Month: August 2013

The Lonely planet website describes Turku thus

This one-time capital of Finland has a very historic feel, being the country’s oldest city. While hardly any mediaeval buildings remain, a visit to the doughty castle and superb archaeological museum will stimulate your imagination into populating the riverbanks with bustling crowds of merchants receiving and dispatching Baltic cargoes

While its guide book called it ‘intriguing’. We thus had high hopes for the place, which were sadly dashed because very little remains of Turku’s visual heritage thanks to multiple fires and so on.

Continue reading “Turku”

Today we made a dash northwestwards to the strangely popular lakeside city of Tampere.

Continue reading “Tampere”

Helsinki is great, but it helps we have had more glorious weather – to the point of getting sunburnt!

It’s not a beautiful place like Stockholm but it is stuffed with beauty, great architecture and amazing public art

Continue reading “Helsinki”

Uppsala is a university town north of Stockholm with a rich historical and scientific heritage. Among other claims to fame, it was the home of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy.

Continue reading “Uppsala”

You may or may not have noticed that I went quiet after we arrived in Stockholm. To be honest, I’m horribly guilty about the fact I went to the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in – and that includes Paris and San Francisco – and all I really wanted to do was hide in the hotel. The problem was that Stockholm is so fucking overwhelming. It’s big, gorgeous, self-assured – fantastically expensive – and was just too much to consume even in little bites. Also, it rivals Rome for the volume of tourists and the annoyance and traffic caused thereby. It’s exhausting struggling through rude,yelling teenagers, and clueless Italians, and everywhere I might have liked to have gone was chockablock with groups.

Continue reading “Stockholm syndrome”

Lund is a medieval town a short (but expensive) train ride from Malmö, and a true delight in every way. We travelled on a train that should have been taking us to Ystad, i think 🙂 Continue reading “Lund”

We knew we would like Malmo almost as soon as we set foot in it. Not only does it present a lovely face from the train station right on a little canal (our hotel is just on the other side, about 100m away from the station), but we had fortuitously arrived in at the start of the Malmö festival. The festival meant a lot of noise but lots of life in an already lively, pretty town. The gorgeous and very old St Peter’s church is around the corner from our hotel

Continue reading “Malmö ohhhh”

The crap hotel in Copenhagen tried to stiff us to the end by charging us for things we had not bought, so we were both glad to see the back of it. Continue reading “Goodbye Copenhagen, hello Aarhus (and Aalborg)”

So, my cold has gone and my foot is somewhat better. However, Copenhagen is a city of stone streets and not much rest, so it gets tiring fast. Continue reading “Copenhagen, the days all blur together”

Just as my cold was finishing, I’ve managed to sprain my foot getting off the Flybus to Keflavik airport. So another day sitting in the hotel for me 🙁

Our hotel is in a popular area so is very noisy, and since it’s rather hot here, we had to leave the windows open – the hotel is rather proud of its ‘environmental’ ( ie cheapskate) rep, so no airconor propers. We are just around the corner from a rather swishy food market (think selfridges food hall) so i hobbled there for brunch. Now doug is exploring, and i have my foot up again. Sigh.

Tomorrow i hope to be mobile enough to go sightseeing.