Italian supermarkets are generally very, very good. Produce is usually always very fresh, and locally grown – great for the carbon footprint – and often loose, so you can avoid the plastic overload. Fish, meats and cheese are often sold in the same way – loose, unpackaged and by the weight. Same with breads and […]
To the front of the house, we have an area which is mix of concrete paving and grass. The grassed area, in particular, is a bit of a mess, as it’s where we currently park the cars. We’ve used bamboo plants to screen the garden as much as possible from the road – although to […]
Marrakech is up there as one of the craziest, loudest, most colourful, chaotic, beautiful, exhausting and intriguing cities we’ve ever visited. Hot and dusty (even in January when we’ve visited), it’s somewhere that we only do for a couple of days before escaping to the calmness of the coast, and the gorgeous Essaouira. You can […]
Sometimes, you see somewhere online and you just have to go. No matter what. This happened recently when I discovered the website for the Hotel Grand Wiesler, in Graz, in the Styria region of southern Austria. When we lived in Manchester, the thought of seeing a hotel online, in another country, and planning a spontaneous […]
We’ve decided that the not-so-bottle-green bedroom wall, is staying. Despite it not being the colour I had in my mind’s eye, we’ve grown to really love it. And a bargain of a find in TK Maxx when we went to Graz, in Austria, sealed the fate of the colour – a beautiful green angle poise […]
Bergamo, located west of Milan, in the region of Lombardy, is beautiful. Often overlooked for the more glitzy (and possibly more brash) Milan, it has everything. There is the lower, more modern town (Citta Bassa) – although, as well as your retail therapy kicks, you can still soak up the history of the town. Wide […]
Maribor is Slovenia’s second largest city, but that doesn’t mean it’s big, by any stretch of the imagination. Up until now, we’ve overlooked it, in favour of the capital, Ljubljana, whose appeal is immediate. It’s beautiful, full of well restored and well maintained historical buildings, with a winding river, fringed with weeping willows and a […]
Split by the River Esk, Whitby is one of my favourite spots on the Yorkshire coast. I always seem to have visited in the winter months, and although I am sure spring and summer are glorious (mostly!) – my impression of Whitby is of brooding and dramatic skies, and waves crashing in from the North […]
Like every room in the house, the main bedroom had a mix of natural, untreated stone walls, bare plaster in places and some parts of the walls, already painted white. Pine floorboards were untreated, and ceiling beams were in the same state. They were actually quite lovely in their naked condition, but just felt a […]
1st March marks exactly two years since we moved into the house – the renovation project in Istria which has been the most amazing journey! Two years ago today, the day before all of our belongings arrived from England – we sat in an icy cold kitchen, watching our breath as we talked, taking in […]
Our second accommodation on our weekend stopover in Padova was an apartment, slap bang in the historical centre, called Officine Cavour. Directions to the car park were great – but we struggled a little bit initially to find the actual apartment. It’s located in a small square called Piazza Camillo – perhaps the easiest way […]
When I last blogged about the saga of our TV journey, it was early January and Mauro, from T-Com had been out and had given us a glimmer of hope that we could, one day, have fixed line internet. Meaning we could one day, at some point in the future, have TV like we used […]