One in particular stands out among several unusual instructions given to new arrivals renting cars at Iceland’s Keflavik airport. ‘Please, always park your car facing the wind’, says the impeccably charming, smiling woman behind the desk, ‘never with your back to it’. Apparently, they have a significant problem with tourists who ignore this request, park […]
Es como París… It’s like Paris… I first heard this from an Argentinian about Buenos Aires years ago, long before I ever had the chance to go there. And it’s odd to see, now that I have been, how often Argentinians in general and Porteños, Buenos Aires natives, in particular still bring up this old image […]
Morecambe is a fading, or probably now better to say faded, old seaside town on the Lancashire coast of northwest England – it seems required to say this to start off with, because even in the south of England a town like this is probably more remote than Machu Picchu or Marrakesh, or maybe just […]
Went to Manchester a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in years. And I was amazed: what’s amazing is just how new so much of it is, and how shiny new its new bits are. Go to Salford Quays (OK, not technically Manchester, but obviously part of the same entity) and you enter […]
Why is the world so crazy about Antoni Gaudí? His architecture is Barcelona’s number-one identity-badge and calling card, even ahead of its football club, for Gaudí-mania seems to reach even those lost souls who still respond to the name Lionel Messi with blank looks. When I was back in the city a couple of weeks […]
I picked up a book in a charity shop a while ago, I’m not sure where or when, an old 60s paperback. Spanish Fever, by Norman Bogner. It had a cheesy cover, of the sort typical of those times at the dawn of the sexual revolution when any book that hoped to fly off the […]
The food gods have been kind. Last December I went to a one-off meal prepared by star Mexican chefs and René Redzepi, for some years number-one chef in the world. And now I’ve eaten in one of the most recent recipients of three Michelin stars, Emmanuel Renaut’s Flocons de Sel restaurant near Megève in the French Alps. […]
‘For my birthday,’ she said, ‘I want to go on a hot-air balloon ride’… That said, the question was where. Obviously, when you go up in a balloon, you want something special to look down at. The options within the UK seemed a little routine, the landscapes to fly over too familiar and lacking in […]
21 December 2012 was supposed to be the End of the Great Mayan Calendar Cycle. Everybody seems to have heard that, and that somehow this was supposed to mean the end of the world. Global attention was briefly focussed on the Yucatán in particular, where the local powers-that-are, feeling they had to do something, put […]
Here in Mérida everyone is on tenterhooks waiting for the big day tomorrow… well, no, actually most people seem to greet the idea with a snort and treat it as a big excuse for a party, or just doing something else special. In the meantime, not wanting to be narrow minded, I’ve been reading a book […]
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