When planning a stay at a hotel, there is always a choice. Sometimes, preference may be given to a uniform and relatively sterile ambience. Chain addicts best relax when layout and appearance are identical in Paris, Prague or NYC. Yet: A genuine „home away from home“ will come in all different shapes, sizes and outfits – just as people’s residences do. The more variety the interior offers, the more likely it caters to a person’s individual needs. The management of the Hotel Art Nouveau (Garni) in Berlin Charlottenburg is readily being credited for taste and sensitivity and a talent for original style, design and quality food. Enhanced by their ability to create an international atmosphere by weaving cosmopolitan influences into their offering, the result is a smooth concoction of pleasing vintage components.
Posts about Savoir Vivre
Iceland for Beer Enthusiasts?
A Guest Post by Atlantik DMC, Iceland
Beer has been in the story books of Iceland since settlement times in 874. Yet, in 1915, alcohol was banned in Iceland. In 1921, the import of rosé and red wine from Spain and Portugal was approved due to business trading – and other products followed later. Eventually in 1935, all alcohol except beer became legalised. During the prohibition years, the two breweries in Iceland were allowed to only brew a 2,25% beer which we normally call Pilsner.
Ireland: Delightful prospects for train lovers
As of summer 2016, Ireland (Republic and Northern) can be explored by rail luxury style aboard the Grand Hibernian, a new member to the family of iconic trains such as the legendary Royal Scotsman. Between August and October, clients are offered an attractive choice of three journeys – each following a different itinerary, yet all starting and ending in Dublin. The train boasts accommodation for up to 40 guests in private en-suite cabins whose cosy interior has been inspired by the isle’s rich cultural heritage.
London: The German Gymnasium at King’s Cross
For the conscientiously-thinking German of the past centuries, keeping physically fit was equal to a national duty to be fulfilled – like going to church on Holy Sundays. Not a chance of ever playing truant. The constant surveillance by a rigorously watchful society saw to these rules not being neglected. Meanwhile in Germany, like in any place else in the world, people who work out regularly on a voluntary basis have become rarer and those zigzagging between sporadic exertion and hard-core couch-potatoing a sad majority.
German discipline was worthwhile being exported to ensure that far-away expats would not forget to stay in shape. And this is how the German Gymnasium at King’s Cross came to be. The money for „the first purpose-built gymnasium in the United Kingdom“, opened in 1865, was raised entirely by the German Gymnastics Society and the German community in London. 6,000 pounds well invested. Even women were allowed to use the facility: a freedom otherwise alien to ladies of that era.
Austria: The science of coffee-brewing in Vienna
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 which has to be given 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 can do for a treasure accidentally left by the Ottomans after their siege of Vienna in 1683. Apart from war and devastation, they had brought along with them a culinary novelty: Viennese citizens discovered a number of bags filled with precious coffee beans in an abandoned Turkish camp after the battle was over. Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, a Polish-Lithuanian nobleman, had taken hold of the bags and opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse in the same year. www.wien.info/en/shopping-wining-dining/coffeehouses/in-the-old-city