Fort Boyard

Haute-Normandie, the region of France including the départements of Seine-Maritime and l'Eure. Haute-Normandie (Upper Normandy) corresponds to the eastern half of the ancient duchy of Normandy, located to the east of River Seine.

This coastline saw fierce fighting during World War II, especially during the three months after the Allied D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944. Very few of the lighthouses in the area escaped damage and many were destroyed.

Giacomo Puccini Most expensive postcard on ebay

Today 13.07.2010 most expensive postcard on ebay is:

GIACOMO PUCCINI - Picture post card singed US $14,999.00

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), the greatest Italian opera composer of his time, wrote a number of operas, including his three most famous works, La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

Oldest postcard

The world's oldest picture postcard has sold for a record sum at auction in London.
The card - with a Penny Black stamp - was sent in 1840 to a writer called Theodore Hook who lived at Fulham in London.
The hammer went down at £27,000 but the total price including commission and value added tax (VAT) was £31,750.

The card caricatures the postal service. This is a record for a postcard, according to postal historian Edward Proud, who discovered the card.
It was bought by collector Eugene Gomberg, of Riga, Latvia, in a telephone bid at the London Stamp Exchange auction.
Posted in 1840, the hand-coloured card was addressed to "Theodore Hook Esq, Fulham", a playwright and novelist noted at the time for his "wit and drollery".
It caricatures the postal service by showing post office "scribes" sitting around an enormous inkwell.

Hook probably sent it to himself as a practical joke.
The significance of Hook's card was not realised until last year, when an expert discovered it in a stamp collection.
Until then it had been thought the postcard was invented in Austria, Germany or the United States in the 1860s.
The card and the stamp were authenticated by the British Philatelic Association.

BBC 08.03.2002

The whales

So amazing how one of my long time childhood dream has full-filled. When I was just a little kid I used to watch with my grand-dad Finish channel "Yle 1". We sat together on the cauch watching wonderful adventures of Jacques Cousteau. His long journeys to the ocean and that amazing underwater world.

I dreamt that I could see whales with my own eyes. Are they really that big, do they really jump that high up and then fall back to the water splashing waves high in the sky... It all seemed so amazing and so beyond the reach. For years I had "forgotten" my childhood dream.

But now I saw them... They really jump and play splashing the water up to the sky. Their size is so incredible, you could just watch them hours from the windy beach. For a moment I was again that little kid who sat with his grand-dad on the cauch admiring this wonderful world.

On the road

For the last 5 years I have been travelling approx in 30 different countrys. The best thing being on the road is to send postcards back home because I know how great it is to get them :) Usually you can find only bills and spamm from your post-box, but time to time I will have a postcard from some country far away.
At the moment I'm on the road again. At the beginning of the year I visited Malaysia and from there I flew to Australia where I still am.