norway – part 3

Finally, the last in the Norway series!
We spent the last few days before returning to Oslo in the Flam / Laerdal region. Driving along these narrow fjords is exciting, but the region also featured a 25km tunnel through the mountains which was quite an experience. Instead of taking the tunnel, one time we took the alternativ route over the mountains instead, the Aurlandsfjellet road. It takes you up high over the mountains, snowy even in the height of summer.




It’s a breathtaking route, not least of all because it’s all serpentines going up and down the mountain. The region itself was just beautiful, with lots of old norwegian houses I loved to capture.




We would be ending our journey in Oslo so we decided to drive down in one day and spend the last two days exploring the city. Bye bye, beautiful fjords!


Hello Oslo! Such a sweet and cozy city. I’m not much of a city person but I really liked Oslo (though we had a hard time finding a warm dinner that was also bordering on affordable each night).


We spent the first day just perusing the city but for me the museum island Bygdoy held most interest and I had a great time visiting the Kon Tiki Museum (I now have a crush on Thor Heyerdahl), the polarship museum ‘Fram’, the viking ship museum and most of all the norwegian folk museum. Lovely place!




I loved learning more about norwegian culture and life in the country in times gone by (I’m a big history buff and for me travel isn’t complete without learning at least some background of the country and people). Thank you for showing yourself in the best light during our two weeks, Norway! I can’t wait to go back some time.

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travel diary: marburg

I seem to be doing a lot of spontaneous travelling at the moment. No doubt this is about to change as we go apartment hunting and planning our new place and packing up our old. Not that we’ve come any further since my last post. We’re still weighing options and deciding where to start looking!
Last weekend we visited friends in the beautiful city of Marburg. The whole city centre consists of century old crooked half-timbered houses.


There’s also a castle that dates back to the 11th century and is just beautiful to walk around.



We strolled around, shopped a little, had a bite to eat and some nice cold cocktails to cool us down on the very hot day.


Our friends have two very sweet kitties as well.

I love little day trips like these. They really make you get out of the day to day routine and spend some quality time with friends you see way to little.
I guess that’s the big advantage of living in the centre of Europe. Within only 2 hours, or 3 or 4, you can be in a completely different environment, different country even.

gardening 2011 – part 5 and some other news

I finally managed to get a nearly full balcony shot:

As you can see the zucchini has become enormous but despite fertilizing it once a week the leaves are going yellow. We are still regularly harvesting huge zucchinis though.
The cucumbers and tomatoes (behind the zucchini) are also doing great. We’ve only had one cucumber so far (which was bitter unfortunately) but there is another one or two growing now.

The other side of the balcony isn’t looking quite as lush, because we only just resowed some salad greens in boxes.

The sicilian peppermint is looking (and smelling) great though and the tomatoes have really taken off. I truly didn’t think they would carry so much, we’ll have a much bigger harvest than I expected.

We ate the first ones just today, yum!

Homemade garlic rosemary bread with farmer’s market wild garlic cheese and homegrown tomatoes and basil…it doesn’t get any better than this!

I’m writing this feeling a little bittersweet about it. We only just found out today that we will need to move out of this apartment as soon as possible. We’ve been here for about five years and love this place. Still, it has gotten way too small for the two of us plus the kitties plus a lot of stuff and hobbies and we would have started looking for a new home in winter anyway. But as it happens, a legal battle our landlady has been fighting with the city about some fire safety measures has, after years and years, finally come to a conclusion which is that they need to take this whole place completely apart, walls and all.
So we’re looking out for something new and green and countryish and hopefully lots larger and with maybe a bit of garden to go with it (or at the least a large balcony). I’m not really looking forward to packing up us and all our stuff and all those plants and planning and painting and moving and scaring our cats but move we must and I guess we’ll be happy about it once we’ve found something nice and gotten settled.

travel diary: bruges

I went to visit Belgium with a friend earlier in the week and we stopped in Bruges for a night and a half day of exploring.
None of us knew anything about Bruges before, we’d just heard it was pretty.

What we found was that Bruges wasn’t pretty. It was beautiful.

There isn’t an ugly street or house in the whole city and obviously the whole town is very well cared for, very clean and lovingly preserved with flowers everywhere.

We just wandered around for a couple of hours, having got a map at the hotel.


All the little canals reminded me of Amsterdam but much quainter and smaller and less noisy.


The city is small enough to be explored walking in a day or two but still is full of impressive buildings and museums and sights.

We only had limited time so we decided to not go see the Picasso exhibition, but went to the Chocolate Museum and the French Fries Museum instead (you may shake your head and laugh now, but we had lost of fun!).


Then we ate chocolate and french fries. In that order.

All in all a perfect day in a wonderful little town. If you are ever in Belgium you must go see Bruges!

cityscapes: cologne

As some of you might know I work in Cologne, Germany. To make my lunch breaks more interesting I set myself a weekly challenge to take a series of pictures with the theme ‘yellow’.

All of these were taken with the Olympus OM 2N. Isn’t it funny how much english language there is in this very german city!

I must say I find it hard to take pictures in the city. I see little beauty in noisy, dirty, crowded streets, while the country with its quiet, muddy paths is heaven.

This one isn’t really yellowy but Lynda requested a close-up picture of a little old fashioned bakery shop I photographed before:

holga city pictures

These Holga shots were taken a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to sharing them here.
Duesseldorf on a summer weekend, at twilight.

It was still hot, around 30°C and the city center and all the promenades along the Rhine were crowded.


All of these are developed and scanned at home, as always.
I’ve found out that the Holga makes for the most wonderful sun flares (because of its awful lens of course). I am loving this shot of my pony (bestest horse there ever was, loving you to bits baby!):

I’ve really got to try to get those sun flares in color shots as well!

travel diary: amsterdam 2

On to our last day in Amsterdam. We got up early on Sunday and packed up, because we wanted to leave right after a last visit to the city center, to get home reasonably early.
Amsterdam on a Sunday morning at 8.30am is a sight to see…it’s funny to see this vibrant city completely empty and asleep.



We’d passed the Anne Frank House Museum two days before and I really wanted to visit it, though I am not usually into museums much. It opens at 9am each day and who would believe it but there’s a line even sunday mornings at 8.45am!
I’d read the diary of Anne Frank as a teenager and of course everyone knows about her story (at least here in Germany) but still nothing can prepare you for visiting the very rooms in which she and her family were hiding during the Nazi regime. My friend and I were very much affected by the visit…it was a good thing we had nothing else planned that day except wander around the city for a bit. We didn’t talk to the other visitors (from the UK and Italy and Spain) but I believe it might be a little different for us Germans, because added to the incredible sadness and madness of it all there is also a feeling of shame, knowing that our very grandparents participated, knowingly or not, in that darkest part of german history.

That was it for our short trip to Amsterdam! We had lots of fun getting by on our tiny budget and are already planning our next adventure 🙂

at the barn

I honestly couldn’t think of a fitting title and I didn’t want to call this post ‘even more Holga photos’. But that’s what they are basically, more Holga photos and I am really loving them. The Holga is the camera I take to work (I couldn’t not take a camera, I feel naked without at least one camera in my bag), because it is so lightweight and inconspicious. I have a half hour lunch break during the day, but as I am actually eating lunch during work I can just wander around Cologne in that time. You’ll probably get lots of Holga city shots on here in the coming weeks 😉
Ok, enough rambling, here are the pics, developed at home again:

The barn is one of my favourite places in the world, I can’t even explain why. Some more western shots of my friend:


And a last one that wasn’t actually taken at the barn, but I really like it (it’s called ‘Rainy days call for pretty shoes’):

Today is a bank holiday in Germany, which is why I had time to write this post in the first place. Planned for today is: sewing, horseriding, taking photos and barbecuing, all in bright sunshine 🙂
Hoping you are all having a nice day too!

city life

Street photography is one of the most fascinating fields in photography for me. Gritty, black and white city images always get me, and I don’t even like the city much! Even though I live in one of the biggest cities in Germany I am not too keen on a city lifestyle. I prefer the country.
I don’t often make a trip to the city center, because it inevitably makes me spend money I don’t have (as a compulsory online fabric buyer I spend too much as it is) and the whole athmosphere of ‘I know this dress is hideous, but it’s expensive Brand XY, so look at me and admire how rich and chic I am’ feels alien to me.
I went to do some window-shopping (aka market research) last week with the boss of the italian shoe company I work for and this was my shot of the day:

It almost looks like Paris, doesn’t it? I love the trees and their shadows and the girl in the middle, alone in a crowd.