Our first anniversary

In our calendar, December is not only for Sinterklaas (oh yeah, we live in Belgium), Christmas and New Year's Eve party, but also for celebrating Beginnings, as in our own Beginning, in our personal style. It's been already 1 year since we started this own micro-universe called our blog with the simple scope of sharing interesting stories of people around the world and little bits of our daily life in The Rainy City and wherever else might our path bring us. If we have successfully done that…well…you will be the one to judge. The time has came to open up the champagne, put on the party shoes and cross check the resolutions we managed to fulfill this year. And how we like to say, for what we haven't managed to do, there still are 18 days of this year left to set the record. Cheers to that!

Facebook has its own Year in Review, now so do we:). Here are some of our memorable moments from 2013, happiness snapshots spiced with beautiful people and that 'je ne sais quoi' that makes them unforgetable. They might not be the best shots but for sure they mean something to us for one reason or another. We admit that sometimes these reasons are the smallest things on earth like a bloomed tulip or a sunset that makes us smile. So what? We choose to wear always our Rose Coloured Glasses, precisely because we want to enjoy these moments and to remember them. Anyway, at the end of the year, when we look back at how our life has changed in the last 12 months, we recall all these small things and the good moments in which we were truly happy. Enjoy! 

1 December 2012. Supporting the organisation "Sante pour Tous" in Amsterdam at the Benefit Gala for giving to the less fortunate people a second chance to a normal life.

     Christmas in London last year. Hair was longer, smile was wider. Actually, not really! It's still as wide!

                                                                                       On the streets of charming Istanbul in January.

Having fun in the park on a lazy Sunday.

                     
 Wandering the streets of Paris and getting photographed by a German fashion blogger :)

Smiling because the spring is finally in town after a long cold winter.

                                                                     Back in a sunny day in June. Nope, we don't live there:)

Just a random day when you realise that what you dream turns into reality.

That moment of the day when you just stop to enjoy a beautiful sunset in Brussels.

Almost jumping in the air because you've just found the perfect "home" :)

That day when you enjoy the Belgian Coast especially because you have the beach all for your yourself

Feeling the sun on your skin on a hot beach in Valencia.

And living The Easy Life.

Love,

Laura & Elena

Inspired by Max Loessl, founder Agrilution @GEW 2013, part 1

As we have previously promised you, we would like to bring in front of you some of the projects presented during the conference Global Entrepreneurship Week held last week in Maastricht, The Netherlands. There were so many great ideas and so many innovative projects discussed and we do believe they are worth sharing and we hope they will inspire you or at least motivate you to start thinking out-of-the-box .
One of the projects that made a great impact on us concerns Vertical Farming. Perhaps, you are not very familiar with this concept but Max Loessl, a 24 year old student from Germany who is currently studying at the HAS University of Applied Science in the Netherlands has built a company called Agrilution which develops this concept to a whole new level.

Vertical Farming is basically a new way of producing nutritional food using a limited surface by stacking greenhouses on top of the other which are connected as a recycling system. There are several advantages such as year-round production independent of the climate, fertility of the land, temperature or even droughts, floods and other natural disasters which jeopardise today traditional farming. Moreover, it reduces the use of water up to 99% and also the use of nutrients and there is no need to use pesticides or herbicides.

Before we go further into the subject we would like to highlight the inspiration behind this start-up. When Max was asked by the audience WHY he invests his time in vertical farming he answered: "I saw a problem in limited food resources and I wanted to find a solution. I read a book called "Vertical farming" by Dr Dickson and I knew this could be a solution to develop and produce nutritional food. And so I just got started. " This is perhaps the best advice that someone could give: "Get started and you will find the answers along the way". 

Max Loessl had an awesome idea and he started to implement it with the help and support of fellow students and professors from the university HAS in The Netherlands. He founded Agrilution in order to create awareness around Vertical Farming, to support those who believe in this innovative project as a solution for producing sustainable and healthy food and ultimately to develop technology for Vertical Farming. Now Agrilution is developing their own incubator called "Agrilution One" which shall be available soon.

Max Loessl dreams to a world with fully implemented Vertical Farming and we believe in his dream and we know he will make it happen because he has the determination to make a change in the world.

We hope you enjoyed his story, feel free to check his website Agrilution and his page on Facebook for news and updates.

Many thanks once again to Ana from Maastricht Centre for Entrepreneurship for bringing together such amazing people at the conference. Have a great successful week and DREAM BIG!

Love,
Laura &Elena