We're only a few hours away from the end of the year, so for  brevity's sake, I will not write an all-encompassing retro- or  introspective of this year and myself. Rather, I'll post mostly pictures  with captions.

Going away

The time we spent away from Vienna.

Prague

We went to Prague, a first for both of us. We found a cozy little  AirBnB very near to the old town and spent three days eating us through  various restaurants.

A collection of dumplings and meats served in a small restaurant near  the Prague Castle. An area, by the way, you can with no regrets choose  to ignore. There's so many other places to see, there is no reason at  all to wait in line for hours.

The view from one of the many bridges in Prague. There's so many tourists around, try not to cross the

It's unfathomable to me how so few people would visit these places,  but my best guess is, that Prague is just so full of great things, it's  hard to go everywhere.

Anyway, that was Prague. The train from Vienna to Prague, by the way,  had a happy hour when we went, which made for the cheapest, best beer  I've ever had on a train. I later found out that happy hour is all the  time on those trains.

Corfu

Our first time on Corfu but most probably not our last. We spent a  week in a small village with might as well have been created for  tourists alone. At least it looked that way. It wasn't to our detriment,  because it meant that on a stretch of roughly 800 meters, we'd find  about 30 restaurants nestled against a sandy beach.

We ate, swam and drank. I also read YOU WILL KNOW ME by Megan Abott there, and was turned into an instant fan.

Have some pictures.

Munich

We also spent a few days in Munich for my birthday. It was a bit of  an impromptu vacation, but turned out to be quite fantastic. I won't  bother you with the details here, because I've already written two  accounts of what we did there. You can find them here and here.

Scotland

Well, what can I say? Scotland is the best and we spent two weeks  driving through the highlands and the Western isles. I'm still planning  on writing a few more words about it, but whenever I try to, I realize  that words and even pictures won't do the whole thing justice. Still,  here's some pictures.

Podcasts

Podcasts have seen quite a surge in popularity in 2017. Which is fine by me, considering we're still going strong with Zeitsprung,  a history podcast in German about, well, stories from history. We  managed to keep up our schedule of posting an episode a week. You should  check it out, if you speak German.

Also, there is this funny saying that once you start podcasting,  you'll sooner or later not be content with making just one. Not sure if  that's actually a saying, but it happened that way with me. So in 2017, I  also created my very own podcast for my other project, the selfhostedweb.org.

It's about software you can install on your own server in order to  not be dependent on hosted services as much. The release cycle is  somewhat slower than Zeitsprung, but I did manage to release four  episodes (the latest of which just yesterday). It's in English, in order  to be able to reach more than just the German-speaking world. You can  find it here or wherever you usually get your podcasts from.

What else?

When in Corfu, I read YOU WILL KNOW ME, by Megan Abbott. It turned out to be fantastic. At the end of the year, I read DARE ME, which was equally fantastic. You should buy her books.

And that's it. The shooting outside the window is showing me that  time is running out. I'll have to go ahead and start preparing the New  Year's Eve dinner.

Have a good 2018, whoever you are who's reading this.