I don’t bring back that many weird souvenirs but occasionally I want to talk about a trip and something unusual that I found or bought. It’s all fairly small stuff – I love the idea in books of bringing back entire carpets or large pieces of furniture from your travels but mine has to be stuff that fits in a suitcase that I’ve probably already over-filled – but my office and bedroom are both liberally decorated with my souvenirs.
Sometimes I look around and I think that I’d like to tell the internet why this or that peculiar item is sitting on my shelf. Of course, mostly I buy postcards and badges for my blanket and of course I bought a little metal Eiffel Tower the first time I went to Paris. This is about horseshoes and rocks and miniature walking sticks.
I’ve been meaning to do this post for years. Over time, I’ve picked up bits and pieces while travelling and some of them come out only at Christmas. I don’t collect Christmas decorations. I know there are people who bring back a fridge magnet or a beer mat from every place they go to. I’m not… More Christmas decorations from my travels
I started a Weird Souvenirs series a long time ago and it didn’t get beyond two installments. Well, here’s the third and it’s an expansion of the first, which was about a piece of lava I brought back from Holuhraun. This is my rock collection. It’s actually four rock collections. The first three are all… More Weird souvenirs: meet my rock collection
Take a guess what country has the most Nobel Prizes in the world? It’s Iceland! Ok, let’s qualify that. Which country has the most Nobel Prizes per capita? Iceland has one Nobel Prize but on the other hand, it has a population the size of Camden, so that’s a pretty high ratio of Nobel Prizes to… More The A-Z of Iceland: N for Nobel Prizes
The first time I went to Iceland, we went out looking for the Northern Lights. It was really cold and we stopped initially in the car park of a small roadhouse in the south-west, a little way west of Hella (at the junction of the Ring Road, the 26 going north-ish and the 275 going… More Weird Souvenirs: a used horseshoe
In mid-2014, a volcano in Iceland started rumbling. On August 29th 2014, I shrieked aloud in excitement in front of a dozen uninterested elderly ladies because it had finally started erupting. Well, the volcano hadn’t. But its magma was oozing out of a fissure not too far away. It oozed and poured and fountained for… More My best souvenir: lava!