Reflections of a traveling veterinarian
I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, when at our local church, which was a converted farmhouse with a thatched roof in the North of Germany, the villagers had been invited to an unusual spectacle: a member of the parish had travelled to Brazil and had come back with a …
Continue reading “Brasilia and the legacy of Oscar Niemeyer”
It had been impossible to find some sleep… It was 4 o’clock in the morning, the power cut had started 6 hours earlier and it was 32 degrees in a room with next to no ventilation. It was then, when a group of howler monkeys were starting with their morning concert in the wildlife …
Continue reading “The Northern Pantanal and the Tiramisu effect”
The early September sun is about to climb above the roof of a conference centre in the middle of Antwerp, that can claim to feature a “Room with a Zoo” as well as a meeting room guarded by the life-sized model of a Central African Okapi. The first rays of direct sun light are …
The last bar had just closed and with the streets now deserted, I took a stroll through a world that had disappeared over a hundred years ago, in a place that was so charming and peaceful, that it provided the canvas for one of history’s most chilling narratives….. I was in Sighisoara, one of …
I realised that it had been a mistake to pass the last petrol station on the fertile plain near Sibiu, before starting the long ascend along the Transfăgărşan Road, which is crossing the Transylvanian mountain range from the North to the South. The forecasted 150 km of reach, the fuel gauge had indicated, had …
Robert Popa was indignant when I entered his consulting room in Timisoara, in the most western corner of Romania, and the image I saw was just all too familiar to me: Robert had just examined a one-year-old terrier with a non-weight bearing lameness that had for all of two weeks not responded to rest …
“She’s got a smile that seems to me Reminds me of childhood memories Where everything was as fresh As the bright blue sky Now and then when I see her face She takes me away to that special place And if I stared too long, I’d probably break down and cry….” (Sweet Child …
Oleksandr Nazaryshyn was preparing his consulting room for a busy afternoon surgery. Outside his small practice on the ground floor of a multi storey building in Irpin, just a few miles west of Kyiv, pet owners already started to queue to have their animals seen. Together with his colleague Alina Klechanovska, a native of …
We were just approaching the Maidan, the very heart of Kyiv, which by now was a Sea of blue and yellow flags that were commemorating fallen Ukrainian soldiers, when my phone exploded with the sounds of my first real air raid alarm. Both drones as well as rockets were approaching the capital, and we …
Exiting Vystavkovyi Tsentre metro station, we first had to pass a considerable amount of tank barriers, which had been placed conveniently on the pavement next to Akademika Hushkova Ave, to be always at hand to set up an impromptu road block on this major trunk road leading into the centre of Kyiv and to …
The Blue Vet Diary