The whole of Vienna is built on a foundation of lies: The Danube does not really flow through the city (and is neither beautiful or even blue) ; Vienna’s Imperial splendour belies the reality of being the capital of a small-ish country in Eastern Central Europe; a good portion of her much famed architecture is…
In the initial post about our trip along the Danube, I said that the Rhine landscape featured a large number of castles. While this is undeniably true, it may have been misconstrued to imply that the landscape of the Danube did not. So let me clearly state once and for all that this would be…
Considering we have sung the praises of Regensburg in our last post, it seems all the more unforgivable that we failed to mention the city’s key asset on the central European tourism market: the fact that its entire (and fairly substantial) Old Town has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You are forgiven to ask,…
Alone among European countries, Germany can claim sections of both the Rhine and the Danube, Europe’s most storied rivers. Most of you will have been aware of that, of course, but here is something that may surprise you: the German sections of both rivers are of a roughly similar length (865 km for the Rhine,…
Grasse, as Joe Namath very nearly said, is not for visiting, it’s for smoking. And you’d be surprised how many locals share this opinion, at least the first half of it: that your time would be better spent going somewhere else (not to put too fine a point on it.) Nice-Matin, our local rag, recently…
Münster is one of western Germany’s most favourite day trip destinations and also happens to be a modern art hotspot. People from the region and beyond like to come here partly to experience the town’s ancient and interesting history: in 1535, the Siege of Münster ended the tyrannical regime of the eccentric Jan van Leiden, a…
Here is a tip if you face an acute what-to-do-with-the kids emergency in Barcelona. If you are visiting the Catalan capital with teenage kids in tow who have become ever so slightly rebellious after three days of art nouveau, hallucinogenic architecture and the musty smell of museum corridors take them to Girona (it’s a little…
Over the years, this blog has featured many different kinds of walks for different occasions: exhausting hikes as well as gentle strolls, explorations of the wild and urban walks with a cultural theme, walks for summer and walks for winter, walks that you can spread over several days and walks that you can squeeze in between…
Enough about painters and the French Riviera! Entire books have been written about the way in which the great modernists of European painting – from Monet to Picasso – fell in love with the lights and the sights and the colours of southern France. You don’t even have to go to the library to read…
Now that we have established that the local food alone is worth a trip to Barcelona (by eating a lot of it, intrepid adventurers that we are), only one question remains: how do we get all those calories off our waistlines? Well, by walking, of course. I am sure you had already figured that out…