It’s a new country for Peter’s Big Adventure! Welcome to Poland 🇵🇱
Our journey in Poland starts in Krakow. This is a city that I knew first from the WWII history books, and later as a desirable and beautiful European destination that I’d be well-advised to bump up to the top of my priority list of future trips. Indeed, Krakow is many different things to many different groups of people, and today we’re going to do our best to understand as many of these layers as we can. So let’s get started, eh?
In this article, we’re going to be agnostic with the location within London. Indeed, this article has been sitting around as a ‘draft’ since 2023, and I have just been adding to the gallery every time I walk by a mural in my day-to-day life. So, I stumbled onto all of these randomly, and accordingly, they are really from a random collection of places. I think the London neighborhoods covered here include Camberwell, Stoke Newington, Little Portugal, Bow, Bethnal Green, Walthamstow, Peckham, Hackney, Finsbury Park, Waterloo, Nunhead, Stockwell, Fitzrovia, Clapham, Earl’s Court, Soho, Notting Hill, Streatham… and probably more!
It turns out that Glasgow has a reputation for murals! The one at the top of the gallery below is, perhaps, the most famous of them all. It was done by an Australian-born street artist named Sam Bates, better known under the moniker Smug. He’s offered little information on the intended symbolism of the mural, but because the subject is holding a robin and appears to have some sort of halo—both imagery that were/are commonly associated with St Mungo—the mural has been widely interpreted as a modern St Mungo. The mural’s close proximity to Glasgow Cathedral, which is the resting place of St Mungo, serves to reinforce this.
When you think of Scotland, I’m betting you don’t immediately think of Glasgow. You probably think beautiful scenes in the Scottish Highlands, or the charming cobblestone streets of Edinburgh. Indeed, this is the image that Scotland likes to show to the outside world, but the largest city in Scotland is actually not Edinburgh; it’s Glasgow! With a metro area population of ~1.8 million, the joke goes that this is where Scots actually live. It could be said that Edinburgh and Glasgow are two sides of the same coin. They are the largest two cities in Scotland, and they are literally right next to each other at only 70-80km (45-50 miles). Edinburgh is smaller, but it is the administrative, governmental, diplomatic, academic, and financial hub of Scotland. It’s well-connected, it’s expensive, and it’s posh. Glasgow, on the other hand, is none of these things.
You’re gonna love it. 😉
Here’s a fun fact for you: the concept and tradition of the Christmas tree originated right here, in Alsace! The first written records of Christmas Trees anywhere in the world first appear here in 1521, in a small Alsatian village called Sélestat. If you’d imagined there were snowy spruce trees in the Israeli desert for the actual birth of Jesus… I’ve got bad news for you. 😬
Anyway, Sélestat is about a ~20-minute drive from the places we’ll be visiting today! But this is not a historical expedition; we’re going to visit a few more present-day Christmas Markets!
Today, we’re in the ✨S0uTh 0f FrAnC3✨, which is a destination that carries with it some implied glitz and glam. Indeed, when you picture the “South of France”, chances are that you think of places like Nice, Cannes, or Saint-Tropez. Most of these post-card “French Riviera” destinations are over near the Italian border, in an administrative region called Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. But that ain’t where we’re going today. Instead, we’re going to the even-further-south region of Occitania, which was actually only formed in 2016 when France merged the administrative regions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées. But don’t let its administrative “newness” fool you: Occitania has a story that dates back farther than France itself.
And we’re back in France! But rather than continuing our exploration of 21st century France, we’re going to rewind today and visit Medieval France. I’ve never been a fan of Renaissance Faires (actually, I low-key hate them), but this is an undeniably fascinating time in history to learn about. And actually seeing the castles in real life really takes this to the next level! Today we’re visiting two Medieval castles in the South of France: Carcassone and Villerouge-Termenès. Vamos!
And we’re closing our time in Milano with a street art feature! On this trip I did not find nearly the quantity that I have in some of the other articles on street art, but the quality of what I did find was high enough that I decided these murals deserved their own space. That being said, the mural map of Milan that I found on streetartcities.com suggests I may have missed some really good ones along the way, but that’s okay. I’ll be back!
During my first visit to Milan, I had the great privilege of locals taking me under their wing, which is always a game-changer when exploring a new place. Dropping into communities that already exist and riding the coattails of their intuitive understanding of their home really gives you a feel for what life in a place is really like—but it also relieves you of having to think about where exactly you are in the city at any given moment. As a result, you’ll walk away with a strong emotional bond to a city, but not much concrete information about it. That was my challenge in returning to Milan. So I did the legwork of sifting through exactly where I was during my first visit to Milan, and came up withe two neighborhoods that made the biggest impression on me. They were Brera and Navigli. Let’s jump in.
Milan (or, in Italian, Milano) is not a city that is known for its beauty—at least not within Italy. But I never thought this was fair. Yes, Milan prioritizes function over form, and is more of an industrial hub than any other city in Italy… but the rest of Italy sets an extremely high bar for what it means to be a ~beautiful city. In most other countries, this would be considered an absolutely gorgeous city, but when you’re competing with Rome, Florence, and Venice… yeah, it’s going to be a losing battle. But comparison is the thief of joy, and Milan is still quite beautiful in its own rite! More to the point; it will give you a better window into what everyday life looks like for Italians much better than Venice or Florence ever could. This is real life, and—to me—real life in Milan looks pretty damn good.
Duomo di Milano is arguably the center piece of Milan, and the plaza bearing its name—Piazza del Duomo—sits at the center of “Central Milan”. We’ll branch out to other parts of the city in forthcoming articles, but today, we’re only going to focus on the comings and goings of this little area.
