I Think The Earth Moved

I might have mentioned that I'm the honorary treasurer of the club where my son plays basketball, and in connection with that I have just wound up last years accounts. All which is to be presented at the annual meeting. Last night we had a final board meeting before the annual, just to tidy up next years budget and some other things. I didn't tell you this because it's particularly interesting, on the contrary, it's actually quite boring. Figures and numbers that need to be correct, and a lot of talk around it. That's why I needed a little break last night after the meeting.

So what can you do in the middle of February, thats free, and won't take long? Easy. You'll travel the world! With the help of modern technology and a good portion of vivid imagination you can go anywhere in a jiffy.

I drove directly from the meeting to a dear friend of mine. We had something to celebrate, and did that with some cake and coffee and... Yummy, indeed. A little later I said something about wanting to visit Monte Negro sometime. Not exactly sure how far up on the coastline it was situated (it turned out to be much further south than we'd expected), we decided to check it online. But why settle for a crude graphic map when you can use Google Earth? In your own living room you can zoom in on every single spot on the earth, it's absolutely amazing. Not all the maps have equally good resolution, for example my hometown doesn't show that well. But when we started our trip to places he'd been, it became a totally different experience. Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and so on are extremely well represented. But the travel there went further, beyond the actual places. When we came to Babylon, I made some associations to an assignment I had last year. While working on that essay I came across Hammurabi's Code of Laws, and also wrote a blogpost about that.

And like that we traveled here and there, sharing memories and experiences. I took him to Australia and Canada, with a stopover in Sardinia, while he showed me Curacao. We also had a look at a few places neither of us had been before, but that looked tempting. Like the Maldives.

Well back "home" again we suddenly realized that the world had turned upside down on the screen. In Google Earth you can control the map of the world in almost every possible angle and direction, and when we'd zoomed out somehow there was another perspective to it. Refreshing.