It is getting really hot in southern Europe. July and August are really warm in Barcelona and you start sweating without doing any kind of effort. It is a good time to remember my walk through the white streets in Heidelberg after a postcard snowfall.
Two weeks ago we went to Venice. As every year we organize a winter trip and considering how crowded is Venice the rest of the year, we thought it would be a fantastic option. We visited the city without doing any queue in any tourist hotspot and we could see and take photos of San Marco square with no tourists in it! No cruises, cold and humit air and a special atmosphere full of mistery and romance among the winter mist of the lagoon is what we found. Put an extra ingredient: Christmas Time.
We arrived at our hotel in a cold night of January after an intensive day visiting Brussels. We were staying in the city only for the weekend but the Belgian charm had taken us and we wanted to see a bit more of the country before leaving. Our flight departed the following day in the afternoon, so we had sufficient time to go somewhere from Brussels. We thought about potential destinations and found out that Antwerp was quite well connected with the Zaventem airport. We had not planned to visit Antwerp in that trip, but Google told us that there were certain hotspots there. So the next day, under a light morning snow, we walked to the train station and bought our tickets to Antwerp, where we arrived shortly.
We did not even have to leave the train station to get impressed by Antwerp. We found so much beauty inside Antwerpen-Centraal, the main railway station in the city, built between 1895 and 1905 and mostly designed by the Bruges architect Louis Delacenserie. After our visit we knew that Antwerpen-Centraal was regarded as one of the most beautiful train stations in the world. And we got there by chance!
Since we have been together, we have been making what we call a “winter trip” within Europe during the first two months of every year. It almost seems a tradition between us, at least for the time being. When looking for our 2017 “winter trip”, we discovered an amazing city that we had quite close but that (wrongly) was not on our travel wish list.
We found really affordable flights to Lyon that perfectly suited the dates on which we wanted to travel, so we finally had a destination: we would visit Lyon at the beginning of January. Although Lyon is not as much visited as other cities in France such as Paris or Nice, the truth is that it has plenty of things to see. In fact, the Historic Site of Lyon has been evolving for more than two millennia, since the founding of the ancient Lugdunum in 43 BC, and thus is currently part of the UNESCO World Heritage.
In our weekend in Lyon we had the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful architecture of the city, from the ancient Roman theatres to the recently built Musée des Confluences. Below you can find a brief description of what we visited in each of the three amazing days that we spent in Lyon.
