What to see. When a bit of a city looks like a chessboard, it is highly likely some luminary’s fever dream, and in keeping with the maxim, the Baixa was thought up by the Marquess de Pombal, the minister of Joseph I of Portugal, in the wake of the devastating quake of 1755- being on…
Category: travel photography
Beer Fiends in Wine Country- Lisbon Guide Part Two
What to eat and drink. For those who have chanced on this blog before, it’s perhaps clear that we are firmly positioned on the beer side of life, so any judgement passed on wine will be of the lay kind. And for the lay wine drinker Lisbon is paradise. The variety of wines, both red…
Plenty of Stairways to Heaven- Lisbon Guide Part One
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…
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…
Lake of Ice- A Trip to the Wintry Balaton
So on Friday evening our bit of the world was bracing itself for a weekend out of, well not hell, because hell is supposed to be hot, yet if I compare sitting in a sauna with a nice beer in tow, or meeting an Arctic blast (with or without a nice beer in tow) I…
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…
Pocket Diary Budapest 