The Greenhouse: Audur Ava Olafsdottir

-You won’t get far on dreams, Lobbi, Dad would say.

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‘An Exact Observer of all things in Earth, Sea and Air’

He wrote the first bestselling travel books which inspired Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, and gave us many new words from barbeque, chopsticks, cashew and avocado to sub-species.  He has more than 1,000 words in the OED. He circumnavigated the world three times and visited all 5 continents. He visited the Galapagos 150 years before Darwin and Australia 80 years before Cook. He described plants and animals never seen by a European. Nelson’s sailors studied his Discourse of Winds, Tides and Currents. He was quoted by Darwin, Nelson, Humboldt and Cook.  He documented the effects of marijuana, described how soy sauce was made and drank the Spanish version of a cappuccino. He rescued Alexander Selkirk.

His burial site is unknown and he is largely forgotten.

Daniel Mendelsohn: An Odyssey

Gert in Kerala

Kerala State in Southern India is known as God’s Own Country. It has all the delightful features of other parts of India; temples, music, colour, great food, agreeable and helpful people, luxuriant vegetation, wonderful flowers… I could go on, but the thing it does have, unlike many other parts of India, is a sufficiency of Toilets. You may wish to call them bathrooms, lavatories, washrooms, but they all amount to the same thing. It has an adequate supply of reasonably clean sanitation. Kerala’s toilet coverage is almost universal – 97 percent. This is to my mind a key indicator of the way people are respected there.

Chicken Lady goes to Nar Nar Goon

Saga Land The island of stories at the edge of the world. Richard Fidler and Kari Gislason

I’ve begun studying Icelandic, and I believe that the literature produced during the Middle Ages in that remote island close to the Arctic Circle is one of the most important in the world.

Jose Luis Borges

Dig this

Painting Norway: Nikolai Astrup 1880-1928

Wrong number?

Settlement of Denmark….. as depicted in murals in our hotel in Aarhus
We love the dogs, but is the crazed prophet figure holding a mobile phone to his ear?

Lenin

When we heard that the Lenin Museum in Tampere (Finland) was in the Workers’ Hall we were expecting to find a pleasantly dowdy and battered space, but this is what we found, complete with buxom Russian receptionist.