above photo: the little daughter of one of my soccer friends joins me during the break in a game (she was one of my adopted grandchildren in China, because the mine were in Germany).
Not only I am working hard, but also playing hard – when active in my various hobbies:
playing soccer as a goalkeeper
- for 13 years, I played in China (ShenZhen) in up to 3 different teams (WED night, SAT and SUN afternoon); my SAT and SUN team organized an extremely touching farewell party end of 2017, when I stopped working regularly in China; this gallery also includes some goalkeeper action photos (Tilkowski, decades ago Germany’s National Team goalkeeper, was my idol; he was the goalkeeper in my hometown’s soccer team „Westfalia Herne“, as a young boy, I never missed any game in Herne’s stadium)
- my Sunday tean („Lao Niu“) prepared a nice and touching video about our many years of playing together, the upper photo on the right has the link to this video; photo below: my Sunday and my Saturday team (老牛，天龙) played against each other during my last Sunday in China.
- in Germany, I had played for decades as the goalkeeper in my company teams; I am again now playing with the „elderly team“ in the neighbour town.
I like to take photos, mainly nature, preferably birds
- a nice selection can be found on my national geographic photo page
- here is a selection of nature photos 1989 – 2007 which also shows the development of my skills and the hardware I used
- Antarctica was fascinating as well as Galapagos, breath-taking
- Iceland is one of my favorite locations to visit, I went there more than a dozen times
- the photo gallery list could be endless … Australia, China, Europe, North America, Seychelles … not possible to show all so I finish here with a dream I had for 20 years and realized in 2017: we went to QingHai Lake (China) and saw – besides many other interesting birds – black-necked cranes.
at almost 50 years of age, I started diving, performed several courses (achieved to get the „Master Scuba Diver“ PADI level) and have done far more than 500 dives, partially in extremely interesting and challenging dive spots.
- whale shark encounters on Maldives (photos and some videos)
- some underwater photos taken in Desroches (Seychelles), where I took an underwater photography course but decided not to become an underwater photographer
- the most challenging trip was an expedition to Aldabra, the world’s biggest raising atoll, for which I joined a marine biology research team; we investigated the coral and fish situation around Aldabra
(Almost every day, I play piano, but not very well, nonetheless, I like playing.)
Below you can see a few of my many photos, here from Antarctica (penguin and sea lion), diving (whale shark, powderblue surgeonfish & first dive together with my grandson), China (QingHai: bar-headed geese), Aldabra (giant tortoises mating)
