I’m an introvert, but I also love to visit cities. Visiting cities is wonderful, I love to explore, see the gorgeous buildings and do some shopping. It can also very easily overwhelm me. At those times I need to seek the quiet places.In Amsterdam, my favourite quiet space in the heart of the city is the Begijnhof,...

In 2015 we visited The Kunsthal in Rotterdam for an exhibit of the work of Krištof Kintera, as I’d seen a picture of his sculptures and I wanted to see the sculptures for myself.  Looking at this picture I’m there, again, staring at this huge sculpture that so overwhelmed me.  The colours were spectacular, the sculpture...

When my husband and I celebrated our 25 years of marriage in April of this year, we went to the zoo where we got married, Blijdorp in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was such a joyous day, the weather was fantastic, and I was so excited to be out and about after a long time recovering from surgery. The zoo was fantastic...

This picture was taken somewhere in Ireland, on a trip with my mom, in a little harbour town on a short train ride from Dublin. We were there because we’d heard that the harbour was gorgeous. It was a tad disappointing.It was smelly and dirty, and the pretty buildings weren’t so pretty, close up. It was okay though,...

In 2001, I went on a solo trip to Dublin, mostly to regain confidence in myself after a major surgery changed my life completely. It was amazing to be there, in the old city full of marvels, and, being a true tourist, I had to go to the Guinness brewery, mostly because I loved the beer. I don’t remember much of the...

)In June 2017 we went to the Glastonbury Festival, and, as we weren't dead on our feet for a change, we visited a site afterwards that I’d always wanted to visit: the Avebury henge. When we first arrived, I was a tad disappointed, it looked like the village was very close to the site, and a road ran really close to the...

In August/September 2016 we had a pretty epic trip planned, flying half way across the globe to the US. We had tickets for two Dresden Dolls shows, one in Boston and one in New York, and had planned to stay in both cities for some time around those shows. Boston was amazing, both the concert and the city, and soon it...

This blog is brought to you by yesterday’s Crucial Track The day was 15 February 2012, a day I’d so looked forward to (and was so very nervous about) as my husband and I were some of the lucky ones invited to attend a radio recording of Florence and the Machine. The venue: a small bar in a radio station’s office...

For most of my life, I've loved Roman history. I was fascinated by the archaeology most of all. Through the years, I visited so many different sites, saw the most amazing mosaics in museums, and gorgeous sculptures. But this, this was the pinnacle, the Roman theatre in Orange, France. The picture doesn't do it justice....

This is a picture of the Leidseplein, a famous square in Amsterdam. The picture was taken from the tram stop while I was sitting on one of the benches, waiting for the tram to take my husband and me back to central station. It’s been a while since I was there, for many reasons, but in my mind I can still see some of the...

I can still remember the feeling of meeting this artwork. We were in Amsterdam, and we walked the city, I was snapping pictures left and right, of buildings and people. And then I met joy in the form of this sculpture by Alexander Calder. When I met this artwork, I was in complete awe, staring at it with childlike...

I don’t know when I first encountered labyrinths.I do know that for a long time, I thought that labyrinths and mazes are the same thing.They aren’t.Labyrinths and mazes are fundamentally different.Mazes are designed to lead you astray, to follow paths you think lead to the centre but lead you to be stuck somewhere...

I don’t even know when and how I fell in love with medieval castles. It could be the tv-show about a knight I saw as a kid, and the castle where it was filmed was a real castle, relatively near me.It could also be that I was a bookish girl and I read a lot of books, fiction and non-fiction, on medieval history.Over the...

The weather was miserable during Glastonbury Festival in 2016, especially before. It was so muddy at the site due to all the rainfall, that it was hard to walk around (especially when you already were having physical issues).Despite all these challenges, we made it to the Sunday evening relatively unscathed. We were at...

This is the start of a new series on my blog, with stories from my life guided by the pictures I took in those moments.This is a memory from an early morning in June 2006. I dearly miss Mikey, the dog I write about, and this is one of my favourite memories with him. My dog woke me just after sunrise. I smiled and put on...