Daniel Mendelsohn: An Odyssey

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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.

On beer

Gert has made firm friends with Icelandic beer in the past few weeks. All the same….

Goodbye Iceland