Masked

I'll be staying in and getting cozy watching movies with husband to ring in the new year. However, a masquerade ball in Venice sounds like something to add to my bucket list. This is Glamorous gives the rundown of what to expect.

{all images via This is Glamorous}

Layover

I want to be Anthony Bourdain. The End.

I want a re-do in italy. this time slower.

Window Seat

Go read this beautiful post about traveling by train in elegance and style.

The Orient Express, from London through Paris all the way to Budapest is definitely on my wanderlust list.

But, now slightly more attainable, I have added the Royal Canadian Pacific to that list.

{all photos and links via This is Glamorous}

a moveable feast

Cousin and I saw Midnight in Paris yesterday. Let me start by saying Woody Allen manages to capture the best, often underrated, simplest and most beautiful aspects of a city and push them to the forefront. (like with Barcelona and New York City). His movies are always a hopeless romantic's best fantasy. But I think what hit me most about this one (more than blowing my savings and buying a ticket to paris), was:
a. Nostalgia is not inherently a bad thing but with it must come a healthy foundation in the present and willingness to look to the future.
b. I need to take more risks. I need to step away from my comfort zone. One of my biggest fears is complacency.
Hmmm. Time to contemplate.
Also a round up of some of the gorgeous stills:

c. be more cultured. read more, learn art history and figure out how to look way cuter next time I'm in Paris.
d. walk in the rain.

remember

Hi friends, my dear uncle is getting married today! So I am off celebrating with the family. I will return with more tales of my LA vacation but for now I want to leave you with this:

I collected at least one postcard from each city I visited in Europe. This is currently hanging above my desk, directly across from my bed. Two years ago I was settling into the dorms at Cambridge and getting ready for a road trip to Scotland. I need to start saving my pennies.

blooms and bruges

I have a friend who lives in Belgium, and we were trying to add it to our Europe trip but just didn't have the time (so he came to visit us while we were in Dublin instead!). But Belgium is another place that keeps moving up my list. Fiance and I saw In Bruges a while back and loved it. The canals and ancient stone buildings, big town squares. Everything I love about old European towns. The subject matter itself is brilliant, so much depth, and yet there were some very funny parts. Definition of a perfect dark comedy. But the whole thing takes place in Bruges, Belgium and I fell in love, despite Ray's (Colin Farrell) deprecating remarks about the town.

(i love the taglines and subtitles in the poster: "In Bruges (it's in Belgium)" and "Shoot first. Sightsee later." brilliant. via imdb)

I just found these articles about a carefully arranged display of flowers in Brussells. No soil, not planted, just placed directly onto the ground in the town square. It looks like a beautiful, bright tapestry rug. Love!

Not to mention I love Belgian waffles. I hear there are street vendors everywhere. And a rumor that french fries were invented by the Belgians (french describes the way the potato is cut)...considering french fries are one of my main food groups, thank Belgium!

jealousity

I finally had some downtime and have spent the better part of the evening going through Marie-Eve's European adventure on Lake Jane. She and her husband took off from their home in Montreal to travel for 3 months. Including a whole month in Spain. I'm going backward in time and I'm only on their time in Barcelona, which was the end of Spain. There was Carcasssone and Aix-en-Provence, France, London and 3 weeks in British Columbia. Much to my delight, they are definite foodies, so there is plenty of delicious drool-inducing photos along with scenery shots. I've already bookmarked half a dozen of her posts to my travel folder.

salvador dali

things learned from watching "Little Ashes":

-Spain is still definitely on my must-see list
-especially Andalusia and Catalonia. I love the moorish influence in architecture and decor.
-Salvador Dali is insane...insanely eccentric and awkward and crazy and fascinating. (wiki furthered my education on the subject)
-i absolutely do not get/understand or honestly really like surrealism or cubism. but it fascinates me. does that make sense? my mind is so incredibly logical, analytical and black and white, art like that just cannot be comprehended by my brain. I would choose abstract over surrealism. but i love having a peek into the way someone else's mind works.
-which brings me to my next point. i'm insanely inspired right now to learn about/view more works of art and poetry and films. museums need to be in my very near future.
-robert pattinson is actually a very talented actor. i'm dead serious. it's good to see him in a role where he is not playing eye candy. especially with this mustache:

Bon Appetit!

I finally got around to watching Julie & Julia this weekend. One one level it simply appealed to the sappy romantic side of me. But on another level my mind was being pulled in a million different directions
a. can time travel count as a part of this blog? Because I'd really love to visit paris in the late 40s/early 50s. yes please.
b. I remember watching julia child's cooking show late at night at with my grandmother. Meryl Streep sounds exactly like her. she's an amazing actress. Was she truly that joyous, positive and loving? I feel like Julie, I need to be more like that. To bring out the best in everyone, to not sweat the small stuff, even if that means dropping food on live television.
c. I CAN cook, if i have the patience and time. I've never attempted anything too crazy but I do want to try. I want to have sit-down meals with my future family.
d. I need to engage in more food-centric travels. Culinary experiences are very important to travels especially to places in other cultures and foreign lands. I'm sad to admit I erred on the side of budget-friendly and mostly safe when it came to trying foods in Europe.

Let's see, NEW things I tried?
-Traditional English Breakfast: consisting of beans, egg sunny side up/poached/ half a tomato, sausage (and not american style sausage), "bacon" (that was really just a fried slice of ham), and a mushroom.

(AWFUL, i'm sorry England. I love you to death, but the only native dishes that are good are served at tea houses and consist of sandwiches, scones and cakes)

-Indian Food: of course we ordered the NON-spicy items. and I love naan. but we already knew I'm a bit of a carboholic.
-English Breakfast Tea: I know it's nothing crazy, but I had never put milk in my tea before! and I sadly didn't discover this until the last week at Cambridge, so I had been ordering peppermint or chai tea the whole time.

The rest of the time we stuck to standards. The best meals I had were Italian. There was a spectacular hole-in-the-wall Italian place called "il positano" in Edinburgh. In Bath we scored at another delicious pasta place. We ordered pizza and creme brulee(the best EVER) at a french restaurant in Montmartre where the waitress didn't even speak english. (and of course we ate crepes for pretty much the rest of our meals in paris...)

In Italy I was content to eat pasta/pizza three times a day.

And gelato. Oh gelato. I could never get tired of that.

The other restaurants that stuck out were Chinese. Typical American right? Chinese in Soho, London (duh),

Chinese in Edinburgh, Chinese in Dublin (with these odd prawn flavored styrofoam-y chips. The Europeans love their prawns! I did not try the prawn cocktail potato "crisps" in England.) Plus an amazing noodle place in Cambridge called "Dojo's". Discovered far too late into our stay there, it served every type of asian noodle dish you could possibly imagine, was super cheap and fast.

Things I didn't try:
curry, spicy Indian, Falafal, basically any other ethnic dish (which London is FULL of), any truly authentic french dishes, no haggis or black pudding for me in Scotland.
(why must UK food be bland, starchy, greasy and gross??? - case in point "sausage and chips" in Scotland...I had fish and chips in London and it made me sick)

In my future travels I would love to plan a whole trip around just eating, not sightseeing, just restaurants. I would love to go somewhere that offers one day to week long cooking classes. I know I don't have to go far, I've read about places in even Napa Valley that do so. I loved in Julie & Julia when Paul asks Julia what she really enjoys and she says "eating. and I'm really good at it." I enjoy eating with company, relaxing and slow meals, enjoying and savoring every moment and taste.

one year ago

one year ago i got on a plane.
i dragged my luggage through here:

i wandered around this place on my own:

where i met new friends:

then onto here:

i consumed a lot of this:

my heart aches for it sometimes.

I MISS ENGLAND

the hiatus is gonna last a little longer as school has bombarded me right before finals of course.

but i had to share this and the sheer brilliance.



i wish i could be annoying pedestrian on abbey road that british drivers want to run over...

alternative transportation

i haven't disappeared. life just got in my way.


(giancarlo rado via her)

technically this is treviso. but it makes me wish for that one long night in venice.

the airport bathroom with no toilets (only holes in the ground), getting dropped off by the bus and not knowing where to go, ridiculous water taxi prices, discovering the water bus, the positively lovely hotel booked the night before (at a price...), a room with a window above a side alley canal, and if you looked sideways you could see the grand canal, the only english channel on the tv was pre-olympics coverage, the delightful breakfast the next morning and the adorable older folks on holiday from england.

i would love to see those canals in the fog. so dreamy. and whomever says that it smells like sewage in venice is a liar. i was there in the heat and humidity of august and it was perfection. you don't even mind the spray of canal water on your already sweaty skin as you ride the water bus up and down the grand canal with your 14 hour cheap pass because you couldn't afford a gondola.

saving the world?

so i'm taking an environmental policy class right now. and it's FASCINATING. not so much "let's save mother earth" hippie stuff, but "everything is interconnected and is affected by everything else and our very society is on a downhill slope due to anthropogenic climate change unless we start making some drastic changes". it's a little overwhelming at first. but it's becoming clearer that even the tiniest changes will have an impact and be able to spur a chain reaction.

it did however instantly spur an intense desire to get out of my current surburbian location and move somewhere where i don't need a car and can ride a bike/(good) public transportation. (a more in depth post about that later). since moving isn't an option at the moment, i want my next car (the first one i'll buy myself) to be some sort of hybrid. heck, i'm even embracing the smartcars that we all made fun of in europe. biodiesel reduces our dependence on fossil fuels...BUT it still pollutes and with so much corn/grain going toward fuel now instead of food it's causing other economic problems.

it gets better. apparently the US government was one of the only main countries that didn't join the kyoto protocol in 1992. it was because china wasn't joining and they thought it would hurt trade or something lame like that. we're at least one step behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to legislature concerning environmental regulations. which is weird, because the people and celebrity culture are totally on top of the "green fad". there was a great article in the Guardian yesterday about regulating the fashion industry because of "trendy" and "throwaway" fashion is contributing huge amounts of waste to landfills. England has its own "Minister of Sustainability" in parliament. I'm pretty sure we don't have anything like that here.

for once the bandwagon is doing something right for humanity, jump on it America!

recommended reading:
Plan B 3.0, Mobilizing to Save Civilization. By Lester R. Brown.

barcelona

i mentioned the movie "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" in my last post and i feel the need to expand. it was such a beautiful film. first off i'm a HUGE fan of woody allen, love his style. scarlett johanssen and selma hayek are great and i'm becoming a fan of Javier Bardem. There was a bit of controversy apparently because Woody accepted money from Spain's tourism board. but i think it was worth it, that movie makes me want to brush up on my spanish and catch a flight to barcelona tomorrow morning.

i've never really had the desire to visit spain. to me it was another beautiful old european country, but there are plenty of those and i didn't feel any ties to it. plus i'm not a fan of warmer climates. a couple of my friends went to barcelona over a free weekend at cambridge, they loved it for it's beach resort type atmosphere (although i hear the men are outrageously crass and creepy...), again not quite my style.

but the movie painted barcelona in a whole new light. i'm ready to wear loose, comfy neutrals, let my hair hang au natural and spend warm balmy nights drinking wine, sitting at an outdoor cafe listening to the sounds of spanish guitar (one of my guilty pleasures is carlos santana...;D). i want to visit all of antoni gaudi's works, and the picasso museum, and the seaside carnival and art galleries and street markets.

here's some film stills to convince you:







(found here and here)

Oh! Darling

so one place on my list of things I didn't get to see is Liverpool. Basically to see home of the Beatles.

the Magical Mystery Tour is definitely one of those cheesy tourist bus trips that i would not mind taking in the least bit. even the bus itself is cool!

aqui

Here's the tour website.
to be able to have seen real places of song inspiration like penny lane and strawberry field...how magical it would truly be.

here

and now for a moment of failure as both a small and (sadly recent) Beatles fan and as a human being in general. I for some reason was under the impression that Abbey Road was in Liverpool not London...
It was much later that I discovered that dear Abbey Road was a mere 1.7 miles from the hostel i stayed at for 3 nights upon first arriving in London.
fail.

via

once again

Paris will not leave me alone.
I see images like this and feel like i've never even been.
it's not that i'm ungrateful for the experience i had.
i just have a sense that there's many secrets that i did not discover there.
that paris has 2 doors and i missed the whimsical, sophisticated, romantic one.

(hermes ad found here)

(Dior ad found here)

(Dior ad found here)

I want to blend in with those classy, sophisticated French women.
With ubiquitous style and an air of confidence.
whether stopping at a cafe on the champs elysees,

(found here)

or strolling through the jardin de tuileries,

(found here)

or just running errands in the city a la geraldine saglio,

(found here)

and for more Paris lust, enjoy:

Dior ad campaign directed by Sofia Coppola

a place i dearly miss

just around the corner from pembroke college was a darling little boutique called ARK.

right next door to auntie tea's restaurant, it is so quintessentially english. i'm usually not one for pink and girliness galore, but this place had a wonderful subdued vintage vibe and made me feel like a little kid in a toy store. i visited a couple times a week. i spent hours wandering that tiny 2 story shop with the spiral staircase.


one of the things my writing professor at cambridge said to us was to keep a small notebook on you at all times to record various sources of inspiration. whether it was a snippet of overheard conversation or a really delicious meal, anything that peaked your interest could be used later on as part of a story. additionally, if we saw something inspiring, she urged us to photograph it or purchase it (within reason).

i wanted to buy all of ARK. so many little trinkets and treasures that one doesn't quite need, but would definitely make life a bit more enjoyable.




one lovely find was the work of designer Cath Kidston. She designs vintage inspired fabric/textile patterns and uses it for various clothing and household items. i had to savor the adorable-ness with a vinyl coated passport cover. there were tote bags, umbrellas, backpacks, rainboots and loads more all decked out in her precious little patterns.




there was this postcard. such a lovely artistic montage in both color and style that i am not normally attracted to. i snapped a photo and visited it many times and now i kick myself for not buying it.