The magnificent Mezquita in Cordoba is without doubt one of the world’s great buildings, once a mosque and now a cathedral. It’s also somewhere to shelter from the city’s oven-like heat, for even at the end of September the thermometer was recording late 30s centigrade. I really struggle with the heat and spent much of…
Tag: Museums
Discovering Krakow’s war
Krakow is synonymous with the Second World War. It’s the city of Oskar Schindler, of the horrors of the ghetto and the death camps. Some miles out of town lies that most infamous of concentration camps, Auschwitz, where up to one-sixth of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were killed. It’s a museum now and…
Exploring Krakow, night and day
You’ve got to love a city when two can eat a hearty meal in a city centre restaurant, consume two beers each and be charged a total of less than £30 for the pleasure. Welcome to Krakow… OK, our choice of eatery wasn’t exactly Michelin-starred but, while Restauracja Polska must have had a particularly unimaginative…
Art and history in Nantes
Tomatoes of all shapes and sizes bulging and bursting with flavour, heads of broccoli larger than any I’ve seen and oysters from all points along the French coast. This can’t be a British supermarket… In fact it’s the Marche de Talensac, one of Nantes’ oldest and biggest markets on a typical Saturday morning. Browsing the…
Greece: A week on the coast at Parga
Greece may be a part of Europe but there are times when it feels like a world apart. Epirus, the region in the country’s north-west, is wild and rugged, remote and peppered with ruins. It’s a land of mountains and broad valleys, lakes, striking bays and cliffs that plunge to the sea. Driving through, it…
A weekend in The Hague
Amsterdam has become all that’s wrong with tourism. It overflows with people, marauding stag and hen parties, drunks, druggies and sex tourists. The seat of government in The Netherlands, The Hague, couldn’t be more different. It’s nowhere near as busy, is elegant and cultured and an absolute pleasure to explore. We were there for little…
Udaipur, lakes and lavish palaces
The lakeside city of Udaipur has one of the most beautiful settings in all of India, nestled among the hills and waterways of the Aravalli Range. With its glorious, dream-like palaces and magical sunsets, it was perhaps inevitable that it would one day be featured in a James Bond film. And sure enough, back in…
Zagreb, war and broken relationships
Zagreb and its residents may have been full of Christmas cheer during our weekend in the city but we spent a day wallowing in break-ups – the violent collapse of the old Yugoslavia and the more personal stories of lost love. Image of War: The Museum of War Photography opened in 2018 – the same…
Beit Beirut and the buildings of war
The speed with which Beirut is being rebuilt suggests that some Lebanese want to wipe out the memory of civil war. Others see the blanking out of the past as a mistake and are fighting to keep it alive. But as the experience of Beit Beirut shows, it’s an uphill struggle. Beit Beirut is the…
Brussels, beer and beautiful buildings
The Belgians have a reputation for being just a little bit boring, but I saw precious little proof of it during our city break in Brussels. A jazz festival was in full swing throughout the city and the squares were crowded with music fans, dancers and drinkers. In Place Sainte Catherine we joined them, beer…
Oktoberfest’s little sister and other Munich treats
So who knew that Oktoberfest had a junior sibling? Not me, that’s for sure. But with great good fortune we discovered its existence coincided with our May weekend break in Munich. However, with the beer cruelly not being served until 4pm we needed to find something to do to keep us occupied on what was…
Thessaloniki: The second city of Greece
Thessaloniki was a surprise. I hadn’t expected it to have such a vibrant nightlife, so many stylish and busy bars and so much atmosphere. Perhaps, as a waitress told us over cold beers on a warm and sunny April afternoon, it’s because Thessaloniki is a city of students. There are tens of thousands of them in…
A winter weekend in Reykjavik
Welcome to Iceland, where rain, snow and hail falls horizontally, where gales shred umbrellas and the cold really does hurt. In Iceland we experienced foul weather at its foulest, wind so strong that we could barely stand up in it and cold so perishing during a tour of the Golden Circle that I would’ve got…
A walk around East Melbourne
Our last full day in wonderful Australia and we found somewhere I’d be happy to call home – East Melbourne. But sadly I can’t see our budget stretching that far… Just a short walk from the central business district and its famous Laneways, East Melbourne is overflowing with the most glorious houses and cottages, perfectly…
Sydney: Hyde Park Barracks and Watsons Bay
Ahead of our Australian holiday I started reading A Commonwealth of Thieves, the excellent Thomas Keneally book that describes the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts in New South Wales in 1788 and its consequences. On our second day in Sydney we visited two places that played a key role in the early years…