After spending a year in Madrid and three months in London, Kate is now back in one of her favourite cities: Oxford. A full time editor and free time travel writer, Kate writes for Rough Guides and The Travel Belles as well as her own blogs, Tales of a Brit Abroad and Girl Eats Oxford .You can also find her on Twitter @katebritabroad.
Grand and stately, fun and hip – Edinburgh’s a city with more than one side. Scotland’s capital is a key fixture on the itinerary of most UK visitors, and given its mixture of history and vibrancy, it’s easy to see why. Divided in two halves by the green strip of is made up of the [...]
Kate Turner pays a visit to Bath in the UK’s Somerset County in its splendor throughout the ages. On a Saturday evening in October, I was lounging in a rooftop pool watching the sun set over Bath Abbey. Yes that’s right: Bath. In the UK – a country not exactly renowned for its warmth. [...]
When visiting Portugal’s second city, Porto, I found it was possible to escape the rat race for a weekend and return relatively refreshed, with by a wallet that didn’t feel as though it had accompanied Paris Hilton on a shopping trip. Unlike much of Western Europe, Portugal still offers travellers excellent value for money, even in the main metropolises of Lisbon and Porto.
When I was living in Spain’s largest city, I played host to a stream of visitors and developed my own Madrid tour (tailored to my guests’ interests, naturally). So in order to test the expat guide theory, here’s my guide to seeing Madrid in a weekend.
Thanks to the recent global popularity of tapas, foreign conceptions of Spanish cuisine are no longer restricted to that oh-so-famous Valencian rice dish, paella. But where does this custom of eating mini morsels stem from?
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 to work as an English Language Assistant in a Spanish secondary school, ticking ‘Andalucía’ as my ideal destination, hoping that I’d be placed in a quaint coastal town offering plenty of tanning opportunities (my cultural sensibilities were highly developed back then, as you can tell).
Later that day, I finally decided to indulge in the quintessential Melaka experience and took my own trishaw ride. Choosing the most garish vehicle I could find, I set off on an hour’s tour of the town with a friendly guide. Stereo booming with Shaggy’s Greatest Hits, I swallowed my embarrassment and sat back in my gaudy carriage.
As Southeast Asia’s most Westernised nation, with a Chinese, Malay, Indian and expat population, ‘bland’ is perhaps the last word you would associate with Singapore, yet it cropped up several times in my trip planning research. Surely there were places to visit in Singapore, an an international island with an historically diverse culture and community, that had some excitement to offer?
After moving to London two months ago, I realised I knew very little about the city. Beyond having a basic idea of how to get around, knowing what some of the major monuments are and the addresses of a few good restaurants, my knowledge was shamefully limited. I had no real idea of its architecture, history or what London has to offer its residents.
Imagine going to dinner at a stranger’s house, eating an excellent meal with a group of other unknowns and paying at the end of the evening. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But this is exactly the premise on which London’s supper club phenomenon is based.
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Silence, Color and Architecture on Lake Orta, Italy by @gomarwrites
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