• General,  Traveling

    2019: A year of travel blogging and traveling

    One year. 52 weeks. 365 days. 54 blog posts (55 including the one you’re reading at this very moment). Over 5,000 views from more than 100 countries all over the world (I’ve even had 4 views from Brunei). These are some of the stats for my blog. 9 trips abroad. 7 countries. 2 islands. 27 flights (I do like my stop-overs). It is not a secret that traveling is one of my favorite activities; in 2019 I have been fortunate enough to travel back to some of my favorite places (Vienna, Rome, Kos, and California), but also to visit new ones (Cortina, Trondheim, Isle of Man, and Tromsø). These travels…

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  • Nutrition

    Keep Calm & Bake for Christmas

    Travelling is one of my favorite activities. Baking is another. I generally prefer going on holidays in the summer, for this is the best time to visit the Greek islands and Scandinavia, my favorite holiday destinations. Come December, I tend to have used my annual leave, and I therefore spend Christmas at home. A perfect opportunity to bake. Once I have put the tree up and posted my greeting cards (with Christmas classics playing in the background), I am covered in flour (and not just for the snow effect) whilst my flat smells of all those lovely Christmas scents and spicy aromas: orange, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and the list…

  • Norway & Scandinavia,  Traveling

    Chasing the Northern Lights in Tromsø

    In order to experience the Northern Lights first hand, I recently traveled to Tromsø. Also known as Aurora Borealis (named after the Roman goddess of dawn, not the Norwegian singer-songwriter), the Northern Lights is a spectacular natural phenomenon observed around the Arctic (the same phenomenon when observed around the Antarctic is called Southern Lights or Aurora Australis). In brief, the auroras are due to the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetosphere. Simply put, they are the result of disturbances in the magnetosphere caused by the solar wind. The Northern Lights are visible from Tromsø, as well as other places in Northern Scandinavia, Russia, Canada and Alaska. Thanks…

  • Reading,  Wellbeing

    Keep Calm and Carry On & Secrets to Serenity

    The iconic ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was originally produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for World War II. However, it was little known until 2000, when a copy was rediscovered at Barter Books, a second-hand bookshop in the market town of Alnwick, in Northumberland, in North East England. It was not until the late noughties, nevertheless, when the famous phrase printed in sans serif font, in white letters against a red background, and topped with a crown, took the world by storm. Since then, it has been used as the decorative theme for a range of products, from mugs to coasters, and from T-shirts to…