Tag Archives: europe

Blog, Travel

Wanderlust

I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than ?100).

Of course they published the Cuba story but edited out the rest. I thought the Polish story was the best part so I reprint it here:

The second is a short story from a couple of years ago when I went to Gdansk. Kind of. The friend I was visiting was working in Warsaw and one of her colleagues told her that if we were visiting Gdansk we had to see Sopot which was just a little bit further up the coast. Sopot was their home town and, reportedly, well worth a visit.

Gdansk was lovely, we wandered around, my friend dragging me to many amber jewellery stores and, long story short, we were quite late leaving and heading up the coast. We were expecting a lot and were disappointed. I didn’t miss a word out there. It was the Polish version of Ayia Napa with late-teens running around in an advanced state of inebriation. We weren’t impressed and time was getting on so we didn’t have very much choice other than to stay the night. Unfortunately pretty much everywhere was fully booked.

In the end we got the last room in the worst hotel I’ve stay in for quite some time. It was some distance from town (we were also hungry by this time) and there was a big party going on in a field next door. An all nighter it turned out. Come 6am, tired and miserable, we decide to leave. If breakfast was anything like the shower, we wouldn’t have eaten anything anyway!

Still, it would take more than that to stop me travelling to new places…

Travel

Paris, 2006

I am occasionally told that I have been “everywhere.” My usual retort to this — that I have made it as far as Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, but not Paris, the capital of the next country south — is going to need changing after this weekend.

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We did all the usual tourist things — so thanks to B for being so patient as she’s been before — including checking out some of the more elaborate metro stations such as Arts et M?tiers.

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Of course no first time trip would be complete without seeing the Eiffel Tower, although we didn’t actually go up it. Assuming long queues we decided to view Paris from the top of the Arc de Triomphe instead. Later we found that we probably could have climbed the Eiffel Tower but by then we were hungry…

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Also on the agenda was the was the Louvre. Given the beautiful weather we decided to stay outside and just look at the buildings. I’d see these glass pyramids again a few weeks later when The Da Vinci Code came out on general release.

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Naturally I also wanted to see Notre Dame. At least, the Parisian Notre Dame. I’d seen another when I was in Ho Chi Minh City last year. The French version was missing much of the neon, which should probably be considered a good thing.

With many of the famous landmarks out of the way, perhaps next time we can take some time to look at some of the less well known but equally deserving places in Paris. Hopefully it won’t take me quite as long to get around to going as last time.