Like many parents, we’re constantly dragging our children along to art museums. And like many parents, we are accustomed to groans of  “Oh no, not another museum!” Museums are starting to realize the importance of courting their future visitors and, as parents, it’s nice to see how many art museums have started to put together [...]

Have you ever wondered where the ‘quiche Lorraine’ got its name from? It is so named because it originates in the north eastern region of France called Lorraine. The region shares a border with three other European countries, namely Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg. Not surprisingly then Lorraine has often been at the centre of Europe’s [...]

Introduction The Scottish city of Glasgow has undergone a successful metamorphosis from unappealing post industrial gloom to a popular global tourist destination.  How was this achieved?  What lessons can be learned for other cities keen to make themselves more attractive to potential visitors with so much competition from other possible destinations. Glasgow from Queens Park [...]

Marseille may only be the second largest city in France, but it is the oldest. It was the Greeks from an ancient town of Phocaea (Asia Minor) who in about 600 BC founded the city as a base for their maritime trade on the Mediterranean. And ever since, Marseille has played a prominent role in [...]

Spread across an area of 10.000 m2, with a total exhibition space of around 5.000 m2, the BMW car museum in Munich attracts thousands of visitors each year. While being a car enthusiast certainly helps when visiting the museum, it is not a necessity as we discovered. The “bowl” shaped museum is just across the street from [...]

Discovery Point, in the Scottish city of Dundee, is the home of RRS Discovery, the the ship which transported Captain Scott’s first Antarctic “Discovery Expedition” to the South Pole in 1901. The ship was built in Dundee and returned there in 1986. RSS Discovery against the Dundee skyline Discovery was locked in by ice in [...]

Otranto, the picturesque Adriatic town in Italy’s Salento region, is so beautiful and peaceful, that it seems hard to believe this was once the site of the gruesome “Sack of Otranto”.  Luckily for today’s tourists, Ottoman invasions are no longer a threat to this tranquil coastline. Lovely Otranto – my European travel tip this week [...]

Of the twenty-one new additions this year to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites, France has two – the city of Albi and a stunning, natural landscape on the island of Reunion. Albi is on the River Tarn in the south of France, about 85 kms to the northeast of Toulouse. Like many significant towns [...]

I found myself in a series of seemingly random and inexplicable Google searches – you know the ones, that go from this to that to the next…and I saw an entry about Europe’s longest street.  Investigating further, I found not one…but several of Europe’s longest streets.  What is it with Europe’s fascinate to dispute nearly [...]

The Louvre Museum is almost certainly the most well-known of all the World’s museums, it is the most visited museum in the world and definitely one of the largest. The Museum ‘owns’ over 35 000 objects that range from prehistory to the nineteenth century. The Louvre started out as a fort in the twelfth century [...]