a unique perspective on this crazy world

Posts tagged ‘london’

places to bring your mistress ;)

Sorry about the time travelling but the travel stories end up this way cause there are too many stories 😉  imagine it is Sat, Sep 15th


I am sitting somewhere in East London, slightly disorientated – but having a wonderful time.  I was waiting for my server to bring my Manhattan so was just checking out the venue.  I looked up at the ceiling and it’s spectacular – and unique.  It’s vaulted and filled with white beams intersecting with glass panels.  Two ceiling fans are whirling away beneath octopus shaped hammered silver chandeliers.  The cuisine is French and Malay and each ceiling fixture evokes a sense  of one of those locales.

What caught my attention though was the sparkling blue light that shines through the glass ceiling.  I’m not sure what it is.  It shines like a supernatural celestial being.

When you get old, your brain synapses with all kinds of strange connections 😉  The sparkly blue light sent me back to the 80’s and a place called – I think – The Stardust CafĂ©.

I am enamored of food – and architecture, art
 I don’t eat at McDonald’s 🙂  As a result, I have now been to so many memorable restaurants a lot of the memories have blurred together and only the truly unique experiences are easy to channel in the current day.

My friend Karen was the one who introduced me to the Stardust CafĂ©.  Back in those days I didn’t have a lot of cash for restaurants so a night out was an event.  And we were always on the lookout for a value proposition.

That was the attraction.  Karen had been there before so suggested it for our catchup session.  I was young then so maybe it wouldn’t impress me so much today.

The food was good – but it was the atmosphere that made it stand out.  The lighting was very subdued.  You walked up a staircase covered in black carpeting and lots of glitter.  The fairy dust of my Brownie years 🙂  Maybe that’s where my love for glitter began


Because it was a great value proposition, it became our meeting spot at that point in time.  Because it was in the part of town “across the tracks”, it was hard to find, you had to walk up a staircase to get to the dining room and it was filled with low lighting, mirrors and glitter, we decided on one of our visits it was the ultimate place to take your mistress 😉

The place I found in London because I got lost on my way home from Waterloo station because they were doing the constant upgrades on the Underground and the Jubilee line was down fits the same sort of bill.

But it was also a great discovery.  The food was excellent, the cocktails were first rate and the staff were lovely.  Apparently it is a family who used to manage Ronnie Scott’s.  Everyone is really friendly and the jazz is shockingly good for 5 pounds!  The plan is to do it every Friday.  It is a tiny room and you can chat with the musicians in the break.

They have only been open for a month or two so right now you can bring your mistress – but if it catches on, it might be trickier 😉

For those with no mistresses in tow, here are the details


 www.nolias11.com

p.s. London has been amazing and there are fresh stories as usual – bear with me as it might take some time to get them on line!

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artsy stuff, eating & drinking - well, travel stories

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grizzly bears, geox and her majesty’s secret service


OK, this is a little stale-dated now
 but too much has been happening
 so pretend it’s Thu, Sep 13th
  I am mostly over jet-lag so will see if I can start catching up with the storyline


I have arrived in London!  Because I was travelling on airline points I had to arrive at Heathrow via Frankfurt.  Marcel suggested had I prepared better I could have just jumped out of the plane when we flew over London and saved a lot of time.  I suppose I could have even skipped the gigantic customs and immigration line 🙂

But sadly I am not on the same terms with 007 as the Queen and I told Marcel I would only feel comfortable in a parachute if we were doing a tandem jump (James Bond et moi :))

I’m not sure if Marcel has jumped from a plane.  But I doubt it would phase him.  It’s the first time I’ve even seen someone’s scar from a personal encounter with a grizzly bear (and it has claw marks so pretty authentic!)

I grew up with the bears so heard myriad advice in my childhood about what to do if you get too close to a bear.  Apparently you are supposed to “play dead” because grizzly bears are the connoisseurs of the bush and they won’t eat road kill.  If it’s not organic free-roaming prey they know is as fresh as sushi, they will go in search of alternative fresh meat.  If it’s running away, they know it will be fresh 🙂

You may not have had a children’s game where you pretend to “play dead” just in case you need to steel yourself for that tete-tete with the bear but, no matter how convincing we could be in an empty field, we all secretly knew we would likely just run if we actually SAW a bear.

So I had to ask
 apparently Marcel passed out.  And the bear didn’t devour him.  So perhaps your body will just “play dead” without your consent.  Likely the best possible outcome.

I am a big fan of the “pod” and most of my recent business class treats on airline points have provided me with my private cocoon to drink champagne and catch up on movies.

But I love to travel.  And there is a higher probability you will meet an interesting person who likes to travel on an airplane.

We bonded when they took our champagne away before take-off because we weren’t drinking fast enough.  Conversations with strangers on airplanes are always mysterious encounters.  You can’t escape for ten hours.  But you aren’t required to converse at all.  So there is always this mutual dance between being friendly and making sure you aren’t crowding the other person’s space.

Marcel is Swiss.  He has travelled a lot.  He has lots of opinions.  And he wrestles grizzly bears for sport.  I didn’t catch up on any movies but we seemed to arrive in Frankfurt in no time.

Frankfurt airport is kind of like a second home for me but those stories are for another time.  The next few days will be all about London 2012.  I have this strange habit of arriving in cities just after the Olympics have ended.  The same thing happened in Beijing in 2008.  It’s a little like arriving at a party after all the guests have gone home.  But maybe I’ll hear some stories about the party while they are fresh.  It won’t really matter.

Beijing needed the Olympics to get the world’s attention.  London did not.  As I write this I am sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant being filled to bursting with Persian food.  It was just a random pick near the hotel but it is bringing back fond memories of Istanbul and Egypt from earlier this year.

I’m pretty thrifty so I took the Tube from Heathrow.  I’m staying in a new neighbourhood for me – at the cool CitizenM Bankside.

www.citizenm.com

Because I don’t know my way around yet, I went the wrong way out of Southwark station so I got to tour the streets of London with my suitcase.  This isn’t a tourist neighbourhood so it was more striking.  And made me think of the commentary during the Olympics about how many different cultures and languages there are in the city of London.  That will happen when you  decide to create an Empire to rule the entire world


Paris is more romantic.  Amsterdam is more freewheeling.  Istanbul is more entertaining.  But London feels like a city of the future – where the past and the future fuse.  Where, imperfectly, but with a very low level of violence by world standards, almost the entire world lives together.  I think they said 250 different countries are represented in the city of London.  It certainly looks that way is you walk in the non-tourist zones or ride the Tube all the way from Heathrow to the center of London.

I’ve been to London so many times I had an Oyster card when not all locals had one yet!  (My London friends explained it was the way to travel the Tube for those of us with thrifty Scottish genes).

In a couple of years it will be 25 years since my very first trip to London.  Many of my visits to London have been lost in the shuffle of memories and the exact details are blurry but I still have many memories of that very first trip.

At the time I had an Australian boyfriend and he was returning to Sydney and I was going with him.  But – in the interim – he was travelling through Europe as Australians are prone to do.  But I had just received my professional designation so had been living hand-to-mouth and had no funds to gallivant around Europe.

So we made a deal.  He would start on his own and I would save money like mad and join him for the last three months.

I know it’s likely hard to believe, kids, but back then there was no internet, no Skype, no mobile phones even, let alone smart phones.  So every week he would go to a European post office to make a short, wildly expensive transatlantic call.  I would wait by the land line and jump when it rang.  Not so functional but far more romantic 🙂

And I think that was part of it.   He wanted me to come for a quick, interim visit before I joined him later.  He was staying with friends in Earl’s Court so I just needed the plane fare – and a passport.  My first!

Having no experience with international travel, I thought it would be impossible.  But Toronto-London was a popular route and there was lots of competition.  So I quickly found myself on a Wardair flight to London with a tiny backpack, some travellers’cheques and a spirit of adventure.

In those days they didn’t mark the streets and it took some time to always look the wrong way for traffic – because everyone was driving on the left – but I didn’t sustain any injury.  The food was absolute crap.  But the people were lovely (yet again today some stranger helped me with my suitcase on the stairs and another gave me detailed directions without me even asking – I was just standing with my suitcase and a map looking confused :))

And then you start seeing the stuff.  St Paul’s.  The Tower of London.  The British Museum.  That is only the tip of the iceberg.  I still haven’t done everything there is to do in London as a tourist, let alone a local.  But that just gives you a reason to come back


And so it begins!  We’ll do some tourist stuff.  And we’ll weave together pieces from my enormous memory bank of the City of London – one of the world’s most spectacular and important urban settings.  Just imagine you’ve pulled the ripcord on your parachute and you and James are about to head to the bar for a martini.  Claridges, maybe? 🙂

p.s. you may be wondering why Geox?  It’s in honour of my new travel shoes.  Because I am famous for my eye-catching collection of stilettos, it would come as a surprise to many that I am equally obsessed with loafers.  Some time ago, loafers fell out of fashion and finding a pair that were non-orthopedic was like searching for pork in Israel.  So when they opened a Geox store in Vancouver I bought four pairs!  I have discovered the ballerina flat is even more versatile, possibly the perfect travel shoe.  I road tested my new Geox leopard  print ballet flats for this trip – and they are winners!  I have now been wearing them for two days straight.  With pants on the plane.  With tights and a leather miniskirt as I type this.

http://www.geox.com/collection/catalogo.asp##p

leopard print ballerinas part of Piuma collection

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travel stories

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believing your own press…

Posts have been floating around in my head but it has been intense trying to catch up with my real life… goal is to post something daily… we shall see…

Last week there was an article in the Georgia Straight about Bruce Poon Tip.  Richard Branson was also here talking about himself 🙂

Bruce is not as famous as Richard but does seem to also have a large personality.  I met him once, way back in 1992, when he was at a travel show to promote his fledgling venture – the Great Adventure People.

I knew who he was because I had been to Thailand the year before on my very first foray into the developing world – an Intrepid Travel tour of Thailand.  I had been raised in the school of safe travel – stay at Best Westerns, only travel where they speak English, don’t walk the streets at night…  And then I started dating some guy who had grown up urban in Toronto, taking the subway to school on his own at a young age.  And we went to Montreal for the weekend.  And Mike made me stay in some simple bed and breakfast that he just picked at random.  Why weren’t we at a Best Western where we would be safe!?!  Because we had arrived by train, not car, and were students with almost no cash and no credit cards…

And it was great!  The lady didn’t speak English so it wasn’t a warm and fuzzy experience but it was totally fine and cost $10!  Mike changed my life is so many ways and that lodging choice was only one of them.

I became the kind of girl whose first trip to Europe went something like this… my needy Australian boyfriend who had gone off alone on his eight month tour of Europe because we had just met and I couldn’t afford to travel for eight months called and enticed me into coming to London for a week.  I did the math and the Wardair flight would cost next to nothing, we could stay with his friends in Earl’s Court sleeping on the sofa and we could eat in pubs for a few pounds… so I got my very first passport and arrived at Gatwick with a daypack… practicing packing light for the three month backpacking journey I would join him on a few months later.

Scott got me to backpack through Europe… when it came time to travel back to Canada from Oz, I turned the tables on him and said I wanted to do this “adventure tour” through Thailand.  Having scrambled through Europe on $50 a day carrying my own pack for several kilometres on a regular basis had turned me into the kind of girl who doesn’t do “group tours” 😉  But I knew Thailand was not Europe and a little caution might be in order… so the Intrepid tour sounded like the perfect compromise.  We would travel like a local and it would cost almost nothing but we would have someone who knew his way around in charge of the official details…

http://www.intrepidtravel.com/?promo=CanadaSEM

Scott was a weenie so he was totally freaked at my choice but I told him he had two choices – come with me or meet me in Vancouver once I got there two or three months later…  I’d begun to realize that I had dealt with all the hard stuff when we were travelling in Europe and he was an appendage rather than this boy protecting me from the world so I could conquer Asia without him 🙂

He came along – but by then I realized I was the protector and he was just tagging along…  I also learned that maybe you SHOULD pay for the airport transfer… although you will never get a story that way… The tour cost about $10-15 per day so an airport transfer at $30+ dollars seemed outrageous to me.  Having never been to the developing world, I surmised that we were arriving mid-day so I had tons of time with daylight to find the obscure guesthouse in Chinatown in Bangkok where the tour began.

I am obsessive about details so I had a map for the guesthouse, the name in both English and Thai script… what could go wrong?  Maybe the fact that the taxi driver was likely illiterate… and most tourists crazy enough to just rock up to the airport in Bangkok and organize their own taxi just wanted somewhere to sleep…

So we spent the next two hours driving around Bangkok with the taxi driver trying to drop us off at random guesthouses… me asking for someone who spoke English, trying to figure out how to get out of this infinite loop… and telling Scott to stay in the taxi!  Cause we had paid a flat fee at the airport so I could have the taxi drive us around for hours…

I kept showing the driver the map and the name of the guest house but it became obviously that this strategy was going nowhere and we somehow needed to find OUR guesthouse or we wouldn’t make it onto the tour.  All my preparation started to pay off.  I decided our guest house seemed pretty close to a railway station.  And I might be able to get the taxi driver to understand THAT destination.  And at least then we would know where we were!

It worked.  And luckily I had read copious amounts about Thailand before we arrived so spied in one of the shops a map of Bangkok that had been written in English by Americans and came recommended by my guidebook.  I checked it out… our guest house was on the map!  So I bought it.  And told Scott we were going to walk toward the Chao Phraya River with our backpacks cause it appeared our guest house was on the river so it should be easy to find.

Well… that was when I learned that if you wander the poorer parts of a developing city, the signs are not going to be in English!  And some languages are easier to translate if you are an English speaker… Thai, Arabic… not so much… I just went for counting the number of streets between the railway station and the river!  I was pretty sure we were on the right street but the numbers didn’t add up… we walked past the spot where the guest house should be using the street address.

What to do?  Channel my instincts growing up in the bush… There were a bunch of vehicles in a parking space at the location where the street address would suggest our guest house should be.  It looked like there might be a river if you squinted through the morass of vehicles blocking the view.  So I boldly told Scott, “I think we need to walk through the maze of trucks toward what I think is the river and I bet we will find the guest house where our tour starts.”  And Sherlock would have been proud 😉

If I hadn’t managed to find the starting point for the tour, I would have never known about Bruce.  His name came up when we got to the Golden Triangle and we were so close to Burma (Myanmar by then) you could walk across the bridge on foot and add another country to your list.  Diane (our tour leader) appreciated how enticing it looked so she told us the cautionary tale of Bruce…

Apparently on a past trip she had a traveller named Bruce who because of his mixed ethnicity looked Thai.  Thais could cross into Burma without a problem but not the same for the rest of us.  Bruce was a bit of a brat so he snuck off when Diane wasn’t looking.  What Bruce hadn’t appreciated is that anyone will be welcomed into Burma with open arms.  He thought he was really clever.

But then he tried to leave!  That was another matter entirely, involving cash, camera equipment, bribes, etc.  Diane rescued him.  But she told us that was the extent of her largess.  We knew the score.  So if WE decided to sneak into Burma, we would have to orchestrate our own escape.  The cautionary tale of Bruce worked.  We just took pictures of the border sign.

But that is why when I read the re-branded G Adventures marketing stuff about Bruce I roll my eyes a little bit.  It does seem like Bruce is a pretty cool guy and I will likely take one of his tours at some point – but the idea that HE invented this form of travel… seriously, dude, Diane rescued your ass from rotting in prison in Burma and the concept of low key, hang out with the locals travel was pioneered by Intrepid, not by you, honey.  But you seem to be the more alpha male, beating your chest about how cool you are while the Intrepid guys are just doing their thing.  Me, I am a fan of the beta male… there is a lot to be said for self-deprecation 🙂  Richard – I really think you should turn in your passport.  You must be an American with all that self-promotion 😉

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life philosophy, travel stories

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