The Swiss canton of Valais—specifically the town of Belalp—has a downhill skiing race for which all participants dress as witches (with brooms, even).
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I read a lot of books in 2023, but I managed to winnow down my list of the best-of-the-best using four criteria. Here are my five favorites—and several runners-up.
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How I rounded out the 2023 reading year, with my favorites of the quarter in bold and links to the rest of the year’s lists.
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I spent a portion of the first day of 2024 reviewing my 2023 progress against the goals I’d set for myself—always an interesting reflection point.
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How does Lausanne in Switzerland celebrate New Year’s Eve? Why, it fake-burns its gothic cathedral, of course.
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This site very much has the form of an old-school blog. It’ll stay that way as well. Too much to hope that the good old days of blogging could make a comeback?
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While bad people make mistakes, good people make them, too. Treating good people like bad people in the face of an error harms them (and us).
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Checking progress on my current-year goals at the end of November, even though the year still has one more month to go, always feels like looking into the wayback machine.
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While people and organizations have aimed to reduce life friction as much as possible, we might just want to add back in some of it for our own health and wellbeing.
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SAD or just the season? it seems unreasonable to assume that seasons don’t affect humans when they affect everything else. We live in the atmosphere, after all. Even when we sometimes wish we did not.
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Switzerland doesn’t have a feast of thanksgiving, but it does have the opposite: A day of fasting. Say what? Here’s the full story of the Swiss federal fasting day, including its history and how it’s celebrated.
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Attentively warding off any tendencies toward creeping bad eating habits and keeping an eye out for “alone” turning into “lonely” mean, in my thinking, that eating alone has far greater benefits than it does risks.
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Much accomplished on several fronts—and just in time, as my hibernation season indeed set in toward the end of the month, when autumn settled in Lausanne.
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You’ll have more than plenty to see in Strasbourg—and if you have enough time, I’d recommend you visit other cities and sites in the region as well!
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Seeking French and Swiss monsters? I went on a creature quest and uncovered one good mythical monster story from France and one from Switzerland. And I’m on the hunt for more!
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The full rundown of the books I finished in the third quarter of 2023, with my particular favorites from the three-month period in bold.
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So much exploring outside the comfort zone in September 2023—and some family time as well. (Along with writing work, of course, always that!)
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With a few days in Strasbourg—one of the can’t-miss cities in France—you can see the must-see sites I’ve listed plus at least one or two of the mix-and-match options I’ve shared as well.
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