The weekend before Easter we visited Brno, the largest Moravian city in the Czech Republic and the second largest city after Prague. Apart from visiting the wonderful Easter market, we also enjoyed soaking up the atmosphere of the city in spring, and visited some sights that I had not been to on previous visits to Brno.
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My highlight for last weekend was visiting the Easter market in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic. My husband used to live in Brno, so ever so often we go there so he can do some admin and visit friends. This used to be quite a long trip from Berlin (7-8 hours), but now Ryanair has introduced a flight from Berlin to Brno, so there will probably be a lot more visitors between the two cities in the coming year.
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Interesting fact: the Thursday before Easter is also a public holiday in Denmark. The traditional Skærtorsdag meal was Skærtorsdag søbekål: “Nine Cabbage Soup”, made from cabbage and pork or mutton. You can find a recipe for one variation here.
We arrived in the capital city of Denmark, Copenhagen (København), and after picking up a rental car we headed into town to check into our Airbnb. Kitchens close earlier in Copenhagen than in Berlin, so we had trouble finding a place to eat, but eventually we found a pizzeria that was still serving food. After a fairly long walk there and back with a bitterly cold wind blowing, we were relieved to arrive back to our apartment and stagger into bed.
Our neighbourhood – although we would not see it properly until morning
Interesting fact: In Denmark, flags fly at half-mast on Good Friday. Traditionally, people ate porridge on this day.
Copenhagen lies near the border of Denmark and Sweden, and the Øresund bridge, a combined road and rail bridge, connects it to the Swedish city of Malmö. As we had a full day and night in Copenhagen, we decided to use this day to take a trip across to Sweden. This was mostly because we’d never been to either of these Scandinavian countries, and we were interested to see if we would notice any differences between the two. The bridge itself apparently features in a popular Danish TV series, “The Bridge”, and it is quite a striking construction, being 4km long and straight across the sea. It’s quite expensive to drive across with the car, so we took a train across and arrived at Malmö railway station. Continue reading
Easter is coming and so is spring! Although I quite like the warm Christmas we have in the southern hemisphere, I do find that spring is probably a nicer time to have Easter, like they do in the northern hemisphere, since it comes with the added excitement of the arrival of spring. In Germany I first came into contact with the Easter egg tree, and have since also seen them in other countries such as Czech and Slovenia (apparently you can also see them in Austria, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary). Sometimes people decorate trees or shrubs outside, but you also see cut branches decorated in vases. This year I decided to make my own Easter egg tree. Continue reading
Easter market in Vienna
My family’s Easter tradition was fairly simple: on Easter morning my sister and I would wake up and hunt for the chocolate eggs hidden around our house by the Easter bunny (or our parents).
