To the delight for visitors and locals alike, there are city bikes in an increasing number of cities all around the world. In my hometown Helsinki we get to enjoy the yellow city bikes from April thru October, i.e. almost six months. Perhaps even longer in the future if climate change continues to give us shorter winters. In Helsinki the bikes are yellow. In Melbourne they are blue, in Amsterdam green, in Reykjavik pink. Continue reading

is a new article series here in Journeys of Life. It can entail most anything, and is really about creative writing - as opposed to some other article series here. The publication date will be the 8th of each month. The When can be a beginning of a question sentence, or a story that follows. These stories will typically be short ones, but can be long-reads as well. So we always start with When, and go on from there. Continue reading

IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - had it’s latest conference a couple of months ago in Katowice, Poland. Widely reported throughout the world, IPCC got a lot of attention. One of the speakers at the conference was Sir Richard Attenborough, whom most of us know from his splendid nature documentaries. He had an urgent message to give to the rest of the world. The organization is becoming increasingly familiar to most of us. Continue reading

in Istanbul, Turkey, you can take your empty plastic bottles and cans to your local metro station, recycle them, place your transit card on the screen to collect the amount, and then pay all or part of your fare with that? Now that is hats off to Turkey - even if there are lots of less desirable things happening in that country. Smart environmental thinking, for we all need to get from A to B, and this is such a good method to get people to take those bottles with them instead of creating more waste. Continue reading