Tim Myer and Christoph Kemper Right in the middle of the Ruhr industrial region of Germany lies Oberhausen, a working class heartland, one of a line of cities making use of the Rhine, Ruhr and Lippe rivers. Nicknamed Germany’s Detroit, Oberhausen is at the tail end of decades of decline and is now known for [...]

However you look at it, we are the lucky ones. Anyone who stays at such a lovely hotel as the Park Hyatt, Vienna, should consider the same. This is high end luxury and should never be taken for granted. Occasional reminders appear, as this morning, a particularly emaciated young girl comes up to Mark and [...]

Wiener schnitzel. Need I say more? You cannot come to Vienna and not have this traditional dish, vegetarians excluded. We hadn’t been in the hotel half an hour before plates of it, with Truffle Mayonnaise, were laid out on tables in front of us. More on that below. In Prague this morning, the weather was [...]

Browsing through the Times online, I read this morning that Prague is the official Hen capital of the world. It’s hardly surprising with alcohol being as cheap as it is. Cut price air travel means that Stag parties get a look-in too and wild weekends seem to be the thing…it is certainly the place to [...]

Each day off we have is usually necessitated by travel distances and the crew were ‘overnighting’ to Hamburg where I’m sure they made the best of their town for the day. For the band, “One of life’s true pleasures, a day off in Amsterdam” as I put it yesterday, lived up to its hype. It [...]

Ah well, it was inevitable I suppose. I got up this morning, in Brussels, to make a cup of tea to discover that housekeeping had removed my travel kettle and tea mug from the room. An innocent enough mistake, but no less frustrating as I interrogated the maids in the corridor in vain. “No English [...]

Here in our hotel, there’s a yellow spin bike in the gym that I’ve been taking an interest in. Not an actual Peloton, the one I fell in love with at the Beaumont hotel in London, but it’s really good. I told Jim, who was midway through his 1-hour uphill walk next to me on [...]

Belval is an area to the West of Esch-sur-Alzette, in south-western Luxembourg which was once the home of the country’s steel production. As I’ve mentioned in previous diaries, when production was abandoned in 1994, the Belval works became derelict. A project of regeneration which started in 2001 has seen 18 years of steady growth and [...]

Rhône and Saône, the two rivers that converge in the heart of France’s 3rd largest city. It was the Romans who initially recognised that the strategic location at the convergence of 2 navigable rivers made it a natural communications hub. Lugdunum, as it was known then, can be translated as ‘Desired Mountain’. The original foundations [...]

The PreSonus interfaces in the rack Blimey, what a day.  Over the many years we’ve been coming to Paris, we have enjoyed extended stays in hotels and often made it a ‘hubbing’ point. This time we’ve chosen Lyon as a base. Whenever there are large events on in Paris, which is often, hotels ramp up [...]