A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 9 July 2026 - T for church, air conditioning and Ronnie

 Hello lovely girls,

I have another postcard for you. It came from the bottom of the pile as I didn't find it very interesting. 

It is unusual in that it is a so-called Maxi-card. The stamp is on the front of the card and it is meant for collectors. 

The theme of this card is the Austrian Day of Catholicism which took place on the 9th of September 1983. 

The church in the picture is the St Stephen's church in Vienna.

I have recently been in Vienna and here is the photo I took of that church:

It has a beautiful coloured roof.

The stage was there because of the Eurovision Song Contest that was being held in Vienna. Two big occasions, but completely different in ethos.

The back of the postcard gives some information about the event in 1983:

Google translates this as:

The stamps are pretty:

The one on the right is a Christmas stamp featuring a detail from the Adoration of the Kings by Jan Breughel the older. Here is the entire painting:

The blue stamp shows a slipcase chain with pocket watch - 

It comes from a series of stamps about Traditional costumes 

Montafon is a valley in the western part of Austria. 

Some trivia about Montafon: (from Wikipedia):

Ernest Hemingway spent two winters in Montafon: 1924/25 and 1925/26.  The Snows of the Kilimanjaro (1936) and several other novels and short stories were written in, or they contain material about, the Montafon and the Silvretta glaciers.

The famous German novelist and poet Erich Kästner also repeatedly visited the valley, as did the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl. The noted opera singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf spent her last years in Schruns, where she died on 2 August 2006.

What have I been doing here in Spain. Well I mentioned last time that I had installed airconditioning in the top flat for my visitors. I thought that I might get one for myself too, so the other day a guy came to install it:

The outdoor unit (seen in the above photo) is enormous. Two men worked for several hours to sort everything out.

The indoor unit is quite discreet above the door:

And this is what the outside looks like:

I am really thankful that I can have air conditioning. It is quite a luxury.

As today I will join Elizabeth and Bluebeard's T-Party, I need a drink. This is my dinner a few days ago:

It was a piece of salmon with lots of spices that I cooked in the air fryer together with some wild rice and peas. My drink is a nice rosé.

This evening I've been to the hairdresser and I had my hair cut.

I'll leave you with some photos of Ronnie:

And a close-up:

That is all from me today,

Happy T-Day all,

Lisca

A Postcard A day - Friday 5 June 2026 - Friday smiles

 

Hello lovely peeps,

It's Friday again and for a lot of people the end of a working week and the road into the weekend. For me being retired, it's the other way round. I'm quite relaxed during the week, but at the weekend everything kicks off. I will tell you what I've done during the week and will try to find the silver lining of the things that went wrong. Smiles too. 

One of which is the following postcard:

It comes from China and it makes me smile because through Google translate I've been able to translate the Chinese words at the bottom right and what do they say?  'Provence, France'! So..not very Chinese.

Nevertheless, the lavender looks lovely and I can almost smell it.

The stamp shows some fearsome crocodiles:

Is it me or is that croc a bit boss-eyed?

So my week was a bit of a slog if truth be told. On Friday, Ronnie vomited over my clean duvet in the middle of the night so I had to get up, change the bed, turn the washing machine on and try to get a few more hours sleep. The rest of Friday was spent sorting out my winter clothes as I arrived from my holidays in full summer weather. (two suit cases and a vacuum bag).

In the afternoon my friends Kim & Andy came to bring the car keys back (Andy had driven me to the airport when I went away) and he also sorted the tv out which was behaving weirdly.

On Saturday I tackled the top item on my to-do list: get my passport renewed. It's not easy to get a quick appointment. Usually one has to wait a bit. I managed to get an appointment for Tuesday in Madrid. I was very happy about that and quickly booked the bus there and back, plus two nights accommodation. Madrid is too far to do in one day. 

The embassy emailed me the paper work and it was then that I discovered that the documents they require now would be impossible to obtain over the weekend. Bummer. I cancelled the appointment and the accommodation but unfortunately I was not able to cancel the bus tickets. I'm trying to get the money back from the insurance, but I think I can say goodbye to that money.

Sunday I went to church, had fish pie for lunch and then spent the afternoon doing reviews of places I'd been during my holiday. And for those who live in the UK: I have now watched all the the Race-Across-The-World episodes!

On Monday I went to the gym, machine washed two pairs of Sketchers (shoes) as they will dry nicely in this weather and wrote my Tuesday blogpost. Chicken and rice for lunch.

On Tuesday I went into town and did Pilates, then went to the main police station that has a department for foreigners to get a particular document. I spent a few hours in there as I went without an appointment. After that I went supermarket shopping. I'd been away so I needed a lot of groceries. One of the supermarkets (Mercadona) does a nice raw salmon poke bowl, so I had that for lunch.

On Wednesday I did some food prepping before going to the gym. When I got back I got changed and then my friends Kim and Andy arrived. They always come for lunch on Wednesday. I had made a broccoli salad and cooked salmon (easy peasy). Andy, bless him, does little jobs for me so he took the suitcases of winter clothes upstairs, fixed a leaking sink, sorted out the tv once and for all and looked at my scales. I had changed the battery but it was still not working. (I had left the sticker on the battery! (Duh!)

Then today, Pilates again and later on a guy came to finish installing the air conditioning upstairs in the flat as I am expecting quite a few visitors this summer. 

I had a bean and spinach salad for lunch and now I'm writing this. No photos whatsoever. I just haven't remembered to take any. Sorry.

I'll take one now of Ronnie beside me:

He is gently snoring....

I have also made another appointment with the embassy for my passport in a couple of weeks time. I will have all my documents by then.

Of course as per usual, I have some funnies at the end. I hope they make you smile. 

Enjoy the weekend,

Keep smiling!

Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 2 June 2026 - T for cats, and left-over Romania

 Hello lovely peeps,

Here I am again with a postcard and some photos from my trip that you haven't seen yet. (I'm not doing a Second on the 2nd this time.)

Here is one of the postcards that was waiting in my mail box when I got home:

I was so happy that I was reunited with my cat Ronnie, that this card really 'spoke' to me. It is entitled (using Google Translate) 'On Christmas Eve' by Maria Pavlova. There is no date/year, but it's very timeless. 

I've come back to very high temperatures (we don't seem to have spring. We jump from winter straight into summer). I've had to change my bed from a thick duck down duvet with flanelette duvet covers to cool cotton sheets. Today it's 35 degrees C (95 F).

While I was photographing the card, Ronnie joined me on the table:

The stamps on the card are the usual Russian ones:

The sticker of the man:

As you can read it is the author Chekhov.

Now I would like to show you a few photos of Romania that you haven't seen yet. While we were staying in Brasov, we visited the delightful little town of Sighisoara, in the very centre of Romania in Transylvania. Wikipedia writes:

Located in the historic region of Transylvania, Sighișoara had a population of 23,927 according to the 2021 census. It is a popular tourist destination for its well-preserved old town, which is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site since 1999.

 Vlad Dracul (father of Vlad the Impaler), lived in exile in the town. 

We had lunch in his house as it is now a restaurant. I think Bram Stoker based his Dracula stories on Vlad the Impaler who was very cruel and the name he took from his father (Dracul, meaning 'the dragon').

In the main town square I saw a house with antlers. The above photo is mine and below is a photo from the Internet:

The Clock Tower has a beautiful roof:

As it's a fortified town there are city walls and defensive towers on every corner. There are nine towers. These towers were paid for by the different guilds in the town.

Below is the Bootmaker's tower:

Despite its low height, the tower is interesting due to its pentagon plan, an outer diameter of 10 meters long and a roof hosting two small and elegant observation towers, one facing South-east and one North-west. The current tower was built in 1681 on the site of a previous destroyed tower.

Our little group was staying in Brasov, a really nice city, in a hotel called Kronwell. It was the nicest hotel I have stayed in (so far). 

We stayed a few nights and every day when I came back from whatever we were doing, there was a flask of tea and some sweeties waiting for me on my desk:

This can be my 'ticket' to Elizabeth and Bluebeard's T-Party.

The TV welcomed me by name:

There was an fancy espresso machine:

The coffee was free but the bottles of wine had to be paid for.

And a very comfy bed:

I forgot to take a picture of the outside but found one on the Internet.

That is enough for today I think.

Happy T-Day all!

Lisca

A Postcard A day - Friday 29 May 2026 - Friday Smiles

Hello lovely peeps,

I'm finally home again! I arrived yesterday in the early hours of the morning. In the course of yesterday, I set the washing machine to work and I went to the shops to get some basic provisions. I also went to empty my mailbox and I found this lovely card from my friend Maggie:

It shows a 16th century fresco from Knossos called 'Ladies in Blue'. They certainly are very beautiful. (Look at their wasp waist line!)

Maggie and her husband are in Greece, on the island of Crete to be precise, where Knossos is.

The website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes this:

Excavated before 1914 near Royal Magazines, Knossos.

This group of three women was originally restored by E. Gillieron, designed on the basis of other fragments of frescos from Knossos, mostly of a much smaller scale. It has been shown that details of the facial outline of the "Cup-bearer" fresco, a reproduction of which is displayed in the exhibition, supplied the model for the faces of the "Ladies in Blue", which are not preserved at all.

This fresco reproduces the few fragments of burnt and abraded original fresco, represented as slightly offset from the restoration, and shows the extent to which the Gillierons recreated the scene. Extensive restorations like this one led the writer Evelyn Waugh after a visit to the Archaeological Museum in Herakleion in 1929 to state it is not easy to judge the merits of Minoan painting "since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last twenty years, and it is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate prediliction for the covers of Vogue."

The stamp also features Crete (Thank you Maggie):

The Lighthouse Stamp Society writes:

On 29 Jun 2023, Greece issued a mini sheet of 4 stamps with the theme “Traveling in Greece”. The stamps show views of Crete. One of the stamps depicts the inactive Réthymno Lighthouse located at the port of the same name on the north coast of Crete.

Wikipedia writes: Rethymno, or Rethimno, is a city on the north coast of the Greek island of Crete. In the old town, the Venetian Harbor is filled with fishing boats and lined with tavernas. Rethymno Lighthouse was built in the 1830s.

What's happening here in Spain? I flew back from Istanbul to Malaga (with Turkish airlines, which merits a mention as it was very good). My sister picked me up from the airport and I stayed a few days with her in Marbella. She lives a short walk from the beach, so here I am walking along the water's edge:

Below I am at my sister's, with my feet in the pool drinking a glass of something nice. I feel blessed.

I started preparing this blog (looking for the funnies) by the pool:

On Wednesday, before catching the evening bus home, my sister, her husband and I had lunch on the beach at a bar called The Hippopotamus!

Then I got on the bus which arrived at 01:15 in the morning. Then a taxi ride home and blissfully sleeping in my own bed (after a cuddle with Ronnie the cat).

That is all for today.

More news on Tuesday. In the meantime there are some funnies at the end.

Enjoy your weekend,

Lisca