L'Oreille Cassée

As Linnéa tells her kids that she is going to French Guiana over Christmas, the obvious question is: why? It is in situations like these that one wishes to be Tintin, with an artefact having gone missing from the Museum of Ethnography in Brussels or Professor Calculus having been kidnapped, either of which would immediately provide a perfectly good reason to set off on an adventure.

But in our case, I guess it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, something about rockets launching into space, French cheese, and rivers winding through the jungle. A blank spot on my mental map, somewhere without templates or fixed expectations. And, of course, the fact that Linnéa speaks French (and I aspire to one day).