Episode 21: Sunday, Bloody Sunday II, or: we did not learn from history and are doomed to repeat it.

So, apparently our struggles in Bremen should have been a warning: Germany as a whole just doesn't work Sundays. Bars and restaurants are allowed to open but shops either aren't allowed to or just don't. Obviously, this is an example of how even some of the more fiscally conservative European countries look after workers and as a worker and committed socialist I'm glad that my fellows get such a better deal here than I do. I just wish someone had warned us that Sundays would be a wash-out.

You might think it's no big deal, really. And you'd be right, except that the car park where we left the car last night is attached to a shopping centre and that doesn't open today either. So, we're stuck in Aachen. This means several things: 1) we can't get to the final of the football tournament this evening in Enschede, 2) we can't get to the hotel we booked in Antwerp tonight, 3) that's going to be a very expensive carpark stay, both in itself and due to wasted expenditure on the match and the hotel and 4) we've ruined our plan of being in a different city every day. Granted we didn't see much of Aachen yesterday and we wouldn't have had time to see Antwerp tomorrow but it's the principle of the thing. 22 cities in 22 days was part of the point, it was a challenge.

We managed to get a room for tonight in the same hotel we were in yesterday so that's no problem but with the car and the match and thinking I'd lost my glasses (found 'em, thankfully) and a host of other niggling little annoyances, today has been the worst of the trip.

Thankfully we should be able to make it to the channel tunnel in time for the train back to England tomorrow and I really can't wait to get home now but today has sort of soured the whole experience. It was supposed to be the culmination of the tour: the final game, being in three cities in three countries over the course of about 10 hours. Instead we're stranded with nothing to do and the knowledge that tomorrow's massive trek back home leads only to our first days back at work on Tuesday. Once I've got some emotional distance from it, today won't have spoiled the whole thing, of course, but it's hard to look at things that way just now.

Anyway, we got a bit of a look around Aachen's historic buildings today and they were nice. It's hard to be enthusiastic but if I was currently part-way to Enschede, I think I'd be looking back on them as fine sights to have seen.

Episode 20: Photo-dump III

Another photo-dump for you. Luxembourg-Schengen-Aachen via the scenic mountain road is a long drive and a wrong turning here and there only makes it longer so not much happened today that's worth writing about. Here are some snaps from Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Kolding, Copenhagen, Helsingør and Luxembourg. Sorry they're not particularly well-arranged, I've had enough struggling with the formatting on this site to last a lifetime so you'll have to take them as you find them. Give the first one a click and you can cycle through without it bothering you, anyway.

Episode 19: Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

Luxembourg: our fourth country in four days and the last new country of the trip. After today we re-tread old ground, passing into Germany tomorrow, returning to Enschede for the final of the football tournament on Sunday afternoon, taking our last sleep on the continent in Antwerp, Belgium on Sunday night before getting the Eurotunnel back to England on Monday.

When I think of Luxembourg, I think of fairy-tale castles nestled in the mountains, surrounded by evergreens and commanding vistas of a sun-drenched valley with maybe a little village at the bottom, much like the Hogwarts/Minas Tirith hybrid we encountered at Hohenzollern on the way to Stuttgart. Luxembourg city isn't quite like that, of course. It's a modern metropolis with all the usual trappings; shopping plazas, so-called nightlife, traffic, tourists, what I'm now beginning to think of as the obligatory red-light district, multi-national chain stores so you could be pretty much anywhere in the world, hotels, conference centres etc. etc. etc.

The aldstadt - or old town - where we are staying, actually is a bit more like my Schloss-in-the-forested-valley vision. It sits on either side of a shallow, narrow valley which clearly did used to be heavily tree-lined and does indeed feature a number of smaller dwellings at the bottom, though because it's so small, they climb the valley walls and from a certain angle, you're back in Lord of the Rings territory - gazing down on the Elves' home at Rivendell - perhaps unsurprisingly as we are only just over the border from Burg Hohenzollern and this whole region is where some of the properly ancient fairy tales that inspire fantasy writers came from.

Connecting the two parts of the aldstadt (and responsible for the vantage point that made me see Rivendell in the Péitrusse valley) is the Adolphe bridge, also known as the new bridge, despite being 114 years old; an impressive sight at 502 feet long, 138 feet above the valley floor and built from a local sandstone - as is most of the aldstadt. The light-coloured masonry gives the whole thing a regal air and ramps the wow factor up just a little.

A random wander over the bridge and around the new town led us into a residential area which also contained most of Luxembourg's government offices. Flats and the finance ministry seem odd bedfellows but I think you'll find both on the same street. All the ministries are in the same area, surrounded by Brazilian restaurants and tattoo parlours.

We came to Luxembourg pretty much on a whim. We were planning the trip and we'd sorted which football matches we'd attend and we had this two-day gap between games. Well, we'd already established that there didn't seem much to see in the Netherlands (we thought we'd have got a better look at Amsterdam than we actually did, otherwise we might have gone there) and we thought, why not?

Looking into it today, I discovered that Luxembourg is actually the perfect place to end the trip.* The people of Luxembourg have an attitude towards borders that regular readers here might recognise; a Luxembourg passport will get you into 172 countries without the need for a visa, this tiny nation is a founding member of the EU, they've been part of alliances with all four of the countries that border them for centuries and it was in Schengen, Luxembourg that the eponymous Schengen agreement was signed, without which this trip would have been a complete pain in the arse, probably twice as expensive and full of needless bureaucracy.

Thank you, Luxembourg.



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*Yes, I know we've got three days left. I'm doing a thing here, alright? Don't come in here with your facts and spoil it. The last few days are pretty much just the homeward journey, OK? 

Episode 18: Not a lot to say about three countries in three days.

Sorry I've been away for a while; a lack of WiFi in the hotel in Neumunster was to blame at first and then I somehow forgot to write anything last night here in Enschede. Honestly, not that much has happened anyway. In Copenhagen we toyed with the idea of an impromptu visit to Sweden but we decided against due to the cost of the crossing (54€ one way on the bridge) and the time it would then take us to get back through Denmark to our hotel in Neumunster, Germany. We drove up the coast instead to a place called Helsingør. All the way along the coast you could see across the water to Sweden but from Helsingør you felt you could almost reach out and touch Helsingborg on the opposite shore.

From there we went to Neumunster, which was nothing more than a stop on the road to Enschede, and therefore another place I don't have a lot to tell you about. We ended up talking to an Austrian woman at breakfast; she - and apparently everyone else - assumed we were in town for the heavy metal festival happening not far away. Fair enough, my aesthetic does have something of the metalhead about it. That was the only thing that happened in Neumunster anyway and we very soon hit the road to Enschede.

By a stroke of luck our hotel was only about 15 minutes' walk from the football stadium so we stayed in our rooms and chilled out all evening until it was time for the game. The Dutch team defeated the English and it was a triumph of will over skill - not that the Dutch weren't skilled, that's just not the main reason they won - and dare I say that England's supposed tactical genius head coach got a number of things wrong?

Anyway, that's what has happened over the last few days. We're just off to Luxembourg now and I'll update again from there.

Episode 17: Shiny; Happy People.

København (I've always preferred the Danish spelling, it just looks cool) is king of the capitals. I've seen Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Berlin on this trip and London, Cardiff, Dublin and Edinburgh previously but Copenhagen tops the lot. We came to Europe basically to wander around and here is where we've found the best place to do that. There seems to be no end to the procession of new things to see as you go around the city.

But more importantly there's simply a general nice feeling about the place, the people just seem happy. I know I said the same in Paris but now comparing Paris to here I start to wonder if I was getting good vibes from fellow tourists there, because in the Danish capital it seems more noticeable how at home the people are with their wonderful city. Paris felt like a beautiful place where people live. København is a beautiful place to live. The distinction is slight but important. Now the main difference may be tourists; Paris got at least 11 times as many as Copenhagen last year (according to some very basic research by me that probably misses out a bunch of factors), and it must be a bit difficult to really feel at home somewhere when the visitors outnumber the locals. While that may stop Copenhagen becoming jaded, though, it's not the main reason why the place feels so happy to begin with. Chesterfield gets basically zero tourists but as much as I love my town I can't say it's anything like a happy place to live. So what is the secret?

Denmark as a whole regularly tops the world happiness charts and there are a ton of theories as to why. Without wanting to get all political again, I'd have to say that it's the laws of the land that play a big part. It's quite a progressive country and - as visitdenmark.com puts it - few have too much but even fewer have too little. Equality's the thing. You can't be anything but happy when you live in a country with such a level playing field for all. It's freedom. Where there's equality and mutual respect, there's the freedom to be yourself, and that's the only way to be happy.

It shows anyway. Once I got to thinking about how good the city felt to be in, I had plenty of opportunities to just people-watch and work out why. There're ways people act when they aren't confident they can be themselves (I'm something of an expert because I've never been confident in myself) and I saw just one example of those behaviours today, and that from a tourist. It's not the most scientific study but there you have it; it is my conclusion that in Copenhagen everyone can be themselves, so it seems, and the laid-back happy feeling thus created permeates the whole city, giving you the chance to really appreciate the beauty of the place.

This is the furthest point from home on this trip (discounting a trip to Majorca a couple of years ago it is the furthest from home that either of us have ever been) and yet we didn't feel out of place today. That's not unique to Copenhagen but it's interesting, nonetheless, and certainly a far cry from the streets of Doesburg, the police stations of Brussels and even the British Embassy.

Denmark - and especially the capital - has been my favourite place so far. If I had been able to stay here a little longer and had I the skill for such a thing, I think this entry would have been a real love letter to København. As is I've not really gotten to know the place well enough for that and I probably couldn't do it justice anyway.

Oh, and Chris spent about an hour in the LEGO store and managed to come out with just one tiny bag of bricks.