Visiting friends is one of my favorite excuses to choose travel destinations. It is nice as you get to see people who are normally a bit far away, you have local guides to show you the city, and you can actually see another city.
You can see in the pictures, there is a lot of light, and that is relative uncommon when you go to the north of Europe, and that could be felt in everyone there. People were happy, and channels looked like a busy road in Madrid on a workday, but instead of cars, there were hundreds of boats.
The channels make Amsterdam one of the nicest cities in Europe that I know, and the fact that it is completely flat, and bikes are the most extended mean of transportation for everybody, create a calm atmosphere difficult to beat.
This post should have been published in February 2009, after my trip to China in Christmas 2008… but it has lived happily since ever in my Drafts.
The last stop in the trip to China was Macao. It is, like Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region, as it also used to be a Portuguese colony, and now they are trying to integrate it with Mainland China.
It is pretty close to Hong Kong, and the two former colonies are linked with frequent and convenient ferries, perfect for a one-day trip. But note that you should add some time to your estimations for border crossing (you have to go through HK and Macao inmigration in both ways, which may take some time)… In my case, that day I spent around two hours in immigration lanes.
Macao is not a business center as Hong Kong, and it is not full of skyscrapers. The architecture of the city is very similar to what we can find in the Iberian Peninsula. Nothing really new to me, as you can imagine. So, the biggest interest in this sense was the contrast of being in a Chinese city, full of Chinese people, and with an Iberian look, apart from the funny bilingualism of Chinese and Portuguese.
But Macao is nowadays important in Asia for other reasons. It is the Asian capital for gambling and is perfectly comparable to Las Vegas in business importance. I do not like gambling, but as the city did not offer much to me and had some time left, I went to a casino. I chose The Venetian, because it is the one which appears in Ocean’s Eleven, so I wanted to feel like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, while watching live some human behavior totally new for me.
We are now close to the beginning of the year, and it is time for some almost-new-year resolutions. One of them is writing again in this blog, that I use as a public diary, and a place to share some of my trips, experiences and pictures with my friends and family. Due to a number of good reasons, I have not been very active for the last 16 months, but I hope with some effort in the next weeks/months, I can make up for the last year.
Exactly, one year ago, some friends and I went to one corner of Spain, to La Garrotxa in Girona. It was a good excuse (a surprise party for the 30th Birthday of a good friend), and we enjoyed the colours of Autumn, a great fideuà, some cava and a great time with old and new friends.
Strasbourg is a French city, hosting the European Parlament, next to the Rhine river, and being a border city with Germany (is border still a valid word in the EU?). The region where it lies (Alsace) has been changing hands from the French to the Germans, and vice versa since the Romans were around. The last exchange took place in the beginning of the 20th Century, so not that long ago.
This is why Strasbourg was chosen as the host city for the European Parliament: this region has lived more wars (can you live a war? isn’t that totally impossible?) than any other region in the continent, and is therefore a perfect example of what EU is all about (in its origin: peace).
In fact, both sides of the Rhine have a massive park linked by a bridge to show this unification spirit.
Walking in the city you will notice examples proving this is one of the cities with the highest income in France: everything is clean, in perfect conservation state, and parks are full of attractions for the children and some grown-up. If you woke up in the beautiful small city centre, you would think you are in a German town for several reasons: the architecture cannot hide the German influence, it is crowded with German tourists, and even the dishes you can see in the restaurants are very similar to the food on the other side of the Rhine: Riesling wine, choucroute, flammkuchen, …
You can also find some additional signs of old installations that make a German speaking time clear.
One of the best things of this region is, without any kind of doubt, their white wine. Names as Riesling or Gewurzträminer varieties are well known for anyone who is properly advised in the wine world. There is a wine route well organized going south from Strasbourg, where you can stay as many days as you can while visiting the vineyards and tasting the different ones. We took only a part of it, and visited Obernai, where we had the opportunity to taste several wines, buy some, and have a walk around the vineyards.
If you want to take a deeper look to these cities, check the following slideshows: Strasbourg and Obernai
