People go to Luxembourg to earn money or to buy cheap fuel – the rainy country is not a popular tourist destination. But people who already live there tend to travel quite a bit – travel inside the country, which has the highest GDP per capita in the EU, is obscenely cheap (EUR 1.3 to go by train or bus …
Luxembourg’s treasures I: The Mullerthal Trail
Luxembourg is not frequently visited by tourists, and I have an impression that the country doesn’t promote itself as a tourist destination. Why should it? The world already comes there to pick up the paycheck. Germans go there to fill the tanks of their cars (lower taxes). Streets are already overcrowded with people who commute to the tiny country from …
Unexpected objects and sights in Paris in 2012
For various reasons, I visited Paris three times in 2013. I didn’t feel like blogging about it, because there’s not much I can say about Paris that people wouldn’t already know, and I about it during my first visit there. But as I go through old travel photos in my computer and delete some, I will share a few interesting …
Exploring (and trying not to do it the wrong way) in Tuscany
I didn’t think twice when my friend, who now lives in Tuscany, offered me to visit her there. I only started to explore the Mediterranean region in 2009, when I went to live in Israel, so it was head-on and initially different experience. Later, when I visited , Egypt, , South France and Portugal on shorter trips, I decided that …
Malta – for perfect vacations
Malta has long been my priority destination. It is logically a perfect place for vacations – it has the sea, plenty of sun, and an English-speaking population. The few days I spent there confirmed every expectation that I had. Malta is easy to navigate, because everyone from the age 10 to 100 speaks English, it is culturally interesting and has …
Sde Boker, Mitzpe Ramon and sleeping out in the desert
Everyone was telling me that seeing the desert in Israel is a must. So, having collected a few tips, I set of to explore the desert. Before that, the South-most point I had visited in Israel was . There are buses to some of the desert towns, but we decided to choose a more adventurous way to get there rather …
Be’er Sheva: intercultural encounters
Be’er Sheva is the main city in Israel’s South and home to a prominent university. As I had to revisit the university after three years from the first visit, I had a chance to take a closer look at its unique architecture and color palette. When I visited it for the first time, I wrote this blog entry. At the …
Esch-sur-Alzette – the hope of Luxembourg
It seems I will start describing my recent travels in Europe from the end. After I saw many towns and villages in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and a lot of the city itself, I went to visit Esch-sur-Alzette, the second largest town in Luxembourg. With a population of under 30,000, it could be expected to be just like anything …
Wine flows on top of battlefields
When, due to EU laws, some countries had to stop using the term ‘champagne’ for sparkling wines produced outside of Champagne, the change was met with sarcasm and reluctance. Yet the history of Champagne and champagne is more about a local workers’ struggle against unfair trade than about French exceptionalism.
The ABC of this year’s travels
I found a fun questionnaire on this blog and decided to use it to ‘close’ 2011 on Wonderland. This year was exceptionally full of travelling, for which I feel grateful. I went somewhere almost every month. I visited 3 continents, 12 countries (6 of them – for the first time) and 21 cities. True, I didn’t blog on Wonderland much, …