Domodossola isn’t really too much of a tourist town so Milan is the first real Italian city I’ve visited and it is…quite Italian. The 4th century churches, gothic architecture, dirty metro, liberal traffic flows, and “free” trams are just some of the highlights of the city. There are so many Read more…
Heidi is perhaps the most famous piece of Swiss literature to non-Swiss people. Spyri’s take of a girl living with her grandfather, being sold to a rich family in Frankfurt, and then returning to the mountains due to homesickness has been turned into major motion pictures all around the world. Read more…
Known as “Sylvester Klausen” to High German speakers and “Sylvesterchlausen” to Swiss German speakers, the festival is unique to Appenzell and only happens twice a a year in winter in select villages of Switzerland. To celebrate Saint Sylvester’s day on December 31, volunteers in each participating village meet at 5am Read more…
Appenzell is a rather curious place in Switzerland. While the country was named after the canton of Schwyz in the centre of the country and its language is as diverse as birds in the trees, Appenzell feels to me as the most quintessentially Swiss region. Appenzell is located in the Read more…
It has been a few years since I gave an art museum its own post, but the Graubünden Art Museum in Chur is something special – I saw my first poo exhibition here. Poo aside, the museum consists of an older building and a newer cuboid building. The entrance in Read more…
Being the furthest canton from Geneva, Graubünden was the last canton I visited after visiting all 25 other cantons on the way to taking the Glacier Express. If you had a preconception that Switzerland is a land of snowy peaks, deep valleys, and grassy slopes with cows, Graubünden is the Read more…
Also known as the world’s slowest express train, the Glacier Express is Switzerland’s premier express train. Its main route goes all the way from St. Moritz through Chur and Andermatt to end in Zermatt. Although travel passes are valid on this route in first and second class, there is a Read more…
Despite having lived in Germany before, I haven’t actually heard of Lindau until a French colleague told me about its beauty when I was working in Geneva. Having already been to 56 Swiss cities in my first six months in Switzerland, I decided to give Lindau a try. In terms Read more…
There are two things that I really enjoy about Rigi: it has two railways going up and down the opposite sides of the mountain to offer different views and both railways are included as a normal rail line with no supplement charged. What I didn’t do so well was visiting Read more…
On a recent ICE trip from Berlin to Bremen, I read in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the German government will cut VAT for train tickets in 2020 to just 7% (about 10% off ticket price at present 19.5% VAT rates) and consider raising taxes for flights. I am in total Read more…