Arenenberg Castle and Stein am Rhein

My parents are visiting and on their second day we planned an outing, as the weather was very rainy we changed to find a place to visit inside. That place turned out to be Arenenberg Castle and Park which houses the Napoleon Museum. Situated in Salenstein which gives you a lovely view of Lake Constance, is a very interesting place to visit.

The castle was eventually bought by Hortense de Beauharnis, who then married Louis Bonaparte the brother of Napoleon and they then became King and Queen of the Netherlands. So history lesson over now, the museum itself is truly very interesting it still has all the original furnishings which are kept with amazing care, it almost looks like hardly any years has passed since these people lived there.

There are lots of great views of Lake Constance which is always nice to see and visit. Afterwards we stopped off for lunch and then soldiered on to Stein am Rhein. I have been here a few times and I checked to see if I had already done a post. I have but it was in winter with snow on the ground and a good few years ago.

We wandered around this quaint town even in the rain it was still quite busy and found a place to stop to have some dessert. Then we headed back home to Kilchberg.

Photo of the Week - Little Critter!

During the last week of the school holidays Alessio and I went on a trip to see the Stanserhorn mountain. It was a great day and we saw these lovely little critters, they were very happy to show themselves to everyone looking at them. Marmots are large squirrels which I did not know until now and live in mountainous areas.

European Athletics Championship 2014

Alessio and myself got tickets for the Saturday at the European Athletics Championship and we were very excited about going. It was more or less packed and we saw a number of finals, the 800m and 5000m women, we saw the relay heats for the women and men. That was really exciting to see and we were really shouting for team GB.

The final of the pole vault which was situated the nearest to our seating was good fun! Everyone got into it, really cheering when they started their run-up. The mascot kept the crowd happy too, and we saw team GB win a gold for the women`s 800m.

All luckily the rain kept off too!

Photo of the Week - Street Art Along the River

It has been a good while since I did a photo of the week post and after flicking through my recentish photos saw some (hopefully) good ones to put up.

While we were in Gloucester we took a boat trip up and down the river and we saw this bit of street art. There is an actual photo of Albert Einstein doing this and written on the wall is "It`s all relative".

It is nearly the weekend, only 2 work days left, reason enough to celebrate!!

Oslo Waterfront

My building

Captain Rutherford

Reminded us of Berlin

In Oslo during the spring holiday we spent a couple of hours exploring the waterfront area Aker Brygge. We were all very impressed, there are plenty of restaurants, bars, cafes and shops to keep the visitors very busy. We were looking for lunch but the prices in this area proved to be a bit to much for us.

There is a museum Astrup Fearnley right at the end of walkway, we never went to it, but the building itself looks interesting. It apparently opens up to a pebble beach but we did not see that. There is lots of great architecture and design in this area and I could have just walked around looking at the different buildings.

This area is full of flats and offices, I just loved the purple patterned building with blue tiles (7th photo), also the long windows at the top look amazing. You can just image the wonderful view. Well I am quite sure they will be extremely expensive to buy or rent.

You can definitely pass away hours here and along the other side of the waterfront where the Akerhus Castle is situated.

Views of the Bosphorus

Ciragan Palace Kempinski

Ortakoy Mosque

Maiden Tower

Blue Mosque

During our trip to Istanbul we took a boat trip along part of the Bosphorus. It is one of the best ways to see Istanbul and how large of a city it is. We passed a number of very posh hotels well out of our league, but still great to look at, we also saw many palaces, mosques, gardens and villas.

The Bosphorus strait is 32km long and connects the Sea of Marmara to the Black sea, there were some boats that went right to the Black sea and I was secretly hoping ours would but it did not. It is an extremely busy waterway, with many ships from passenger boats to oil tankers. It also separates the two continents Europe and Asia.

There are two bridges over the straits one is the Bosphorus Bridge and the other the Mehmet the Conqueror Bridge. Our boat trip took 90mins but there are longer or shorters ones, or you can take the ferries to the Asian side which would be much cheaper.

No matter what boat trip you make, it is worth well the effort!!