Illustrated Travel Journal

If I could simply take one place from Porto with me to Hamburg, it would definitely be the “Protest Kitchen” café. This wonderful restaurant was just a few meters away from our Airbnb and we discovered it because we noticed the yellow-painted facade of the house with the catchy slogan “Average vibe, ordinary food, drinkable coffee”.

Porto has many different parks spread throughout the city. We often visited the great park “Jardins do Palácio de Cristal” because it was particularly close to our apartment.

Luckily, the street where our Airbnb in Porto was located had lots of great coffee places with very good coffee, breakfast and lunch. One of our favorite cafés was “Early”.

After living and working in the small village of Grottole in southern Italy for three weeks, we also wanted to spend some time at the nearest, larger city of Matera.

In addition to Angelo’s vegetable shop and Rosalia’s pop-up vegetable stand in front of her house, the small supermarket in the village was another important shop for us, where we often did our shopping.

Grottole has been inhabited since prehistoric times. As the Appian Way passes through Grottole, the village was once a hub of people and business from the north-south route. Today only about 2000 people live in the whole village. In the historic center of the village there are now just living about 300 people. At the same time, there are around 600 houses in the historic village center alone that have been abandoned.

After having spent March and April this year in Athens and Budapest, Christoph and I decided to embark on a new, slightly bigger adventure in May. Working in our normal jobs remotely worked very well for us as long as we have a good internet connection. Since we liked our new everyday life in Athens and Budapest so much, we decided to continue pursuing this lifestyle and combine travelling and working. We sublet our apartment in Hamburg for a year, packed our bags and booked a one-way ticket to Italy.

On my first day in Budapest, when got off the bus from the airport and walked to my apartment in the city, I noticed the many Israeli restaurants everywhere. It wasn’t until the next day that I understood that our apartment was in the Jewish Quarter, just one street away from the largest synagogue in Europe. That explained the amount of Israeli cafés and why their menus sometimes were written entirely in Hebrew.

When walking the streets of Budapest, there are mainly two different types of street food stalls that you come across again and again: First there is “Langos” (savory): Fried yeast dough topped with sour cream, garlic oil and grated cheese. The other food you’ll find everywhere is “Chimney Cake” (sweet): Sweet yeast dough wrapped around a tube, baked and rolled in cinnamon and sugar.

I love markets of all kinds and how beautifully and carefully fruit, vegetables and other foods are set up and presented by the stall holders. One type of market I have mixed feelings about is fish markets. To all Hamburg residents who are now having a little heart attack while reading: I’m not talking about the Hamburg fish market, which is basically a farmer’s market, but rather the real, somewhat coarser fish markets in huge market halls.

A detail in the cityscape of Athens that I particularly like is the amount of plants and trees. There are orange, lime and lemon trees everywhere, the blossoms of which make the streets of Athens smell good. Most apartment buildings in Athens have balconies, some of which are large, many of which are filled with beautiful plants.

Anyone who has ever booked a hotel or Airbnb in a foreign city knows how difficult it can be to judge distances and the coolness of different neighborhoods. If you’ve never been to a place yourself, you just don’t know what the best neighborhoods are. Since we chose our Airbnb based more on looks and feel-good factor than location in the city, we ended up in the “Exarchia” neighborhood more or less by accident.

Probably the most beautiful building in our district is the Archaeological Museum. The impressive row of large columns, the wide staircase to the entrance and the spacious forecourt of the Archaeological Museum can be seen from afar. The elongated building looks particularly great at night – then it is brightly lit and looks even more majestic than during the day.

Anyone who read my post about “Black Salami Bakery” a few days ago now knows that I love good bread and baked goods and am therefore always on the lookout for great bakeries. As part of my internet research on special (sourdough) bakeries in Athens, I not only came across the “Black Salami Microbakery”, but also discovered the great “Kora Bakery”.

After almost a week here in Greece, where I really like it so far, there was one thing that I was missing more and more: German bread! All over Athens and also right in our neighborhood, there are a lot of bakeries that offer different kinds of bread, which also taste very good. Most of the time, however, it is a very light, somewhat softer yeast dough bread. Super tasty, but after a few days I just felt like eating heavy, crispy sourdough bread again.

One detail that probably surprised me the most about living in Athens is the large number of orange, tangerine and lime trees in the middle of the city. To my surprise, these trees are not only found in well-maintained parks in the city center, but also on the side of the road on almost every street!

During my first walk late in the evening on the first day in our district, Exarchia, one coffee shop in particular caught my eye: the “behold theman”. Although it was already closed that evening, I could guess the colorful and modern interior through the large glass facade and really wanted to go there.