We had five travel days left on our Interrail passes from the Summer Rails trip to Finland, and thought it would be a good idea to use them to visit the Black Forest (Schwartzwald) in South-western Germany for some relaxed hiking. And so we did. The Fall foliage was not […]
From Tampere we took the Serlachius shuttle to Mänttä to visit the Art Festival, the largest summer exhibition of Finnish contemporary art — our almost annual tradition since I don’t remember when, but it must have been before we moved to Singapore in 2008. This year’s theme was “On Being”, […]
We had just one whole day in Bergamo, since our outbound flight was in the evening of the second day. We took the funicular up to Città Alta, the medieval town surrounded by the 16th-century Venetian Walls. We walked through the old town and returned to the city center on […]
The storm Ulla arrived in the evening of our arrival to Mänttä, bringing heavy rains and strong winds with her. The strong wind still prevailed in the morning but we headed out for a run nevertheless. Trails were quite muddy and the grass wet, and fortunately we decided to wear […]
We did not stay but one day in Helsinki both on our trip in and out from Finland. That was quite enough to squeeze in a morning run in a refreshing temperature, pay a visit to an optician to choose and order our new glasses, and then pick them up […]
I use various filters and a special plugin in Facebook to filter out advertisements and sponsored posts from my feed. For some reason an ad for The Art of the Brick, a LEGO® art exhibition by an American artist (and a former lawyer) Nathan Sawaya, got through. We didn’t think […]
One of the reason we chose Quimper (Finistère) over Brest was that I had read somewhere that it is a colorful town. Maybe it was the weather, but we found it equally grey and dull as many other French towns. Most of the color was found in the flowers on […]
In this summer’s vacation we spent three weeks in our native country. We spent the middle week working, and for the first and the last week we planned visits to lesser known (at least to us) nature destinations both in Helsinki and in the Savonia region of Finland. We also […]
Saariselkä is more than thousand kilometers North of Helsinki and it took us 12 hours to get there; first by train to Oulu (5h30m), where we changed to another train for Rovaniemi (2h15m). From there we took a bus to Saariselkä (3h). We arrived late in Lapland but it was […]