You can rejoice in the fact that mobile phones have opened up gaming, making these convenient games available on a single portable device. Due to timing, technology, costs, and other factors, mobile gaming is generally considered to be the most widespread type of gaming that anyone can take part in today. Background of mobile gaming […]
Il Palio in Siena
A horse race, up close, is actually quite a startling affair, the full chaos of which one can’t entirely appreciate on television or even from the clubhouse. Up close, by the rails, you realise that in spite of their beauty and grace and haughty charm, horses are big, dopey, powerful, loud juggernauts and in race […]
Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta
Serious amateur photographers can’t help but to have noticed the sea-change that’s taken place in their art over the last decade and its legion consequences, from tiresomely hilarious face-swaps to the diabolical scourge of the text-meme but above all the dubious contention that, as of the introduction of digital cameras and photoshop and its attendant […]
Abu Dhabi Dune Bashing
If you’re in Abu Dhabi and you’re not a menial labourer from the subcontinent then you’re in the oil business and, likely, bored out of your mind. Abu Dhabi has a nice harbourfront and some beaches, some very posh hotels with maybe slightly too fancy restaurants and a very few licensed bars and clubs where […]
London Layover
If you’ve got a layover at Heathrow, even one of those diabolical short overnight layovers where it’s not economical or practical to get a hotel, consider yourself lucky — it could be Gatwick. Or worse, it could be a train station and you’ll be standing outside waiting for it to open or tramping up and […]
It’s Not a Travel Agency
The great tourist cities like London and Paris and Rome and countless others are so tremendously well-suited to tourism that it’s sometimes easy to forget that they’re also cities. People live there and work there and use the same mass transport to get from home to work and back that you use to get to […]
Not a Craigslist Endorsement
This is most emphatically not an endorsement of Craigslist. I hear enough stories of people getting ripped off or having unsatisfactory anonymous sex to know better than to associate my good name with the world’s largest classified ads website. It’s purely anecdotal that I’ve had several exceptional addresses in Amsterdam entirely owing to Craigslist and […]
Couchsurfing
A few weeks ago I updated hitchhiking for the internet age and introduced, particularly, www.carpooling.co.uk. So now you know how to get where you’re going and share the experience with someone who has a car and knows how to drive it someplace you want to go. Consider this part two. You still need somewhere to […]
Communicating with the Dead
Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris sadly remains one of the few places in the world where you can view barely post-pubescent hipsters vandalising trees in memory of a musician none of them could possibly be old enough to appreciate. So by all means visit Jim Morrison’s messy, teenage tourist draw, but if you limit your […]
Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves Part II
Last week I started a guide to European Gypsy street theatre that turned into too much funny for one blog so this is part two. And by street theatre of course I mean the complex dance of swindler and victim, predator and prey, gypsy and tourist. I’m not writing this as a warning because if […]