New Blog Posts, Travel Plans, Media

Hello subscribers!

It’s been a while since the previous DT Newsletter. Sorry for the prolonged silence (reasons given below). But, most importantly for this Newsletter: since the last one a couple of new Blog posts have gone up.

Shortly after sending that previous Newsletter I uploaded a new DT Blog post on 9 May to mark that day’s historical significance, as the anniversary of the signing of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender which ended WWII in Europe. If you’re now thinking, hang on, isn’t VE Day on 8 May? … then you are right, for Western Europe, that is. But in the East the date is indeed the 9th. If you don’t know why, the discrepancy regarding the exact date of the surrender is explained here. In this Blog post I also took the opportunity for some more musings about Russia and Ukraine, and about some reactions to the war. For instance, the site of the signing of the Nazis’ surrender in Berlin has changed its name from previously the “German-Russian Museum” to simply “Museum Berlin-Karlshorst”, just to avoid the “dirty word” Russian! I find that a rather unhelpful, exaggerated overreaction (it’s linguistic iconoclasm, basically). I also pointed out again that Russia isn’t Putin and Putin isn’t Russia – adding a few links to (artists’) voices of dissent within Russia. Well worth a good look!

And then yesterday I finally managed to complete and upload the long promised next Northern Ireland post, namely the one about Belfast and the Titanic. That’s again a rather photo-heavy post (featuring 21 images in total). Do go and take a look. The photo above is one featured in that Blog post and shows a graffito add-on to a Titanic image I spotted in East Belfast. It suggests that not everybody has so enthusiastically embraced the Titanic legacy as much as the Belfast tourism industry generally has …

There were several reasons for the delays in sending out this Newsletter. For one thing I resumed travel planning, especially for Taiwan in December. Flights and accommodation are now booked, but some finer details still need to be finalized. I just hope that this time it’ll work out, at the fourth attempt (!!) since we had to cancel the original Taiwan trip scheduled for Easter 2020 due to the pandemic.

Then I also started looking into travel options for the summer – and tentatively booked accommodation in Iceland for late July/early August. This is a bit precarious given my health condition, hence I booked everything so far cancellable for free. But fingers crossed I will actually be able to go. It’s been 19 years since my first trip to Iceland and meanwhile lots has changed and new DT-relevant sites have appeared that warrant a visit. And because tropical or any other hot destinations are not an option currently, somewhere subarctic tickled my fancy.
  

And then I’ve been contacted by the media again. It had been comparatively quiet on that front since the start of the pandemic, but now I had no fewer than four emails from various media outlets, mostly German TV, within just a couple of weeks. This week I’ll have a shoot with the main Austrian public channel ORF, so in German, then in two weeks’ time it’s a podcast (that one is to be in English) and theoretically an appearance on German TV shortly after that, though that’s not definite yet. In addition I acted as a consultant for a programme about dark tourism in Eastern Europe that is to appear in the “Re.” format on the German-French cultural channel ARTE (I won’t be in that myself, but I arranged contacts with DT-relevant tour operators I know in Croatia, Slovakia and Bulgaria).

Of course, I generally have to be careful with the media, given the history of negative portrayals of DT in the more tabloid-like newspapers and websites, but these four media outlets now seem to follow a genuinely interested and more objective approach. Let’s hope that this impression of mine, gathered from talking to the people involved over the phone, will in fact be borne out.

As for further DT Blog posts, I can’t make any definite promises, though another thematic one about “Belfast and the Troubles” will certainly be due at a later stage, maybe also one about Derry/Londonderry. And at some point I will also have to get around to updating all those Northern Ireland chapters on my main website as well as adding quite a few all-new chapters. I certainly won’t run out of things to do any time soon …

It’s just that my productivity in general is at a reduced level these days, due not only to the various distractions mentioned above but also to my continuing health issues, which haven’t gone away, but are, shall we say, “evolving” (but I won’t go into details again here).
  

Anyway, so much as an update about what’s going on with DT, the Blog and myself. Hopefully it won’t be another four weeks before the next instalment of this Newsletter. We’ll see. Fingers crossed.

All the best,

Peter