Posts Tagged “travel”
Ross • 7th Jun 2010 • Living, Thinking • drinking, dublin, guinness, ireland, travel
Quick thoughts from 24 hours in Dublin:
- I finally understand the point of Ryanair. If you are going to Dublin overnight, with a small carry-on case, the cheap, 50 minute flight from Gatwick is superb. Despite having discovered that you can catch the train to Dublin from London for £30, I’d still be tempted to fly again.
- The city centre is flat, low-rise and lacks the impact and grandeur of Edinburgh, or, frankly, Birmingham. If you swapped out the € signs for £s and got rid of the ubiquitous Ye Olde Worlde Celtic Font (used for everything) you could be in Portsmouth, Liverpool or just about anywhere in the UK. In Dublin, the city is less about the built environment and more about the people, who from the beggars to barmen, seem universally good humoured, friendly and delightful.
- The Temple Bar, the short drinking and partying street, is great fun. Few people from Ireland drink there: expect Brits, Americans and a surprising number of French, all drinking stout to excess in good humour and good song.
- The Guinness Brewery Tour is poor, but worth the €14 for the sample pint in the panoramic Gravity bar. A pint alone normally costs ~€5.50 in the fun parts of town, one effect of heavy Pigouvian taxes. The Jameson’s distillery tour is a much better tourist experience: better explanations, real human guides. Incidentally, John Jameson was a Scot.
- Partly because of the price of the drinks, food in Dublin seems (and sometimes is) very cheap. A full Irish breakfast can be had for €5, even in a high-end café. Oysters are €10 per dozen. However, while Richard Corrigan’s restaurant at Bentley’s Townhouse does a three-course Sunday lunch for €25, the price is the only selling point. I have rarely eaten worse in restaurant of such supposed quality: they served mango sorbet in the same bowl as walnut ice-cream, made an onion soup that tasted like melted garlic butter and even managed to find a way of taking the flavour out of roast beef.
- There is a fascinating exhibit of peat-bog preserved ancient human bodies in the National Museum, but it’s certainly not for the squeamish, and it could put you off biltong for life.
While I lack the experience to pronounce on this, I’m not sure cities are what the Irish are best at.
Ross • 7th Dec 2009 • Learning, Living, Thinking • bargaining, negotiation, taxi, travel
Via Tim Harford’s Twitter feed, I came across this interesting piece from Chris Blattman on national variation in bargaining strategies, a.k.a. how to negotiate your taxi fees. A good example of a thread where the comments add as much value as the post.
My top overseas taxi tip: When you arrive at an airport, go by foot from the Arrivals concourse to the Departures concourse. Collect a taxi there to save yourself roughly 50% of the price of a waiting taxi. (Plus you know they are a real taxi, you just saw their last Westerner fare arrive unmolested.)
Ross • 24th Oct 2009 • Learning • drugs, gringo, latin america, sex, south america, travel, violence
American-born Colin is a seasoned gringo who blogs of his new life in Latin America at Expat Chronicles. He’d just written a PDF guide for gringos. The guide is no Lonely Planet: focusing on drugs, sex, love and violence, it’s by turns lurid and sordid, with many detailed descriptions of sex and violence. For this reason, it comes across as honest, and, frankly, captivating; mixing the ethics of stabbing prisonmates with theories of Latina love-psychology. I would not, however, consider it workplace or family reading.
Incidentally, Google Reader ‘found’ this for me – suggesting that I might like it. If its recommendations for what I might enjoy reading continue to be so accurate, I may no longer need to use Tyler Cowen as my human information filter.
Ross • 2nd Oct 2009 • Learning • blog, business travel, gender, internet, travel, web
I must not have being paying attention to The Economist‘s (excellent) business travel blog because only after reading this post did I shake off my complacent but long-held assumption that Gulliver was male.
Update: After now reading this post, I am assuming that there is more than one Gulliver, or that the name is assumed by any Economist correspondent with a business-travel story.
Ross • 1st Sep 2009 • Living • biking, food, Friends, holidays, isle of wight, motorbikes, summer, travel, vacation
Helen and I spent the long weekend motorbiking around the Isle of Wight with some good friends who are also bikers. We all had a great time, and the weather held wonderfully. I can wholeheartedly recommend:
- The Lake Hotel, Bonchurch – although this wasn’t our first choice of accommodation, the Lake has some great lounges, a lovely garden and the perfect location
- The New Inn, Main Road, Shalfleet – a charming country pub in a lovely spot, with local food, good beer and raised decked area to the rear
- Cachalot Charters – fishing trips from Bembridge marina, £26 for four hours mackerelling and sea angling
- The Tea Shop in Freshwater Bay – proper clotted cream and a nice garden, although the tea was a little disappointing
- The Military Road – running along the south-west coast of the island, this road is a blast on bikes – with stunning views towards the Needles if you’re heading West
I was less keen on The Spyglass, a pub on the front at Ventnor, which had Ringwood beer and huge portions of hearty pub food, but was a bit crowded and dark; the Pond Café in Bonchurch, which had top-class food (and prices) but disinterested service, despite having only five tables; and Red Funnel ferries, which, despite good onboard accommodation and a good outward crossing, made a total hash of loading the ferry out of Cowes on the return leg. I would also advise strongly against riding pillion on the back of a Suzuki GSXR, especially after a wine-tasting. Some photos will appear on Flickr soon.
Ross • 10th May 2009 • Living • photography, photos, travel
I love getting notes like this one. They come in quite regularly. I have had my photos reprinted in all sorts of (mainly non-UK) magazines. This wouldn’t have happened if I charged for them, I’ll bet. Still, I hope one day to notice a photo I took long ago in a magazine, book or on a poster when in some distant land.
Dear Ross,
Hi, I’m Cheryl Sim, editor for Holiday Fun! magazine which is
published four times a year in Singapore by Point Media Pte Ltd to coincide with
every school term holiday.
Holiday Fun! provides parents with kids aged between 4-12 with useful info on activities to do/places to go during the school holidays.
I’m currently working on the June-August issue and will be using your images on Malacca for the next issue’s article on travelling to Malaysia for a holiday. Your photos are impressive, and I will credit you accordingly. Thank you!
Best regards,
Cheryl Sim
Editor
Holiday Fun! / Holiday Fun! Kids
Point Media Pte Ltd
Singapore
The photos of which she speaks are here. Incidentally, Helen and I loved Malaysia, although KL more than Malacca. I’m quite keen on Singapore too, although I’d prefer to live north of the border.
Ross • 30th May 2008 • Living • adventure, expeditions, Friends, travel
A quick but well-deserved round of congratulations to James, who recently managed to get to the top of Everest, raising a bit of cash for a Liberian school in the process. You can find his trip details and donation site here. The most amazing thing on the site is the photo showing Everest’s shadow. Fantastic. Hopefully James will back in London sometime for Bournemouthian drinks, if he’s not climbing something else, or trying to conquer the Polish gym market.
