View from my balcony in JLT, Dubai
Svaty Petr - My first impression from Prague. This city preserves all the grittiness of past centuries .It's very cinematographic and literary at the same time.
When I was already seriously lost, I found a live band playing in a courtyard. It was free entrance and free beer, and there were 3 lead singers dressed as American football players and their sound was a mix of techno/Industrial with a lot of shouting in Czech.. After 4 free beers I was loving the concert.
My dinner -Traditional Czech Goulash soup and Roasted pork with bread dumplings and Moravian cabbage.
Prague map with some key locations.
Stephanplatz cathedral - My first Vienna impression. It started raining almost immediately, and never stopped till I left the city. A huge fight broke out right next to me. It was the last thing that I expected to witness in such an idyllic setting, at the entrance of a posh Viennese cafe..
Dr Karl Rener Ring station - To avoid developing a serious cold I’ve decided to take cover on a transport hub of trams. It’s impressive the life that you find in an unusual place like this. There is a lot of kiosks with different food and beverage offers.
Dinner at the station. 'Typical' Austrian pizza. At least the beer was local (I think).
MQ Daily - a cozy bar in Museums Quartier.
Vienna map with some key locations.
My first Budapest impression was crossing the Danube through this bridge - Szabadság Hid. I wasn’t prepared for this city. I just loved it from the start. It’s interesting the contrast with Vienna.
Some Veal stew with egg noddles at Sonka Arcak.
Gozsdu Udvar in the Jewish district - A mall dedicated to night life. It's a new concept to me. Instead of clothes stores, there's only bars and clubs.
Országház - The third largest parliament building in the world. It's incredible and you have to see it live to understand its size and beauty. But it makes me think why the hell would they ever need such a huge building. Remnants from the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Budapest metro is the world's second oldest underground train system. After taking one of the trains I tend to strongly believe this claim.
This McDonald's in Budapest is the most luxurious fast food restaurant that I've ever seen. It's almost a crime having this use.
Instant is a club with multiple rooms with different music have a broad range in music style.I’ve got so carried away with this place that I’ve ended up leaving it at 9:00 AM with no idea where I was, where was the right way to go, and especially the whereabouts of my phone.
Budapest map with some key locations.
Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. I was warned before that Croatia is all about the coast and I guess that they've put all their effort on there, because I wasn’t prepared for such a disappointment of a city.
Zagreb map with some key uninteresting locations.
Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Charming small city with a well preserved medieval city centre. The architecture actually reminds me of something taken out of a medieval city builder video game.
Metelkova Mesto is a city counterculture hub.A lot of bars, clubs and art galleries. There's also some nice eateries close by.
Ljubljana map with some key locations.
Finally Venice. Now I understand all the fuzz around this city that’s built around canals instead of roads. It’s way more genuine than I had imagined it. The major drawback is the amount of tourists. It seems like you can travel without moving here. If you stay still, you will end moving against your will, with the powerful force of the wave of tourists eager to devour all the corners of this city. That’s why is not surprising that Venice keeps losing habitants at an alarming rate. 25 million visitors a year in a city with 55 000 habitants is way too much.
It’s so refreshingly anacronic the way this city functions without roads. How all public services like garbage pick ups, police, ambulances and deliveries have to rely on boats since there aren’t any roads available. It’s actually crazy the amount of boats in the canals and how they don’t smash into each other at several times.
I’ve sited in a wood platform for pedestrian use in case of floods, right outside the exit of the Basilica. Bad idea. I was runned over, stepped on, rammed and squashed without any sign of mercy by the huge flocks of elderly tourists trying to overcome this enormous barrier for them.
There's no shortage of idylic restaurants by the canals. But this comes with an expensive price attached.
Forget about nightlife here. I even struggled to find bars that stay open before midnight.
After catching one specific wave of tourists I’ve found myself at the Piazza San Marco. I think that if you go along with any big flow of tourists you will always end up, being drained here.
I had a tremendous amount of luck. Without any planning I’ve discovered that the Bienal of International Art was happening right while I was there. I always wanted to see this event but due to the philosophy that I had back then, I chose to do minimal planning.
Ice-cream in an Italy is an art form. To be fair they take all food related activities very, very seriously.
Venice map with some key locations
By mistake, I’ve discovered a plazza with a wonderful panoramic view of the city. And there was a Festival of Ice-cream also happening there, that I decided to took advantage of while sketching.
After this I headed to a restaurant to have a 3 course typical Italian meal with traditional Italian wine. It’s crazy how expensive things are in Italy.
I was surprised that the city centre had a lot of parts that seemed out of place. I thought it was a consequence of WWII, but someone later explained me that this center zones were destroyed on purpose, on the 19th century, to build newer and more pretentious buildings in order to accommodate the new capital of the recent formed Italian state - which never happened and at the last moment Rome was considered a better option for the capital.
Ponte Vecchio has a series of adjacent chambers that are supported by a handful of rough wooden spikes that seem to defy the laws of gravity. I really don’t understand how it’s still standing after almost 7 centuries. The details that I really loved were the medieval mechanisms that they still use to close the shops, in wood and ironworks. It’s interesting that the origin of the businesses here only being jewellery, comes from the fact that nobility wanted to have a private passage above this shops to connect the palaces on opposite margins of the Arno river and they didn't wanted any unpleasant smells.
At night I decided to draw the Catedral Santa Maria del Fiore, which I had to skip visiting the inside due to enormous queues. It’s seems so surreal the scale of it. It still is the largest brick dome in the world. I clap my hands to Brunelleschi and Giotto for this marvelous design. Unfortunately the Battistero di San Giovanni was closed for restoration so I couldn’t admire the famous bronze doors with their relief sculptures. Dante (that wrote Inferno) was baptized here and ironically Miguelangelo called them gates of heaven.
The Palazzo is so different from the outside where it looks like a fortress, and the inside is very opulent. They really tend to overdo it in terms of displaying wealth in the decoration. The main hall is impressive in terms of having no pillars supporting the large scale of it, and also for looking like the sistine chapel with the ceiling and walls full of paintings. Another room that was very interesting was the Geography room, where you could find a huge old world globe and several panels in the walls with old illustrated maps of different parts of the known world at the time - and full of interesting inaccuracies.
A lot of of erotic art for all tastes. The Renaissance was really into digging into the old Greek traditions.
Florence map with some key locations.
When I reached the suburbs of Marseille I was surprised how ugly and decadent it was. And when I reached the center of the city my, impression didn’t got much better. Everything revolves around the old port and you can see a real social tension everywhere. A little bit different from the vibe portrayed in Fanny (1961) film. I will never understand why people find it nice to be looking to a parking lot for yachts. Maybe it was different some decades ago, but now the marinas always give me the sensation of being in a supermarket parking lot, that instead of cars you see boats.
I’ve seen Monaco from the top because I wanted to go from there to Nice through a secondary road along the seaside. I’ve found the landscape breathtaking. The colour of the water, the luxurious vegetation and the magnitude of the mountains were something to behold.
At least I’ve managed to catch spontaneous and free concerts nearby. They were all emigrants and the style was tremendous refreshingly with a mix of Reggae, Dub and Tribal.
Marseille map with some key locations.
Lyon it’s way more interesting than Marseille. Everything is so well preserved. I’m suspicious because this city seems very similar to my home town - Lisbon. Even the colours used on the facade of the buildings are so similar.I think the French ripped us off in terms of style to build this city...just kidding.
I had to find a good restaurant to have a true experience, since this city is considered the French capital of gastronomy. I’ve found one that was called Le Petit Gluton, meaning The Small Gluton which I’ve found would be adequate to my personality.
I was lucky once again because I’ve found by chance a museum dedicated to Cinema. It was in Lyon that the second movie ever, was directed and screened by the Lumière brothers - Sortie des Usines Lumière a Lyon - in 1895. The museum, although a little small in scale, had very interesting features. The one that stands out is a huge collection of miniature realistic settings with all kinds of situations.
There's some cool bars in Lyon with authentic vintage look and vibe.
Lyon map with some key locations.
The city looks nice from the outside but the city center of Bern is very weird. Everything looks so artificial with a lot of tacky statues, buildings with flowers on the balconies that looking so perfect that they seem plastic. Even the police station looked like the Noddy’s house, which doesn’t impose a lot of respect.
Switzerland is known for its strong bank activity but I really struggled a lot to find ATMs in the center. After finally having success at the railway station, I went to meet my friend Eduardo which is living here and that would help me to demystify the city. I discovered that he has the same opinion as I do. Switzerland is a weird nation. The positive thing to note is the natural landscape, salaries and the tolerance that they appear to have. I had to take a strange road that passes by Austria for a few Kms and then you actually find a very confusing intersection that I had to do 3 times before finding the right direction to enter in Germany - another fine to the collection.
Bern map with some key locations.
Finally in Munich. I’ve found that I was very lucky not to catch the Oktoberfest by a few days. I imagine that the city turns into a nightmare, full of drunk tourists.
Some random street concerts that I had the pleasure to encounter.
But all beers that I’ve drank here were handcrafted and they were so damn good. And you feel good drinking a lot, because it seems like you’re doing sports due to the effort that you have to do to lift the heavy mugs.
The philosophy here seems to be, trying to behave as a medieval person as you can in terms of eating and drinking. The antagonist word here is sophistication. I never saw a beer less than one litre size and people eat all the parts of pig, like their life depends on it.
Next day I headed to the Deutsche Museum which is the world’s largest museum of science and technology. One of the first exhibited objects that I came across was a Moliceiro - a typical portuguese boat from the Aveiro region in Portugal - from 1940. This is one of the most interesting museums of this type that I had the pleasure to visit. You have so much to see and learn that you need more than 1 day to properly absorb it
Munich map with some key locations.
Nuremberg wins the prize of the most medieval place that I’ve ever seen. But it’s a pity to observe how much of it was destroyed in the WW2.
I had to travel a lot of hours during the night in order to be able to sleep a little bit before catching my plane back to Dubai. I delivered the car but I never saw the security money back, since the amount of fines was huge. At least I didn’t have to pay more for them.
