When the sun is setting, between dusk and darkness, there is a moment when the light turns blue. And the world stops for a heartbeat.
Day 100 – feels like an achievement! I had hoped to do something special for the occassion but – appropriately enough – I spent the day travelling.
A few special moments above the clouds. Then frantic rush on the ground. Broken laptop. Last minute presentation prep literally in the lobby. On my colleague’s laptop. Great lunch. Productive meetings. Good coctails. Another mad rush.
Looking back, it feels like a pretty good analogy for my everyday life.
Train travel in Finland is incredibly comfortable and, in many instances, very convenient. But as it feels awkward to start taking photos in a train carriage, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Instead, I took a few shots at the Helsinki railway station. At a first glance, it is a quite a modest building. In fact, as I never eat at the station, I passed through the building a hundred times before properly looking around. Especially the restaurants in the old section are gorgeous Art Nouveau. Not something you expect from such a small railway station.
The metro tunnel underneath, less so.
I travelled to Kokkola for work today. It’s a small town on the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia. In spring, before the nature awakens, there isn’t all that much to see. In summer, it can be nice (so I hear).
The old town of Kokkola has some beautiful wooden houses from the 18th and 19th centuries, with a few dating back to the 17th. They were definitely worth a walk.
With my siblings, good food, good drinks, and escape rooms tend to go hand in hand. That didn’t leave much time for any other sightseeing. With stormy, rainy weather, it hardly felt like a loss.
In between showers, I managed a few quick pictures around town and a short visit to Fotografiska – still my favourite photo museum in the city.
As said before, escape rooms are a thing in my family. The idea of going to Tallinn for an “escape trip” started off as a joke. But turning jokes into reality is also a thing in my family (e.g., annual the-most-useless-useful-Christmas-present competition).
One weekend, four rooms. Three of the rooms were actually hard, one was… an experience… We escaped three of the rooms, but are now trapped to a haunted orphanage for all eternity.
Luckily there was drinks after.
Tallinn is just a 2 hour ferry ride from Helsinki, which makes it a perfect weekend get-away with Stuart, my brother, sister, and brother-in-law.
Tallinn is an old Hansa city and the old town is just beautiful. As a tourist, one rarely wonders outside of the old town. However, one purpose for the trip was to solve a number of escape rooms – none of which are in the old town.
One down, three to go. And we got to see some of the modern Tallinn too.
South Africa and Finland are in the same time zone (+/- an hour). It’s 20h+ travel, but it is basically one badly slept night…
Telling this to myself was much easier, when I did not have to keep peace between two 7-year olds who have both slept less than 4 hours the night before.
Worth it, tho.
Cape Town faces the Atlantic, so the water is pretty chilly even in summer. Muizenberg Beach is a popular surfing destination because of the good waves it gets, but any sane surfer wears a wetsuit.
Despite the cold, Kiara and Alanna squeezed every bit of fun out of the waves, sand, and sun in the last hours before heading to the airport. Since they were soaked to the skin and covered in wet sand, we had luckily scheduled time for a shower before starting our trip.
There is just something so picturesque about the wine farms, even when the weather is not perfect. My fingers itch whenever I get near one.
Stuart and the girls are generally pretty patient with my photography, but even they had enough for this trip. Stuart packed me in a car and sent me to Constancia Wine route as we were living in the neighbourhood. He and the girls stayed at the house swimming and relaxing.
As I was driving myself, I ended up drinking more coke than wine – but I got my photos.
When I was a kid, I remember visiting the Helsinki Natural History Museum. The exhibit that impressed me most was a calf with two heads (still there today). Otherwise, I remember it being quite ‘dusty’ and stiff. It was very different from today’s museums.
Entering the Iziko South African Museum felt like a return to the late 80s, with glass cases filled with rather poor examples of taxidermy… until we wandered into the new side with the dinosaur and shark exhibits. They were cool! Very cool!
The main picture today is a giant fig tree in the Company’s Garden just outside the museum. It is approx 150–175 years old, so you can quite fairly classify it as well within Natural History.
Blue Moment 