Author: Anthony

To Strasbourg for the first time, for a conference at the Council of Europe on democracy and participation (more on which in a separate post).

My trip did not begin well, with a late change of plan at the Brighton end requiring a last-minute change of travel arrangements and an overnight in the Mercure Gare de l’Est Château Landon before catching the 0644 train to Strasbourg. The Mercure hotel was pleasant enough in terms of fittings, but the room was SO HOT I could barely catch a minute’s sleep, and with only six hours from arrival to departure, I got on the train the next morning feeling very much in need of a café noir and a croissant. In another blow, the train was a Corail express to Munich, and the cafe was run by DB, whose coffee was poor and whose croissants were non-existent.

Finally, when I arrived at Strasbourg, twenty minutes late, I ended up going to the wrong place – to the European Parliament building rather than the Palais de l’Europe where the Council is based. They are only across the canal from each other, but without the magical blue badge of a guest at the Parliament, you have to make a 500m detour along the towpath to cross the water. Add to that the contradictory directions given by well-meaning people in the Parliament building (who assumed I had a pass), and you get an hour wandering around in the hot sun with a heavy suitcase and an increasingly tetchy frame of mind.

Happier tales after the jump.

Continue reading “Travel notes: Strasbourg”

Just back in England after a trip by train to Tallinn via Berlin and Warsaw. Faultless journey at every point, until now. National Rail have decided that we have no business travelling when they don’t want us to, and have shut the railway between Three Bridges and Brighton. So my welcome home is a 45 minute bus ride with loads of luggage and two exhausted kids.

Britain’s railways: the envy of the world (except every other country in Europe).

So, a few days in Tallinn with Daryl’s stag party, and I’m not sure what to make of it really. The Old Town has lovely architecture and has been well restored. Particularly worth visiting is Toompea – the historic fortress hill at the centre of the city – with its two viewing platforms looking out over the lower town.

Overall, though, I didn’t find Tallinn as appealing as Rīga, perhaps because Tallinn’s centre of business activity has moved outside the old town, leaving the old town as a fairly quiet place of restaurants, cafes and souvenir shops. In Rīga, the main business of the city still seems to take place in and around the old city centre. This means that Tallinn is a bit EveryHansa while Rīga has more of a spirit of its own.

Another factor may be that the Latvian language, though very different to Polish, is still marginally more familiar-looking than Estonian. I find it quite discomforting to be in a country where I don’t speak a word of the language and can’t even recognise words on signs.

Of course, experiencing a city with eight other blokes is different from wandering round on your own (though I did a bit of that). We had the main formal dinner of the trip at Karl Friedrich, a “pepper restaurant”, on the Town Hall Square. I assume that pepper is their main ingredient, although in the set menu we enjoyed there was not that much of it: smoked salmon (far too salty); pork (with chopped red peppers, in a perfect delicate cream sauce), and finally some sort of ice-cream that was more vanilla than pepper. The interior was very elegant and comfortable but the music (including a rasping cover of Atomic) didn’t really go with the setting.

Otherwise, we did some usual stag weekend things: shot guns with the friendly and amusing Mr Death Shooting Academy, played poker (very successfully from my point of view), and had a cultural walking tour in the freezing cold wind.