Halfway during the year I fell off my blogging habit. Largely due to facebook and a myriad of other reasons (I'm sure, I just can't think of them now) but especially my mum (Hi mum) seems to appreciate a bit of blogging effort. I don't think signing her up on facebook is a solution and somehow there's something that feels more permanent about making a blog post. It's christmas and Momo and Barthold are here in Rome. We just had an inside wintery christmas day with lots of lego building, eating Pandolce and swedish meatballs and watching Sissi on tv. Momo (my mother) and Barthold went to the local church of San Saba and Kika wanted to come along so she got to see the baby Jesus in the presepio and experience her first church service, which apparently she took very serious and she made M&B kneal too and be very quiet. A previously undiscovered religious instinct. Francisco and I staid home helping Felix build his new Star Wars Republic Attack Gunship.
Francisco and I came back from a tiny wee city trip to Vienna on Christmas Eve, we went to see Shantel and the Bucovina Club Orkestar at the WUK and it was brilliant, we jumped and sweated and danced with the rest of the sold out WUK. Gigs where the musicians throw vodka glasses in the audience and start filling glasses personally with vodka are rare as far as I know. Great great fun. We went with Rashad, a friend Francisco works with at the FAO, in whose appartment we got to stay the night.
I'll gather a pile of posts with fotos so there's a bit of an overview of the year.
In October we spent a weekend in Tuscany and discovered a little pearl - Lucca, a town with intact city walls that are perfect for cycling and walking and running on. A big part of the town is also car free, which makes it more fun wandering and biking around with small children.
We spent most of our time this summer in Barchem at Momo and Bartholds place. Felix has his own bike and cycled along with me when I went running so we really got the Dutch road cycling down this summer. M and B provided for excellent entertainment with bikes and a trampoline and a bolderkar. Kirsten C. was also in NL so we got to hang out a bit. Francisco was travelling or in Italy and came back to NL again at the end of August to drive back with us down to Italy. I did a web design course for a few days, I saw family, friends, aunties, cousins, lots of street theatre. Kika helped Momo in the garden and harvested the onions she planted in spring.
We visit Eva and Kewin in Denmark. Felix met their son Magnus in February at school in Rome and they were great friends but within six weeks Magnus already left Rome back to Denmark with his parents. But since I've always wanted to visit Denmark and we had decided we wanted to go to Legoland while in Europe we made a point of looking them up this summer. Eva and Kewin have a great place in a small village on Fyn, I love their cool old style farm house. The garden has a fantastic tree house as you can see.
We left HOT HOT Rome by car second weekend of July up north to Germany/Holland and Denmark. This is the opposite movement of most tourism at this time of year. It took us a day pretty much to get to the Italian/Austrian border and staid in Sterzing/Vipiteno (this is where our favourite yoghurt comes from) the night and the next day went on to Frankfurt to say Happy Birthday to my friend Karoline's daughter Tilly. We arrived in the middle of the birthday party and Felix got to build a little fire and we stayed two nights at Karoline and Marcus' place.
