Outlandish

I don't think I'm quite right in the head because I keep putting myself  voluntarily into situation that are far from my comfort zone. This time especially I found myself close to the limit. Last time I made the big mistake of drinking too much on Friday. This time I knew better... But I apparently still had one shot too many. I blame the altitude, it fucked up my body because normally I wouldn't have been so hungover on Saturday morning! (Comparison: Turku approx. 10m above sea level, Bratislava 140m above sea level, Zuberec (where our cottage was) much higher.) Not so bad though that a proper portion of scrambled eggs, bacon and a bucket of coffee wouldn't fix! The weather for Saturday was forecasted to be bad. Rain and a lot of clouds. So I comforted myself by thinking that we would take it easy. And we did find a route that was supposed to take approximately three hours and which would take us to some mountain lakes. So, we got our gear together a...

Midsummer is the time when Nordic people withdraw away from the cities into hiding in their summer houses in the countryside. No matter what the weather is you sit outside and have a barbecue for four days. Last year I moved to Bratislava just before Midsummer so I didn't have much time to spend in our summer house. Neither this year. I am traveling to Prague for an alternative Midsummer with one of my best friends in Finland.  I feel like I'm a professional when it comes to packing. I've been moving around Europe so many times that most things come automatically for me when it comes to packing... not passport, though. No, that's way too obvious. I've been very happy to carry enormous bags on my travels instead of getting one with wheels. But now, going to Prague for five days, I thought that the bag would have to be so big that I probably couldn't carry it. So I had to go searching for a small, pull suitcase. There were these regular ones, nicely c...

Busy busy and lovin' it! This weekend we directed our noses towards Czech Republic and the Lednice-Valtice cultural landscape just few kilometres away from the Slovak border. Lednice-Valtice is a castle complex and 283 square kilometres of parks, human-made lakes and forest tracks. Everything there is there because of and used to belong to the Liechtenstein aristocrat family. These days the area belongs to the Czech state and is  protected by UNESCO. But this family, I tell you, had way too much time and money in their hands!  Nonetheless we took a 20-kilometre-hike to see most of the extraordinary buildings and areas that the family had built there. Apollo Temple Our first stop was at the Apollo temple. It used to be a fancy pancy hunting lodge with living areas behind it and a nice view over the artificial pond. The family had a habit a planting trees and bushes around these monuments so that you don't really know what you're approaching. And then ...