Twenty-first century Madrid positively surprised us. Before Tony and I met, we visited Madrid independently in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and we both left the city NOT loving it. While Tony got robbed in the Chamartín train station (and had to deal with the aftermath including a screaming match with an embassy official who refused to help a stranded 19-year old), I passed through the same railway station and found the city to look dull and grey through my dusty train window. Coming back 25 years later, however, completely restored our faith in what must be one of Spain’s most livable cities.

During our three-week stay in Madrid, we saw the city in a very different light. The rough edges seemed to have softened and the city parks and art museums were everything but dull and grey. To give you an idea how to find some color, excitement and fun, and make the most of your time, we have compiled a list of things to do in Madrid which reflects some of our most enjoyable activities in the capital.

The Rockabillies of Yoyogi Park are, perhaps, the best example of what makes Tokyo so Tokyo. This city is all about awesome subcultures, retro tongue-in-cheek chic, music, and serious love for everything fun.

For more than 30 years, these Tokyo icons have been gathering on Sundays at the southeastern corner of Yoyogi Park to dazzle visitors with their dance moves, humor and extreme vertical hair. They don’t do it for money; they don’t ask for a thing. They just dance to dance and entertain the crowds.

As I said in our Srinagar post, it seems that every city with canals is inevitably compared to Venice. Perhaps, they should be compared to Bruges instead. Simply put, beautiful Bruges is northern Europe’s most enchanting, atmospheric town. A stunning medieval canvas embroidered with lovely canals and cobblestone streets, Bruges is one of those rare, perfectly preserved fairy-tale destinations – which I personally love, love, love! Some, however, will disagree.

Filled with chocolatiers, cafes, horse-drawn carriages, candy shops, pubs and cute little boutique hotels, some will dismiss Bruges as one of those tourist traps artificially maintained to keep visitors happy. Lonely Planet Online goes out of its way to suggest Bruges is part fabrication, reminding us that much of its architecture was redone in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Planning a group trip to Los Angeles may not be an easy task. You have significant decisions to make such as the places you are going to be visiting, your transport and the best suitable hotels. Los Angeles has a lot to offer, but it may not be fun if you don’t plan your trip well. The following tips can help:

Choosing the Right Bus for Your Trip

Transportation should be your first concern. You should charter a tour bus in Los Angeles if you want to get the best out of your group trip and visit all the sites comfortably. One of the challenges you might face is choosing the type of bus to use for your trip. Your bus type will be influenced by factors such as the number of hours you need to be on the road, the number of people on the trip, the amount of luggage space you need on the bus as well as other services, such as WIFI. Continue…

Tokyo feels a world apart from the rest of the country, and from Earth in general. The city is wonderfully weird and inspirationally insane. Diving into the city’s lively Shinjuku neighborhood at night will probably be the closest you come to interstellar travel. Welcome to planet Crazy!

After exploring the city’s ever-clinking pachinko parlors, kooky Harajuku culture and anime emporiums, we were looking for the piece de resistance of crazy Tokyo experiences. Resistance was futile. There was no way we could escape the gravitational force of Tokyo’s insane Robot Restaurant, a futuristic electro-cabaret featuring a very distinct air of Disneyland meets Blade Runner. Merely approaching the restaurant, makes it clear that this is something different. Continue…

Happy Halloween from Osaka, one of the craziest, most over-the-top cities in Japan. There were literally thousands of people dressed up and celebrating in the streets – that’s even more than on a normal day. Continue…

Twenty-seven years ago, I told my parents I was going on a camping trip to Wisconsin with my friend Robin. Instead, I secretly took off on a wild adventure to Morocco, which marked the beginning of a lifetime of independent travel. Now, I have returned with Thomas to relive a bit of those early days and dive back into one of the craziest, most colorful adventure travel destinations on the planet. Continue…

Life on the road is awesome, but – to be honest – it can be exhausting. Recent months have seen us bouncing from Berlin to Mallorca to Rome to Munich to Ulm to Prague to Salzburg to Milan… ugh, I was having fun, but I was totally kaput.

“I need to just sit somewhere… anywhere… for a few weeks,” I told Thomas, “I need to rest.” So, he booked an apartment in Lisbon for six weeks. Yay!!!

That turned out to be a great decision. Situated at the furthest extremes of the Iberian peninsula, beautiful Lisbon feels slightly forgotten by the rest of Europe. It’s not that the city doesn’t have tourists, it does. It just feels like Lisbon is Continue…

Sometimes, you just have to grab your dad and go have an adventure, right? This trip was something special, something very different. In my years of travel blogging, this stands WAY out as one of my favorite travel moments. Because of the way it began, and the epic dad & son experience it became.

So how did we end up in Istanbul?

In 2013, Thomas and I joined a group of friends from Berlin in our favorite city on the planet, Istanbul. I had been to Istanbul twice before and had seen most of the tourist attractions there, but there was one thing I had never done, one thing I insisted we do: I wanted to Continue…

After spending a year and a half in Latin America, Rio de Janeiro was our final stop in the Americas before heading back to Europe. Rio is one of those epic, world-famous cities we always knew we wanted to spend some time in. While it is neither the capital nor the biggest city in Brazil (that would be Brasilia and São Paulo), Rio attracts the highest number of visitors of any city in the country. And we wanted to be part of that.

In my tourist fantasy, Rio was all about caipirinhas on Copacabana Beach, rhythmic samba music, boundless zest for life, and gorgeous Brazilians strutting their stuff on the powdery sands. And – oh my god – it’s all true! Continue…