Like many girls, I am in a long-term love affair with chocolate, and have a weakness for fairytale castles. Imagine my delight when I happened across a small town which combined the two. Not so surprising, you might be thinking, if I were in Belgium, or Switzerland perhaps. In fact,…
I’m sure that every one who loves to travel the world has at least once experienced a moment of disappointment. You have chosen a destination because of the beautiful or interesting things you have heard or seen in pictures; you get there and all you think is: oh my God,…
My first visit to the city of Seville was not as a tourist, but as a resident of a nearby town. As a twenty year old Spanish student at a UK university, I was required to spend a year in Spain or South America, fine-tuning my language skills. I applied…
Perhaps I had some romantic notion in my head that one day I’d trade the palm trees and tropical sunsets for a clandestine kiss on the top of the Eiffel Tower, or something equally befitting of a black and white movie with a dramatic score. In Hawaii, we’re all about…
First thing in the morning the place is humming, folks wandering about the bird cages and animal pens to see if they really want that strapping calf or feisty goose. My friends were in the market for chickens that day and informed me that once they made their choices, yours…
We paused our three-week boat trip around Sicily to visit other islands, the Aeolian Islands. Named after the Greek wind god Aeolus, these seven islands are just a short ferry ride from the northeastern tip of Sicily. Sprinkled like glitter in the Tyrrhenian Sea forming a Y-shaped cluster, these islands,…
Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse, was the book which led me to Carcassonne, a town in the South of France. In simple terms, this is a time-slip, grail-quest novel, but this does it would be a disservice to say this book is just like The Da Vinci Code. Labyrinth is not…
Out of the blue a friend called & told me she had 4 free days, had found a great deal to go to Morocco & asked would I fancy to come too? I was already throwing things in my bag before the conversation was over.
This Palóc ethnographic village’s name means “Raven Stone.” And yes, a statue of raven welcomes you at the entrance of the village. The name perhaps, comes from the legend in which the lord of a castle stole a pretty maiden, whose nurse was a witch.