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Public holiday here in Italy today, which is always a good thing.. especially when it’s on a Monday!
Today is the traditional day to put up the Christmas tree and decorations.Many people also have a big family meal together.
I’m reading about a place in Sweden…called Grövelsjön… where you can do a homestay with Sami herder family and learn about how they herd reindeer.
It looks great, really interesting place but unfortunately the price is extortionate 😉 I’d like to maybe try and find something around that area that’s more informal,less organised and a lot less expensive!
I did something kind of similar in Kyrgyzstan, where I stayed with Kirghiz sheep herders up in the mountains and learned about their job, lots of hands-on experience..it was really interesting.
An espresso at the train station costs 4 Euros these days (more 3,60 but I like to tip the rest). It’s too expensive 😭 well, I don’t have it every day. It’s delicious, though. I think it’s the virtue of those big ass machines they have with a lot of pressure. My mocha machine coffee at home isn’t as good.
It reminds me that I haven’t had any train or bus station tea in Turkey in a while. I have no idea what a glass of tea costs these days. It would probably make me swear inwardly.
I am off to a meeting where I and fellow scientists can once again agree that the massive salt deposit that’s leftover from mining is fucking up the nearby river and our grandkids’ water supplies, the excess nitrogen and phosphate doing the same, and wastewater treatment systems not being adequate, so that politicians can go ahead and ignore it. But there’s no corruption, it’s lobbyism. That’s totally different.
The young students are growing moustaches again. My husband said that some of his friends joined the game. I wonder if he’ll do the same. When I was a kid I thought Freddy Mercury is Turkish because he had a moustache.
When Reddit started providing comment insights, I almost always noticed the same pattern on all the UK subs: UK users would consistently make up about 80-85% of comment views, US users would consistently make up about 10-15% of comment views (fair enough, there’s a lot of Americans on Reddit, they speak the same language and there’s probably some bias on my end because of the time zone) and then after that, there was always the same consistent 2-3% of comment viewers from the Netherlands.
Hmmm, intriguing, I thought to myself. What could possibly be the reason for all those Dutch people visiting UK meme subs? Maybe it’s just related to a combination of having a relatively large population (at least compared to, say, Ireland or Denmark) with high English proficiency but unlike, say, Australia, the time zone works in their favour? Maybe the Dutch are much bigger Anglophiles than I thought?
So I decided to investigate and, well, turns out, there’s a boring answer. Since the government implemented the bafflingly misguided [Online Safety Act](https://youtube.com/shorts/pjRMwN2B4TA?si=M_BzUxLSMgC-XTN5) which requires you to upload your ID to access age-restricted content, a lot of people in the UK have been making use of a free Dutch VPN service that routes them through…the Netherlands.
Was yesterday at the Christmas Market at Belvedere in Vienna and man, they nailed it this year. Used to be kinda randomly scattered all over the place, now it was really cozy and beautiful. Got some Punsch and Käsespätzle, good stuff.