Lennard Ramone

The Dutch department of Foreign Affairs has a really nifty app with travel advice and other handy information for people when they travel abroad.  My favorite part is the map. Every country in the world is classified on it.  There is a color code that shows how safe it is to go: Green: Safe. No problems to speak of.  This is nearly the whole of Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia etc. Basically all fully developed countries. Yellow: Still safe, but keep your eyes open. This is most of South America, except for Uruguay (Green) and Venezuela(orange). Parts of Northern Africa and the Middle East, the tourist hotspots in Asia like Thailand, most of the Caucasus (except for border regions in disputed areas like Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia etc) and small bits of former Yugoslavia like Kosovo and the border areas between Bosnia and Serbia. Orange: Only go if you really, really have to, and if you’re there, I would get out pronto. Hire local security where possible. This is no...

  At the end of the year, people typically look back on what has happened and make lists of favorite new movies, albums or books, but at the end of this train wreck of a year, I couldn’t really come up with anything worth saying that hasn’t been said a million times already so I decided to look back a bit further. A lot further, in fact.  I don’t know exactly what triggered it, but I thought about my high school years a lot recently, so I decided to highlight some of my favorite teachers. You often hear people complain that high school was a drag and that they didn’t like it but I always enjoyed it. I spent my high school years at a place called the St. Antonius College in the city of Gouda in Holland, just outside Rotterdam. It was a midsized school back then, with about 700 students, housed in a 4 story building with 2 gyms, a large arts and crafts area and a cafeteria/gathering space (called ‘aula’ in Dutch). It was a pleasant place to go to school, despite it being on the...

Many years ago, when I was living in Holland, I was a regular visitor of a heavy metal message board. The internet was still a new thing then (I’m talking early 2000s here) and the possibility to discuss the finer things in life, like music and drinking, with strangers who were many miles away, without leaving your seat, was still a novel and exciting experience.  I don’t remember exactly what the lead-in to the discussion was, but it was something along the lines of someone posting that they had been to a gig and afterwards had gone on the most epic of pub crawls and gotten home at 6 in the morning. This triggered some more tall tales of people running into the mailman when they got home, going to an early bar straight after and more of those familiar party-til-you-drop stories. Someone then interjected that he didn’t understand how people could do shit like that and that he went home straight after a gig to go to sleep because he was a morning person.  I was quick out the tr...

  Some time in 2005, I came across a blog from a guy in New York called Dan Freeman. He had retired in his 50s, after he sold his company, and now looked for an activity to fill his days.  What he came up with was this: he was going to visit 1000 bars in one year. Starting out on New Year’s Day, he marched around New York for the entire year, with occasional excursions to New Jersey and his vacation home in Mexico, in order to reach his goal. He wrote a daily blog about his booze tour and it was very entertaining to read. His blog is still online, and you can read it here . Content additions are sporadic, the most recent new post is from 2016, but it’s still worth to have a look at it.  He also did an interview with NBC, which you can read here   I loved reading his blog and, being somewhat of a bar enthusiast myself, this gave me the idea to do something similar. I realized immediately that I wouldn’t be able to do 1000 in one year, because I wasn’t retired and didn...