Top travel destinations of the last year

So I worked out that during 2014 I managed to go to nine countries (including England where I live). In order, I went to:

New Zealand
Singapore
Italy (specifically Venice)
Scotland (twice)
The Republic of Ireland
Northern Ireland
Wales (several times as it's just over the bridge from Bristol)
Hungary  (specifically Budapest)

That's pretty good going, I think. Of that list Italy, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Hungary were new to me.

Singapore is a perennial favourite. If only it were closer, I'd probably make an annual pilgrimage, I love it so much. I'd just love to be basking in the warmth and swimming in a hotel pool right now!

Budapest is a new favourite - I expect we'll be back there at some point to have a better look around. Possibly in Spring for a change.

I love Scotland with my heart and will be back there whenever I can make an excuse. I'm still keen on seeing the real Shetland ponies and exploring some remote whiskey distilleries in the north.

So what about travel for next year? Well, we're off to Bruge and Ghent in Belgium for a few days just after New Year's. I've been to (and loved) Bruge and am looking forward to Ghent.

Easter will probably be somewhere a bit warmer and sunnier like Spain or Portugal. We loved Alicante in Spain so are keen to see some more of that country.

Due to getting my visa renewed, I'll probably be grounded for months during the middle of the year so summer holidays might need to be a road trip around Scotland. What a shame! (Kidding!).

Just clicking on the EasyJet 'where do we fly' tool opens up a world of possibility (literally). There's Greece, Croatia, Iceland and we need to get to Prague at some point... I guess we'll see how things go.

Happy travels to you!

Dos and Don'ts of Budapest

So we popped off to Budapest for a long weekend recently. My thoughts about the place can be filed under 'Do' and 'Don't'. I'll start with the 'Don'ts' to get them out of the way.

Don't

Go to the Cave Church. It's (as the name suggests) a Catholic church founded by Pauline monks in 1926, set in a small network of caves. Unfortunately it's totally devoid of atmosphere as all the caves have been sprayed with concrete, had floors put in and decorated with flowers and statues.

Also, the film about the place and the audio commentry were hilariously bad. The soundtrack was a group of monks singing 'Chasing Cars' by Snow Patrol (why?!), the commentary was read by someone who sounded like a bored student and written by someone who thought that to convert us to Catholicism, all we needed was loooooong explanations of topics such as 'the Sacred Heart of Jesus'.

Nice view from the Gellèrt Hills though.

 


Don't
Give yourself less than three days in Budapest. Five days would be ideal, to allow for side trips. There is so much to see and do. With the way our flights worked out, we only ended up with two days and it just wasn't enough.

Don't
 This one is a bit of a qualified suggestion... The baths at the Gellèrt Hotel are famous and on the recommended list for a visit to Budapest BUT... I found the experience before and after actually being in the hot water quite stressful. It was really quite expensive and hard to work out what kind of ticket we actually needed. We didn't notice until we were actually in there that we needed to buy a swimming cap to go in the inside pool. We snuck in without one and we got away with it.

The place is a labyrinth! So difficult to find your way around, it's not funny. I couldn't find a ladies loo for the life of me, and there were only two hairdryers (significant in a cold climate as you don't want to go out with wet hair).

The hotel looked a bit like it was leaning on its fading grandeur, with tacky stalls in the foyer. The main outdoor pool was closed for winter, which was a bit sad.

I'd suggest you try some of the other baths available and see if you get a better experience.




Don't 
Bother with the main shopping street Váci utca and Central Market Hall. They are complete tourist traps, complete with acres of similar souveniers, people calling out to you to come and see their shops or eat at their overpriced restaurants. If you wanted to buy food i.e. fruit, vegetables, cheese, spirits including local liquers, meat including lots of sausages and salamis, then the Central Market Hall is probably a decent proposition, but we weren't there long enough to do any cooking.

Don't 
Worry about not being able to speak any Hungarian. We looked at a phrase book and gave up on even being able to say hello. Not to worry, everyone kindly spoke English.

Right, now onto the positives...

Do

Go to Budpest, especially in autumn. It's such a pretty city and it was made even prettier by the autumn leaves and mist. Evidently it gets crazy-hot and full of tourists in summer. The only slight suggestion would be to maybe go in September so that some things wouldn't be closed for winter and the days would be longer. It did get dark very early (like around 4:30pm).Or try going in spring as I'm sure that would be very pretty too.

 Do
Decide what you want to do and book early. We missed out on a evening river cruise and on a performance at the Opera House 'cos we hadn't worked out our itinerary for our visit and booked tickets.

Do
Walk over as many of the bridges across the Danube as possible.  The views along the riverbanks are stunning, either by day or by night. The parliament buildings are particularly pretty.





 

Do
Walk up Castle Hill (or take the funicular railway - sadly it was undergoing maintainance while we were there) and spend a day. The views are amazing, the architecture spectacular, Matthias Church is one of the prettiest churches I've ever seen. We also did a whistle-stop tour of the Hungarian National Gallery which had a lovely collection of art, from ancient elaborate church decorations to a spooky modern installation in the dome. Sadly we didn't have time for the other museum in the old Palace. We'll have to go back at some point as there's just so much to see!

Cute Neo-Gothic tower on Castle Hill

Spiral window inside Matthias Church

Castle Hill from the river bank

Do
Eat like a pig! The traditional food is hearty, rich and filling to help keep out the winter cold (and also reasonably priced). We had delicious paprika spiced sausages, lots of mulled wine, goulash (of course), soups like the kosher pea soup in the picture, rich desserts with honey and cream... mmm... makes me hungry just thinking about it! We enjoyed the good service and amazing food at the Drum Cafe.

So, in summary, Budapest is awesome! I'm definitely planning to go back at some point and catch up with some of the things we missed. It's also handily close to other places I'd love to visit such as the Croatian coast and Austria. 

Weird things about Venice

So we're just back from four days in Venice. Someone asked me today, "Did it live up to your expectations?". Actually, I'm not sure what I expected, but it was certainly a singular experience.

Venice is built in the middle of the sea

It's one of the oddest places that I've seen humans live. It seems so dangerous to build big stone buildings on top of basically nothing in the middle of the sea. And to have open water everywhere so that a stumble could lead to falling into the sea. Odd.

Venice is super-touristy
The main island has blocks and blocks and blocks of shops selling masks, glass things and fridge magnets, leavened by gelato stalls and restaurants selling pasta and pizza.  There are men trying (and failing) to sell splatty-balls (see pic below), thrusting roses on passing women and attempting to sell horribly bad knock-off designer bags.

Murano must have hundreds of glass shops selling basically the same stuff, just rows and rows of them. I didn't buy any glass, but we did have an okay pizza sitting beside a canal.The crowds and queues weren't too bad over Easter weekend - evidently things get worse in summer.

Why is Lido mostly abandoned buildings?

I haven't been able to work out why the middle of Lido island is almost all abandoned and derelict buildings. TripAdvisor reviewer Elizabeth described the place neatly: "Abandoned buildings with broken windows are interspersed with beautiful hotels. Expensive ice cream sundaes are served from cafes with rusty chairs. Huge forlorn Art Deco buildings along the beach side make you want to cross the road in case the zombies start to wander out.

The abandoned mansions on Strada dell Ospizo Marino in the north east of the island are like something from a war-torn country. It's a photographers' dream if you like to capture faded glory as piles of bricks, rusty gates, broken windows and rubbish adorn what were once fine buildings.

Elsewhere on the island ugly concrete blocks of flats sit next to pretty parks and waterways. I found the whole experience hugely unsettling yet more interesting than Venice itself."

If you do visit Venice, I highly recommend staying on Lido - it's cheaper and much calmer than the main island. I really enjoyed going back to a bigger island and what felt like solid ground and room to breathe after the crowds and craziness around San Marco.

The Doges were dicks!
Visiting the Doge's Palace, we were overwhelmed with the opulence and the hubris of the whole thing. Various Doges inserted themselves into paintings of Jesus's birth, the crucifixion, the Last Supper as well as commissioning paintings showing the various rulers of the world submitting to them. The scale and magnitude of decoration was so over the top, I can see where people like Versace got their inspiration from.


During the reign of the Doges, they developed more and more elaborate forms of government, including secret police and anonymous denunciations by slipping notes into the mouths of faces on the wall (see below. Then the last Doge just gave up when Napoleon came calling.

Venice makes it seem reasonable to spend 45 Euros on a mask

 I could post dozens of photos of the various types of mask, they were amazing. And 45 Euros is a very mid-level price for a mask - some of them went up into the hundreds. I got beautiful black wire swirling design with blue and green glitter and my husband got a traditional black, red, white particoloured mask with a long nose and gold trim. We have no occasion to wear these and they were tricky to pack but it just seemed to be a good idea at the time...

In summary
So would I recommend visiting Venice? Hmm... I'm about 50/50. I guess it's somewhere that one should see, but I'm certainly not yearning to go back. I think I'd generally prefer to visit some more ordinary Italian cities but Venice was a unique holiday destination with plenty of bits to enjoy. 

Visit Copenhagen? Maybe I'm getting jaded...

It was my lovely husband's birthday last weekend. He's fond of travel so I popped onto friend internet to see where we could go on a cheap flight. Copenhagen looked good. I booked flights and a few weeks later we hopped on a plane.

Pros:
* Delicious food with some new tastes - we ate a cake with a creamy topping made with sea buckthorn berries.

* The royal family lives right in the centre of town and there's quite a nice museum with lots of royal history right next to their house.

* The National Museum has lots of interesting Viking things with all captions in English (and it's warm inside!)

They threw lots of things in a bog as sacrifices - helpful for future generations to ogle!

* Magasin du Nord is an attractive (and warm!) department store with good food at the restaurant in the basement. We had fried fish, dark rye bread, salad and chunky skin-on chips for dinner. I got a couple of fine merino wool cardigans for 50% off the normal price.

Magasin du Nord

Yum dinner!

 * The free walking tour was a good way to orientate ourselves to the city and learn a bit of history. Two and a half hours outside in the wind was a bit much, though.

Brrr!

Nyhavn (New Harbour)

King Frederik's Church - he wanted somewhere posh to go on a Sunday so he built this.

* Everyone spoke English - helpful as we don't speak a word of Danish!

* Clean and safe - we felt perfectly safe walking around the city, in fact we were often the only pedestrians! There were a few people on bikes, but the city seemed reasonably empty of people (or maybe they were all huddling at home in the warm).

Cons:
* Cold! -4 with a -11 windchill and only a light dusting of snow on the second day to cheer us up (we like snow).

Icy river!

* Grey - Copenhagen seemed to a city made of grey pavements and squares, grey buildings and grey skies with hardly any trees or vegetation generally. There was a little more colour down by the harbour but where we were was a deserted grey plain with hardly even a pedestrian to break the monotony.

* Cost - we knew Copenhagen would be pretty expensive when it came to eating out, but it meant that I felt kind of hungry most of the time I was there as I didn't feel I could justify ordering enough food. We did manage to find a nice coffee chain called Baresso who did reasonably priced food and hot drinks. Coffee was definitely better in Copenhagen than in England - sorry England, you're just not great at coffee. On the plus side of the cost issue, our hotel was a good quality budget hotel for a very reasonable price.

* The Tivoli amusement park was closed for the winter. I'm not normally an amusement park kind of girl, but this one opened in 1843 and looked (from the outside) pretty amazing.

Dry fountain with Tivoli in the background

All in all, I guess I'd give Copenhagen a six out of 10. It's not quite as good a European city break as somewhere like Bruges in Belgium, but it would probably get a better score from me in spring or autumn when it's not so cooooold! 

Any suggestions on where we should go next?