What's your hobby!?

Usually stories, sometimes poetry in my mother tongue, italian.
Actually, I have also a trunk novel set in Rome. ;)

I know. This year I went to Berlin on a low budget trip (from Rome) and I spent 38€ for the plain ticket and like 12€/night for the "accomodation" (Good bless Air BnB). With food and museums, i spent around 230 euros for 7 days, so not too bad.

Now I'm saving money for Japan. (Let's say, I spent the last 2 years saving money for my on-rail trip)

Actually, I won a few writing competition back at my place, but nothing too serious. I used to write more, once. Maybe, I used to write better 😂

This joke is top notch ^_^

Well, I kinda always wanted to upload it all to one place but never did so it really is all-over. But there's at least one of my cross-stitch projects and all my clone pics on my instagram, so there's that.

Nah, it's perfectly fine :)
So far thinking of a picture as individual parts helped - trying to do parts individually well but paying less attention to the big picture helped to accept some parts of it as good, and not just write off the whole thing as bad. Or paying attention to the goal of making the picture (practice, just as you said) and the time spent on it - looking at how even good artists often spend hours, days on their really, really good pictures - making an acceptible sketch with coal in ~20minute, based on a scene from a game is good enough for me. (for now!) :)

Little shop of horrors is the bomb. Once my mum got a really weird looking cactus that looked almost like a Cactus/carnivore hybrid and we asked her if there had been an eclipse right before she picked it up.

My sister also suffers from what we call the 'brown thumb'. She killed two cacti (supposedly the hardiest plants for beginners)

Looooots. Some of my favorite flavors are liquor based and with a kick too because I use real liquor and no boiling away the alcohol. It's a bit of a tweak from the classic ice cream making process to make sure the alcohol doesn't prevent proper freezing and create texture problems but it's very easily solved.
I also work a lot with home made infused liquor (mostly rum and vodka, sometimes gin or brandy) that I have lying around the garage.

What's your favorite ice cream?

Garage sale went really well and we raised over $500 which will go right in savings because it always seems stuff is going wrong so best to be prepared for the next thing!

Very sensible of you. I'm a spender. My lady's a saver. Thankfully she's also very convincing so she wins most of the time.

I like to watch cooking shows though, it's satisfying to see the professionals figure out which flavour works with which.

I'm also a cooking show addict. Iron Chef is my cocaine.

I think the work-life balance has started to deteriorate over the last few years!

Definitely. Gets worse when your loved one has a day job and you work mostly nights. Definitely a balancing act.

Aha yes I've been on it for the 4 last years!
Well self publishing would be my last resort. I lack all the discipline, skills and entrepreunarial mindset for this... I'm not sure it could appeal to a big audience though, but let's hope I can find a publisher who thinks so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Kind of a bit of everything. I also like nature and architecture, reading about the history of a place and seeing famous monuments. However, I also love meeting new people, experiencing different cultures, trying new foods, and volunteering to help people in need. Plus the backpacker/hostel scene is super open and welcoming; I've made a bunch of friends and had some great times with people I'd met earlier that day.

Sorry for late reply. I used to do that for quite some years, too old for that now but thanks for the suggestion :)

Thanks! You sure you want that, I would spam you with cuteness :D
And yes, hard work, but so much fun when it clicks. His name is Zoomer, it is a whippet, so very fast and fun. Very friendly and if not running like mental outside then sleeping the whole day :)

BTW: added you on steam

I will be honest - travelling as much is a little problematic sometimes, it often interferes with other stuff, we often travel during holidays (cause we don't have to wast limited amount of free days in work, but it also means we will miss some family holidays, birthdays of friends, parties etc), and such amount of travelling basically means you cannot save up for anything else, you gotta give up some things to have monies for other things ;) But yeah we have lots of memories, both good and bad, but bad ones tend to turn blank quite soon ;p Also two additions - some of these countries 'visited' are not fully 'visited' yet, we went somewhere for citybreak, saw one city for 1-3 days and went back, so we still have whole country to explore ;p Plus we already had 9 countries visited before we even started more serious travelling ;p

well, even if technically some country may no longer be around you can still visit the same place - the city will still be there, the tourist attractions will still be there, all beautiful places will look the same no matter what country they are currently in. Who cares if Prague is now in Czechia, previously was in Czech Republic and before that it was in Czechoslovakia - it's still the same wonderful Prague ;p Only time when you cannot go somewhere is when there is a war nowadays (luckilly in Europe not common thing, still will prolly not go to Crimea for example and it used to be a great destination), or if something gets completelly destroyed (by war or natural forces) - again luckilly also not a common thing in Europe, yet still happens. For example Azure Window in Malta is no longer existing, luckilly I managed to see it before it collapsed.

hmm, let's think, I got a new countertop blender last month, but this is actually useful as my fiancee is currently on a diet consisting of lots of coctails and cream soups and thus for such things done in big amounts a countertop blender is much more useful than normal hand-blender or immersion blender, and I only had these two, from less useful accesorries, I got a new cheese board - one that you can open and inside of it is space for set of 6 cheese knives and last week I bought an ice cream machine on promotion, summer will be ending soon so they discounted it heavilly and I couldn't stop myself xD And from travel-related stuff, we were in Greece in June and I used almost all our luggage for food products (and alcohol ;p) xD I brought almost 1kg of spices, herbs etc, 1.5l jar of tahini, lots of kalamata olives, cheeses, dried seasoned mutton meat, 1kg of baklava, balsamico infused with fruits, 5 bottles of wine, Ouzo, Tsipouro, Metaxa, kumquats liqueur, went to Czechia recently but into mountains, not major cities, so I had no place to purchase local food, only brought back beer and absinthe ;p

oh and got one more thing but I cannot find how it's translated into english, in polish it's called przecierak, and it's a tool you use to make mousses, I mainly use it to make shitloads of tomato mousse in summer when tomatoes are cheap, I usually buy 20-30kg of tomatoes, cook them, mousse them all, jar them, pasteurize them and then I have base for soups, sauces, casseroles etc for whole year ;p I got it because my old przecierak broke in half last year ;p Anyway tool looks like this:

View attached image.

As for theatres I guess it depends on local ticket prices, what cinemas you choose and on your watching habits. I usually avoid chain cinemas, go to biggest independent cinema in region (not only no wasting 45minutes on ads but also no popcorn and other stuff like that, cheaper tickets, much more movies to choose from - usually they are showing 20+ movies just not as often, while chain cinema will be showing 5-8 just screening after screening for the whole day) - I usually use promotion 'cheap mondays' where I buy tickets for 14PLN (3.20EUR) so it's really not that expensive, if I were to go to big chain cinema, go at weekend, buy big popcorn, soda etc I'd probably spend 50+PLN (13.5EUR) - so like I said cinema-going habits make a big difference ;p

As for cheap tickets - at least in Europe anyone can do it, there are flight search agregators, there are websites, groups, forums etc dedicated to cheap flights searches (if I find a flight I know will not use myself I will spread the word, other people will do the same), there are blogs solely dedicated to teaching how to hunt for cheap tickets or how to organise cheap travels etc. But I honestly have no idea how this works in Northern America, are such a big savings as often possible or not, we sometimes share cheap tickets to US and across US, but I don't know how representative they are for whole flight market there, so cannot really recommend if and how to oprganize cheap travels there, maybe just an idea of hunting for cheap WOW/Norwegian (EU-US sometimes is ~140-200EUR for return tickets, I assume US-EU would be the same) flights and then continuing to travel over Europe, but it is much longer, more complicated to organize and more expensive trip than European citybreak so I wouldn't really recommend it for someone just starting.

As for favoritue place it's really hard to say, not only because I visited quite a lot, but also because 'fave place' can mean a lot of things, it can mean fave city, fave region, fave trip, fave location etc. For example I've had trips which were not-horrible-but-also-not-so-great but there was one place I visited that made it all up (for example Meteora in Greece, probably best place I've ever been, surely best place in Greece, thou our whole trip to Greek Macewdonia with parts of Central Greece was not best, there were worthy elements, but were misses as well, and I would say going for southern Greece or Greek Islands is overall much better idea than going for Macedonia). So as it's quite hard to name one place I will name a few ;p

My favoritue tourist attraction is probably before-mentioned Meteora, it is simply stunning, everything, mountains, sights, strange rock formations, these monasteries on top of high rocks - it's all very surreal and otherworldly, probably also helps that we visited before high season and there really weren't that manyt tourists around which is rarity for such popular spots.
As for favoritue city it's gonna be strange one, but italian Bergamo - no crowds of big tourists cities, beautifully preserved old city, great atmosphere, no 'big-city' elements like endless fields of concrete buildings etc, close to many great spots, like Alpine mountains, Como lake (one of the most beautiful lakes ever), Milan... Bergamo itself is probably my favoritue place for city-break and I've visited it 3-4 times so far just like that - for one-three days :)
Favoritue region - here it's no-brainer, I'm crazy in love with Spanish Andalucia (just off-season, mid-summer it's way too hot), it has everything - beautiful beaches and just few kilometers off-shore you have mountains with beautiful sights, few kilometers further and you have really high mountains, one of the most beautiful mountain trails ever (Caminito del Rey is absolutelly stunning), you have snow peaks of Sierra Nevada, you have both clasical spanish architecture and old arabic architecture, you have small white-cities and you have lots of great and unique medium and big cities (Seville, Malaga, Granada, Cordoba, Ronda to name a few), you have world-wide-known tourist attractions (Alhambra for example) and you have totally undiscovered ones (like Nerja cave), you have great natural regions, like mentioned mountains, you have Gibraltar pretty close...), you have very tasty food, people are always smiling, extremelly friendly - I could go on and on aboiut why Andalucia is so great ;p
Favoritue Island gotta be portuguese Madeira, island of forever-spring, great climate, it's far away from everything, beautiful sights, it's not overflooded with tourists, it's not popular among parety-goers like many other islands are, but there are many other great islands I love, Madeira is closely followed by Malta nad maybe Santorini (thou problem with Santorini lately is that it became way too popular, there are too many tourists and it's simply way too crowded for such a small island).
Favoritue place to eat - Sicily.
Favoritue country overall - Ireland (plus Dublin is also pretty high on my list of favoritue cities).
Best place far from civilization? Norwegian fjords (thou Norway is crazy expensive, but it's not such a big problem for fjords, you just pack most of your food with you and don't spend locally more than you absolutelly have), but Iceland is awesome as well (and very otherworldly), but also as expensive as Norway ;(

I could go on and on, and these are just my most beloved places, there are many many more that are also great, just not as great as these ;p

Ahaha as an ice hockey player I can relate xD

Mostly reviews, but I won't shy away from a lengthier opinion piece.