Learning London City Day One Breakfast, tentative, tiptoing into a corner of the chatting room. I toasted bread, find peanut butter and quirk a first smile. I will spend the next two years oscillating between amusement and exasperation that the British understanding of peanut butter is full of sugar and very little of peanuts. But …
Visit London: Transform Dreams into Lived Stories
Visit London: An Introduction I lived in London for two years and I have endless stories from the experience. I’m in the process of organising years of descriptive emails into a series of travel memoirs. Before all that gets settled, I’d like to let you all into some of my experiences as I continue my …
Challenge: Keep Your Feet
The Challenge It’s been a while. So what’s the point in coming back? 1. Going full circle. 2. New perspectives of the beginning and where you are now. 3. Never leave something incomplete. Really, that’s three ways of saying nearly the same thing. Returning to the beginning always brings fresh perspectives which, when you’re …
Visiting Mundanity: The Value of Travel for a More Fulfilled Life
Two years ago, I started my UK adventure in the small town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. It’s the sort of middle of the field town where public transportation consists of trains one every hour to larger centres like Ipswich, and otherwise, you really need a car. I managed well enough though, still getting …
The Value of Visiting Museums
Museums… Make your jaw drop the first time. Give you sensory overload. Contain room after room, like the Never-ending Story. And sometimes they begin to look all the same. For example… The Enlightenment Room at the British Museum is an endless hall of collectors bits. I figured this out after a month and a half …
Cardiff: City of Curios
Some people don’t know where Cardiff is. Most people don’t particularly care about going there. Wales. Really? Tiny. Sidelined next to the big ones. England. Scotland. What’s there to do in Wales but see sheep? A lot of sheep? And stone circles. Lots. Also sacrificial stones. This is a park. Well, yes, there are sheep. …
Un-Becoming
As I’ve been going back through my old blog format and refreshing past posts which still speak to my present self, I stumbled on this one. I’ve been trying to find my feet with my writing voice and identity in novel format lately and this reminded me that un-becoming is a life work. It’s not …
Bicycle Adventures
You can tell a culture by the way they ride bicycles. Not on the right or wrong side of the road. That’s irrelevant to this particular case. Rather, the riding is in where they go and how they stop. Especially in how they stop. Remember when you first learned how to cycle? Getting started wasn’t …
Bath: A Tub of History
Stylish. Unanimous. Uniform. Sleek. Polished. The famous Royal Crescent. Those words and their synonyms summarise Bath. A city which looks to have been built in one era, when in reality, it is part of as many eras as any city in these parts of the world. So what makes it so special? It’s in the …
Modernism: Visit Glasgow
Most people gave me an odd look, cocked their heads and were generally befuddled as to why I would stop in Glasgow. “You’d be better off going to Edinburgh. Glasgow’s just a city,” they insisted. But then again, the Glencoe Mountains isn’t the Isle of Skye but they both fall under ‘hiking through nature.’ Each …