My friends and family are surprised again and again, where my wanderlust nowadays leads me to. But also for me, everything started quite innocent: With common city trips and a deep interest in sightseeing. And that even continues by today.

Florence, London and Paris

After I hadn’t travelled that much in my childhood and teenage years, apart from beach holidays, I catched up on everything in my school graduation year 2002. In this year, I travelled four times to four cities: Italy with Florence and Pisa, Paris in France, and the British London City even twice – once in the summer and then again on New Year’s Eve. Four cities with lots of sightseeing, museums, art, culture, and history.

If you travel to larger cities, you’ll get a different impression of a country compared to a travel through rural regions or nature. The same is vice versa. This doesn’t mean that one is better or worse than the other. It is just different and you can discover other things that characterise a country.

I love city trips. The same way as I love travelling through a country or adventures in nature. The great thing about city trips is that you can experience a lot of culture here. It starts with ancient, historical buildings, which give you insights into long-past times and a feeling of the former life. The exploration of the different architecture of buildings or entire city districts. Continuing to many nice museums, where you can learn a lot about a country, its past, development, culture, and its peculiarities – not to mention the art. The small shops and cafes, where you can, if you are lucky, experience the way of life of the local people. And if you are really lucky, you sometimes even find an extraordinary exhibition as the icing on your city trip cake.

Stockholm – The City of Lights

When I travel to cities, it often happens to me that in the course of my stay a few characteristic descriptions crystallises out of the many impressions. For example: “Rome – The City of Queues”. In Rome, there are either far too many people for the existing facilities and infrastructure, or there are just too few infrastructural facilities to handle this mass of people who live in Rome and visit the city. However, in Greece it was “Athens – The City of Street Dogs”, while in Hungary I experienced “Budapest – The City of The Homeless Old People”. In Norway, I got the impression of “Oslo – The City of The Strange Creatures.” Whereas in Sweden, it was “Stockholm – The City of Lights” and of Denmark I remember until today: “Copenhagen – The City of Runners”.

Of course, these are just personal snapshots, because I wasn’t long enough in none of these cities to get a realistic full picture of it. Sometimes I stayed only 24 hours, but: It was the first impression that I got from the city at this first glance and the most intensive I got within this short time frame.

City trips cannot be compared with outdoor or nature trips. Each kind of travelling has its very own facets. I’m very happy to have a lot of different types of travel in my travel potpourri and I wouldn’t want to miss one of them – not the adventures in nature, not travelling by bike and not the beautiful city trips.