#citybreak

Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to BerlinIn 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps no

One winter evening, one quiet morning and a ferry waiting at the end Helsinki was never meant to be the main event. The journey had already taken me north to Lapland and then south to Tampere for an Erasmus programme, while Tallinn was waiting across the Gulf of Finland before the final return home. Helsinki entered the itinerary almost as a matt

How Vivaldi, an extraordinary countertenor and a convenient flight became the beginning of my first proper journey through Poland Three hundred years before Instagram, Antonio Vivaldi wrote an aria about longing and the quiet certainty of seeing someone beloved again. “Vedrò con mio diletto” belongs to Giustino, an opera first performed in Rome i

Two hotels, two stages and one unapologetically expensive escape Technically, this story is about forty hours in Paris. Spiritually, it began with a brioche in Strasbourg. I had flown into Paris the previous day, only to leave it almost immediately by train. I had never visited Strasbourg, and late November seemed like a reasonable time to correc