Books of the week - "This is" series

I was a little bit reluctant about starting a blog. I didn't really know what to talk about, I didn't want to expose my life to strangers, I didn't know if I would have the time and willingness to write frequently and so on. Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try; mainly because I thought that it could bring me some kind of satisfaction. Well, so far, it has been an extremely pleasant activity. I enjoy writing, taking pictures, visiting new places and sharing all this here.

Once I've decided to start something, I always try to give my best at it and with this blog it hasn't been different (unfortunately the result is not always at the same level as the effort to accomplish the goal). Therefore, so far, while preparing my posts, I usually need to do some research. Some posts require more than others but almost all of them have had some background work.

Having said that, today, I discovered a new feature about this blog that got me even more motivated to continue. I can actually learn from it. When I discovered this I was thrilled. I always thought that blogs were a one-way communication tool that we could use to share something (an idea, an experience, a book, a restaurant, etc) with people that we may or may not know. But I never thought I would learn anything new from my own blog.

The subject of this post today is about the series of books "This is (and here usually comes the name of a city or region)", written by Miroslav Sasek. As the title points out, the books are about important cities/regions around the world. I love these books, because even if they are somewhat outdated (they were all written between 1959 and 1974), they still describe very well, with humor and beautiful illustrations the characteristics of all the places that are part of the collection.

The first book of the series I bought, when F was still a baby, was the one about New York. Then I decided to collect all of them. And the way I do it is that whenever we visit one of the places with the kids, I buy the book. Preferably before going, so that we can prepare for the trip and take it with us.

And this is what I learned today: while searching for some covers to illustrate this post, I discovered that there are almost 20 books in this series. I already have 3 and I always thought that there were around 5 or 6 or maybe 10 at most. Okay, you may think, this is not necessarily an extremely relevant information or you probably were already aware of it and you are thinking right now that I'm a complete ignorant. Nonetheless it's new information for me and I wouldn't have known it unless I would have checked Mr. Sasek's website (that I googled and found out, because I had no idea that there was actually a website about him) to write this post. Which brings me to the beginning of this post when I stated that I could learn new things through my blog.

The other important information that I became aware of today is that I need to travel a lot with my children in order to complete our collection. Not a bad problem to have, right?