How I confused a lake for a bread roll

Hey, <<First Name>>

How did your year start? Have you already made some travel plans for 2023?

While I, personally, do start fantasizing about possible dreamed itineraries in this period, I also use January to reflect on the year that passed. In the first week of the month, I usually publish the year review.

The good news is that the web traffic seems to be on a road to recovery, yes, even for travel blogs! The pandemic changed people's habits not only in traveling, but also in consuming media, so travel content sunk to most radical lows. But in 2022, Pipeaway had 54,8 % more readers than in 2019! Could we be out of the slime?

For the featured image of the year review, I chose an almost surreal scene. A gigantic fork “jammed“ into the surface of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

When I first saw this artwork placed just in front of Charlie Chaplin's statue in Vevey, I thought it had to be a reference to his famous dance of the bread rolls performed in “The Gold Rush”.

That didn’t make much sense, but interpreting artists is not always easy. And why wouldn’t the lake be a stage of an imaginary graceful ballet performed by the artist celebrated in Chaplin’s World museum? Why wouldn’t the eight-meter-tall fork be a commentary on finding love among the gold diggers?

Chaplin’s bread dance on New Year’s Eve, while he was waiting to fulfill his romantic dreams, had nothing to do with the Fork of Vevey, a stainless-steel artwork by Jean-Pierre Zaugg that would be created to mark the 10^th birthday of Alimentarium, the local food museum.

Indeed, with the lack of information, we can be equally creative and rather silly in reading and misreading the signs around us.

So if I cannot call fork a fork with absolute certainty, should I read web statistics as a sign of “better days” on travel writing horizons? Well, dreaming is still not forbidden. And after all, in the movie with literal cliffhangers, Chaplin does get the girl in the end.

If you want to have a quick overview of what you might have missed on Pipeaway in 2022, head to the article now!

And for fork sake, don’t be afraid of losing yourself in translation!

Have a forklifting week!

Ivan Kralj
Pipeaway.com