A Weekend in Venice

Gosh it's been a long time since I've posted on here! It's been a crazily busy year teaching, but I've made time for plenty of trips away in those long school holidays to relax, unwind and see somewhere new. I thought it was about time to start blogging again and share my thoughts on some of the different places I've explored.

I'll start with the most recent. I've just come back from a lovely long weekend in Venice with some old school friends. I visited several spots in Italy a few summers ago (including Como, Milan, Florence, Siena, Pisa and Rome), which was a fantastic trip! However, I hadn't ever been to Venice, and it was always somewhere I had been interested in seeing.

We flew to Treviso airport, which is further out than Marco Polo and requires a coach rather than a waterbus to take you to Venice. Upon arrival, I was rather shocked (and concerned about my bank balance!) when I saw that a single ticket for travelling around cost €7.50, even though our planned journey to our AirBnB was only 10 minutes! We decided to walk instead, which took us through the maze of Venice's 'roads', which I would only describe as alley ways. We definitely got lost, but it was a great way to see what navigating the city is like.

After being greeted by our AirBnb host, we wandered just 3 minutes from our apartment where we sat down for pizza 1/6 that I enjoyed... (a friendly warning: do not weigh yourself after a trip to Italy).  Our accommodation was in a perfect location, meaning that this restaurant gave us beautiful views of the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal. The pizza, Prosecco and ice cream consumed that evening set me up nicely for the rest of the weekend.

Highlights of the trip

• Going up San Marco Campanile (the Bell Tower of the Basilica), which gives incredible views across Venice, the lagoon and the surrounding area

• Hotel Danieli Terrazza is a restaurant which is part of the famous 5 star hotel looking over the lagoon. Between 3 and 6:30pm you can enjoy a drink on the roof terrace, offering beautiful views. The drinks are rather £££ but the views made it worth a visit

• A gondola ride. Obviously a must! We got ours about 5 minutes walk north from San Marco square, and the 45 minute journey took us past Casanova's house, along the lagoon, under the Bridge of Sighs and along many of the beautiful canals showing sights we wouldn't have otherwise seen

• Burano Island. For this, I was happy to pay to go on the waterbus (we paid €20 for a 24 hour ticket, and later took a trip along the Grand Canal). The trip takes around 40 minutes and the island is the most colourful I've seen. It's small, but a mix of restaurants, lace and glass shops and tourists getting snap happy taking photos of the rainbow houses. The Huffington Post describes it as "The cheeriest little island [which] will lift your soul," and after a few too many Proseccos and Limoncellos the night before, I can vouch that the island fixes hangovers too      

Isn't it beautiful?! I'd recommend Venice to anyone wanting a more chilled out city break. I can't stand just lying on a beach all day, but Venice gives the perfect combination of relaxation and things to see and do. I think the lack of cars really adds to the relaxation, and all you can smell is seafood and pizza. I'll certainly be going back!

Thank you for reading, I'll be posting more soon! X

A long weekend in Budiful Budapest

A couple of weeks ago I headed to Budapest for a few days with some friends. With extremely lacking knowledge and no expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised! As cities go, I'm not sure I've ever seen anywhere that looks so pretty in such dull weather!

We arrived on Thursday afternoon, pretty shattered after an early start and had a wander round the neighbourhood. We stayed on the Pest side of the river, about a 10 minute walk from the Chain Bridge over the Danube - a perfect location for what we needed! We decided to go for a hostel to keep costs down, and I can't recommend Wombats Hostels enough. Having stayed in their Berlin hostel last September (a trip you can read about here and here) and now Budapest, they are so reasonably priced, clean, friendly and do very good, cheap breakfasts to set you up for a day of sightseeing!

On Friday morning we headed over the bridge to Buda, which is historically the wealthier, more fancy side of the river. We headed up to the Castle on the Funicular

Originally built in the 13th century, the castle has been destructed and rebuilt after seiges and attacks. It's now a maze of ruins, the Baroque palace and underground tunnels built into the hill. It's also home to the Budapest Historical Museum.

After a look round and a quick bite to eat we headed along Castle Hill to Matthias Church (which the coolest tiled roof I've ever seen on a church!)

And the Fishermans Bastion... the closest I've ever come to a Disney Fairytale Castle!

From the Bastion there are amazing views of the Parliament Building across the Danube and Pest.

We had a wander around the Castle Hill area in search of coffee & cake and some very wise words.

As the sun set, we headed back to Pest just as all the lights came up on the historical buildings on both sides of the river.

In what was possibly the most cultural day of my life, we then decided to go to a string orchestra concert in St Stephen's Basilica. 

A very impressive concert... and I even recognised some of the music (even more impressive!)

 A very busy but interesting first day in Budapest!

Berlin 2: Bikes, Bricks and Biiiig Buildings

We weren't in Berlin for that long really, which meant we had a lot to fit in. The first couple of days were pretty jam packed with getting our bearings, seeing the sights and learning a lotttt of stuff that I probably should have already known.

By the last day, our feet were getting pretty tired. We wanted to go to the East Side Gallery - the open air art gallery on the remaining part of the Berlin Wall along side the Spree River - and it was nice and sunny. So, we rented some pretty precarious bikes from our hostel and after a bit of a panicky start, headed East.

My chain came off. I sent us the wrong way. They drive on the wrong side of the road...

But we got there, safe and sound.

Now, I'm a bit of a sucker for an inspirational/meaningful/cute/lame (delete as appropriate) quote. So given that there were dozens of them painted on such a historically significant wall, in some pretty cool styles, I was loving it. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.

One of the star attractions of the wall - Honecker & Brezhnev's famous kiss

The famous Trabi car - apprently they're awfullll but they are cute looking cars (priorities in check)

^ Me, 'doing it cool' (or not?)

Loved the wall. What used to completely segregate and stand in the way of freedom now is all about freedom of expression. Definitely worth a visit.

That evening, we decided to head up the Fernsehturm (TV Tower in Alexanderplatz).

We treated ourselves to cocktails... 

...the only way to handle the height, obviously

We watched the sun go down over toy-model Berlin before grabbing dinner at the bottom of the tower.

A great end to a lovely trip!

Niobe X

City Breakin' in Berlin - Part 1

Last week, I headed over to Berlin for a few days as a bit of an end of summer getaway. Neither of us had been before, but with her deep interest in German history and my interest in, well, getting out of Nottingham, we were definitely looking forward to the trip.

We got there late at night, headed to the airport's train station and tried to figure out what the hell we were doing. After probably a bit too long we finally made it to the city centre, in the rain, where we got lost. Obviously. Sooo we got a taxi which took us the two blocks we had to walk... turns out I thought our hostel was 2 miles in the other direction. Strangely I still took charge of the map for the rest of the trip...

The first couple of days were the main history days. We had a list of sights & museums we wanted to see and headed off bright and early to explore. 

Having dropped my history studies age 13 my knowledge is severely lacking. I know quite a lot about the Holocaust thanks to RS lessons, but knew very, very little about East & West Germany and the Berlin Wall before we went. After going to Checkpoint Charlie, the Stasi Museum and the DDR Museum I've definitely improved.

The Holocaust Memorial is one of the reasons I wanted to go to Berlin. I've seen so many photographs of it and it always looked worth visiting, but I never really imagined the size of it, or really appreciated the design. 

Claire's written essays on the Memorial and we wanted through the narrow paths in between the concrete blocks as she told me all about what everything represented.

Apparently, the architect Peter Eisenman used the concrete blocks of varying sizes to represent the inexplicableness (is that a word?!) of the events. You may ask "how does that represent what happened?", but his idea is basically that nothing could ever really show portray it.

Some of the paths go up and down; this combined with the different heights of the blocks makes people 'disappear' as you watch someone from the side, a clever way of representing the vast number of disappearances that took place.

In the evening we went to the Reichstag, the main Parliament building.

We'd disregarded it, but a few friends told us we absolutely haaad to go. 

I'm so glad they did, I was extremely impressed.

From the bottom, the Reichstag looks like many other large, important buildings - to be honest, not the kind I'm ever that interested in looking round.

We headed straight into the lift to the top of the building, picked up an audio guide, and walked into this.

It's big. It's all glass. You can see all the important sights, and as you walk along the audio guide stops you in all the important places. 

Inside, running down the centre and into the main Parliament building is a mirrored 'cone' reflecting the light 

This cone is hollow and lets the water from a big hole in the roof down into the main building; the dome also overlooks the debating chamber.

I feel like I should be better at describing this, but I'm not. It's an amazing design, one of the best I've seen. If you go to Berlin, go into the dome. It's free, but you should book a slot before you go. I'm just going to let a few photos do the talking...

After marvelling for quiiite a while, we headed out to the roof terrace. We'd perfectly timed our visit so that we could see the sights in the daylight and then the sunset.

(I'm a sucker for a good sunset)

 

We wandered back, stopping for some dinner along the way, to the roof terrace bar of our hostel. A great first day, but we were absolutely shattered!

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I'll post about the rest of the trip soon. A lot's going on at the moment - I've managed to get a job down in Exeter so I'm moving back down to the South West next week! Which is good for this blog since Devon is a lottt prettier than Nottingham!

XX