Introducing Friday Walks and Sunday Strolls
Getting outdoors and showing you a little more of Berlin at the same time
One of my New Year’s resolutions for this newsletter is to do more frequent short updates over on my Instagram feed and on the photo-sharing app, Flickr.
Basically, microblogging with photos. We see and do a lot more here than I have time to write up for the newsletter. And I am sure no one needs a more crowded inbox. So, photoblogging it is.
And one of my personal resolutions is to get outside more—even in the winter.
For some reason, this Berlin winter seems even longer than most. (And most Berliners will tell you the winters are long.) The past two years, I’ve focused on hunkering down: making our apartment cozy, drinking herbal teas, lighting all the candles, setting up game nights with friends.
But this year, I started going a little stir crazy after the holidays and decided I needed to get out and get into nature—even if nature is cold, grey and icy.
Komoot—not just for commutes
I started off this past Sunday pretty close to home, with a recommended walking route on the Komoot app.
My husband and I have been using Komoot to plan our bike routes through the city since we moved here. I’ve found it more reliable than Google Maps. But it also offers lots of recommendations for hiking and bike touring.
For example, Berlin S-Bahn has an account and its own recommended walking tours of the city. (Each one starts from a local S-Bahn station, of course.) You can see my time and distance on the “Spaziergang durch den Plänterwald” from this weekend.
On Fridays, I’m going to do more city walks, starting with the Berlin S-Bahn’s list “12 districts—one Berlin.” My goal is a different district each Friday, but some districts are larger than others—and I might spread them out over a couple of weeks.
On Sundays, I’m going to try to head farther out into some of the natural areas around Berlin into Brandenburg, starting with the area around the Kleinmachnow Schleuse (lock) and the Machnower See.
Sharing more photos on Flickr
I just recently re-activated my Flickr account. I’ve been on Flickr since 2004! Hard to believe that is more than 20 years ago, now.
Like a lot of people, I had mostly abandoned in favor of sharing on Facebook and Instagram. But neither of those platforms offer the level of photo editing and hosting that Flickr does. On Flickr, for example, I can write more detailed captions, and include hyperlinks to other websites with more information.
Their integrated image editor offers more options for fine-tuning my photos. And I have the option to allow other uses to tag and post ‘notes’ on each photo with their own reactions or links.
And Flickr doesn’t restrict you to just the standard square image for posts—or limit you to 10 photos at a time. I can upload photos of different sizes and change the privacy and permissions for each one.
With the growing concerns about data privacy on Meta’s platforms and control over your own content, I am also moving toward diversifying my online presence again.
I’ll still keep my Insta and Facebook profiles active, but I hope to use them to drive traffic to sites where I have more control and ownership of my content.
So, each of the strolls and walks will get their own public Flickr album, with detailed captions and links to more information about each place I visit. But I will put a link out on Instagram, Bluesky and my other channels for people that don’t want to set up another profile on that platform.
Flickr is a great idea!
Getting outdoors is good for the soul....