Last weekend, Jon took me on a surprise trip to The Hague (Netherlands), and I loved every second of it, especially the Alphonse Mucha exhibition at the Kunstmuseum.
I was a voracious reader when I was a child. I did watch TV too, and I suspect a lot of it, but my most striking memories of entertainment from…
For some reason, I always end up in the warmest regions of Europe at the warmest time. You can count on me to be in Malta in the middle of August, in Firenze at the height of July; I studied in the Canary Islands, where I once saw the beach thermometer hit 50°c (122°F), and somehow, I never suffered from the heat in those places as I do in Belgium. Here's why, and more importantly, what to do about it based on my observations in warmer countries.
You know how sometimes you’re watching TV and suddenly you see a place that looks perfect and you think something like “Oh wow, I’d sure love to be there right now”? Well, welcome to the Bush Inn (Wales) as featured in Sherlock!
Mary Pearson is a photographer and a doctoral researcher in photography researching the interconnections between lines, borders, memory and place; she has a distinctive approach that combines evocations of grief, identity, and liminal spaces. She has accepted to share her work on Fagradalsfjall (Iceland) with us and to answer a couple of questions.
The Question Book: What Makes You Tick? (2012) by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler is exactly what you'd expect from its title; it is a series of provocative questions that explore who you really are, how you see the world, and how others see you. And then there are sillier chapters, like Pick Your Three. I thought it would be fun to share the questions and my answers with you like it's 2003 MySpace all over again.
We live in what is usually—and somewhat inelegantly—referred to as a “cul-de-sac”. It is a dead-end street, a blind alley; an impasse of sorts. Those are funny words when you consider them. The place is either the bag’s ass, the street where even the end is bereft of life, where nothing can be seen, or a predicament without any solution. Everything is locked at a standstill.
Sometimes I feel that I might be a bit unlucky when it comes to technology. I'm typically the girl whose computer displays the blue screen of death without warning the day before handing in a big assignment, the one whose USB stick mysteriously doesn't show any document when plugging it into the conference hall computer before a big presentation, and definitely the one whose phone will stop uploading pictures to the cloud for no reason at all. If there is a one-in-a-million chance for a critical error to happen to anyone, then you can be sure that it has happened to me. Twice.
Like many people I know, I tend to keep my electronics for as long as possible, because (1) I always find that everything is too darn expensive — a trait I've inherited from my dad, I'm afraid —, and (2) I feel guilty whenever I have to replace them because there is no real way to know what sort of damages discarded electronics cause on the environment. So I still had my first Kindle, a 4th generation device from 2011, which I still loved, but lacked some features I really needed.
I am an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, and my former students always speak to me in English. Even those who attended my class over ten years ago. Their mother tongue (at least, for most of them) is French; so is mine. Yet, whenever I run into one of them in town or on social media, they address me in English.