Two Zen temples

The autumn leaves hunt — momijigari, 紅葉狩り– must be the perfect excuse for the overworked Japanese to escape the daily routine and make a trip to Kyōto to celebrate the favorite past-time of the nation. They are accompanied in their fever by quite a lot of foreign tourists attracted by all these pretty fall season photos in guidebooks and web sites… Accordingly, the must-see landmarks and historical sites surrounded gardens claimed to be most beautiful in the autumn leaves colors, tend to be pretty well visited. But not all of them!… Read More

Steilneset, Vardø

Dømt til ild og bål was the usual sentence, condemned to be burnt at the stake. In the seventeenth century Vardøhus fortress, that time the easternmost remote outpost of the Kingdom of Norway, 91 people — in the vast majority Norwegian women and a few Sami men — were sentenced to death for practicing witchcraft — if they had not been already tortured to death during interrogations. The detailed court records concerning the trials survived, bearing witness to the insanity of terror in the name of religion. Read More

Borgata San Sebastiano

After finding out that quite a large branch of my ancestors in 18th and 19th centuries were millers I have become more aware of these specific pieces of pre-industrial architecture spread more or less ruined in landscape cultivated since centuries: old mills. By an incredible chance, I have spent some time in an alpine hamlet in the Valle Maira, Piemont, which only some days after the arrival occurred to me to be a very old settlement build around an old mill.

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Księgi Jakubowe by Olga Tokarczuk

Huh! Huh!! Huh!!!

The news from my dearest arrived during my lunchtime at 13:05 hours on 10th October 2019 and was full of emotional spelling errors. But the message was clear: Olga Tokarczuk was rewarded the Nobel Prize for the (missing) year 2018.

Huh! Huh!! Huh!!! Read More

Thomas Cook logo

Farewell, Thomas Cook

Well, almost all Thomas Cook owned entities of any kind in numerous countries has just been forced to insolvency declarations, causing an avalanche of problems. But, anyway, the package tour — as invented by Thomas Cook in 1841 — is not dead, I suppose. But it will become a luxury. Read More

Hjörleifshöfði :: the last farm site

Hjörleifshöfði

We climbed Hjörleifshöfði after a spontaneous decision on one of these typical Icelandic dark days when very low clouds and wet wind in combination with black earth and contrasting green summer meadows on the flat mountain make you feel somehow out-of-place and awkward. Read More