On this New Year’s Eve of 2026, still recovering from the flu, we chose to celebrate quietly at home, preparing a traditional ajiaco from Bogotá 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!

Yesterday we celebrated New Year's Eve in Switzerland with a delightful dish from Bogotá called Ajiaco con Pollo. We placed the steaming pot at the center of the table, and everyone served themselves a good amount, adding capers, cream, and the all-important avocado slices. This Colombian dish always brings back 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 get 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 has passed and how the seasons and months have gone by so quickly. 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 so quickly: it has been a tug-of-war of hope and despair, associated with the desire we all have for this pandemic to end once and for all!

Anyway, since I haven't updated this blog much lately, I wanted to take this time to write a longer post and look back, through a few illustrations, at the events that marked this year. In my opinion, these were the most important events of this year:

James Webb Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) developed by NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) was launched on the 25th of December. This telescope will support a broad array of research across the fields of astronomy and cosmology.

Facebook Files

Beginning in September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation", a series of news reports "based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management." A couple of weeks later, the whistleblower behind them came forward: Frances Haugen, a courageous former product manager on the Civic Integrity team, which was in charge of curbing misinformation and other threats to election security.

It's not news that social media has been used for years to spread misinformation. But having an "insider" to document and record the action (or inaction) coming from the senior management of the social giant was quite a moment.

Tokyo Summer Olympics

A year later than planned and with a lot of restrictions, the Summer Olympic Games finally took place in Tokyo this year. A number of athletes discussed the importance of participating in the games, but they also expressed their frustration at the lack of spectators and the confinement, which kept them from enjoying one of the most interesting cities in the world!

COVID-19 vaccine rollout

In January the COVID-19 vaccine rollout started, mainly in the industrialized countries (leaving the poorest nations behind). But then the scarcity of this valuable resource became clear, with many nations competing for the same vaccines.

There was a lot of criticism in particular of the EU, since the pace of the rollout was quite slow at the start.

Insurrection at the US Capitol

I remember I was working at home in January when those images of people attacking the US Congress appeared in my news feeds, so I switched to a live stream to check what was going on.

My first thought was "there can't be a coup d'état in the USA!"... but from everything that has been discovered so far, they weren't that far off. Democracy can be quite fragile.

PS: All the source pictures used in the illustrations come from Wikimedia Commons.

I wish you all a very happy 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 show Last Week Tonight, 2016 has been a pretty shitty year. So many music and movie legends passed 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, populist 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 Scottish and Northern Irish opposition, the Colombian plebiscite's 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 would make it a horrible year as well.