Thanks to my lovely colleague Aiga, this year we were able to take on a new challenge - not to drive along the coastline, as we had done many years before, but to simply walk part of it. Moreover, it was not only a significant challenge for desk-dwellers' muscles, but also a discovery of the nature and history of Latvia's western coast.
Whatever happened to the times when one went to Saaremaa on a school-rented bus and stayed in a campsite?! Everyone was obediently taken around the traditional most popular spots of Muhu Island and Saaremaa - the meteorite crater, wooden windmills, Kuressaare Fortress, the rocky cliff. Incidentally, it was right from the Panga cliff that some good years back I brought home a stone with a pasty's soul (I have this quirk of looking for special stones).
Hey, yesterday was my birthday (I won't say which one), but yesterday was also another significant day in my and Ēriks's life - exactly the 100th day since we no longer have a television at home in the classical sense. That is, there is a fairly large LED screen in our living room, but no television lives inside it. I'll admit it - one fantastic choice in the modern age.
We tried to lighten the grey and subdued mood of the rainy Easter holidays by going to Daugavpils and enjoying the large, colour-rich works of Mark Rothko, which art critics and the artist himself compared to the walls of a temple or portals to another parallel reality.
Pantone codes are a familiar thing for anyone who works with graphic design programmes, draws layouts, illustrations, or processes images. Likewise, every self-respecting company - or at least its marketing specialist - knows the corporate Pantone codes by heart. Until now I had not been following these official Colors of the Year, but had been guided by the principle of "like-dislike", "goes together-doesn't go together", "readable-not readable". But it's never too late to learn something new, is it?
This will be the last of five articles about the trip to the Netherlands, whose positive impressions are still vivid in the memory. This time the story is about a small but - in the Netherlands and neighbouring countries - popular resort town called Zandvoort (Zandvoort aan Zee), to which we went by bus from Haarlem to enjoy the world and swim in the North Sea.
One morning we got up quite early, made do with Starbucks coffee at the railway station instead of breakfast (seemingly the only place where a decent large size is available - everywhere else in Amsterdam and beyond, they served truly tiny cups), and boarded a train from Haarlem to Rotterdam, which by all accounts is radically different from Amsterdam and Haarlem itself. And so it proved.
A distinctly Dutch city of snobs and wealthy people, one of the most expensive in the country. But very well-kept and refined - a city for enjoying life, with countless shops, cafés, and art salons.
A historic village reflecting Dutch everyday life of the 18th–19th centuries. Essentially an open-air museum with several still-operational windmills, traditional residential houses that have largely been converted into shops, cafés, souvenir stalls, mini museums, and craft workshops. And a picturesque view of the waterway, against which one simply cannot resist taking selfies.