I've done another daytrip last weekend - this time it was one I had been planning for a long time - to Bath - and for some reason picked exactly one of the worst weekends to do it! The day was all rainy and cloudy and grey ...

 

Anyway, on Saturday morning I had cruised through central London heading west and in some 3 hours (including obligatory coffee stop) I've reached Bath. The place is really a beauty, which one can tell immediately when reaching the town center. My Lonely Planet advised that Bath has an immense parking problem, so I've contemplated for a while leaving the car in Bristol and taking train to Bath - or some kind'a non-sense like that ... glad I decided to go to Bath straight as the parking issue didn't turn out to be as pressing as it seemed on paper ... I did find a parking lot for long-term parking and left my Toyota on it for some 4 hrs, which only cost me £4 and that's also acceptable.

 

I have taken around 200 pics that day that I will post on my blog in a couple of days. The town is very photogenic, although given the weather I was putting up with it could have been way better ...

 

So what do you need to see? Probably the most famous attraction is the Roman bath - one pays £10.50 to see remnants of what used to be Roman spa long time ago ... this one is allegedly the largest Roman spa site in Northern Europe, so you get to see the pools with warm steaming water and blocks of ancient decorated stone and plenty of mock constructions of what the bath probably used to be ... well, it's interesting to see, but not sure if it's really worth this money to be honest ... I'd probably value it to half of what they charge currently ...

 

There are also plenty of Cathedrals to see in the center - the Bath Abbey being the most famous and largest. Then I've done a river walk, checked the indoor market in the Guildhouse, took a picture of the outside of Jane Austin museum and walked up north to the Circle, which is a circular square, which lead to the Royal Crescent, which is a half-ring of houses overseeing the valley of Bath - very cool indeed.

 

Bath also offers plenty of entertainment - apart from thermal bath, you can play golf, minigolf, see a botanical garden, etc. I didn't have time for even half of these perks, as I had to head back home early in the afternoon to reach London early enough to make it to a birthday party of one of my Brazilian friends ...

I have just returned from a week stay in the Bavarian capital – Munich.

 

I left London for Munich last week on Sunday and took a relatively early flight to get there early, settle down, get ready for the next day conference and maybe grab some typical German food on the way. A colleague and friend of mine – Rebecca – was also participating in the conference and came along. I met her right before we took off from London and we spent most of the time together down there in Munich until Thursday afternoon when we parted.

 

The hotel I stayed in between Sunday and Thursday was a 3-star. As I’ve gotten slightly spoiled lately with all the Marriott stays in Leicester, it somehow didn’t appeal as much as it would normally do. Well, the breakfast was good with all the German sausages and such ;o)) …

 

The first night we really tried hard to find something typically German to eat, meaning something that involved sauerkraut and sausages ;o)) … that’s how I described typical German dish to Rebecca, who luckily trusted everything I had to say, hehe … We eventually found something that looked like a German meal, but was in fact Bulgarian, which we only found out after we ordered. But anyway, was good enough and we didn’t complain.

 

I intended to do gym over the week, so that I could reduce the damage of a huge intake of calories coming out of the German food. I made a decent effort the first night, missed on the second night and only found the gym was closed until Thursday on the third night when I rocked the gym finally! Well, I can see the result now ;o)) …

 

The conference was dedicated to a Documentum content & document management system. I hadn’t been familiar with the solution, but was eager to find out about it and its new release, which arrived at the market a few months ago. And all I can say about it is that it’s a really nice package offering a very wide variety of solutions, so the overall feeling is very positive.

 

On Monday evening, Rebecca and I went on to discover downtown Munich at night. We managed to get to Marienplatz, which is the most interesting part of the city with its huge cathedral and a few other cathedrals and impressive buildings around. Further down the pathway we discovered a neat German restaurants with very nice prices and I have finally got my sauerkraut and assorted sausages. The food was great, but heavy.

 

Meanwhile the breakfast in the hotel, the orange juices and fat lunches in the conference center started taking their toll … I could then feel my daily routine was pretty way out of balance ;o)) …

 

Anyway, Tuesday evening I stayed in and did some work and on Wednesday the vendor took us all – the Accenture participants – out for a nice steak dinner and some dancing. It was a good time, I got to meet other Accenture people from Netherlands, Germany, France and Finland. On Thursday the conference was over and we said good bye. For me though, it was the beginning of a long-weekend holiday ;o)) …

 

I took a taxi right from the conference centre down to a Munich Courtyard Marriott, where I had booked a room for three people – myself, Tomas and Michal – for three nights using my Marriott membership points.  I could tell the standard changing from the previous hotel ;o)) … however, Marriott isn’t very cheap either, and so we never actually tasted the ‘certainly’ fabulous breakfast valued at meagre 19EUR!!!!

 

Michal and Tomas arrived a bit late on Thursday, which gave me some time to use the gym downstairs at least for an hour, while the guys relaxed after a long ride. Michal was still curing himself out of a little flu he caught earlier that week and so a little break was welcome. In the evening we followed Tomas’ culinary plan and headed straight into a Sushi bar, where one only pays 13EUR and can eat as much food as desired over the period of 1hr. The food travels around the restaurant on small plates and people grab them as they want, which I found to be a great concept!!! Anyway, the place was full when we arrived, and so we had to start outside, which was really fun, seeing all the locals passing by and three dudes with loads of small plates around eating like crazy.

 

Friday morning started my 1 day off holiday ;o)) … Tomas needed to do some business nearby Munich, so he left us straight after breakfast, while Michal and I headed for a sightseeing walking tour, which I planned myself. The Munich centre isn’t exactly huge, so one can move slowly around, take time to take pics of buildings and self and still crowd it all in within one day. So we saw the Ministry of Justice, Karlsplatz, Marienplatz with its cathedrals and downtown department houses and all those nice houses with flowers in the windows, while we still manage to check out a local Apple store and grab a couple café latte’s on the way!

 

Early in the afternoon we bought ourselves a tube ticket and headed for the Munich Olympic park with its huge tower overseeing the whole city. It wasn’t very expensive to get all the way up (some 4EUR) and gave us a great pleasure of seeing the football stadium where the Czech national team beat Germany 3:0 in the Euro ’08 qualifiers 2 days earlier ;o)) … we also saw the centre and oversaw the whole Olympic centre property. Very close to this is a BMW museum, which we all wanted to see, but unfortunately it was closed on that day and we could have only seen an extract of the original museum anyway due to some reconstruction work underway, so we skipped this :o((( … The evening meal was another culinary specialty planned by Tomas – a pork knee with sauerkraut and dumplings in the center of the city. And we got super full again … Because it was pretty cold then, we headed straight back to the hotel and made it an early night getting ready for a bit of travelling on Saturday morning.

 

Saturday morning I made the guys wake up early – they slept enough anyway due to early night the day before, we did a good and quick breakfast and Tomas drove us to a beautiful castle 120km far from Munich, which is also known as the ‘Cinderella castle’ or the Neuchschweinstein. The castle is really a beauty – a must see place!!! I will post pictures here very soon, so stay tuned. We had to walk up a 30min path, not really steep to see it. Tomas had been there before, so he left us for another castle in the vicinity, while Michal and I strolled forward. The tour was pretty short – some 20 mins, but definitely worth it and I recommend it to everyone. The views from the castle are sooo nice!!! You can observe lakes and forests from the castle rooms in far away distance.

 

It started snowing pretty badly later on in the afternoon and Tomas didn’t have his Subaru Impreza sports car equipped with winter tires, so we drove slowly back to Munich, where we still find time to check out this Munich castle at the outskirts, which name I successfully forgot already ;o)) … The super was awaiting, and so we went back to the restaurant, which Rebecca and I visited earlier that week and ordered ourselves some huge portions of pork, sauerkraut and dumplings. I could hardly breathe on the way out … really baaaddddd!!!!! Michal and I still needed to take a few night shots of the Munich centre, while Tomas headed back to bed and then we also called it a night.

 

On Sunday morning, our last day, or better said half-day, we woke up earlier again, bought some breakfast in a durum place nearby the hotel and Tomas drove us to this town Erling, where an inside water-world is situated. We spent some 2.5hrs inside and had a fab time riding water slides, relaxing in massaging pools, hot streams, etc. It was really cool and made me very tired. The guys then drove to the Erlings’ centre to find some food before they drove me to the airport. We bought some pretzels and white sausages with mustard in buns – this food is sooo similar to what I eat in the Czech Republic, unbelievable!!!

 

Anyway, my time in Munich was then over and I was ready to go. I fell asleep at the airport while waiting for my flight – that’s how tired I was. Now I’m finishing this article while still on the tube ;o))) … When I get home, I’ll just do some Leicester-packing, try to process my pics from Munich, upload them on the net and will hit the bed ASAP!!! I really need to get some sleep tonight. Tomorrow will be a busy day at work …

I left London early morning on Saturday first going to Winchester, which the GPS claimed to be less than 2hrs away. Well, I made the mistake to choose a track around Zone 1 (congestion charge area) although the charge isn't levied on the weekends - but the hope was there that I could at least avoid heavy traffic. Well, that didn't happen either and I got stuck in quite a bad traffic jam right after I crossed Tower Bridge to the south of river Thames.

 

Half way to Winchester I stopped by the Motorway services to pick up some junk food - haven't had a Burger King hamburger for a llloooonnnggg time ... then I drove straight to my first destination. Parking didn't seem to be so much of a problem in Winchester, but it certainly turned out to be eventually when I chose to leave my darling at one very cramped and busy place. I did find a spot after all and headed off for the town ...

 

It was quite a surprise to see the famous Winchester cathedral and realize I had already seen this before. Believe it or not, I visited this site some 3 years ago when I arrived in the UK for my internship and we were travelling around with the other AIESEC exchange students. We did Stonehenge (that I still do remember ;o)) & also Winchester, which I managed to successfully forget, hehe .... anyway, the town was a beauty, although quite small. I walked up and down High Street and enjoyed the laid back vibe. Shortly after 1pm I left the town for my second destination of the day - Portsmouth!

 

I knew quite well what I was after in Portsmouth - it was the naval base and the historic dockyard. Both turned out to be located at exactly the same spot, so I bought this pass, which gave me access to all tourist facilities and also paid for an hour long boat tour around the navy base, which was trully amazing.

 

I finished in Portsmouth at around 5 and launched back for London. For some reason my GPS decided to take me through side streets of Clapham area, so I did some 13 miles of driving in a traffic jam, which wasn't cool!