Delays and Medical Issues

Hello subscribers!

This is just a short note to keep you in the loop, as it were. My work on new Blog posts to follow the latest one, i.e. about dark tourism in Namibia, especially its fabulous ghost towns, has been delayed a bit. For one thing, I was away for a few days, mainly to attend a wedding, down in the Austrian state of Carinthia. (That wasn’t dark tourism, obviously, although I found a somewhat related little detail in the cemetery next to the church where the wedding ceremony was held, namely a tombstone that lauded the deceased, in 1942, as having received the “Mutterkreuz” … That was the Nazis’ medal, complete with a swastika, that was awarded to women who had given birth to at least four children!)

And then I also had to deal with some health issues over the past few weeks. I won’t go into details, but in the process I also encountered certain bureaucratic hurdles inherent in the Austrian health insurance system, which have been further prolonging things.

This is why I chose the photo above – as it seems to indicate that medical care is a bit of a lottery. (So I may have health issues, but I won’t so easily lose my black humour …)

The photo was taken a good ten years ago during my trip to Norway, at the Red Cross Museum in Narvik. Despite that name it’s not just a medical museum, but a larger part is actually about WWII, the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany and the resistance against the Nazis. That makes it the premier dark-tourism attraction in this little northern town. Narvik may be small, but its harbour has long been of great importance, namely because valuable iron ore mined in Kiruna in neighbouring Sweden has since 1902 been brought in by train to be shipped around the world from Narvik’s harbour. That was one of the reasons why the Nazis were so keen to conquer northern Norway in the first place. You can read more about all that in my main website’s entry for Narvik.
  

I’ll send the next DT Newsletter out once I have managed to upload another new Blog post or two with photos from Namibia’s ghost towns – they are all supremely photogenic, so you can look forward to some cool images. Hopefully that will be soon.
  

Until then,

best wishes,

Peter