You don’t see much English on signs where I live. French either, though France is just a few minutes drive away. So it was a little surprising to see a bilingual sign on the fence of the ostrich enclosure at the Mundenhof, the zoo in Freiburg. Warning signs in zoos are not uncommon. Especially ones […]

Some COVID-19 jokes for your Monday morning (or whatever time it is when you see this).

The Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, like most cultural establishments in Europe, is closed these days. Usually about 10,000 people go through every month. COVID-19 has hot the cultural sector as had as any other industry. I wonder if the government supports to help museums, theatres, dance troupes and the like through this time are […]

It’s Saturday, which in theory is a day of rest for many people. Though in these everybody-works-from-home days there may be less of a distinction between times of work and leisure. I’ve been enjoying the daydreaming about travel, something that I still hope will be a reality for me this summer, even though I know […]

It’s tough not being able to travel when you want to. And that loss of freedom is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many travel-oriented businesses which will not survive this involuntary shutdown. That might be a topic for another day, maybe once planes start flying again. (I expect those flights to […]

My first thought was that six-year-old boys would probably roll on the floor in laughter – but only if they speak English. German children wouldn’t see the humor. It’s another holiday in Germany, one that I never remember being mentioned in Canada. It is Ascension Day. For some reason, until this week I never heard […]

Do you ever make plans and then forget to follow through? Of course not, only I would do that, right? When I went to post Tuesday’s flashback post from Brussels’ Musical Instruments Museum I thought I would choose photos from several different posts rather than just the ones from the 2014 original. But there weren’t […]

Dreaming of travel again since none of us can go anywhere. Here’s a post from 2014 about the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels. It’s a monument to creativity, seven floors in downtown Brussels devoted to musical instruments. But there was no cigar box banjo. Admission is free at the Musical Instruments Museum on Wednesdays, so we planned […]

Though I am not a farm boy, I have seen my share of tractors over the years – but never one like this. Sunday afternoon in Feldberg (not to be confused with the town of the same name in the Titisee region), we were taking in some nice views of the vineyards and surrounding hills […]

Amnesty International is calling for Canada to re-open its border with the US – for refugees only. Do you see a problem with that? Your first thought might be that they are calling for Canada to take in Americans fleeing their country at the thought of four more years of Donald Trump. But that isn’t […]