This break has been a real series of contrasts for me. Today we arrived in Chemnitz (pronounced as in ‘chemical’, and known as Karl Marx Stadt before the fall of the wall) to find a very different kind of city to Dresden – in fact, somewhere that is still struggling to find itself after the […]

If you’ve only visited Germany once (or not at all) it probably brings to mind beer kellers and lederhosen, but I think Germany’s Christmas Markets offer a far more authentic experience. There’s nothing like sipping a hot gluhwein and munching on a Bratwurst on a cold winter night in a fairy-lit city square along with […]

Today marks the start of a trip around Saxony in Germany, taking in all of its major cities (and railway stations in a few other places too!). We began with a wait for our first train (to Dresden) at Leipzig’s main railway station (or properly, ‘Leipzig Hauptbanhof’) – this place makes the newly refurbished St […]

I wanted to put another post about Wroclaw because of something a bit quirky about the place – the statues. Throughout the city you will find gnomes, not charming little garden ornaments but put there by the Orange Alternative movement during the 1980s as a protest against the Communist authorities… they pop up at the […]

So I was in Poland again this weekend, specifically in the city of Wroclaw (pronounced Vrot-swaff). Historically, its typical of cities in that region in that its spent its existence in several different countries, only becoming part of Poland after 1945 before which it had been part of Germany and known as Breslaw. The Wikipedia […]

Well we’re back from Brussels. I don’t know why people say that it’s a boring destination – we were there for four days and didn’t get to see everything we wanted to see. There are as many museums as there are in London, restaurants and chocolate shops everywhere, and lovely little ‘estaminets’ that serve traditional […]

Well there’ll be no blogposts for a few days because I’m off to Brussels for ‘le weekend’. The BBC weather report says sleet and snow are predicted with a minimum temperature of -6C on Saturday night, so there’ll be a lot of nipping in and out of warm little bars I’m sure. There’ll be some […]