How to get there and around. Unless you happen to live in the western bit of Spain or are Vasco da Gama returning with galleons laden with gold and spices, flying seems the best idea. Lisbon Portela airport is incredibly pleasantly located within the city limits, quite a rarity these days, and all central locations…
Category: travel diary
An Impractical Guide to Lisbon
Lisbon then is at the end of the world, on the edge of it, Lisbon is the fear of toppling over into the abyss of what you do not yet know. Lisbon is the city of dozens of sad poets walking the pavements shiny with the mild rain of the Mediterranean, which never pierces the…
Parklife: Day Trip to Gödollő
I like to start my weekends with a bit of planning and as I was doing just that, since it’s a weekend and there’s no pressure, I kept an alternative eye on my social media feeds as well (I totally don’t do that during the week, really) where you’ll never guess what I saw. A…
Best of 2016- Travels
Besides being a retrospective of where we’ve traveled to in these past twelve months, this will also try to be one of those useful travel advice posts, just in case any of you decides to follow in our footsteps in the twelve months to come. Sightseeing. It’s probably a common place, but if you’re in…
Vienna Beyond Christmas
I have already entertained people with the ‘arrival in Hauptbahnhof’ drama this summer, but there is no escape from it yet, for this was the first time it was actually inflicted on me. Objectively though there’s nothing wrong with disembarking in Vienna’s shiny new central station: metro line 1 takes you to the very centre…
Christmas Lights of Vienna
Certain things have a language which best suits them: rock songs are English, opera is Italian, assembling furniture is Swedish and Christmas in German. Come to think of it, Tannenbaum might have been the first word I learned in German when for the yearly kindergarden event, which had just gone from celebrating socialist ‘winter holidays’…
Barlove: Café Central Vienna
Last time I visited Vienna it was on an absolutely ridiculously glorious spring day- incidentally, my birthday, so I could hereby venture into claims of controlling the weather, only then it would be somewhat hard to explain the infernally cold drizzle which greeted it on other occasions. And speaking of infernally cold drizzle, that’s what…
The Meaning of Everywhere: Trieste
Jan Morris’s book about Trieste is entitled the Meaning of Nowhere, and since I am yet to read it, I cannot necessarily elaborate on why, nor can I disagree with anything therein contained. The only thing I can say for sure is that upon arrival in Trieste I felt something which is either the complete…
Sleepy Island in the Sun: Ráckeve
So I finally snapped into action regarding my let’s check where the other HÉVs are going plan and took H6 to its final stop in Ráckeve, some 30 kilometres south of Budapest’s city limits, on Csepel Island. First things first, after more than ten years of living here, it finally dawned on me that the…
Pocket Diary Budapest 