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in germany in the uk one second everyday video

one second every day – april 2014

i’ve just realized i’ve been making these little one second videos for over a year now! hooray! :)

despite the bugs in the app and the last-minute-panics (“oh my god it’s almost midnight and we still haven’t filmed one second today!”), it’s been going well. i still miss around 1 or 2 seconds every month, and it still feels like most of them are really mundane… but i love the result and the thrill that watching these 1 second memories brings. they make everything so vivid!

plus, i’m always surprised at how many people seem to enjoy them as well! every now and then, friends, family or even people i’ve just met tell me they look forward to these little glimpses of our life every month. it’s funny, and it kind of makes me feel bad for being so lazy making them sometimes…

so anyway, i just wanted to say thanks for watching! here’s april for you all:

in april we ran, we roadtrip’d in bavaria (and ate an inordinate amount of sausages), saw the coolest museums, went to london for the second time, did a cooking course at leiths, met with lots of friends… it was ridiculously amazing! :D

ps – here is what the past year looked like:
2013: march, april, may, june, july, august, september, october, november, december.
2014: january, february, march.

Categories
in germany

the watershed

once, on a US mini-roadtrip, we passed by a sign on the highway saying “great continental divide”. i googled it and found out that there’s a sort of line, west of which the water flows to the pacific ocean, and east to the atlantic ocean. it was obvious, but somehow i had never thought of it, and it blew my mind! to think that 2 drops of water, hitting the ground a couple of meters apart could end up in two different sides of the country, thousands of miles apart? just… wow.

it’s no secret i love roadtrips, but i think what i like the most in them is actually this kind of random little things – the unexpected curiosities that you only notice because you’re in a new place and everything is foreign. so when we were researching for our bavaria roadtrip last april, i noticed by chance that we would drive across the european watershed drainage divide: the one separating the rhine from the danube… i knew I wanted to see that!

i knew more or less where it would be, but in the end we ended up noticing it by accident, while driving by. i made us turn around to get a proper photo:

wasserscheide_

and there it is, so unassuming, yet so significant! on one side of this line, water flows into the rhine drainage basin, ending up in the atlantic, off the coast of the netherlands. on the other, the water will eventually join the danube, crossing 10 countries until it finally arrives on the black sea.

so cool! :)

Categories
in sweden traveling

skåne roadtrip!

roadtrips are practically an art form, but like all travel, they must be done with the right people. for us, this means easygoing friends who share our interest in food, nice landscapes and all kinds of kitschy or cute things. so when our hosts (lovers of all things kitsch and tasty like us) suggested we do a roadtrip around skåne, our answer was a very enthusiastic YES! :D

in the morning, we rented a wreck and drove around the countryside of central skåne, dodging the heavy rain in search of a famous moose park… which was unfortunately closed. all we saw were 3 sad mooses…

to make up for that small setback, we decided to stop on one of the biggest second hand stores of the region, where we checked out the dishes and christmas decorations…

the weather had cleared up by then, so we did a first quick stop by the baltic sea, to check out the beach and the war bunkers that still exist there:

we also stopped at a burial site that we saw on the way. the stones in this region are all very round, due to erosion.


by then it was time for fika, the traditional swedish coffee break, so we stopped at a little quaint town by the sea. after having crossed the dozens of fields of apple farms, we couldn’t resist a piece of apple pie!

then we turned south, driving along the coast. there are many signs of bronze age in this part of sweden, and we got to see a few marks of the early populations on the polished coastal stones. boats and axes are featured prominently.

a bit further southt, we made a detour to see ale’s stones, sweden’s own stonehenge: a set of massive stones set in an ellipse on a cliff by the sea. nobody seems to know very well why they’re there, but they’re quite impressive nonetheless – and the cows seemed to love them as scratching posts!


we couldn’t resist the calling of the sea, so naturally we descended the cliff and picked rocks at the beach.

with the sea air opening our appetite, we had to make a pit stop for refuel. we drove by a place in skurup that has awesome fast food: meatballs with lingon jam, red danish sausage, fish and chips, and an amazing wrap with sausage, cucumber and mashed potatoes. skurup is famous for being the starting place for the wonderful adventures of nils (the boy that traveled sweden on a goose), and they have a great slogan “when in europe, don’t miss skurup”. it’s a really small place, but i guess it’s worth it for the food and the sweets! :P


on the way home, we passed fields upon fields of sugar beets… i had never seen one up close, so we made a quick stop on a recently harvested field to snatch a leftover beet, which we cleaned and chopped when we got home. it didn’t taste like much except… sweet! :)

all in all, a very successful roadtrip!

Categories
in slovenia in the netherlands traveling

things we do on roadtrips

we test new eyewear and check for directions… often.

we cringe as we cross big bad tunnels and buy vignettes when we get to the other side.

we brave the weather and get stuck in never-ending traffic jams… sometimes for hours.

so we snack on spekulaas and watch star wars to pass the time.

when things go well, we drive on endless roads without a speed limit… this is europe afterall.

and sometimes… well… sometimes, things don’t go exactly as planned…


after four separate diagnosis of “this doesn’t look like a simple problem”, we bid goodbye to our focus (who is now waiting for a diagnosis on a garage somewhere) and drove the last 100km to our destination in a taxi. and here we are now, in glorious amsterdam!

i left this country four years ago, almost to the day. it’s been too long – yet all the details, the smells, the sights, the sounds… they’re all coming back to us with such fierce familiarity that in some ways, it’s like we never left. for us, this is not a mere a sightseeing visit: we’re definitely more interested in revisiting all the things we love about the netherlands, all the particularities we’ve missed throughout the years. i’m really looking forward to this week :)

Categories
in slovenia traveling

crossing europe, roadtrip style

somewhere in portugal


i’ve been away from this blog. after the last post, there were 5 weeks of surgery-and-recovery on the countryside. p’s mom is doing fine at the moment, and so we’ve moved on with our life… which brought us to our original plan: slovenia! :D

we arrived to ljubljana late last thursday, after a pretty intense 3-day roadtrip across portugal, spain, france and italy. we got good weather for traveling, mostly sunny/cloudy weather, with no rain, and lots of lovely autumn views.
puget-theniers, france


noted on the way here:
* we crossed a thousand different versions of seats, citroens, renaults and lancias… but also lots of luxury brand suvs (bmw, mercedes, audi) which, given the current gas prices, is quite odd.
* in italy, you collect a toll ticket at the border with france, proceed to cross the country, and then pay the toll fee on the border with slovenia – it’s brilliant! in france, we stopped 12 times to pay toll fees…
speed cameras in souther europe
* why the hell is portugal the country with less speed cameras among its neighbours? don’t we have one of the highest traffic accident rates in the world? :/
cote d'azur, italy side

* i was expecting tunnels on this trip, but nobody prepared me for côte d’azur. it was kilometer after kilometer of tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge… bridges are ok, but i don’t like tunnels that much… at a certain point all i wanted was to stop right there and let paulo drive… why is there never a service area when you need it?
cote d'azur, italy side

on a positive note, our car handled the trip without breaking a sweat!

so we’re here, discovering the city and looking for a place to stay. more updates when we get that milestone accomplished :)