i am a polar bear @iamapolarbear - Tumblr Blog

We're all making plans against the day we may or may not have to abandon Twitter. I'm too old to learn a new platform so I'll be on Instagram and my blog - and now, my YouTube channel! - but possibly my home for quick stuff will be here. Tumblr was created to be quick and dirty - well, unpolished anyway. Just a tumbling roll of half-baked thoughts which got out of hand.

So, a few things.

I blog twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays). In December I'm doing Blogmas because that's the best time for it. I've got four posts finished and probably about half are somewhere on the production line.

I went from "I'll make a video about my Iceland trip for badge reasons" to making a sub-ten minute daily vlog for my second trip to Iceland to "well, I've got six videos in a row up. Might as well make a video every week for ever now". Provided I can come up with three to fill December, I can keep this up until at least March or April. Then we'll see.

I'm not saying a firm hard no to TikTok... but at the moment it comes under the heading of being too old to learn a new platform.

#polarbearblogs

Iceland's having another eruption!

Every time there’s an eruption in Iceland, I feel a compulsion to write about it, to tell you what’s really going on. I’m not a volcanologist, a geologist, a science writer or in any way qualified to do this but I love Iceland and I know the area as well as any casual tourist who’s been there.. *ahem* sixteen times. This is the tenth eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula since March 2021, a flurry…

#iceland #reykjanes

How to spend a day in Városliget, Budapest's City Park

There’s a lot going on in the centre of Budapest and along the banks of the Danube but perhaps you haven’t realised there’s also a lot going on in a much greener quieter part of the city, the huge Városliget, Budapest’s City Park. Start by taking metro line 1 northbound to Hősök tere, Heroes Square. There are other ways to get there but since we’re enjoying the park today, we might as well get…

#hungary

The House of Terror, Budapest

Having wandered around Budapest for a few days, I very suddenly realised that for the average tourist, there’s very little here to say “you’re in Hungary”. Budapest is a bubble in its own right. It’s where stag parties go for beer bikes and to make a racket in the big outdoor thermal baths, where middle aged middle class people go to appreciate Parliament and Castle Hill and where cruise fans go…

#hungary

8 things you need to know about Budapest thermal baths

This first thing is a bonus fact: the reason Budapest has so many thermal baths is only in part due to around a hundred atural mineral-rich hot springs. The main reason is that during the 150-ish years Budapest – or rather Buda, the city on the west bank of the Danube – was under occupation by the Ottoman Empire, the invaders brought their Turkish baths here in accordance with Islamic law to…

#hungary #spa

The best things to do in Budapest - by a local

Last week I went to Budapest and I think the best post to start with is what to do in Budapest by a local. I’m not the local but I work with someone who is not just Hungarian but born and bred in Budapest. Before I went, we sat down together and he went through the map and created a list of things for me to see and do. I dutifully wrote them down and then, over the course of a lazy week with a…

#hungary

Chocolate Wars: Swiss chocolate vs Norwegian chocolate

In the latest round of “what’s the best chocolate in my eclectic collection?”, it’s time for Switzerland vs Norway, Lindt vs Freia, the battle of the two great neutral European powers. Now, this one’s going to be interesting because these are both high scorers – Lindt soundly defeated Greek Lacta back in April and drew with Dairy Milk in July, although in that case I declared it a favourite…

Two schoolchildren go unsupervised to Italy to spend a week with strangers

“We’re going to Italy!” we said. “OK,” our parents said. Not “No, you’re not, you’re fourteen years old,” – but we were. I was fourteen and my best friend Catherine was also fourteen and the plan we’d hatched was to fly to Italy, just the two of us, to join a raptor protection camp populated by strangers. Neither of us had our own passport, because this was early 2000 and children could still…

#italy

Travel Library: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Now, this is a book of two halves, because for the first few chapters, I was shaking my head and going “Yet again, I’m going to have to write on my blog that I read a travel-themed book that I didn’t particularly like”. But it got better. This month’s book is also the Rebel Readers’ book club book and it’s The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, which is the story of how the double whammy of her home and…

One day in Reykjavik: my itinerary vs Chat GPT's

I had the idea for a human itinerary, one day in Reykjavik vs a day suggested by an AI while I was watching Hannah Witton’s I Asked Chat GPT & a London Expert to Plan A Solo Day Out in London video in September and immediately wondered what I would say for a day in Reykjavik and what Chat GPT would say. Now, Hannah gets someone else to do her expert human itinerary and then she tests them both,…

#capital region #iceland

What is the best solid conditioner bar?

Over the last year or two, I’ve become a bit of a convert to solid haircare bars. Unless I’m taking my tent to Iceland, I usually go hand luggage only, which means I’m limited to 100ml bottles of liquid shampoo and conditioner and frankly, 100ml of conditioner barely touches my hair. On the other hand, solid bars don’t count as liquids, weigh less than 100ml of liquid and will last the entire…

New video: Tbilisi sulphur baths

It’s the Tbilisi sulphur baths video! At last! Well, this has been a long time coming! I went to Tbilisi in January – end of January, last couple of days plus the first couple of days of February and it’s ridiculous that we’re nearly two-thirds of the way through October and I only finished this video last thing last night. I’ve also given the entire series new titles and new cover pictures, so…

#georgia

3 days in London in October

Perhaps this should be a post about all the cosy things you can do in autumn in London – kicking red-gold leaves, PSLs in old-fashioned pubs with open fires, where to buy brown and orange knitwear or hand-made candles… but that’s not what autumn in the UK looks like. Autumn in London is grey and wet and so this is a more realistic itinerary of what to do in our vibrant capital on a distinctly…

#london #uk

Rebel Summer Camp part 2: Sunday and Monday

In part 1, I told you what the Rebel Badge Club is and what Rebel Summer Camp is all about so if you don’t know, you can go and read that. In the meantime, I’m jumping straight into part 2, Sunday and Monday. Greta 2’s first scheduled activity at 9.30am was board games. I’m not a big board games fan so I’d earmarked this session for a swim but the pool was in use all day so I wandered down to the…

#uk #worcestershire

Rebel Summer Camp part 1: Friday and Saturday

Let’s talk about the other big exciting thing I did this summer: I went to Rebel Summer Camp 2024! I didn’t go last year; it was a lot of money and I had doubts about whether a single person can put on an event of that scale. For context, it’s about the same price as Camp Wildfire which is, at this point, a fairly well-established festival. Well, after several months of hearing all about Rebel…

#camping #uk #worcestershire

Eras Train Tour: Monday in Warsaw - the end of an Era(s)

And at last it’s going home day! The reality of this trip was almost as long as the blog posts about it – by the time I woke up in Warsaw on that last morning, to the first rain I’d seen since my first day in Berlin, it all felt so long ago I could hardly remember it. I’d been round Berlin, I’d taken the train to Poznań, I’d spent two days in Wrocław, I’d stopped off in Łódź, I’d had two days in…

#eras train tour #poland

Eras Train Tour: Sunday in Warsaw

It is now October and this journey started in July and I’m still writing about it! Twice a week blogs mean eleven-day trips take a while, I guess. But it’s my last full day! It’s the day after I finally went to the Eras tour and I started it late and lazy with a quest to find a nearby Żabka open on a Sunday morning so I could have fresh bread and butter for breakfast. Then off I went into…

#eras train tour #poland

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