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 […]
Obsolete Serendipity
Part of the great romantic appeal about hitchhiking, particularly across Europe and borders and linguistic and political and cultural divides, is the possibility of getting splendidly and serendipitously lost. Mind you, this fanciful prospect is the flip side of getting hopelessly and desperately lost and not liking it one bit. I propose a compromise — […]
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 […]
Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves Part I
European travel for North Americans is often an endless chain of intense quaint. Adorable little wedding cake houses in Belgium that are still lived in. People who are made heads of state because a direct ancestor had another, slightly less direct ancestor beheaded. British police helmets and French police sirens. And the gypsies. Particularly the […]
A Moveable East
The eighties were such a different time. The Soviet Union was a thing. The Republicans were the party of fiscal restraint. Concorde was losing money at almost three times the speed of sound and America had reuseable spaceships. The North American economy was booming and all Europeans dreamed of was a “green card” or, failing […]
4 Hours Later
The indie zombie flick, 48 Hours Later, managed to film downtown London, including Westminster Bridge, in a manner that made it look completely deserted. How did they do it? Simple, they waited until London was completely deserted. Even London, home to eight million people and, at any given time, another million tourists, looks empty at […]