My reason for visiting Hamburg was not really to find out if the word Hamburger actually started there, although it did intrigue me, it was just a nice Northerly German city, and only a 2 hour trip from my base with Rene in Hannover. Having had an Interail Ticket for Europe, I was finding it…
Read MoreYouve got to love the name of this little village – Osterweddingen, a bizarre and picturesque little ‘Groomsport-esque habitat’ in the middle of Germany. Well actually, close to Magdeberg in the former East side again. I spent two days there with a great German mate of mine, Rene. Rene’s parents live in a lovely house…
Read MoreHaving spent two days in Hannover, I then visited Magdeburg, a massive city in the former East Germany. Magdeberg is quite peaceful and beautiful, and there is no way I would have known it was part of the former East Germany, it was hard somehow to see the difference. Standing head and shoulders above any…
Read MoreWhen I arrived in Hannover, Germany (following a fantastic train journey from Leipzig), my mate Rene was waiting there to meet me, which was class, seeing as I hadn’t had a phone for 6 weeks or seen Rene for 2 and a half years and I also had to ask a polite young German lady…
Read MoreI caught a train from Prague’s Kolesovice station and the final destination was Hannover in Germany (part of the former West Germany), therefore it was a 9 hour journey and I would need to change twice, which I was really looking forward to. One of the things I enjoy about travelling, is the variety of…
Read MoreIt was Lock in Lee that said to me three years ago (2004) that someday we should go to Prague. I don’t know why, but we always knew it would happen. So there I hopped off a plane (delayed by two hours) to find a flight had just arrived from Nottingham. Wearing a graceful Lomas…
Read MoreI first visited post-communist Poland in 2005, getting a train from Berlin to Warsaw. I stayed there for two nights with my Northern Irish friends and sampled only a teeny bit of the Polish culture, as I was there to watch the Northern Ireland football team and quite honestly to get pished on cheap beer…
Read More“We’re in the army now” – Status Quo. I had watched the Northern Ireland ladies team in May 2007 in Gillingham, Kent. We lost 4-0 to England and played with passion and pride against full-time professionals. Me and a few of the lads sang our hearts out, completely making fools of the silent England fans…
Read MoreThe short answer is Bobruisk is a very sublime and extremely bizarre city in the eastern part of Belarus (White Russia). The real answer is that the day I left Moscow for a flight to Minsk (which I favoured due to money and time constraints over the train option), I had no idea how on…
Read MoreOne of the few things I remember from a school history lesson on the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The whole USSR/Russia/Soviet always held an interest in me. It was a massive country (the USSR/CCCP) which endured the horrors of Stalin and carried someone’s communist dream into the…
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