Tag Old Town
Today we have taken things easy compared to the other days and focused on a single tourist site, Siena. It is a larger city than all the other places we visited and there were a lot more tourists. It has several well know places to visit like the Cathedral, The Palio horse races on the Piazza del Campo and the hospital Santa Maria della Scala. We strolled around there for several hours and though we didn’t go in to all of them (the tickets for the cathedral, for example, were unreasonably expensive), we saw most of them from the outside.… Read the rest
My company has sent me and two colleagues to India to install a machine. Naturally we will spend most of our time at the customer site but we get the weekends to ourselves and it just so happened that we arrived on a Saturday, so we got our first day in the country off. Me and one colleague, Scott, took the day to explore the city while our other colleague, who has been here before, stayed at the hotel. Our hotel helped us arrange a car with a driver that took us round to some of the more famous places … Read the rest
My company has sent me to Switzerland to do some work on a machine. So far I have mostly just seen the factory where the machine is, and a bit of local sightseeing in the small town where I live, so not very much to write about.
A bit of local tourism in Badsäckingen
Now that it is weekend however, I took the chance to go skiing. I took an early morning train from my little town near Basel to Engelberg. There I dropped my bags at the hotel, a pretty shoddy military barracks style of dormitory hostel, then went … Read the rest
Warsaw is less overwhelming than Krakow, very likely due to it being a proper city, a metropolis even. Therefore the interesting attractions such as the old town, palaces, churches and so on are all spread out. To see them one cannot simply stroll around, it is a fair walk among modern buildings to get anywhere and public transport would be preferable for the not so young and fit.
For me and Yini, walking along the royal way up past the castle was no problem, so we did manage to see much of old (or should I say rebuilt) Warsaw in … Read the rest
krakow undoubtedly has one of Europes most memorable old towns, definitely the best during this trip. Walking from the train station towards old town a simply breathtaking sight meets you as the street opens up onto the main market square. The churches, market hall, town hall and so on are just magnificent. Other cities like Bratislava are simply no match for this. The sheer size of the place also plays a role in upping the wow factor I guess. I snapped a few quick shots but they don’t really do the place justice.
Shots of old town Krakow taken during … Read the rest
Slovenia is a great country but we have limited time so this morning we moved on through Austria to Bratislava in Slovakia. We have walked around most of the old town and can conclude that, much like Ljubljana, Bratislava can not offer all that much in terms of the old towns compared to places like Budapest; the only noteworthy things are the statues of every day people here and there. The atmosphere however, is much nicer than more popular old towns with fewer crowds. The people on the street seem to be locals for the most part, since very few … Read the rest
The revised plan looks like it’s a good one. We arrived in Ljubljana this morning and spent the day walking around the old town (like you do). The old town itself with it’s castle, churches and government buildings is rather unremarkable as compared to other east European capitals. A bit more colorful than the almost exclusively sand colored old towns of Croatia but not really special.
What is special as compared with the Croatian old towns is the lack of tourists. Most of the people on the streets seem to be locals going for a coffee and with that comes … Read the rest
I can say right from the get-go that Dubrovnik is both wonderful and horrible at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, the place is lovely, anyone with even the slightest interest in old architecture, castles, churches and the like ( I believe that covers some 80 percent of the human race) will love the city. What is less nice is the multitude of people visiting the city during the summer, there are people simply everywhere and you can never get some peace and quiet. I guess it’s better to be here in May or September. Now that that’s sorted … Read the rest