On this New Year’s Eve of 2026, still recovering from the flu, we chose to celebrate quietly at home, preparing a traditional Bogotan ajiaco for a late lunch—a dish perfect for a cold day like yesterday. In that simple moment, I felt hopeful that 2026 would be a good year ahead!

Yesterday we were celebrating New Year's Eve in Switzerland with a delightful Bogotanian dish called Ajiaco con Pollo. We placed the steaming pot at the center of the table and everyone poured a good amount of it, adding capers, cream, and the important avocado slices. This Colombian dish always brings some nice memories of my childhood, so I was delighted to discover that we still had some dried "guascas" to recreate it as close as possible to the real deal. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year 2024!

On this first day of 2022 I had the opportunity to enjoy this beautiful sunset on the shore of Lake Geneva, with the church of Morges in the background. I felt at that moment that in spite of the difficult beginning of 2022, I had hope that everything would be better and that it would be a great year!

In a couple of days, the year 2021 will be over. It seems incredible to me how fast time passed and how the seasons and months went by so fast that this period is indeed going to end. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present serious problems, particularly with the new Omicron variant, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why this year and last year have passed.

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I wish you all a very happy year 2021. I hope that this year comes with good health, vaccinations that will end the pandemic, and a return to that normality where it is possible to travel again.

Finally 2016 is ending. As John Oliver mentioned in the last episode of his last week tonight show, 2016 has been a pretty shitty year. There were so many musical and movie legends passing away (David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Prince, Gene Wilder, Leonard Cohen, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds and George Michael) and Europe experienced terror in many cities including Nice, Istanbul, Brussels and Berlin.

On the other hand, the populists and far right anti-immigrant movements gained a lot of traction in Europe and America. The popular vote brought many unexpected outcomes including the Brexit victory despite the Scottish and Northern Irish opposition, the Colombian plebiscite rejection of the peace agreement reached in Cuba and finally the astonishing Trump victory in the electoral college, even though he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots.

The only silver lining of this year was the historic Paris Agreement on climate change. Let's hope this doesn't change in 2017 (cough trump), since that will make it a horrible year as well.