Travellers often complain that London is so hard to get to know. Believe me, I’m with them on that! The place is so big you’ll find that even seasoned expats only know their own little corners of the city [big ups North London!]. But with a bit of research and a few [or all!] of these…
Yes, the ever-elusive ‘how to make friends in London’ situation. It’s funny when you think about it: it’s one of the few things we actually get worse at as we get older. Since university I’ve watched my circle of friends dwindle1 with no signs of it abating. So, when I started writing this post, my first thought…
Flat hunting in London is a harrowing experience. I get a lot of questions about it from readers but I have put off writing about it because it’s an elaborate issue and it requires a lot of attention to detail. There are so many factors involved that this post will have a lot of little…
Fish and chips? Please. Real Londoners save all their calories for beer and half-price cocktails at Dirty Martini’s happy hour. That means the days are spent drinking kale and cucumber juice while shopping for new yoga pants before dining at that new paleo diet restaurant. Your New Year’s Resolution to eat healthy and lose weight…
Like many itinerant workers, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops (though I recently started branching out to pubs!). When I started freelancing I read a lot of lists about the best places to work for freelancers in London. The one thing they all had in common was that there was almost…
I’ve been reading Thought Catalog for a long time and I’ve sent a few posts their way before – to no avail. A few days ago, I sent this one in expecting the same silence I received in the past. Within a few hours, I received an email from one of the editors: Hi Alyssa,…
One month ’til Christmas, people! As much as I don’t like the cold I could never imagine the festive period without snow before moving to Martinique. I’ll be honest and say that I did hope for a tiny sprinkling in London last year. Alas, no such luck. What I did come to appreciate is that Brits…
It bugs me just a little that in the UK there are no buffer holidays between Easter and Christmas. There are bank holidays but there isn’t anything like Thanksgiving for Canadians or Americans. I suppose there is Halloween or Bonfire Night, and if you’re in London Carnival is a pretty big deal, but it’s still not the…
In Flanders fields the poppies blow. . . Yesterday I took the time to visit the Tower of London to see the poppy installation, entitled Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red. Since the 5th of August volunteers have been planting ceramic poppies created by artist Paul Cummins to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of…
“Does that give you any insight on the unifying theme?” asked Nate, a writer for Rooms Magazine. He asked me because I’m Canadian and thought I might have a bit more of an understanding of the pieces Creative Saskatchewan and curator Adrian Stimson brought to London. The cradleboard, Residential School Baby by Marcia Chikeness, caught my…
