poor fishies...

I know we are feeling bad about all sorts of things concerning the environment, but at the moment my focus is mostly on the fish. It just seems kind of unfair - because we can't see them and have inadequate measures of finding out how many of them are actually still there in the sea, they've been given so much less attention than (just a grab) pandas, eliphants and leopards. Poaching is pictured as ruthless and they are villains, because they are doing something that is not allowed while the animals are endangered. But what about the fish? Have you ever wondered where the fish on your plate come from? Many of them from Africa, where European ships trawl the fish away under the noses of the locals who catch less and less fish with their tiny boats. But even in our own Europeans seas everything is going tits up concerning fish stocks. See here, for example.

In Britain there is the Marine Stewardship Council that monitors which fish are ok to eat and which not. They place a sticker on each package if it gets through their quality check. You can download a Dutch 'viswijzer' too. And there are tons of websites with more information out there... just try google. So I doesn't mean we should stop eating fish altogether, after all there are still a bunch of them non-threatened. But I think we should be aware of what we eat, and spread the knowledge about this, while the media is focussing on things that are much more debated than overfishing.

And just like on land, here are a few pictures of the big and beautiful that make most people gooey and upset if they actually diappear (maybe before you've noticed that tuna has also disappeared from your plate).

ooof... got that off my chest!

/ edit: here's a 3 minute-video on BBC news, showing how quotas designed to keep the prices up for the fishermen or protect fish stocks, are not effective.

/ edit: talking about tuna stocks!

dress shopping (and a lot more) in Madrid

Few weeks ago I joined Bean and her parents Colin and Morag to Madrid for four days (!). Target: a unique wedding dress. Unfortunately, previous successful shopping experiences gave a false sense of ideal wedding-dress-shopping-city: the more shops we entered, the faster we came running out of them. Lots of nice clothing though, according to my wallet :).

Fortunately, Madrid doesn't leave you bored and sad - it's a gorgeous city with so much to see (and eat and drink!). And if you're done with big cities, there's loads to do in the surroundings.



Colin sorted us out with a great bike trip that included a visit to a gigantic monastery/palace in El Escorial and a lunch on a picturesque patio in a nearby village. *sigh*



Another day we took a train to Toledo, where the old Synagoges were beautifully simple in contrast to the typical over-decorated Catholic churches.

Click on Bean for more pictures!



(tip: click on 'slideshow' for a nicer view)