Another day, another place and once again the realisation, that there is so much more to life than veterinary medicine….. It had been a busy morning at the small veterinary clinic in Frauenfeld, not far from the German border in the North of Switzerland, where I had been working in the beginning of October. …
Author Archives: The Blue Vet
4 hours to the Matterhorn
A cold front has moved in from the Atlantic and the mountains of the Northern Alps are covered in thick clouds with non-stop rain forecasted… I am in the middle of a two week locum at a veterinary clinic on the Toggenburger plateau, not far from Lake Constance. Not the best of prospects …
Bacalhau – Not just dried cod….
It had been of no avail……I was grounded on a small airstrip, hundreds of kilometres North of the Polar Circle….. Yes, it was true, that on the previous day, the wing of my plane to Oslo had clipped a building while taxiing at Gatwick airport, so that an alternative machine had to be found. …
For a Bica with Fernando Pessoa at A Brasileira do Chiado
After a busy day at the faculty, I could have chosen a worse places to wind down, than the historic setting of A Brasileira do Chiado, one of Lisbon’s oldest coffee houses. Adraino Telles do Valle, a Portuguese merchant, who had married into a Brazilian coffee planter dynasty at the end of the 19th …
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Life below the bridge
It had been a short night. Despite my late arrival the previous day, I was awake well before sun rise the next morning, due to the constant noise of 7000 cars passing every hour 50 meters above the window of my room. In addition to this, there was a regular interlude caused by one of …
The Oracle
The door to the small balcony was left open and the light of the full moon came flooding into the room. A few fair weather clouds featured on the otherwise blue sky, the shadows of the bannister and the chair produced pitch-black lines on the floor, so that the whole scenery would have given a …
Kraken
Returning from the truly remarkable setting of the small church of Agios Ioannis, which is precariously placed on top of a large rock at the weatherbeaten Northern shore of the Sporadic Island of Skopelos, I was sitting over a beautiful traditional Greek dish of octopus with herbs in olive oil and vinegar, when my …
Spying felines, an encounter with the Mahatma and a race against the sun in Athens
Track shoes ready for another early morning run… And this time for a change one that will include a case of potential espionage and a visit of the American Embassy…. I am in Athens, in the middle of September. It’s by far not the first time I am here and I just love this city: …
Nesslau
It was the beginning of the summer, I was back in Switzerland and this time I was in love… It was a clear case of “Love at first sight”, if this term can be applied to a veterinary clinic or to a place of work in general. By now, I have had a number of …
No 5
There was no point to scream, as there was no escaping from it anyway… With some surprise I realised, how many nerve endings could be found on the surface of a human body, while several layers of my skin were removed by a bearded stranger I had never seen before. I just tried to dig …
The Blue Vet Diary 