A visit to Juventus’s stadium in Turin. Do it even if you don’t like football all that much, or support other clubs. It’s not ridiculously long and the guides are entertaining- provided you speak Italian, as English versions are mainly available only from tape, which I say is fine given we’re in Italy and all…
Category: travel
How Berlin Was Made
On the first day God decided that he would need to furnish some new living quarters for himself and went off to IKEA. On the way there he found a second-hand shop specialized in Communist vintage, a lot of abandoned metal and a golden eagle which had belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm. He returned home in…
Things You Can’t Do in Vienna in Eight Hours
It’s one of my firm convictions that all those 24, 36, 72 hours in this or that city guides are basically the subversive work of the devil trying and very likely succeeding at ruining your holiday, and probably the rest of your life, but that is another, more metaphysical matter, altogether. There is simply no way…
Sunday Bender in Visegrád
I’ve never met a medieval fortress I liked, or, to be more precise, one I was genuinely impressed with. The problem obviously lies with the fact that novels and history books, paired with an active imagination, raised the bar of what I expected to a level no grouping of ruins, no matter how well maintained,…
Fifty Shades of Blue: Alaçatı and Cunda Island
For the final stretch of our trip we decided to hop south of Izmir, an adventure which also included one intense hour in the centre of Izmir itself, naturally stuck in traffic, through which we learned that keeping your eyes peeled for the highway is an absolute must if you want to avoid the hot…
Along the Turkish Aegean at the Mercy of Whimsical Gods
As touched upon in the installment dedicated to Ayvalık, Turkey’s Northern Aegean coast has been the scene of a flurry of major historic activity, which in turn led to some exciting ruins awaiting visitation in every second village- if you have a partner in crime, that is, but as (un)luck would have it the blog’s industrious…
The Stillness of Quinces- A Visit to Ayvalık
There is a special kind of stillness that you can only ever experience around the Mediterranean, the stillness of summer days around midday, when the light is white and shimmering and thick with heat, and although you know there is movement around, a slight breeze, a cat furtively sliding by on silky paws, someone carefully…
The Importance of Being Somewhere Else-A Preamble to the Turkish Travel Diary
Travelling southwards on Turkey’s Aegean coast I remembered two articles I’ve recently read, both concerned with topics related to how we travel these days. The first one was an analysis of how our travel pictures, especially of the ’insta-variety’, all look the same- right now I can’t find the particular article for the life of…
A Most (Un)Orthodox Daytrip to Vác
I’ve occasionally flirted with the idea of setting out on a voyage and ending up somewhere totally different, which of course has its mild dangers if you arrive with your meant for Greece bathing suit in the heart of the Taklamakan desert, so I decided to approach things on a smaller scale and see how…
Fainting Chairs and Russian Spies: The Villas of Mátyásföld
The best thing about going on a city walk with a historian is that they will enthusiastically convey anecdotes about the places you’re visiting, throwing in a couple of juicy details for good measure, and then, with a much more matter of fact tone, they will also inform you that your exciting trivia is just…
