I spent this week end away again but this time in the French speaking Swiss city of Geneva. I really enjoy weekend breaks to cities where you can easily walk around and Geneva is definitely one of them with most of the sights you want to see all within walking distance. The city surrounds a beautiful lake punctuated by the famous Jet d’Eau, a 140-metre-high stream of water that starts in the morning, continues for some time at night and is visible from all over the city.

Just south of the lake you can find the old town, the more historic and the more touristy part. In this part of the city, you will find the town hall where the Geneva Convention was first signed, the longest bench in the world, and the reformation park containing a number of giant game boards including chess and checkers.

Walking around the north shore of the lake, you head towards the botanical gardens complete with a mini-zoo including deer and sheep. Further north you will find the United Nations where you can take a guided tour at 10am and 2pm each day. Just opposite the United Nations you will find the International Committee of the Red Cross. It is one of the only museums where you must pay an entrance fee but you get an overwhelming understanding of why the organisation was created and what they do through their serious exhibitions.

Geneva is not a cheap city, even translated into London prices, but things are not as excessive as those in Scandinavia. Finding decently priced restaurants is possible and most of the places we ate served excellent food. Over the weekend we indulged in a couple of traditional dishes including Raclette (freshly scraped melted cheese served with bread, ham and potatoes), Cheese Fondue (bubbling melted cheese with various things to dip into it). We also dined at a Café De Paris restaurant where they only serve one dish, the excessively rich but tender Beef Entrecote.

We had fantastic weather for the entire weekend with clear skies and a moderate temperature. This allowed us to go for a small hike up a nearby mountain called Mont Salève that is readily accessible by bus and just lies across the border into France. From the top you get a spectacular view of Geneva, its lake and Mont Blanc in the background. Geneva is a friendly town and offers a nice little weekend away from London.

This weekend went by so quickly that I haven’t really had a chance to write about it. The fun part really began last Thursday night when I had a big get together with a great bunch of people from all over London at the Holland Park Mitre, a spacious pub also serves some decent food.

Friday still meant a day of work but at the end of it, I flew out of London with a couple of other people to spend the weekend crashing at a friend’s place in Goteborg, Sweden (also known as little London). All up it was a fairly random weekend having not planned anything in advance, but was also one of the most fun I’ve had abroad for a while.

The first night we jumped into a taxi (with our bags) and ended up at a party in a small but modern Swedish apartment filled with a bunch of locals (as well as our friend). Everyone was super friendly even not really knowing us, and despite the bags we were carrying from the airport (as I said, pretty random).

We spent the rest of the weekend going out, eating at some nice cafes and restaurants and just enjoying the time off. We didn’t do as many of the touristy things I would normally do abroad, but we got an insight into the life of a local in another country, something you rarely get the chance to do. A great weekend all up and just another excuse to go back for another visit.

Since the start of last weekend, I have been lucky to see probably the best weather that Oslo offers for sometime with bright blue skies and not especially cold days. Some of the great things that you have to do if you ever visit Oslo (at least in the summer time) is:

• Take a Fjord cruise around the harbour;
• Visit the Vigeland parks filled with spectacular scenery and some really interesting statues) – home of the famous Angry Boy statue;
• Visit the Cultural Museums to see the evolution of houses and see grass growing on the roof of them
• Walk around the Nobel Peace Centre
• Visit the Giant Ski Jump at Holmenkollen
• Walk around the grounds of Akershus Castle
• Hang out and people watch at Akry Bryge

I think that most people have a very good lifestyle and though things appear costly, the standards of living appear much higher. For example, for the same amount of rent you might pay in London, you may still get something smallish in the centre of Oslo, but it will at least be modern, well designed and, at the very minimum, very well built. Oslo still has its fair share of problems, with many homeless people and less welcoming people surrounding the area just near the central station.

Central Oslo is not very big, most things are well within walking distance, and trams, buses and ferries make getting around to other areas further out extremely easy.

I was fortunate enough to know a few locals from my time at University, and thanks to Kurt, I even was able to attend an extremely rare and popular afternoon tea event with Steven Twining (the tenth generation of the Twining family). Though I think of tea as very English, I was surprised to find out Norwegians are large tea drinkers (after coffee) and were the reason that Twinings created the less malodorous Lady Grey tea. I caught up with a bunch of other people from University, dining at some wonderful restaurants including Plah for dinner followed by Pascal for desserts. They gave me the inside to some great places to hang out but because of the fantastic weather I spent most of my time basking in the sun by the harbour down at Akry Bryges, or on the other side of Akershus Castle looking over the spectacular harbour front.

You can check out more photos from my time in Oslo here.

Long weekends caused by bank holidays always tend to lead to expensive flights and hotels as demand pushes the costs up. Thankfully I scored a relatively cheap flight with Ryanair to Dublin. Ironically Dublin consistently ranks in the top 20 most expensive in the world, this year coming in at number 18. I only spent two days there despite the long weekend since I found the hotel exorbitantly expensive but I think I still got a good feel for the city in this short time.

On my first day I joined a tour that ended up in Glendalough (Valley of the Two Lakes) where we took in some marvellously spectacular scenery. The rolling green hills and a herd of sheep blocking off the path for our bus reminded me a lot of my time on the south island of New Zealand. The tour also stopped along the way at the town of Avoca (also known as Ballykissangel for the BBC series set and shot in this town).

After getting back from the tour we joined the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, a comical trip around town with a group of actors recalling famous quotes and interesting stories from a number of the most famous writers raised in Dublin. Not particularly expensive and not technically a real pub crawl, it’s a fun and entertaining way to see parts of Dublin. People we spoke to also highly recommended the alternative musical pub crawl (it’s funny how most things in Dublin have to do with drinking).

We ended up in some club just south of the infamous and overly touristy Temple Bar area and stayed until closing (which is surprisingly early at 2 or 3am). I found Irish people probably the friendliest out of the places I have been too, with both girls and guys likely to start or continue a conversation. At the end of the night though, I also found the Irish the loudest and some of them the most aggressive I’ve seen. The numerous broken bottles and aftermath of rubbish in the streets the next day only emphasises this observation.

Though I struggled to wake early I still managed to get around to most of the sights in Dublin. The city is great for pedestrians with pretty much most of them all within walking distance. I visited Trinity College, home to the Book of Kells but I couldn’t wait out the long queues for such a quick trip. A short trip away is the Dublin Castle that was full of impressive sand sculptures and the Dublin City Hall just near that.

Overall I found the city of Dublin extremely warm and welcoming and although it didn’t seem overly dangerous, I noticed quite a number of dodgy people simply walking the streets, even during the day.

You can see more of the pictures here.