A Lady in London

Over every August Bank Holiday weekend since 1966, London’s Notting Hill neighborhood has turned into a giant Caribbean extravaganza. The Notting Hill Carnival is Europe’s largest street festival, and I always miss it because I’m traveling.

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I wanted to visit Avignon for ten years. When I studied in Nice my teachers used all sorts of stories, songs, and rhymes to teach us French. There were the Tintin cartoons, the “Champs-Elysees” song, and many others. One of the most memorable of these was the nursery rhyme about a certain bridge in Avignon. ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon,’ it went, ‘on y danse, on y danse’. There we dance, there we dance.

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Last week I got two very exciting invitations for press trips to Europe. The first was for the Eurostar Explorer Train, which would take me to one of six cities in either Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, or France. The second was for a business class flight to Berlin to celebrate the launch of an airline’s fifth daily flight from Heathrow to Berlin Tegel Airport.

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If you drive from Bratislava to the High Tatras, make sure to have your camera ready. The scenic road runs alongside green farmland, picture-pretty church spires, and bucolic rivers. The best stretches even go by castles. Lots of castles.

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Bratislava surprised me. When I studied in Prague years ago my professors told me and my fellow classmates that we should all go hiking in Slovakia, but that we should skip its capital city. Several students ignored their advice and did the exact opposite. They came back with tales of a small city that paled in comparison with its Czech counterpart. They assured the rest of us that we shouldn’t go.

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Every good London neighborhood has a butcher. From the tiny ones in remote pockets of the city to the large ones in central London, they all have a shop with big cuts of meat hanging in the windows. Some are basic butcher shops that sell meat behind a glass counter in an otherwise bare room. Others have gone gourmet, incorporating organic cheeses, fine wines, and other foodie products.

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My boyfriend is an aviation expert. He’s one of those people that can look into the sky, see a speck of a plane, and know exactly what kind it is, what airline it belongs to, and what the best seat in each cabin class is.

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It’s been awhile since I last did a post-by-numbers, so here’s a numerical recap of my weekend in Kent.

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This morning I realized that Sunday marked the three year anniversary quitting my hedge fund job and beginning a new life in London.

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After spending last week in the beautiful Lake District, my mother and I felt a bit sad to return to London. To cheer ourselves up, we decided to go for afternoon tea at The Berkeley in Knightsbridge. The hotel is famous for its Pret-a-Portea service, which they describe as “fashionista tea”. Inspired by the current season’s runway shows, everything from the the cakes and cookies to the teacups and saucers is beautifully on trend with the latest fashions.

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The Lake District is best known for hiking. Trails wind up mountains, though sheep-filled pastures, and along mirrored lakes. Every village in Cumbria from bustling Keswick to tiny Grasmere has at least one outdoor goods shop that caters to the mountaineers that flood the Lake District every summer.

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When the TransPennine Express pulls into Windermere train station the first thing the uninitiated notice is that, despite being in the Lake District, there is no lake. A mile up the hill from the lake of the same name, Windermere is a hill town if the Lake District has one.

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I have a secret. I’m an in-flight magazine junkie. BA High Life, American Way, you name it. But the Eurostar on-board magazine just might be my favorite. Why? Because it really only covers three destinations and I’m always going to one of them.

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