Read part 1 of the itinerary here Sweet Sins In Russian, the walnut is referred to as Greek nut. The connection between the word and its country of origin occurs to me at the age of 24 as I sit down at Stani, looking at the Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts in front of me. I appreciate the hunger of the early morning hours to try as many local dishes as…
At the age of 18, the first trip I ever took on my own began with a map of Amsterdam spread out on my table and an Excel chart on the screen of my laptop. Although it would only be for four days, I took the planning of this trip very seriously, all the way from a to-do list to budget planning for each day. As I sat in a café in…
Last week my Lost in Riyadh Facebook page has reached 1000 likes! Since then I have been thinking about ways to celebrate the occasion beyond the usual thank you post. Looking through my old entries that once composed my Lost in Riyadh blog right before GDPR came along in the EU, I found a comment by a reader from back in 2014. Tonight, to celebrate my blog’s wide outreach, I would like to…
A lot has happened since the last time this blog has seen a new post. To reward myself for the work I had put in over the last couple of months and to celebrate all the good things that have happened recently, I decided to finally add Norway to my list of visited destinations. While there is a lot of truth to Norway’s reputation of being one of the most expensive countries…
Read part 1 of the story here Those who know me personally may have noticed at some point that I usually don’t drink alcohol and should I ever do so, said alcohol would form part of a cocktail. But even in the form of a cocktail, the alcohol strikes me as too strong and always makes me feel like I just had a sip of disinfectant. Not so in Havana. The Cubans,…
To make the post shorter, this is part 1 of a longer story. Read part 2 here. If I really think about it, lobster basically tastes like a fancy shrimp. Back in Riyadh, a piece of lobster the mere size of my thumb was part of a € 70 six course meal I never would have gone for myself, had it not been upon an invitation which would have been rude to…
Quickly stuffing away my Cuban convertible pesos that I had gotten in exchange for a bunch of Mexican currency, I had saved my Euros for another time, I took a deep breath and started looking for a taxi at the airport in Havana. I had barely any time to pick one of the yellow cars to approach when I heard someone asking me where I was going. It was a fellow traveller,…
Ever since my beloved old-fashioned hand written letters were replaced by E-Mail, Facebook & co. , conversations with friends have not only taken new dimensions in the distances traveled by our words but also in the topics being discussed. Hence, while walking the streets of Mexico City not too long ago, a question from Israel kept crossing my mind. What did I think of the fact that there were different religions in…
Have you ever been planning a trip, a short vacation or maybe even an entire move to another country for so and so many months or years? If you have, then you surely have at times wanted to know what may await you at your destination . What is life like outside the tourist bubble? What can I get at the supermarket? What do people eat after a hangover? etc. I can…
We’ve all heard them: rumours about what countries are like. The ones say Kosovo is a war-torn country, where tanks dominate the streets. Others get goosebumps at the thought of living in Saudi Arabia and Belarus is apparently exotic enough to be a destination serviced by travel companies like Young Pioneer Tours alongside North Korea and Chernobyl. In the case of Mexico, German reporters don’t fail to mention that although they have been living…