It started quite a few years ago, when fridge magnets with funny sentences became famous. You know, things like “It’s either me or the house, both of us can’t look good” or “A mind is a terrible thing to waste on cleaning.” We absolutely adored them and started hunting for the most outrageous and funny ones.
And then I started to travel and discovered that this – and other kinds of fridge magnets – you could buy in every country. So first I started buying the magnets with funny sentences in different languages – to this day there are two in Croatian and one in Finnish that we are not exactly sure what they say. And somehow I became a tradition that wherever a go, I hunt for a fridge magnet for my mother’s collection. Fortunately she does have a really huge fridge, while (unfortunately) my fridge is inbuilt into a row of cupboards and the metal doors are covered by wooden ones – which means no fridge magnets…
You wouldn’t believe how many funny or cute magnets are out there. They’re cheap, small and you can get them almost everywhere, which makes them a perfect collectible. My mother has in her collection e.g. garish Turkish traditional shoes, dried chili pepper from Hungary, frangipani flowers from Bali and a samovar from Russia. It’s a bit like a journal of all the travels which reminds you about all the places you’ve been to and cultural wonders which are out there – every time you reach for milk.