Birdie

Why is it that all birds seem to always aim at the same target when dumping "ballast"?

I think I might make a T-shirt out of this one...

Bedmonsters

I'm not talking about the ones who hide under your bed (or in your closet) but rather about the ones that are already lurking among your sheets.
When you're in bed and you feel an itch in your leg and you scratch and maybe even look, and there is nothing there, that is when you know you got the "bedmonsters".
You might not even notice them in your usual bed, but as soon as you go camping and you slip into your sleeping bag, you'll know what I'm talking about. The "bedmonsters" in such forgotten places are likely to be hungry since they haven't been fed for months (sometimes even years), so they will certainly feast on you mercilessly...

Holiday

It's been a while since I last wrote, but this is not me giving up, it's rather due to a long awaited Holiday.

I had been looking forward to visiting a friend from Uni times, who now lives in Helsinki and I hadn't seen for too long. She had a baby boy last April and so that made it easy to decide where to go for our holidays this summer. It was more than coincidental that we also wanted to visit the Northcape in Norway during midsummer, and just about convenient to get away from Madrid when temperatures where reaching well beyond 35 degrees celsius in order to visit cool Finland.

After spending a day in Helsinki, we picked up our rented car and set out due north on the 19th of June. I won't pretend there wasn't any setbacks during the ensuing road trip, but the point is that we made it to the northenmost point in the European continent just about two ours before the summer solstice, which allowed us to bask in the cold midnight sun at that precise moment.

The whole road trip was probably best summed up as a transition from the lush green Finnish primeval forest to the barren coastal tundra of northern Norway, with a few wooden summer cottages and gazillions of kamikaze mosquitos thrown in for good measure...

Of course we also saw lot's of reindeer (of which I didn't expect to see so many), flaunting themselves on the road as if it were a giant catwalk, expecting to be photographed before they would let any vehicles through. Since we saw so many of them, and so fearless, we thought we would surely come upon some elk too, but appart from the stuffed elk head we saw at an Oulu café, the closest we got to seeing one turned out to be a brown horse, rider and all for the disappointment of my Spanish boyfriend.

Back in Helsinki we enjoyed some refreshing walks around town (as well as out of town) with our friends and their new "family member", and too soon it was time to get back to busy, hot, bustling Madrid.