Posts in Category: Europe
Bastei bridge in swiss saxony & Externsteine – Germany
In 2020 worldwide travel has largely subsided due to the spread of a dangerous viral disease named CoVid-19. Therefore, I had to scrap my travel plans as well and decided to spend some time hiking in different areas in germany. For a 3 day weekend-trip, I finally managed to get to the famous Bastei bridge in swiss saxony, close to the czech border. The weather wasn’t always perfect but the whole area offers many hiking trails through forest and rock formations. On another occasion, I hiked around the ‘Externsteine’ in the Teutoburger forest in western germany.
Cluj – Exploring eastern Europe
Another weekend trip to eastern europe. During an evening on the christmas market, a friend and I spontaneously decided to book another weekend trip. We found cheap flights to Cluj-Napoca in Romania and convinced 2 other friends to join us. We walked around the town, visited the botanical gardens (although it was freezing cold), took a trip to a salt mine, tried local food and had awesome cocktails and great coffee in the amazing variety of bars. Here are some impressions:
Lanzarote – Christmas on the beach
This was a first for me – Christmas far from home. We decided to take a family trip to the canary island of Lanzarote to catch some sun over christmas. As you can expect – not a really christmassy-feeling – but we explored the island, whose architecture and art was mainly influenced by César Manrique, by bus car and bike, chilled by the pool and I event went diving.
Vilnius – Exploring eastern europe
One night at a party, a friend and I noticed we had a weekend without plans or events in the near future and decided to do another city trip. Flights to Bratislava or Sofia were super expensive so we scrolled all the way down and clicked on Vilnius. We found return flights for ~75€ that’d leave friday afternoon and return early monday morning so we didn’T even need to take days off work. We booked and didn’t plan anything besides booking a hostel. As always, we did a free walking tour with an amazing guide to learn about the capital of Lithuania and its history. Thanks to ‘no unlock fee’ scooter-offers from BOLT, we scootered a lot around the city. We saw the ‘independent’ republic of Uzupis, a small area near old town which is basically the artsy area of the town. The best-spent 3€ ever was probably for the 30min boat ride around the island-castle ‘Trakai’ near Vilnius 😀 . Thanks to rainy weather, we even visited a nearby water-park with lots of saunas and waterslides and of course we tried the amazing local specialties and beers. Lithuanian cooking seems pretty simple but tasty: take some minced meat, wrap it in dough, cabbage or potatoes and fry / cook / deepfry / bake it. Some resemble potato dumplings, others look like empanadas, cabbage rools or tortellini/pierogi.
Budapest – a beautiful city in eastern europe
As mentioned in the previous post, I tried to explore more of eastern europe in 2019. So in september, I flew over to Budapest, the capital of hungary. Since it was another weekend-trip I only had ~3days but the advantage that a friend of mine was doing an internship there.
As usually, I did a free walking tour to learn about the history and also took the tour through the parliament besides going to the zoo on sunday :D.
Poland – Exploring eastern europe
Back in singapore I spent most weekends exploring the neighbouring countries and wondered, why I never did that in europe. I decided to start ‘exploring europe’ in more detail when I got back. This didn’t work due to a lack of cheap flights, many events on the weekends and other calendar conflicts. This year, I decided to – finally – get a few dots east of germany into my travel map and booked weekend trips to:
– Gdansk, Poland (03/2019)
– Kraków, Poland (04/2019)
– Warsaw, Poland (08/2019)
– Vienna, Austria (01/2019)
– Budapest, Hungary (09/2019)
– Vilnius, Lithuania (10/2019)
Besides these trips to eastern europe, I spent weekends in
– Malta (see post absout diving malta)
– Bergen, Norway (see post about Bergen)
– Lago di garda, Italy
and went to London and Zurich though I’d been there previously.
The gallery below shows pictures from my poland-trips (Gdansk, Warsaw and Kraków since I only had ~2 days each to get a quick grasp of the culture, monuments and lifestlye)
Bergen – Norway
On a perfect weekend trip to norway, we made a roadtrip to stavanger to hike preikestolen – The weather wasn’t perfect but the scenery definetly is!
Malta
I’ve been wanting to dive in Malta for a few years now but everytime I tried to organize a trip with a few friends oder a long weekend, flights were really expensive. This spring I finally managed to spend a 4-day weekend on this mediterranean island and dive some of it’s wrecks.