Posts about Destinations

Niagara Falls Canada: Halloween 24/7

24.10.2025

The Niagara Falls represent one of the most impressive wonders of nature of our day and rightfully enjoy their reputation as an untamed – and untamable – site of awesome beauty. Reason enough for Hollywood movie producers to have made this dramatic setting their filming location of ‘Niagara‘, starring Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotton as gullible wife and wicked husband.

Bloodcurdling fictional Hollywood stories aside: What comes now is REAL! The Nightmares Fear Factory calls itself ‘the scariest and best haunted-house attraction in Niagara Falls Canada’.

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Down by the Riverside: Glasgow’s Museum of Transport and Travel

16.10.2025

Whenever a building has been designed by Iraqi-born star architect Zaha Hadid, it is destined to become an award-winning landmark that attracts maximum attention. The Riverside Museum, Scotland’s Museum of Transport and Travel set on the north bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow, profits from a combined power: the magnetism exerted by a contemporary architectural shell of attested refinement and the veteran exhibits restored to enchant present and future crowds. The Riverside accommodates more than 3,000 objects that profoundly document the city’s transportation-linked past – maritime and otherwise.

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A Fiaker carriage in Vienna: as typical of the city as its many coffee houses.

The science of coffee-brewing in Vienna

3.10.2025

Coffee is not just an invigorating brew but rather a scientific field of expertise worth being explored. Barista Schools popping up the world over bear witness to the cognition that a cup of coffee is not something to be prepared in one’s stride. It is a challenge that deserves care and devotion at least as deep as is granted to the meticulously performed Asian Tea Ceremony.

Here in Vienna, each type of coffee is honoured with its individual cryptical name – the least one could have done for a treasure accidentally left by the Ottomans after their siege of Vienna in 1683. Apart from war and devastation, the Turks had brought along with them a culinary novelty Viennese citizens had later discovered in an abandoned Turkish camp: bags full of precious coffee beans. Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, a Polish-Lithuanian nobleman, had claimed the lot and opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse in the same year.

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Oktoberfest Munich: O’zapft is’!

9.09.2025

On Saturday, September 20th, 2025 at high noon sharp Munich’s Lord Mayor will once again ceremonially exclaim: ‘It’s tapped!’ The Oktoberfest, a festival recurring for the 190th time, has been exerting its magnetism on the crowds since 1810. It means huge fun for regular folks, works as an illustrious place-to-be-seen for celebrities of all shapes, sizes and financial prowess and could even enhance or jog a career of one trade or another. And it serves as a welcome runway for the presentation of suitably traditional garb (such as Dirndl, Lederhos’n or Lodenjanker) – or for a rare species of couture whose daring crossover creations are at times hard to swallow for the more conservative.

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Johannesburg: Constitution Hill

28.07.2025

Before setting off on a journey to foreign latitudes, a general plan of action seems a reasonable idea. When time and funds are limited, the most has to be made of both. The aim is an agreeable cocktail of experiences upon whose long-lasting effect individual memories and emotions can foster. Sometimes even carefully charted programmes are missing a vital link. One that takes travellers back into a country’s historical and political past, grim as it may have been. Then it will be understood why the past is inseparable from the present and the future and why landmarks such as Joburg’s Constitution Hill epitomise the lifeblood of an entire nation.

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