I just spent over an hour writing an entry and lost all of it when Blogger experienced "a problem". However, I am not prepared to leave without a fight and am almost sure I'll be able to reconstruct my newest post - I owe it to you and to myself. So here we go.

I was saying that I'm still not sure this template is exactly what I was looking for when I decided to refresh my blog a bit. It's a little too spotty for my taste, but then again there were so many layouts to choose from I suppose it's all the same! I added some new stuff in the sidebar, in case you didn't notice. I will keep doing this as time passes, so keep checking.



My first online purchase in 2006 on Amazon was made today amid pomp and glamour and I am now waiting for my Family Historian software to arrive so I can start updating the family tree with all the information I retreived last year. Omi's mouth-watering family trunk contained significant documents I hadn't examined before and also her neighbour, my granduncle, has a piece of paper I've been wanting to get my hands on for a long while. With this paper, it's going to be significantly easier to trace the lineage of my great-grandmother, whose surname was Bauer. Try researching that surname in a city as big as Vienna. I downloaded the demo of the newest Historian, and until now I'm convinced it's way better than the Family Tree Maker program I have been using until now, of which the version I have probably dates back to the times of my great-great-greatgrandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Killer from Siegen, Germany (see picture).



I spent altogether 28 nights on the trip, of which one was spent at the Holiday Inn JFK in New York, one on flight AA62 from Miami to Paris (a flight so bumpy it made the roads of the remote Ecuadorian jungle pale in comparison), two at my uncle's house, three at the Hosteria Isla de los Monos (Island of the monkeys - again, see picture) in Archidona, Eastern Ecuador, one at the country house of my aunt's family in Guayllabamba, and the rest at my grandmother's. I'm realising an alarming tendency to make lists and statistics like this of trips. Of course, I need look no further than one generation up to see where that came from, but let's hope I won't end up documenting my visits to the bathroom (until now, this hasn't happened in our family).


A friend asked me today whether my trip made me think of the world as being very small or very big, and I thought it was an interesting question. In a way, it's true the world has become really small because we have stuff to make it look like that. We have telephones and, more recently, intenet call programs like Skype, which make a distance of 20 000 kilometres vanish just like that, we have airplanes which fly so fast we can't grasp it (at least I can't), and we have the most fantastic computer program yet, Google Earth, which allows us to virtually visit any corner of the planet free of charge. But, anyway, I prefer to think that the world is really big. I mean, it's hopefully still the same size as thousands of years ago, and you just have to think about the time it took people to get places before.

Less than a hundred years ago, travelling to Quito from Europe was no picnic. My great-grandparents arrived on horseback from the port city of Guayaquil, built their sausage factory, and got on with life just like that, in a country which, back then, certainly wasn't easy to live in as a European. The factory still exists (see picture - the slogan means "The good things of life never change" and I don't know where that came from, it certainly isn't a family philosophy for all I know) and plays a central role in the history of our family in Ecuador. My father and uncle were practically raised in it.


I'm getting carried away now, and although it feels like the evening is just beginning, it's 2am so maybe I should wrap it up for today. Have a good night, everybody, and an even better tomorrow.