Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

Merry Christmas (/ Fröhliche Weihnachten) and Happy New Year to you all! I thought I'd sneak one last cities blog post in to 2012, rounding out my year with a trip to Stuttgart (and neighbouring Ludwigsburg) to enjoy some authentic German Xmas markets! Since moving to Zurich, the only German city I've actually stopped in has been Dogern to go furniture shopping, so Christmas seemed a good time of year to actually make a trip out of it, Katie and I were both free for a weekend and heard good things about their markets so headed down for a long weekend - it's only a 3hr direct train ride! The Xmas market influence was clear immediately, as the walk from the main station to our hotel went along  Königstraße , the main shopping street which was lined with market stalls, reindeer and tannenbaum aplenty. We explored a bit further out around the gardens to the east, then headed back into the fray, as the crowd was getting big! After a quick dinner and a mug of warm Apfelg...

Grüezi Mitenand! (Swiss German for roughly: Hello everyone!) It has been a rather busy past month, visiting no fewer than five countries in two weeks - Switzerland (naturally), Australia to be best man (congratulations, Bodie & Courtney!), Germany (picking up furniture), and both Denmark and Sweden in a recent visit covered in today's post. First up was Lund - a town of about 100k focused around Lund Univerisity, which is where a friend from Sydney (and our host for the trip) is currently studying. The abundance of cobblestone streets and cute small alley-ways was rather nice, and the sudden transition to hearing Swedish and using Krona was someone lessened by the fact that, being a university town with lots of imports, pretty much everyone spoke English. I appreciated that they also made good coffee at cafes, something I'd been missing in Zurich. On the first night I also made it to Helsingborg (Sweden's closest place to Denmark, apparently) to watch Tommy E...