I am delighted to reveal that I have had my first piece for USA Today published on their website! The feature article is titled:
“How London Surpassed Paris as Europe’s Dining Capital”
And it discusses how the city has developed its dining scene to now claim its place as the true king of continental cuisine.
The piece appears within the travel section of the USA Today site, under the sub-categories Experiences and Food & Wine, and was published this Monday. You can READ IT right here!
This is my brand new infographic on the many varied dances in Spain for BEST IN SPAIN. See it all on their website.
We have some exciting news, and it has been a long time coming! Our city vacation guide for Christchurch in New Zealand, which was written back in July, has finally been published on the Expedia website. You can read the overview by clicking on this here link, or check out one of the POIs, Lyttelton Harbour, here.
In fact, Christchurch is just the latest of several city vacation guides we have created for Expedia. We’ve previously written about city destinations in more than a dozen countries right around the world, including Albuquerque (USA), Friedrichshafen (Germany), Hua Hin (Thailand), Rarotonga (The Cook Islands), Edmonton (Canada), and Hong Kong.
You’ll find a selection of our completed guides in Projects. Or click here to see all Expedia’s guides in one place.
World Words editor Joseph Reaney was recently interviewed by one of our clients, Cities Talking, outlining all the skills, tips and tricks required to compose great audio travel guides that entertain and inform the listener. Here was one of the questions…
Q. HOW DO YOU TACKLE A BRIEF TO WRITE A CITIES TALKING TOUR?
A. Cities Talking is a wonderful client. They provide a clear brief about the tour they wish to be written and have in-house researchers who send over a long document outlining each and every attraction en route. We’ll then scour these notes, pick out the interesting information and use this to create an entertaining and informative audio script. We also supplement this research with some of our own. In particular, we try to find interesting characters and dig into their personalities.
You can read the interview in full of the Cities Talking website. You will find some of the audio city guides we have written for this client, including on the beautiful European cities Amsterdam, Budapest and Prague, in our portfolio.
Often called “London’s most famous hotel,” The Savoy holds a special place in the heart of this great European city. Opened in 1889 as the first truly high-end hotel in Britain, The Savoy has been at the forefront of decadence ever since, having introduced a series of mod cons ranging from electric lighting to hot running water, en suite bathrooms to air-conditioning. Today, the hotel retains its ability to keep pace with modern luxury (every room boasts MP3 players and flat-screen TVs) while retaining the old-fashioned prestige and opulence that has seen figures ranging from Winston Churchill to Frank Sinatra pass through its famous revolving doors. The Savoy has been one of the world’s finest hotels for more than 120 years, and it’s a position it will maintain for many more years to come.
So says the introduction to my brand new Q&A piece on London’s Savoy hotel for Forbes Travel Guide/Startle.com. You will also find everything you need to know about its rooms, restaurants, location and unusual design aesthetic.
You can read the entire thing here. And later, keep a beady eye out for my hotel guides to other London giants including the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park (and its lovely spa), The Goring and The Dorchester… coming soon.
During the last couple of months, I have been employed as a Travel Guide Consultant for the renowned Forbes Travel Guide, contributing a variety of content on cities across Europe for their new online platform Startle.com.
To date, I have completed ‘Question and Answer’ projects for ten major cities throughout the continent, namely Edinburgh, Glasgow and London (Great Britain), Frankfurt (Germany), Prague (Czech Republic), Salzburg and Vienna (Austria), Stockholm (Sweden), Warsaw (Poland) and Zurich (Switzerland), and with any luck there will be more guides to come soon.
You can keep track of every contribution on my Forbes biography page.
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Everyone loves a celebrity corpse, and there are quite literally piles of them in Père-Lachaise. Renowned as the final resting place of Jim Morrison, this enormous Parisian landmark is also home to Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Molière, Marcel Proust and Édith Piaf (three guesses what’s written on her tombstone. Wrong: there’s nothing.)
But it’s not all about the famous cadavers: come for the dead, stay for the décor. Père-Lachaise’s ornate memorials, leafy walkways and lovely smoke-free follies help create a calm oasis in the frantic French capital.
You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk
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The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is, rather predictably, a cemetery for old Jews: specifically, those who snuffed it between 1439 and 1787. During this time the Jewish community was kettled into a tiny ghetto, having to stuff their stiffs into a 60-metre-square graveyard, and so over three centuries it was crammed with around 100,000 bodies. Which explains why it has Europe’s highest concentration of tombstones.
FUN FACT!!! Prague’s famous cemetery only survived Nazi occupation because Hitler wanted to preserve it as ‘a museum to an extinct race’.
You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk
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The most famous resting place in London is, without doubt, the wonderfully gothic Highgate: the eternal residence of everyone from Karl ‘Commie’ Marx to Douglas ‘Galaxy’ Adams; Michael ‘Benzene’ Faraday to Jeremy ‘Withered’ Beadle. The capital’s most interesting cemetery, on the other hand, is Cross Bones.
An unconsecrated necropolis for so-called ‘Winchester Geese’ – medieval prostitutes who were licenced by the Bishop of Winchester to work within Southwark – it is simply a mass grave for those deemed unfit for a Christian burial: the outcast dead. Now it’s most famous for a cracking Halloween procession.
You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk
I’ve recently had a travel article published in the latest issue of Shoestring Travel Magazine. It’s about Transdniestr – the last remaining communist state on the old Eastern bloc – and here’s how it starts:
“1989 was a watershed moment for Europe. It was the year when Poland, after 44 years of stringent Soviet rule, finally turned its back on the communist ideal. This act of defiance was the spark that lit the fire of revolution across Eastern Europe, and within the next three years East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania and more than a dozen other socialist states – including Russia itself – had overthrown their respective governments and entered a new era of capitalist democracy. Communism in Europe was dead and buried.
Well, almost buried. For as the world watched Poland and co. march towards a bright new dawn, no-one seemed to notice that one tiny piece of the Eastern Bloc had been left behind…”
If you’d like to read more, simply click here for the whole article. Or you can visit the Shoestring website to read the entire issue for free. I’ve also been commissioned to write for the next Shoestring Magazine, so watch this space.