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…

Barlove: Castro Bistro

The whole point of having a relaxed late winter (a bit of wishful thinking here, I guess) Sunday in the city is not to have any rules, but sometimes you really can’t refuse the universe, as the great master of everything, Leonard Cohen so rightly put it. So our not so ad-hoc rule, which actually…

River of Ice- A Walk along the Wintry Danube

To quote Blur (and it’s very nice to start a post by quoting your favourite Britpop band), modern life is rubbish. These days, instead of going out onto my balcony to investigate whether I feel mildly cold, just plain old cold, or hideously cold, I constantly refresh the alpha and omega of all Hungarian weather…

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…

Barlove: Kaffemik

As per their website Kaffemik is a Greenlandic word (obviously), which stands for a traditional open house get together, where coffee is served. Presumably plenty of it, since staying awake through the eternal darkness of Greenlandic winters is probably not for the faint hearted.  My first association though was with the Romanian word mic, spelled…

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…