The glorious fortified city of Mdina in the heart of Malta is a must-see and full of atmosphere. Once the island’s capital, it’s been shaped over the centuries by Phonecians, Romans and Arabs. But we nearly didn’t make it there at all. Our mistake was to rely on the country’s public transport. Despite Mdina being…
Tag: Museums
New York’s fascinating Tenement Museum
Our visit to the Chinatown Heritage Centre in Singapore, a museum that revealed much about the lives of the poorest of immigrants to the city state, prompted memories of my favourite museum in New York City. The Tenement Museum in the bustling and traditionally working class Lower East Side explores the experiences of German, Irish and…
Exploring Luxembourg old town
Small but perfectly formed, Luxembourg is one of the Low Countries, a founding member of the EU and our choice for a hot and sunny August bank holiday weekend. Its capital, Luxembourg City, is equally modest but turned out to be a real charmer, easily walkable and attractive. Our first day in town was spent…
Exploring Singapore’s Chinatown
I’ve been to good museums and bad, but among the best have been the ones that reveal what life was like for the poorest of the poor back when the Georgian and Victorian rich were living the high life. There’s the excellent Tenement Museum in New York, for example, which offers a compelling account of how poor…
Singapore’s National Museum and Fort Canning Park
There’s variety in Singapore’s weather. One minute it’s hot and sunny, the next there are downpours and crashes of thunder. On the day we were planning to visit the Botanic Gardens, it chucked it down and the buildings we’d got used to seeing from our bedroom window were lost in the murk. So we opted for the National…
Danish design and royal knick-knacks in Copenhagen
We couldn’t go all the way to Copenhagen and not indulge our love of Scandinavian design. So with rain falling on our first full day in the city, the Designmuseum Denmark was an obvious destination. Despite getting on the wrong bus and having to walk further than we expected in the showers, we eventually found it in…
Dusseldorf: Art, museums and memorials
Dusseldorf may not be one of Germany’s picture postcard cities but it’s only an hour’s hop by air from London and has a festive Christmas market to brighten those depressing December days. Our base for a weekend break was the modern and comfortable Melia on the edge of the park known as the Hofgarten, a short…
Toronto: A museum, a distillery and a market
There was no mistaking that we were staying slap bang in the middle of Toronto’s Entertainment district. Throughout our first night we were woken by police sirens and Friday night drunks shouting their way home from the bars and clubs. I somehow managed to get some sleep despite the racket but a disturbed night and…
The extravagant baroque of Lecce, Puglia
Puglia is poor. Driving from north to south, we witnessed grim estates on the outskirts of Brindisi, derelict buildings by the score and lots of litter. But the sun was shining and bushes bursting with colourful flowers lined the pot-holed motorway. The city of Lecce’s suburbs were as ropey as Brindisi’s but it was the…
Zurich: Visiting museums in the rain
We’d hoped to see Zurich draped in snow, looking romantic and seasonal, during a January city break but a warm winter at home and abroad meant we were destined to be disappointed. When we arrived on the first day of the new year, it was dark, damp and mild, with not a flake of snow…
Alcatraz
Some tourist attractions are a class act while others really manage to screw up the experience. Alcatraz in San Francisco may be a tourist trap but it’s a winner from start to finish. It’s deluged with humanity, which is ironic for a place that many tried to flee during its time as a military prison…
Norway: A weekend in Bergen
Our first visit to Norway ended up being part city break in Bergen, part winter sports holiday in the mountain resort of Geilo. Bergen lies on the west coast, little more than an hour away from London. We’d climbed out of Heathrow on a clear February evening, the sun setting in the west, but landed…
A short break in the historic French city of Angers
Give me a good history book and a glass of wine and I’ll be a happy man. She-Wolves by Helen Castor turned out to be a particularly good read, the story of three of England’s great medieval queens and their various battles to make a mark in a male-dominated world. But it also introduced me…
A journey of discovery at Hong Kong’s history museum
Hong Kong’s Museum of History is a fantastic place to spend a couple of hours, learn about the territory’s past and kill time before the flight back home. It was our last day in the city, and one that dawned with us suffering the after effects of a marathon drinking session the night before. Fortunately the museum…
Istanbul: A long weekend in Sultanahmet
Sultanahmet is the historic heart of Istanbul, the most famous of Turkey’s cities. It may not be the capital but it’s the only city that sits astride Europe and Asia. Just a few months after we visited Istanbul, it was gripped by the worst riots in years. But it seems that historic Sultanahmet escaped the…