Road trip to the Swiss Alps --Part 1--

It has been a month since my family holiday to the Swiss Alps. It has taken this long for me to sort out the many photos that I have taken during the course of the holiday. I am not like a typical Asian, in the sense that I don't feel the need to take a photo of every single thing that they see on holiday and do that 'peace' sign every single time they are in the photo. Apparently by doing so it make their faces appear smaller... I beg to disagree. Having said that, recently I have come to realise that taking photographs are actually a really good way to record 'The moment' (and might as well utilise your iphone functions to the max!).

This post would be one massive post if I put my entire trip in one so I will do a post each on the 5 different places we stayed at.

Part 1 will be the road journey to Interlaken via Strasbourg and a short stop at Luxembourg and Colmar.

Day 1

On the way to Strasbourg, we stopped at Luxembourg. It was my first time there but I really like it! As you can see from the map, it was a long distance to cover in one day so we could only stay there for a few hours but of what I saw, it felt very much like a capital city. I know I'm stating the obvious but it is probably because I had just been to Warsaw which is also a capital city of Poland and it just did not feel like a capital city! 

After some lovely ice coffee in Luxembourg, we set off for Strasbourg. Soon after we left Luxembourg, we faced a bit of traffic jam. It was then that the sat nav tried to be clever and decided to take us on another route to avoid the traffic jam. We didn't really have much idea of the roads around there (obviously!) so just followed the sat nav. We had no intentions of driving through Germany but before we knew it, we were in Germany! Great! That wasn't all. The sat nav took us off the motor way and directed us through the local countryside road! (like we hadn't had enough distance to cover already!) Anyway, when we saw the road sign saying we were near Saarbrucken, we took the navigating into our own hands and went back to the good old map (probably should have done this a little earlier..) and finally arrived in Strasbourg :)

We tried Alastian cuisine called flambee and some other stuff for dinner but it was amazing! You never get disappointed by French food in my opinion! (well, although British food has grown on me in the past few years, the French just seems to have a better taste for their food)

The old town just looked so pretty and luckily we managed to catch a bit of the light show at the cathedral which was pretty cool! It must have been difficult to project a screen onto a building with such Gothic details but they seemed have managed it pretty well.

It was a pretty cool experience to have gone from London through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and back to France again in one single day! Having lived in an island country (Japan and UK) for my whole life, casually driving into another country isn't what I am used to doing often.

Day 2

Here are some photos taken in Strasbourg during the day. The whole of the old town was really pretty but especially the area called La Petite France was super cute! In contrast, the tram that ran through the town looked very modern. It reminded me of the high tech trains portrayed in some old animes!

After having done some sightseeing in Strasbourg, we set off heading to Interlaken via Colmar.

Colmar was like a smaller version of Strasbourg but more touristy.

I'm not entirely sure where I saw this but there was a mini Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout!

 This is a view from our hotel in Interlaken. So pretty in a different way from what it was like in Strasbourg.

That evening, we ventured out in to the centre of Interlaken and heard some music in the nearby park. We went to check it out and this is what we saw. It was some local music festival thing but it was very interesting. Was pretty thrilled to see the alpenhorn played live with a flag waver (why not!). The bell ringers were pretty entertaining to watch but slightly awkward at the same time....

Part 1 was the journey to the Swiss Alps and from next time it will be some photos taken whilst I'm up in the mountains. 

A week in Warsaw

Mid July I went on a holiday to Warsaw with some friends from uni and stayed at an apartment in Warsaw for a week. To be honest, I didn't think there would be much to do in Warsaw (considering we were going to stay for a whole week!) but  for us, skint students, cheap food and cheap alcohol sounded like a very good option. To my surprise, Warsaw had so much to offer and was an absolutely amazing place!!My First impression of Warsaw wasn't exactly that great. The city looked very grey, sparse and had too many dingy areas for my liking. (Maybe this would have been slightly better had the weather been better on the first day.)  However, the more I saw of Warsaw and learnt of their history, the more I was attracted to the place and found it fascinating!
Here are my recommendations on the places to visit / things to do.

Free Tours of the City
Orange Umbrella Free Tour (http://orangeumbrella.pl/) run many types of tours focusing on a particular area of the city or on a particular historical event. I went on the tour of the Old town, Communist tour and the Jewish tour. They were brilliant for someone like myself who had absolutely no knowledge of Warsaw and its history and would highly recommend anyone to go! Apparently there are these free tours running in quite a few European cities too!

Old Town 

Castle Square

Old town market place

This is a 'must visit' place. Can you believe that most of the buildings in these photos were reconstructed after WW2!  Because of this the Old town is listed on the UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. Warsaw suffered huge amounts of damage during WW2 and I was informed that 80% of the city was destroyed. The combination of the scale of destruction during the war  and the communist times post war, a large proportion of the city was still going through construction works. It would be quite interesting to see how Warsaw will shape its self during the course of the next few years.

Lazienki Park and Palace

 Unfortunately when I visited, Lazienki Palace, it was under construction work but there were still many thinks to see within the park complex. Firstly there was a very pretty botanical garden on the north side of the park. It was just the right size to have a nice stroll admiring the beautiful flowers.

For those who are into classical music may well know this but Frederic Chopin was born in Warsaw and have spent his younger years in Warsaw. For those who are a great admire of Chopin it will definitely be worth visiting the Fryderyk Chopin Museum too!!

Day trip to Auschwitz

If you are to visit Auschwitz, Warsaw isn't the easiest of places to go from but it is definitely possible! If I had planned this trip better, I would strongly advise staying in Warsaw for a few nights and in Krakow for a few nights because there are also so much to see in the southern part of Poland!

By all means, Auschwitz is not a place you would like to visit if you just want a relaxing happy holiday and personally it was a very emotionally tiring visit and would not like to go back. Having said that, I personally feel that for those who haven't been there yet, it is very much worth visiting. I'm sure everyone would have leaned about the horrific things that had happened during the Holocaust but there is literally no way of being emotionally prepared. Although I was going to  take many more photos, (because I felt it was such an important visit) I literally couldn't bring myself to take them. I'm not the type of person to get easily emotional but even I found it difficult to listen to the horrifying things that the tour guide was telling us at times. During the summer seasons you can only go round on a tour which  lasted a good 4-5 hours (comfortable shoes are definitely in need!). 

Vodka Bar crawl

Now, onto a more light hearted thing to do! When we were there, we couldn't find any organised bar crawls so we just got the map from  http://www.warsawinsider.pl/feature/warsaw-pub-crawl-1 and went on our own bar crawl. I didn't think there would come day for me to say this but Polish vodkas were amazing! Forget the ones that you would normally drink in the UK like Smirnoff! Flavoured vodkas are the way to go! They had so many flavours such as apple, cherry, black cherry, pineapple,  pear but my favourite one out of all was LEMON. 

Brunch at E. Wedel

Oh the hot chocolate at this chocolate shop was just gorgeous!! So rich and divine! The set menu which came with hot chocolate, fresh juice (which was amazing as well!), 2 croissant, 2 slices of baguette and the three sauces came to a grand total of £5!! What!? If you tried to get the same quality and quantity of food, it will definitely cost you more than double the amount.

I have definitely missed out quite a few places that I visited in Warsaw such as the Uprising Museum and the Palace of Culture and Science (also known as Stalin's Penis) as well as all the lovely (and relatively cheap!) cuisine that Warsaw had to offer but here were the main bulk from my Poland trip. I hope this post will inspire some of you to consider stopping by at the weird but fascinating city of Warsaw.

First Blog post!

Here I find myself sitting in my room on a rainy bank holiday Monday during my last 'proper' Summer Holiday. I have recently discovered the wonderful world of blogging (whilst procrastinating before exam season) and many bloggers and youtubers as inspired me to start my own blog. Well, I just think it is nice way of storing memories. Is it only me who finds it very difficult to keep track of what happened when? I'm pretty sure there has been many funny incidents or some amazing holidays in the past but I am certain that I have forgotten a fair few. (Probably more than I would have liked!)

I will probably start off with posting memories from my recent holiday to Poland and Switzerland and maybe throw in some random beauty favourites and other random things (hence my blog name).

Tech has never really been my forte so it will take me a while to sort this page out but we shall see where this blog goes! (I'm not entirely sure who this is addressed to but I guess that's the good thing about blogs....