional photographing seem to be high. I was thinking about taking that Minolta to repair shop to be cleaned and I also saw some used AF-lenses for it. Then it would most likely last another 10 years while producing long lasting traditional photos. Hmm, difficult choice.

I have been spending weekend with my usual way to get to know new city. Walking around and getting sometimes lost. I used to have a small tourist map of Zurich but I managed to forget it to Budapest. Luckily there are some guide maps at tram stops so getting totally lost is more difficult.

Zurich is very pedestrian and cyclist friendly city. There are numerous lanes for cyclist and car drivers stop at zebra crossings - something you can not expect to happen in Budapest.

The downtown is packed with shops. So far I haven't spent too much money, I only bought prepaid SIM card for my mobile and normal food ingredients. But I guess I rather spend my extra money to traveling and visiting different cities in Switzerland.

I have something like a six or seven weekends to spend for traveling. So far I have plan to visit Bern, Luzern and maybe Lausanne or Geneva...

Hmm, I was about to go out but it started to rain again. Here was a period of good weather but it vanished right when I arrived. It seems that it also rains in Budapest because F1 racetrack there is wet. Maybe I will stay inside and watch the race from TV - with wet conditions the race might be interesting.

Today I am about to travel to Zurich. In the early morning there was some hassle because I lost my flat keys. Luckily I managed to find them without unpacking everything and I even avoided being in hurry.

Oh, and a good tip to everybody who has habit to be early at the airport. Bring your own snack with you and you will save a small fortune. Also a laptop and a free WLAN access at airport help you to kill some time before boarding.

Arrived back to Budapest from Finland on Sunday and now I am packing again. As mentioned before I am heading to Zurich for ten weeks. This time I tried to avoid packing totally useless items with me. I hope I succeed and I don't have to buy too many things from expensive Zurich.

Anyways, I feel good after excellent holiday in Finland. Air was clean and weather was pleasant in addition of meeting friends and relatives. I really hope that weather will be okay also in Zurich...