Today is exactly one year ago that we started this blog. We already had the domain Wolfstad.com since 1999, and had used it as a personal website, featuring our travel photo album and Disney Comics Worldwide, but it wasn’t until October 2005 that we thought of making it into a blog, so I looked into WordPress and launched the site on Monday 17 October, with an entry about bad food at Disneyland Paris. More »

A hot air balloonist who disturbed hundreds of breeding birds when flying too low over the Nieuwkoopse Plassen, here in the Netherlands, has been fined € 300 by a judge in the Hague. The 36-year-old man had started his flight in Woerden in June last year, and had accidentally drifted toward Schiphol Airport. To evade the airport the man changed his heading and flew just 25 meter over the nature reserve, where hundreds of birds were startled by the loud burner of the hot air balloon and flew away. The judge decided that the balloonist had not properly prepared the flight. More »

I have just updated our photo album and created the 2006 yearbook with photos of what we’ve done so far this year. More »

In the last year I’ve had quite a few problems with Webmasters.com. Luckily I am not using their services anymore for quite a while, but I am still waiting to receive a refund, and they refuse to answer my emails. More »

The IKEA in Delft, here in the Netherlands, has recently expanded their store, doubling its size and destroying an important nesting habitat for bats. To provide shelter for the displaced bats, the city of Delft is funding the construction of a special bat-cave behind the IKEA store. More »

I didn’t realize this, but many food products like Pop-Tarts, M&M’s, Cupcakes, Snicker bars, etc. have beef or pork gelatin in them. More »

A new bird species has been discovered in a remote forest in northeastern India, conservationists announced today. The strikingly multi-colored bird has been named Bugun Liocichla and it is the first new bird species discovered in India in more than half a century. More »

Today was Open Monumentendag in the Netherlands, which means that many monuments, otherwise closed to the public, are open for free exploration. We had a walk around our town Leiden today and came across some really nice 1940’s Escher intarsia (a form of wood inlaying) works at the city’s Town Hall. More »

We were in Madrid last weekend and saw the Puerta de Europa (‘Gateway to Europe’) towers, the world’s first leaning high-rise buildings. They were built in 1996 and designed by the American architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. Each building is 115 m tall, or 26 stories, with an inclination of 15º, or more than twice that of the ‘leaning’ (pfft) tower of Pisa. More »

The average supermarket in the Netherlands is the smallest in Europe, and the selection of food and drink here at grocery stores is also very limited compared to stores in Germany, France, UK, USA and even Belgium. Here is a list of several food products that I like to bring back when shopping abroad — stuff that they really should sell here in Holland. More »