This place is where I spent New Year’s Eve:

Welcome to Amrum, the tenth-largest island of Germany:

Amrum on larger map

Some 2.300 people live here, catering to far more than 120.000 tourists per annum.

But why would anybody want to come here in the first place?

I figured most people were looking for the wind. They wanted a massive breeze of fresh air to clear their heads or something.

…

I didn’t go out that much, but I managed to find some spots that I liked on the island:

There are some gravestones from the 17th and 18th centuries near the church…

…and while most of them are nice to look at, they are all rather hard to decipher:

The scenery always seems to have two faces – windward…

…and leeward:

I was surprised when I learned that the original population (the Frisians) are one of the official four national minorities in Germany today. Who could have known?

The Frisian buildings all look very nice…

…and they are easily recognizable once you understand the pattern:

Anyway, I figured I might as well go to the beach:

This proved to be an awesome idea, even though it was SO freakin’ cold:

I braced myself and started snapping away:

Maybe I could even make a new time-lapse?

I got out my new tripod, my camera remote and a novel I had got for Christmas. Then I set everything up and waited in the cold for about two hours…

…only to realize that I had two essential problems:

1) The camera had been in AV-mode in order for it to automatically adjust to the changing light conditions during the sunset. Big mistake: I got flickering exposure changes as a result.
2) The lens started getting fogged up after a while. I was absolutely not prepared for this, since I figured it would be okay if the camera had been out in the cold for a while. Maybe the air was too humid?

Anyway, here’s the video, embedded in some other footage I took during these few days, dubbed over with Tchaikovsky, because I didn’t get any decent audio:

I felt like a fool – having my ass frozen off out there on New Year’s Eve, only to capture a 13 second time-lapse that was flickering and increasingly blurry. Of course I felt dumb.

But happy-dumb.

…

On the first day of the year 2011, I almost fell over some sort of rail that was going across the beach and into the sea:

I followed it for a few steps to find out what it was, then I almost fell on my ass again and decided to drop the idea.

Let others worry about it.

Happy New Year!

Soundtrack: Noize MC – “На Марсе Класно” (“Na Marse Klasno”)