Sigtuna- vacation part 8

Sweden's first and oldest city Sigtuna lies just about an hour away from the Stockholm city centre so when we found sunny weather here on our return we decided to finally visit the old city.

When we got there we saw the old Town Hall but it was under construction. We peeked a bit inside from the open door and a very old cute woman welcomed us to the 12 o'clock tour! We had no idea there was a tour every hour but she was extremely funny and adorable and told us all about the building and the history of the city! A perfect start on our Sigtuna visit!

We then ate some lunch on the square watching people buy groceries on the market...

After lunch we passed the cafeteria Tant Brun- a house from the 17th century!

And walked down to Mälaren- the big lake of Stockholm.

I was apparently really happy :) I don't know if it was because of a perfect vacation day or because of all the geocaches we found but this crazy picture was in Fra's iPhone...

Then we saw a music stage from the 19th century that looked like a space ship.

Then we walked to the bell tower...

See some old church ruins, this one is St Pers kyrkoruin.

And this one St Olofs kyrkoruin.

And read some runes on the way.

And that's about it. An adorable little place with a lot to see.

Details - vacation part 7

1. Ironically IKEA is really fashionable in Milan. Here we had dinner with Giulia and Marco at Seven Steak House.

2. Notre Dame du Fourvier at Lyon.

3. We also did some geocaching. This time geocaching brought us to see a geological phenomena, where water goes underground in Katavothres, climbs up to Karavomylos and out to the sea again. The water is able to climb up because of different densities in sweet and salt water.

4. I just liked the colors so I snapped this one of Fra.

5. I love the cosmetics brand Korres. Somewhere around Greece I remembered that Korres is Greek! So I bought some products from the pharmacy... travel sizes and half of the price :) And products that I hadn't even heard of!

6. Many of the orthodox churches were really nicely decorated.

7. Coffee in Milan on the way to the Museo di Scienze Naturali to watch some amazing animals.

8. An adorable aperitivo place in Corfu town.

9. These are Fra's vespas that have been standing in a garage for a year now waiting for some action. Now we decided to take them into pieces, sandblast them, re-paint them and clean up and fix everything and take them to Stockholm! The blue 125 Primavera from 1981 is mine (a special edition with 144 000 made) and the GS150 from 1964 is Fra's. The -64 will become white with brown seats but the Primavera will stay blue- so they will be in original colors.

1. Somewhere in the south of Corfu it looked like we were in the desert.

2. One of the greatest places on Kefalonia, a house made of bambu with a hammock inside looking over the turquoise bay!

3. At the beach, under the head scarf and under the motorbike helmet I kept my hair braided so it wouldn't suffer- which means I finally learned to do a french braid for myself!

4. The amazing Palokastritsa, beaches only reachable by boats.

5. Turquoise details everywhere. 

6. I think it made it easier for Fra and me to order food after some years of physics in the university- so we understood the alphabet :)

7. A lot of sailing boats from all around the world in the guest harbours.

8. Here we ate dinner 3 evenings in a row in Kefalonia, because this place was just so magical. Extremely good food, white tables with cute flowers, basically on the sea.

9. These 2 girls were so adorable, jumping after their balloons on the beach. The dark shadow behind is Albania.

Mont Blanc, Genève, Lyon, Grenoble, Torino - vacation part 6

Fra's mother Silvana, Fra and I decided to make a mini trip away from Milan as Milan was suppose to have 40 degrees celsius last weekend. We started with driving to Valle D'Aosta...

...and through the Mont Blanc tunnel.

The clouds over Mont Blanc were soooo increadibly fast! The highest top (4810 m) in Europe was of course paked with deep deep snow.

Then we arrived in Genève.

Such a boring place and continued our way to Lyon. When we parked at the hotel it started raining. And oh boy- it rained until we were back home the next day. So Lyon seemed a bit gray...

But the 3 of us squeezed under one big umbrella and walked for several hours around the city, every now and then popping into a shop, a church or a cafeteria to warm up.

In the evening we ate at a cute French restaurant close to this one, with the funny name:

The next day we had planned to go to Cannes, Nice and Monaco but because everything we had with us was completely and totally wet and because it rained also the next day we decided just to go back to Milan with a stop in Grenoble and Torino.

In Grenoble it rained so I didn't even get out of the car... this is what I saw:

In Torino we saw of course La Mole Antonelliana and just walked around on the streets...

And then we returned to Milan with completely wet clothes in our bag but happy to have missed the 24 hours of heat :)

Zakynthos - vacation part 5

We had really expected Zakynthos to be the coolest of the 4 islands, but we were so wrong. Zakynthos was so filled with package tourists! I had never heard of anyone from my home country go to Zakynthos but I was so wrong. They were all there. As all slavic neighbors and Germans and Englishmen.

The island itself has a great nature, with really steep mountains- the irritating part is that there is no roads taking you there. So the mountainous part is completely desert but beautiful.

Zakynthos also has a great amount of caves, also a few ones that colors your skin blue!

The beach, Shipwreck Bay, that I blogged about before the trip was amazing to watch from high above!

I had imagined it to be extremely cool and even the highlight of our trip! But it was only reachable by boats and boats there were- hundreds and hundreds of tourists. The picture I have here I took in the early morning and already then there were boats bringing eager people to the beach.

When we looked closely we could notice that nobody was swimming due to the high waves and that the sea was actually extremely dirty:

So we didn't go there. Instead we found a beach called Xigia with a natural source of sulphur collagen! So great for the psoriasis skin! Yes, it smelled like rotten eggs but we got used to it quite fast...

The higligt of our stay at Zakynthos was an evening out with our Finish friends Susa & Petu and to see the nests of the Loggerhead sea turtles...

Good thing eaten here: Ionian chicken. A grilled chicken fillet with lemon sauce, oven baked apples and dry dill. Sounds like a terrible combination but I promise you it was divine!

Ithaca - vacation part 4

We made also a trip over the day to the island Ithaca- which many knows from the mythological story of Odysseus.

Of the whole experience the most particular thing was the enormous ship driving into the tiny harbor and extremely precisely maneuvering it on centimeters to get people safe on board- but even more precisely counting which bus or truck should go out and how many cars in to keep the height balance of the ship so the next truck would also be able to drive out.... And all of this in just a few minutes! Very impressing.

Nevertheless- Ithaca was much more wild and rough than Kefalonia. Very steep and rough rocks, goats everywhere and I really mean everywhere and a lot of nature and almost no houses. Most of the people live in Vathi- the capital of Ithaca and there we could also see many celebrities' yachts.

The rough nature was really beautiful with fruits and vegetables growing in the wild and we also saw olive trees that are said to be over 1500 years old..!

As you can imagine, religion seemed to be very important on a place like this, and therefore we could also notice that the orthodox churches were different from the ones in Kefalonia or Corfu. On Ithaca they were much more colorful and much more in the centre of attention.

Here still the view over Vathi:

Delicious food eaten here: aubergine filled with minced meat and bechamel.

Kefalonia- vacation part 3

Of all Greek islands I've visited Kefalonia is the best one. If I compare it to other known island close to it I would say Corsica is more amazing but Kefalonia wins Sicily for sure.

If you have ever seen the movie Captain Corelli's Mandolin you know how it looks on Kefalonia- as it is filmed exactly there where we were.

We could not really find much tourists or touristic things on Kefalonia. The tourists that were there were Italians or Greeks that came by own sailing boat or yacht to relax before sailing further.

So the village we lived in looked like this:

Very calm, a few really nice family restaurants, a bakery where we ate breakfast every morning, a church and that's about it.

The whole island is very rocky with green fields and turquoise waters. The highest top is at 1628 meters, which is extremely high for an island so small!

So by the steep cliffs there was always a nice beach to find- like Myrtos, which is also pictured in Captain Corelli's Mandolin several times:

And because of the high peek in the middle of the sea there were clouds that tried their best to climb over to the other side- which meant we were every now and then in the middle of a cloud or above it while driving. A bit the same feeling as when fog creeps up on you at sea.

Talking about fog and clouds- to watch Ithaca in the morning sun and humidity was marvelous:

We drove every morning to a beach, went to a new village for lunch and to explore it at the hottest time of the day- staying in shadows, and explored another beach in the afternoon and evening. My favorite beach of all of them was this Emblissi in the north:

Soft pebble stones, allmost no people at all, lovely waters to swim in. Another nice one was Zola:

Good food we tasted here was: Saganaki. A cheese baken in the oven. This delicious Saganaki we tasted had also honey and sesame seeds and moussaka of course.

Corfu- vacation part 2

We decided to make a trip on a few Greek islands in the Ionian sea this summer and Corfu was the first of them. We had expected the island to be filled with English package tourists so we had more or less the intention to just get as much sun as possible, try to ignore the tourist-bullshit and travel as fast as possible to the next island. (After a month of searching the only option for our trip was to start in Corfu).

But to our (positive) surprise Corfu was actually really nice! We rented a car and skipped all marked beaches from the tourist map and drove around the island to places that seemed to have a nice nature. In the end we found beaches where we were the only ones, restaurants with only Greek people and amazing views of the Adriatic sea.

The best place was Paleokastritsa, a mountainous bay with beaches only reachable by boat:

In that area we also saw the best sunsets over the Adriatic sea:

Besides tourism, olives are the most important livelihood and that could be seen everywhere on the island. The olive trees were old and well taken care of.

The nature is very green with all the olive trees and cypresses. A weird combination as well.

The sandy beaches were filled with package tourists and most of the pebble beaches were empty, which was perfect for us who prefer pebbles over sand...!

Corfu is located very close to the Albanian coast, you can see it as a big, dry shadow in the horizon on the east coast or up from the Mont Pantokrator mountain.

Corfu has a long history with the English and the Italians and of this the Venetian style architecture remains. Corfu's capital is imaginatively called Corfu and reminds of some southern Italian city with a twist of the Northern architecture.

We tasted 2 very good things on Corfu. Recipe number 1: grilled Halloumi with fresh lemon, parsley and olive oil on top. Recipe number 2: a "sauce" made of grilled aubergine, a lot of garlic and olive oil (all mixed together with a mixer).