The Perfect overland weekend city break. day 1.

Economy and Ecology were the buzz word when planning the girls weekend adventure, taking into account convenience of me being based in Glasgow and Marisa in Cardiff.

The actually holiday buzzwords would be booze, (wine, beer, gluhwein, eierpunsch (like eggnog - yum) rum - in coffee and in 'grog' ) blues (live in a bar) , bubbles (as in Jacuzzis) and Bloody fabulous time.

Marisa travelled on a very early morning train from Cardiff to London on Friday while I travelled Thursday night on the Scotrail sleeper.

we left London on the 8:30 am Eurostar arrived Brussels about 2 hours later (but plus 1 for change to central European time) had time for a Leffe Bruin in a bar near Brussels Midi. Caught the Deutsche Bahn ICE train - very swish - to Aachen and arrived there in less that two hours. Our hotel was a ten minute walk from the train station - an Ibis hotel, not glam but less that 80 Euro each for three nights and clean and quiet and our room was of a good standard and decent size. also located just outside the south city gate.

Quick freshen up after checking in and we headed to the Aachner Brauhaus (brewery) for lunch and tiny beers.

The local beer Kolsch is served in a 200ml glass that looks like a little test tube, a large beer is 400ml still less than a pint. In Bavaria (the part of Germany I have most frequented) a small beer would be 500ml and a normal size a litre.

Lunch was typically German but without my typical Bavarian dishes of spatzle or obazda (both yummy and cheese based) I had to order fried potatoes with sauerkraut. Both came with surprise pork. tiny bits of pork that I had to pick off and eat round- Marisa had a sausage Bockwurst (I think) which she seemed a bit underwhelmed about still the interior was old fashioned and traditional so all was not a disaster with lunch.

We pottered for the rest of the day - swung by tourist information to pick up a map and some leaflets of events in the city over the weekend.

Window shopping at all the bakers was a complete joy - Christmas windows and Printen (the local baked treat - like lebkuchen but a bit more chewy) in them all. The medieval old town has a few remaining buildings (post WWII) but they have worked really well alongside the new architecture.

The Christmas market was bigger than the Edinburgh or Glasgow ones and we spent quite a long time wandering around the different stalls, Took a very German Kaffee und Kuchen break in the old Aachen cafe - though on Saturday evening we found an older and cuter one that alas we could never find again ) I had a cherry flan and Marisa an apple one - the slices were gigantic.

More pottering, we looked in some nice shops and remarked that the street art was really good - lots of nice sculptures in well thought out locations.

We stopped to try some Eierpunsch which was delicious. Boozy, yummy custard.

We stopped back at the hotel to shower and change then headed out to get dinner from a Christmas market stall, we had some garlicky mushrooms and cauliflower fritters.

Then went to a bar where we had seen had a blues band /jam session advertised they were OK, much better than something you would usually see in a pub without a cover charge and we stayed for a few hours observing the locals while our favourite waitress of the trip kept bringing us more beer. Table service in pubs is a great thing, we caught her eye, she brought us more. We gave her a small tip and she wished us a pleasant rest of the evening. I think we left around 10pm then we wandered around a bit trying to work out where the main area was for nightlife - I'd read on Tripadvisor about a busy area popular with students.

We found a nice looking pre-club type bar and had another one for the road then stumbled home to bed around 1am which was remarkably late for two people who hadn't slept much at all the nigh before - we had great plans for a bigger night out on Saturday. After a busy day of being tourists and boozy custard.