Hobbies, spleens, et cetera

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Agreed - its easier to play chess than to take pictures

Hobbies

Eating out and making friends

takes its time, and of course I'm busy with those things and stuff. As you can imagine, computers also get their share of my spare time but that's not what I gonna stress your nerves with here.

First and foremost, I'm a gambler and player. Be it chess, pool, darts, all kind of video games, cards, or maybe squash: wherever I can win I'm in.

Player and Organizer

Sometimes serious fun can become funny serious, as did my involvement into chess: Together with two friends of mine we founded the chess section of VfB Leipzig in 1993, something that became one of the more important chess clubs in Leipzig, Germany.

I should perhaps mention that as player I rather failed to enrich the chess scene. There have been peaks: 5^th in the 1990 German Junior Team Championships, rank 3 and qualification for Chess Olympics in the Namibian Championship 2000, Namibian Champion 2002. Most success came from arbiting and organizing, though.

Here in Namibia there's not much going on in chess. I rather play Skat (German kind of cards game related to Bridge), and it's a lot of fun.

Sportsman, sort of

You won't easily find a challenge that I'd refuse to face. Every now and then I overestimate myself badly, however. Some crazy things I did since 2000 were:

took the 90 km Fish River Canyon hiking trail
participated in the Namibian Cycle Classics 2000 and 2001 (Results)
cycled at the Commercial Bank Open (Results)

The only sports I'm doing somewhat regularly are sqash and hiking.

Traveller and visitor

In Africa, it's nothing special to become interested in travelling and nature observation; flora and fauna are really somehow like from a different world if you are not native.

So far, I've been at some of the major attractions in Namibia itself: Etosha Pan, Fish River, Sossusvlei, to mention but a few. The only bigger journey took place in December and January 2001/02, it was a round trip through south-eastern Afrika.

Around Christmas 2001 I travelled cross-continent by Land-Rover. My journey took me to Tsodilo Hills (Botswana), Victoria Falls (Zambia), Lake Malawi, Tete (Moçambique), Harare (Zimbabwe), and the salt pans of Botswana. A detailled description in German is here.