Category archives: travel

 

 

Sacre Coeur

Sacre Coeur

Little pink sketch of the Sacre Coeur from the back. Come March I will be visiting again, this time with my mother, who’s never been to Paris before. I can’t wait.

 

An "abandoned" train station

The train line that joined Segovia with Medina del campo was opened in 1884, bringing the industrial revolution to my grandparents’ village – the deep, deep Spain – a few decades before they were born. This line stopped working in 1985, after improvements in the region’s roads vastly decreased the traffic of passengers. The station, located in the outskirts of the village, hasn’t seen any travellers for over 25 years, but it still stands proud, and it is a wonder to see. However, it is not fully abandoned. Can you imagine living in a 125-year-old train station? I imagine it’s not the most practical living arrangement, but there’s some lucky person who rented it for a really low price. It’s such a great way to keep these beautiful buildings from becoming derelict.

Abandoned train station

I didn’t know the station was still standin. Hell, I didn’t even know this town had a train station, but our hotel was next to it and we decided to take a look. It was amazing to imagine what it must have looked like in the old days. I like to imagine my grandparents getting really excited about little trips to neighbouring towns. It’s strange to remember how much bigger the world was back then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abandoned train station

 

Literary nuns

I’m still not sure whether this bookshop belongs in the Amazing Bookshops Around the World series, but it certainly is remarkable. When Clemens and I were walking around some backstreets in Bologna looking for a place to eat (after we were refused in a place where we wanted to eat merely because Blink182 had once eaten there), a shop window caught my eye, it was full of books related to the Pope. I went to (and work in a) Catholic school, but Catholicism is not my thing at all and it makes me feel sort of uneasy. So there I was, staring at the Pope wondering whether Italian people are nuts when I looked into the shop and saw the till. A nun. A nun at the till. A nun working. Did you hear me? A NUN!!! I thought everything nuns ever did was run around from one church to another and teach little children. It appears I was wrong. I must say that not every book in the place was religious, but I didn’t dare to go in. A nun smiled at me when I took a photo. Maybe she thought I’m hot for Jesus.

 

 

 

 

A weekend in Bologna: The film photos

Back in May my friend Clemens and I went on an Italian adventure. Somehow I only snapped three film photos apart from the band ones. Clemens finished a roll, but it was mostly photos taken by a drunk girl that we didn’t even know. It was a weekend of great randomness. I can only hope 2012 brings us another adventure like this one. Old friends, new cities and a great band.

Bologna

 

Bologna

 

bolognafilm4

 

forgetters

 

forgetters

 

forgetters

 

The first three photos were shot on an olympus compact camera with Vivid Arrow film, which is to blame for the awesome colours (together with Bologna’s lovely light). I’m not sure about the bottom three, but I suspect they belong to a different film.

 

My favourite New Year's resolution

I won’t even try to hide it. I am one for New Year’s resolutions. I like the idea of a fresh start and good intentions. Resolutions are tricky, though. It’s too easy to fall into the “exercise more”, “drink less”, “eat healthily” and the like. I like to set myself tangible goals that are sort of easy to achieve and will make the new year a better one. I know last year I claimed to have only one resolution, but I lied, I had two. The second one is one that has been on my list for years and has become my favourite:

Travel to three new places

Now, the concept of travel is an ambiguous one. The intention of this resolution is not to travel the world or to see every European capital before the decade’s done, but rather to appreciate seeing somewhere new, regardless of size or proximity. I like exploring little villages that time forgot as much as I like to go abroad, and the point of this resolution is to make sure that no year is gone without me having experienced the feeling of seeing somewhere new. Here are 2011′s three new places:

 

 

 

Amazing Bookshops Around the World: East of Eden (Berlin)

 

L'amour a Bali

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Hello everybody, this is Michelle of Green Tea Fields. When Andrea called out on twitter for friends to guest blog on her space and to take care of it while she’s out furiously writing her thesis, I decided to pitch in and help out. To start off my little stint here, I decided to do a premier for a little iphone video that I made of my time in Bali earlier this May. I am still (very) slowly uploading the photographs onto the blog. Whenever I playback this video, I think about the three carefree days that we spent on paradise island, celebrating our friends’ marriage, our friendship of 5 years (we all met in university in 2006!) and to have the opportunity to just be. So for today, as you move about your day, do take a moment out of it to dream a little dream of a faraway place. Till the next time I see you.

 

6-hour Venice

About this post:

This post was written by Inês, a very talented lady who usually shares her creativity over at Aramar. If you want to read more or have a look at her amazing photographs make sure you check out her blog.

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Last September I went to Venice for the first time. One can hardly call this an insightful post about Venice… after all I stayed there for six hours. But since it took me three and a half hours to get there by train from Milan, I’ll keep on considering this as real travelling.

So, first impressions on Venice right after I got out from the train station: there’s a Portuguese expression that we use when we feel a bit claustrophobic, which is “I feel like a canned sardine”. Now that’s exactly what came to my mind at that moment. I could see people everywhere, and they clearly had an agenda, that I can only imagine as something like this: “The last person to arrive at the Piazza San Marco is a rotten egg!!”

As you can see, I’m a very optimistic girl and, naturally, faced the next hours with a look of despair. Here’s an important fact: I wasn’t travelling alone. When you travel with a group you have to make concessions. So, instead of escaping to the more deserted streets of Venice, there I went to the Piazza San Marco via the street with the biggest number of tourists per square meter. That’s what happens when cruise ships pour tourists into a small place filled with canals every 15 minutes.

Now, not everything was bad. I got to talk with an old Venetian man that told me how many bridges and churches there are in Venice, and explained me the meaning behind several of their names. Plus, there was also the time when we got lost and managed to find the way to the piazza by following handwritten directions in several walls. Not to mention the magical and also somewhat decadent atmosphere of the city.

I took lots of film photos during the day, as a way of making myself look closely at the details. It was only after seeing the developed photos that I was sure I had been there, and that Venice is beautiful, even in the midst of all the confusion.

 

 

Berlin 2009

 

Hamburg 2009

 

Bright Brussels