are the ones since 2018. I have not been active in updating the blog anymore. As an interim, I wrote a short blog post about Purok Masingayahon, which was a copy of a small book I made and I only had to copy and paste it into the website. So what happened? Well, I was around of course and the year 2018 became very hectic as I finally managed to retire from my job and I had to move from my place where I lived in Lebanon. I ended up in my home country Germany because for family reasons. Family is family, of course, however since I had not lived in Germany more or less since 1983, I was not too happy to return. Not at all. With all the ongoing obligations at home, I had no desire to write about the same. In these missing years, I did manage to travel a bit, in and outside of Germany. Vienna, Cyprus, Singapore and the Philippines, as well as Belgium, Strasburg and The Netherlands were places visited. In Germany, it was the Baltic coast, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart of course, with a short visit to Poland as well. Since the dreaded Covid crap started, with all its restrictions, lock-downs and other nonsense, it became even more problematic, but we managed to do a few of the above trips. After the passing of my father in early 2020, I decided that I was not going to stay in Germany and made plans to sell the property and move to Asia or maybe Cyprus, just not staying here. The "pandemic" did not make this easier, on the contrary, with all its restrictions, quarantine etc. and travel bans it made it much more difficult to plan so we are now at the end of 2021 and I am still here. I did manage to contract a realtor and have the house checked by an architect. The German buerocarcy does not make it easier to sell the house because of its location in a so-called 'green' zone, however, it can be done but it is this much more complicated. So the plan is to finalize the sale in 2022 and move the hell out of Germany.

The year 2020 started like any other previous year. I was travelling to the far east, this time via Taiwan with China Airlines and I enjoyed the trip and experience of flying with China Airlines. After landing in Manila and connecting with friends and family I was off for a week in the province in the southern Philippines. This was followed by a week in Singapore and another week in Manila, where I started applying for my permanent residence. While waiting for the process, I went back to the province and continued on my project concerning the plight and hardship of the sugar cane and general farm workers that often live in bad conditions and are treated not nicely by their Haciendero employers. I wrote about this already in a short form last year under the title Purok Masingyahon. While doing so, already reports emerged of the virus that had been discovered in China in January, and where while in Singapore more concrete information transpired so much so that a case was discovered in Singapore on Sentosa Island and the Hotel I was staying in implemented temperature checks for anyone entering the building.

In the province, I continued with one of my projects of photographing the people that harvest the sugar cane. These are often migratory workers that move around from province to province and often live under appalling conditions. In Negros Occidental, the part I was living in, much of this work will be performed by labourers of the various haciendas, that, often equally live in squalid conditions and are not treated very well by the big landowners, i.e.hacienderos as they are referred to to locally in a Spanish term. News reached me that my father had been hospitalized with a mild stroke, so I decided to travel home as soon as possible. Passing through Taipeh airport on my way back to Frankfurt had already a bad foreboding, it was nearly empty. When I had transmitted through it seven weeks earlier, it was as full as it could be. In Frankfurt, the same picture, the always full and busy airport was nearly empty as well. My father passed away three weeks after my return, his condition worsening by the day, with other ailments adding to the mild stroke. In the end, the doctors informed me that there was nothing that could be done for him anymore. Because of the 'pandemic', it was only possible to bury him six weeks later. After that, all the bureaucracy of the inheritance of the property and related issues took my energy and I felt I had nothing to write about that was really of interest and so I forgot that I even had this page and blog. I was reminded once the payment became due, but again had no energy to write or display any of the photos that I had been taking in the meantime.

Well what to say, even this is now taking me forever to complete this blog entry. To make it shorter, during the so-called Pandemic we travelled to Cyprus, Austria, Belgium, Poland as well as Paris and in 2019 also to Lebanon. I continued photographing and bought new equipment along the way. In the Philippines I damaged my Olympus OMD, it fell from my shoulder and cracked the sensor. I replaced it with an Olympus Pen F which is a very nice camera that I cherish very much. Currently, my activities only include posting sometimes photos to Instagram @monsoonlight00  and making yearbooks for 2019 to 2021. I have ideas for several publications but have not come around to working on them seriously, although some drafts exist in the publishing software. If all goes well, we will be going to Cyprus again and I want to continue my photo series on the last "divided capital", i.e. Nicosia, in the world. The latter from the end of November planning to go to Asia, via Singapore to the Philippines, Malaysia and maybe Indonesia. In the Philippines, I want to continue to photograph the sugar cane workers and poor landless Campesinos. I hopefully will also make it to the rice terraces of Banaue, one of the Asian wonders of the world. I will try to update this blog from now on a more regular basis hopefully. for now, this shall be all for this intermediate text. Peace, love and light.