I was determined to make at least one boat trip to another island and there were no shortage of options from Rhodes Town. There were some other famous locations within range, Kos and even some Turkish resorts, but in the end I decided on Symi. It’s a much smaller island, known for its attractive harbour, and I thought it would be a good contrast to what I’d already seen in Rhodes.

Can anyone explain the significance of this? I was in Rhodes Old Town and stumbled across this scene. Why would you put a plant on a door like that?

Travelling out of season has its pros and cons. On this plus side it’s cheaper and not as hot. I’m not sure I would have liked Rhodes when it was in the high thirties. Twenty something in early April suits me just fine. There are also fewer tourists which is mostly nice, but does mean — and this is the major disadvantage — that not everything is open. So to head off the same kind of problem I experienced in Porto, where I arrived only to find that the hotel was closed, I decided to stay in the biggest town on the island. Even in hindsight I think that this was the right move.

My challenge for this weeks PhotoFriday, “Primary Colour,” was that the picture I really wanted to use has been used at least once already. The appeal with that one is that it has all three primary colours rather than just the two that you can see in the above picture, taken recently in Symi (a Greek island near to Rhodes). But, as they say, two out of three ain’t bad.

In a poll of two, my parents, one hundred percent of participants recommended Rhodes as a great Greek destination, with a nice mixture of beaches, history and places to eat and drink. I’m not much of a beach person but the rest sounded good so I very quickly booked a week off work and took an Easyjet flight to Diagoras airport.

• US Healthcare vs. the Rest of the World – To the people who think that healthcare in the US isn’t broken… or #ilovethenhs.

I don’t think this is my strongest ever entry to a PhotoFriday challenge, but I do think that this old typewriter fits the theme of “Minimalist.” I am mainly referring to the minimalism of the picture itself, the almost monochrome look and the simplicity of it all. But you could also consider that by using a typewriter rather than a word processor you’d be keeping things simple and minimalist.

• Why you should join the war on paying for hotel Wi-Fi – This has always bugged me, even when I’m not paying with my own money. Why should I pay the equivalent of a months home broadband for one evening if surfing?
• All Languages Have A Common Root? – “Atkinson said the world’s 6000 languages descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early southern African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.”

This weeks PhotoFriday challenge is “Lines.” I have a lot of pictures that have lines in them but fairly few where it’s the most prominent feature. My first choice of image was of my old, broken MacBook hard-disk but then I realised that I had already used it for a PhotoFriday last year! So I switched to the above picture, taken in the Tokyo Forum.

When I initially thought about this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Ride,” my mind first went to cycling. Only I couldn’t find an image that showed bikes in motion which seemed to defeat the point. So, instead, I went for this picture that I took while riding on the Tokyo subway. (It might be a bit of a stretch but I really like this picture!)