de volle manen van 2024

De volle manen van 2024 - illustration by Dorine de Vos

First full moon of the year tonight 🌕

christmas tradition since 2013

December 2023

All lined up for christmas.

Annual tradition since 2013.

december decorations

December traditions. colored Christmas lights in the ginkgo tree.

The multicolored LED festival lights we once bought from Habitat have lasted for many years. The bottom photos are from 2011, back then the beech hedge was still low and the trunk of the ginkgo tree was a lot thinner.

in the year 2022

Saturday 31st of December

On the last day of the year we're browsing through the precious memories we made together in 2022. Captured forever in 178 pages.

An annual photo book tradition since 2007.

Wishing you all an exciting 2023 and challenging new beginnings!

2022 in a nutshell on instagram

december traditions

Thursday 22nd of December

It always remains a convivial tradition, decorating the big colorful Christmas tree in the restaurant at work, also for the fifteenth time hahaha...

our tiny tree ✨

Our tiny tree ✨

This time we decorated the tree with Christmas hares of Anthropologie that we have collected over the years 🐰

The seven hares below you've have seen before and this Christmas season we have expanded our collection with new metropolitan hares from New York, London and Paris.

These hares will always remain a tradition I suspect and reappear every December.

augustus in december

This afternoon we had some oliebollen at the fire pit in the front yard at Villa Augustus.

icy cold christmas walk

Sunday 26st of December.

The traditional Christmas walk wasn't really long this year, we both had a very strong 'shall we go back to the car' feeling, because it's icy cold outside today.

Well we got some fresh air and are now going to have lunch with everything that's left from the past few days.

the slaak

Saturday 9th of January - Rotterdam

On the occasion of our 29th wedding anniversary we stayed overnight in room 409 at The Slaak. A hotel which is housed in the former pressroom of newspaper ‘Het Vrije Volk’. A beautiful building with many authentic elements.

We keep celebrating love and traditions. L'amour toujours!

A sunny and crispy cold weekend with winter walks in Kralingen and Katendrecht.

Coffee to go at Vicini, take away ciabatta's for lunch from Da Giuseppe and dinner by hotel restaurant Didot34, which was delivered up to the hotel room door on a trolley.

Awakened by the sun shining through the large 'office windows' we had breakfast at 9 o'clock (also delivered in front of our door) overlooking the city. We've had a lovely stay.

PS: In November 2019 we had a coffee in the lobby and visited the Pantone Pantry by Tribute Portfolio to celebrate the opening of The Slaak Rotterdam. Different times, when you could drop by spontaneously to drink coffee. How we all miss that!

oliebollen in da house

Oliebollen in da house.

It is a custom for Dutch people to have oliebollen & appelflappen on New Year’s eve, which explains the extra long queues at most of the oliebollen mobile stalls setup on various spots around the city.

Have a wonderful New Year's Eve!
A brandnew year and decade ahead of us, to start all over again and make new plans!

Let's make Twenty Twenty top notch and try to get everything out of it!

Thanks for another year of following my blog.

lots of love, Ingrid x

merry christmas

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!

And a joyful Christmas to you and your family and happy holidays!

fantasia

Fantasia is a traditional exhibition of horsemanship performed during cultural festivals and for Maghrebi wedding celebrations.

The performance consists of a group of horse riders, all wearing traditional clothes, who charge along a straight path at the same speed so as to form a line, and then at the end of the charge (about two hundred meters) fire into the sky using old muskets or muzzle-loading rifles. The difficulty of the performance is in synchronizing the movement of the horses during acceleration of the charge, and especially in firing the guns simultaneously so that one single shot is heard. The horses were bred from the Arabian and Barb breeds or a mixture of the two.

The Fantasia is considered a cultural performance and a kind of martial art and it also symbolizes a strong relationship between the man (or woman) and the horse, as well as an attachment to tradition.

In Morocco, Fantasia performances usually take place during local seasonal, cultural or religious festivals.

I was lucky to experience a Fantasia performance in the Agafay desert, during sunset at one of our workshops in May 2017.

A few weeks ago we walked in Essaouira and guess what we found in front of a curio shop in the medina? A Fantasia painting!

In beautiful colors, simple, but authentic, and battered, and old, with horsemen and berber tents in the desert, and signed by a seagull. We both loved it and decided to make a deal with the antique dealer. Everybody happy and so we cycled back from the medina to our hotel just outside Essaouira, Henk with a Fantasia painting under his arm.

New painting in da house, souvenir with a story...