Adventure planning: New York

Although the year has barely got under way I've actually already travelled abroad once and booked another trip!

I've been to Paris. Unfortunately the visit was for work so I didn't get to do anything fun, but I can't complain since I did get to be in Paris for a a few hours and have lunch in a real French cafe.
I also got to travel on Eurostar which I've not done before. I hardly even noticed that we were in the tunnel. Probably for the best as the idea of being under all that sea is not good to think about too much.

I've also got a (for fun) trip planned to New York. I'm very excited about this one. I've haven't been to the big apple since 2007! Whoop. I'm travelling with my husband this time. We had talked about going somewhere else in the US but oddly NY is a more affordable destination because of the flights.

I generally think it's good to get flights early and hotels later for good deals.

I got a different travel guide as I think the statue of liberty might still be where I left it in 2007 ;)
Last time we were there we did all the major sights so this time we are hoping to see some of the out lying areas - the hipster places in Brooklyn, the galleries and museums. We'll be going to the Brooklyn Brewery and MoMA.

Any recommendations for great places to go in the city that never sleeps?

Adventure planning: Brussels

Isn't it odd sometimes the way things turn out? Like that quote 'Life is what happens when you're making other plans' (I'm not sure who said it originally there seems to be some attribution decay see here). Last year I hadn't planned on going anywhere travel-wise. But as time went on I got severe wanderlust and ended up going to Paris.

This year I am going to visit Belgium.
I'm actually not sure if I've been to Belgium before. I thought I had on a school day trip to France, but I asked the friend I went with and she didn't seem to think we did. This was the days before digital cameras, so I probably didn't take any photos.

But that's not why I'm going. We decided to surprise my Dad with the trip as a Christmas gift, he is interested in Napoleonic era military history and this year is the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, which is, it turns out*, 15km south of Brussels.

After the success of the Paris trip I am using the AirBnB service again. I'm a little more apprehensive taking the whole family, but it should be good. We'll have a whole house to ourselves.

I've started a board on Pinterest with some things to do. Have you been to Brussels? Any recommendations?

*Isn't it shocking I didn't know that Waterloo was near Brussels?

Je t'aime Paris

A few snaps from le weekend

Paris! 
Do I need to say more? I freaking loved it. We drank wine in cafés and ate steak frites. We went on a boat down the Seine and I saw the Eiffel Tower in real life and we went up the Arc de Triomphe and looked down the champs élysées. 
And the flea market! Not the giant one. Just a fantastic street lined with stalls full of all things French. 
Macarons. Obviously. 

C'est incroyable! 
As I mentioned before this was also my first time using AirBnB. I'm pleased to report that it was a tremendous success. We got to stay in a real Paris apartment with a teeny tiny kitchen like Rachel Khoo has in her cooking programme. The location was spot on, in a nice part of town, close to several metro stops and walking distance to the River. 

Now I'm looking forward to printing some of my photos and getting my travel album together.

In other words - I enjoyed it. 

Paris travel journal preparation

I love planning for trips.

I enjoy doing all the research and finding little places to visit that are tucked away behind the main tourist attractions. Not that I don't like tourist attractions - seeing the sights is ace, but if there is a little stationery shop around the corner, I don't want to miss it in the rush!

One of my favourite parts though is putting a travel album together. I usually take a few bits and pieces with me, but I'll admit that I rarely have time to make the pages whilst I'm actually away. Recently I've been trying to do a bit of writing each day, it's surprising what you forget once you've been out all the next day.

I don't use a set book for my journals either - in fact I've done lots of different shapes and styles, my Japan album was 5x7 and bound with book rings, the Germany one was a little notebook, Italy was 12x6!

This time I've gone for 6x4. I'm thinking kraft with red/blue/yellow/green as accents. Since I'm only going away for a weekend I don't need loads of pages so I'm not picking many papers. I'm hoping the kraft cards below (DIY shop by American Crafts) will work as base pages.

Here are few if the things I've picked out ready to go:

Adventure planning: Paris

"Once a year, go somewhere you've never been before."

Dalai Lama 

I am a firm believer in visiting places you've never been before and although they don't have to be far away, I do like those kinds best. Last year I was very fortunate to visit two countries I'd not been to before. They were fabulous trips but it did mean that I didn't think I'd be going anywhere outside these shores this year!

However, I started getting the wanderlust and happened across a cheap flight to Paris, so I booked it. I have been to France before but Ive only really passed through Paris, which seems like a bit of an oversight.

I've heard conflicting views on Paris as a city, some folk say it's beautiful and romantic others that it's dirty and full of rude people. But it is definitely home of the Macaron so I'm excited to see what it's like for myself.

This is going to be the first time I've used Air BnB too, which is an adventure in itself!    

Japan musings: Akihabara

Time for another post about Japan! This time Akihabara.

Akihabara was another place high on our list of places to visit. This part of town is known for its electronic shops and is without a doubt anime capital of the world. Our host laughed at us for wanted to go there as he thought it was pretty geeky and full of maid cafes. He was right. But we loved it anyway.

We wandered around the arcades playing on 'UFO catchers' and I had a go on Dance Dance Revolution. Then we hit up the anime shops. It's a while since we were super into the animes but we found plenty to look at and buy. I found a few pockets of Studio Ghibli merchandise which was nice since we didn't get to go to the museum (booo!).

We visited Manadrake which is generally seen as a bit of a mecca for the anime geeks. It has 7 floors! Though like a lot of places in Japan it was only a very small section of the building and the stair case was on the outside. There was a doll section with some extremely pricey specimens.

I bought my new 'polaroid' camera in one of the big electronics shops. It was probably the first time that I've ever been able to do tax-free shopping! In some of the big shops in London there are counters where you don't pay VAT  (or get the VAT back) if you are from outside the EU. It's only 5% in Japan but here in the UK its 20%.

We were given a lot of flyers for maid cafes, but we didn't go to any. Instead we settled on Mister Dount, they had Halloween x Hello Kitty doughnuts! Awesome.

As it got dark all the lights came on and it looked completely different to in the day. Less pastel and more neon, but still super cool.

Japanese toilets

I'll grant you it's a little bit odd to post a load of pictures of toilets, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Before we visited Japan I had heard about the electronic toilets, but encountering them everywhere was still amusing. It's one of those things that reminds you that places are still very different from each other as the world gets smaller.

They aren't really that difficult to work out, you just don't know what it's set to do automatically when you go in the cubicle! Sometimes the lid would open automatically, or sounds would play, or the seat would warm up. Some also had automatic flush functions, which seems like a really good idea, as long as it flushes at the time it's supposed too... otherwise...

They all had bidet type options, the symbols for those functions made it pretty obvious what would happen, but I didn't encounter any facilities that wanted to do it automatically, fortunately! Apparently a good tip if you do want to use them is to make sure you are sitting down before you press any of the buttons.

One of the toilets had a little basin on the top and the tap came on automatically after it had been flushed, that was quite a useful one.

On the other hand however I saw quite a few 'Japanese toilets', these remind me rather of old French toilets, but they have a slightly better design. The traditional Japanese loo is like a hole in the floor with a flush whereas the French one is more like a shower tray. Much easier to keep your feet dry with the Japanese version ;) Sometimes there would be lots of the old style toilet, then one labeled 'western style' which was usually a normal not-electronic loo. That was mainly at parks and temples, public areas.

I prefer the ones with all the buttons to the traditional style. I'm not sure having that many options on a toilet is necessary, but I rather miss the warm seat.

Japan travel journal/scrapbook

The last couple of times I've been away I've taken a few scrapbooking supplies along with the idea that I'll scrapbook things whilst I'm still there. This hasn't really worked if I'm honest. There's never any time to do it and I can only use photos that I take with my Instax camera.

What I have found is that I like having the book there. For one, it means that it has actually been to that country/place with me. It also provides a place for me to keep all the bits of ephemera I pick up and helps me be a bit more discerning about what to hold on to (I would keep everything ever: hoarder tendencies).

The other thing I've found useful is to do the writing whilst you are there. It's a lot more difficult to write about how you felt about something before you did it, when you've done it. Obviously there is room for reflection too, you can write about what you've learned etc when you are back home.

So lets get onto my Japan scrapbook. I wanted to make it ring bound so that I could add/move pages and a size that I could put 6x4 photos in. I made most of the pages from papers in the My Mind's Eye 'Spread your wings and fly' collection. The covers are sturdy book board and I had to use a crop-o-dile hole punch to get through it!  The overall size is about 5x7 inches.

This is what it looked like before we left:                    

Empty pages.

This is how it travelled:

I keep my books in these pouches from Muji.
I stick washi tape on the outside so I don't
have to take the whole roll with me :)

Here are some of the inside pages:

I like to have a title of some kind, but I tend to leave the front cover until I get home. Choosing a photo which symbolises the trip makes it more personal and although it won't tell the whole story it generally sets the tone for the rest of the book. I love this picture. It's not really of anything, but the colours and the light take me back there in an instant.

It's not finished of course. I rarely 100% finish a project. But I've enjoyed putting it together and it made me actually print some of my favourite photos. Plus I can continue to work on it when I want to look at Japanese things, so that's a win in my book.

Italy travel mini-album scrapbook

I put together some pages about our trip to Italy. It seems a very long time ago now, but I wanted to show you some of the pages since I talked about what supplies I was going to use here.

I've been trying out different page shapes for scrapbooking. I've only actually put together one 12x12 page which is the main page size nowadays. For this book I choose 12x6 inches. It's very wide!

I've not finished the covers for it yet, but here are some of the pages:

A trip to the country

I went for a little get away with some of my lady friends recently. We don't get to see each other very often so we hired a place out in the coutryside and drank wine and chatted for hours.

The place where we stayed was beautiful and even kept chickens and alpacas. The alpacas were lovely. They came over to investigate us, but I think they were dissapointed that we didn't have any food for them.

are you ready for your close-up?

 We also visited the town of Ludlow. Some parts of the castle there date back to the 13th century. The whole town is beautiful though, very old-fashioned and full of little independant shops and cafes. I got some really tasty Mango Ketchup from the market.

Where have I been?

I've been working a lot! But I've managaed to fit in some fun stuff as well, for one I visited another country house. Actually Haddon Hall is "a fortified medieval manor house dating from the 12th Century".

It's a fabulous place. You can look round a lot of the house and gardens including the chapel; but the owners actually live there so obvioulsy you can't see their bit!

I think the chapel and the kitchens were the most interesting parts. In the chapel you can see where they had religious scenes painted on the walls. They are just outlines now, but everthing would have been in full colour back then. In the kitchens you can see huge dents in the wood where they cut the food. Apparently they used to have their meat chopped up really small as they didn't have enough teeth to chew it.

I took loads of photos. I seem to have taken one of every flower in the garden. There are some more on Flickr if you'd like to have a look.

Adventure planning: Other Amusements Tour of London

I'm quite excited about this new adventure.

In a few weeks time I'm taking a trip to London for a couple of days. I've been to London before, but there has always been a reason, like a gig or a show or for work. This time I'm going to all the places I never had time to go on other visits! This is the Other Amusements Tour of London.

I'm looking forward to going to the cupcake shops I had to walk past in order to catch trains, fabric shops which were already closed for the night and the Lomography shop - since it's my newest obsession.

And most of all I'm looking forward to trying some macarons from the top bakeries like Ladurée (the top picture) and Pierre Hermé (the second picture) maybe even PAUL,Yauatcha and La Maison du Chocolat if I don't feel sick by then...


Any other recommendations? What would you do with a day in London?

Adventures at Kedleston Hall

Today has been a gloriously sunny day. It's been about 25°C which is pretty warm for round here! In honour of such an auspicious occasion I decided to go on an adventure. Namely, to the food and drink fair at Kedleston Hall.

Kedleston Hall is an amazing country house built in the 1760s. The fair is held annually in the grounds between the house and the river. Very pretty.

I had a good look round the fair and then investigated the church and the grounds. I didn't go into the house this time, but I might go back and check it out one day when it's not so hot.

I sampled quite a few tasty things including these cupcakes (had to be done!) and some red pepper jelly (as in jam, not the dessert!).














I took lots of photos, some on my film camera; so we'll have to wait and see how they come out. If you'd like to see something a bit more instant, I've put some more pictures on my flickr.