Archive for the 'Travel' Category

Eating Out in Budapest

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

Café Gerbeaud: This Grand European café is the perfect place to watch the world go by while enjoying mouth-wateringly delicious cake and excellent coffee.
Menza: Sublime traditional Hungarian food is served in a popular restaurant with chic retro decor. The house wine is recommended too.
Rézkakas, 1053 Budapest, Veres Paine u.3: Traditional setting with live “gypsy” [...]

Eating Out in London

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

Breakfast, Brunch and Light Lunch

Fuzzy’s Grub, 96 Tooley St: This café’s speciality is a large flat bread roll/bap filled with succulent roast meat, roast potato, yorkshire pudding and vegetables, complemented with a delicious red-onion marmalade. Also does full English breakfast and impressive looking salads.

The Greencoat Boy, Artillery Row: Their “Big Ben” burger is perfect hangover [...]

Bandipur National Park

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Bandipur National Park is about three hours drive south of Bangalore and was recommended to me by some colleagues as being a good two-day break from the hustle and bustle of the city. I arrived around lunchtime and was shown to my cabin which was (as expected) fairly basic, but beautifully decorated. After lunch I [...]

Return to Bangalore

Saturday, June 9th, 2007

Clearly my previous month-long business trip to Bangalore cannot have been too psychologically scarring since I was quite happy to volunteer to return for another three week stint. Sadly there has been little excitement to blog about in this trip—having too much work on is hardly thrilling material to write about—and this time I am [...]

Western Australia

Friday, May 18th, 2007

When a country gets as much sun as Australia does, it becomes very easy to take gorgeous-looking photographs such as these from our seven day tour of Western Australia. In fact, the sun was so incredibly strong that a lot of the photos were really over exposed and had to be corrected.
While I have previously [...]

Pictures from Sydney

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

Sydney has many famous beauty spots (photos), but I think my favourite has to Balmoral Beach. Sydney is famous for its beaches, but this one has something the others don’t: an Edwardian Bathing Pavilion which has been converted to a classy café serving excellent coffee and quite possibly the best breakfast in Sydney—and for a [...]

It rains five days a year here, and today is one of them!

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

North-western Australia is pretty remote: we saw our last traffic light 3 days ago, and driving at night becomes a battle of the wills between the driver and the members of the local wildlife who regard mini-buses as objects of curiosity and wonder… Since I’m not driving, it’s all great stuff!
Today we have reached the [...]

Drinking in (and around) Melbourne

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

After Sydney’s impressive harbour and beautiful beaches, it would easy to be disappointed with Melbourne which has few obvious tourist attractions. However, while Sydney is a stunning supermodel, Melbourne is a multi-layered “onion” of a city, each new exploratory trip reveals new layers: hidden gems of classy shops, chic food markets, interesting cafés, and funky [...]

Too busy travelling to blog

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

I have been in Australia 6 days now, and I really have been too busy to blog! I have taken a great number of photos though, so perhaps I will be able to provide a photo-based retrospective, instead of the running commentary of my last trip.
Anyway, the story so far is that Sydney was [...]

Balkan Skiing

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Last year I learned to ski at the Bulgarian ski resort of Pamporovo. It was great: lots of snow mixed with some gloriously sunny days, and fun nights out. Pamporovo is quite a small resort though, and by the end of the week we felt we had exhausted the runs suitable for our level, and [...]

“Downtown” Bangalore Revisited

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

This weekend I took another trip to MG and Brigade roads, as I was sure I had not seen everything on the previous visit. The trip was an altogether more enjoyable than previously: much like London’s Oxford St, Brigade Road is not nearly as crowded on a Sunday morning compared to later in the day, [...]

Another side of Bangalore

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

Bored of the restaurants near the apartment, on Monday night I took an auto out towards one of Bangalore’s best hotels, the Leela Palace, in the search of some nice food that hopefully wouldn’t poison me.
On reflection, it’s entirely likely that the probability of being killed in a road accident during the 20 minute [...]

Exploring Bangalore

Sunday, August 13th, 2006

Today was the first day since I arrived that I have had chance to really explore Bangalore. It’s a sprawling city, but the auto-rickshaws make getting around very easy (once you get used to the way they drive over here!). My first stop was the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, founded c.1760 by the British (it even [...]

News from home

Friday, August 11th, 2006

Once again I find myself reading about Britain’s response to a major terrorist incident in the foreign press, on the other side of the world (I was also absent from the UK on 11th September 2001 and 7th July 2005). It feels odd to be disconnected from home at times like these, although also slightly [...]

Bangalore Update

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

A little exploration of the area where I am living has led me to believe I am probably living in the Bangalore equivalent of Canary Wharf: there are lots of shiny new office and apartment blocks, and some amenities in the form of an American-style mall, but none of the classy lounge bars and fine [...]