Who helps you discover a city?

A lot of times I travelled wondering around without any guess about what’s in that place. I was seeing a nice building, taking a picture or 200 and then I was moving on. Maybe when I was searching for location to write it on Facebook I was discovering the name of that place, but nothing more. The city was nothing more than a nice place. It’s like you see a girl, you dance with her and then you maybe kiss her, but that’s it. You don’t feel that fulfilled as you would if you would discover things about her. Same goes with the cities, you will feel better once you know more about it.

I must admit. I am really lazy when it comes to reading things about a city I’ll visit because there are a lot of options and most of the places are the most crowded and touristic so instead of enjoying the views I have to take care of my things and wait in line for a picture that other 100 people will make in the same day.

What can you do to make it different? Take the free walking tour.

‘Wow! A free walking tour? Is that for free?’- not really, because you are supposed to pay according to your own preferences, but in case you don’t like it you don’t have to give anything. The principle is that you can donate as much money as you want for their services and that’s it.

I like the free walking tour from Krakow because they have a small bag where you put the money, whereas in other places you just give the money in their hand and that puts some pressure on you, but still, the quality of the tour is really good.

I am not a Spanish speaker, but I am heavily exposed to Spanish language because of all the songs we hear and the large groups of Spanish people everywhere. Because my friends are speaking the language, often I take those tours and I must admit, they are funnier, so if you know a bit of Spanish I definitely recommend it.  Now it comes to my mind the last walking tour I attended, it was in Copenhagen, and the guy from SANDEMANs NewEurope (i think his name was Pedro or Pablo or something like that, I’ll add a picture with him) was speaking really fast Sapnish, but he was making a lot of jokes and he was so devoted to what he was doing that he made me fall in love a bit with the city.  

Usually I take the free walking tours dedicated to the classical parts, alternative, crimes or some special ones. The alternative tour was really good in Berlin where I got to know more about the street art and artists. Since then I have been obsessed with Alice Pasquini who has a really nice piece of art close to the East Side Gallery. A nice tour about crimes and mystery I had in Warsaw when the guy did the tour while snowing only with the three of us. It was like a cheap private tour.

I really like the tours which are not focused only on the touristic parts of the city because it makes you feel the real vibe of the city. You get to know more about the place and if you want to know more, the guides are really nice and give you many tips.

How can you find the free walking tours? You just google it. Free walking tour + the name of the city. I tried it in Bratislava and it was really nice with United Europe, in Prague with SANDEMAN, in Berlin Original Europe Tours and in Poland the Free walking TOUR foundation. There are plenty of other organisations and for sure, all of them are good and will help you get in touch with the real culture of the city.

Enjoy your trip!