Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
If you want to visit the Black Sea from București, then Constanța (in earlier days Tomis) is your port of choice. A comfortable train runs multiple times each day from the Gara de Nord to the shore. It was founded by Greeks in the 7th century BCE. Roman emperor Constantine the Great named the city after his sister Constantiana.
Continue reading “Constanța”
When you’re discovering ancient buildings (like the Palatul Republicii at București) you will come across the coat of arms of Romania. It shows a golden aquila holding a Christian cross, a crown, a mace and a sword. It is colored in the national colors of Romania: blue, yellow and red. But you can also find other animals on it like dolphins. Wait, what?
Continue reading “Two dolphins and three eagles”
The Romanian language is part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Even if as a foreigner you might not be able to understand what people are saying it isn’t hard to read signs. Some knowledge of Italian or Latin will help a lot. Until the year 1862 the Cyrillic alphabet was used, then starting in Transsylvania, the Latin alphabet was introduced – enhanced with the five special letters ă, â, î, ș and ț.
Continue reading “Alo!”
București has a good mix of public transport options: the metro, trolleybuses, buses, tramways. The easiest way is to use the metro system consisting of four lines: M1 (yellow), M2 (blue), M3 (red), M4 (green). Just choose the right line and the correct direction (final stop) and you’re ready to go. It gets a bit confusing with stations like Dristor 1 and 2 (which are not remarkably close to each other) but it’s the fastest and simplest way.
Continue reading “Local transport”
What confuses foreign travelers often is the fact that not all countries in the European Union use the Euro as their currency (and that not all countries using the Euro are part of the European Union). Romania is part of the EU, but still has its own currency, the Leu.
Continue reading “The Lion”
For some years I tried to avoid trips to Switzerland. It is a nice country with beautiful nature, but the prices are just horrible. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 I was searching for places I could reach by train and as I’ve never seen the capital city of Switzerland, I booked my ticket. But then our Swiss neighbors held a large yodel festival (really!), and the infection numbers were increasing dramatically. Therefore, it took me another year before I could do the trip.
Continue reading “Grüessech”
I still remember that day when I had some hours of layover at the airport of Zürich, Switzerland. I decided to have a short trip to the city center and entered a Euro banknote into a vending machine to buy a train ticket and what came out was not only a ticket but also some spare money in a strange currency, the Schwiizerfranke. Yes, Switzerland is in the center of the European Union but not part of it and for sure it has its own currency. How could I not have expected that?
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Throughout Germany you can find a lot of old railway tracks that have been given up. Few of them get reactivated later, most of them get removed and are in best case converted to bicycle paths – a good option, as the low inclination makes cycling easy. In my region you can already find four of them: the Gartetalbahn once connecting Göttingen with Duderstadt could not be run economically; the Söhretalbahn east of Kassel wasn’t needed anymore when there was no brown coal left to be transported.
Continue reading “Carlsbahn”
Travelling on a river by canoe is great fun. But it needs a lot of preparation: you need a boat, suitable equipment, a good point to start and most of all: someone who picks you up at your destination. Canoeing on the Diemel river is in contrast easy and well organized. You’ll get a canoe, a waterproof barrel, life jackets, paddles, and the phone number of someone to pick you up later.
Continue reading “Canoeing on the Diemel”
Göttingen and Kassel are cities that are only 50 km apart and could form a nice region – if they wouldn’t have been part of different kingdoms in the past and now different federal states (Lower Saxony and Hesse). I firmly believe that they will be connected more in the future and first tendencies towards this can already be seen.
Continue reading “Kassel & Göttingen: a roundtrip by bike”