These posts will be about the tours we do.
Although many of our readers seem to think we’re on a one-year round-the-world food odyssey rather than a grand tour of the globe, we just like visiting food markets and talking to chefs, waiters, restaurateurs, and food enthusiasts. All the same, I was ambivalent about visiting the tuna auction at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji Fish Markets. … Read more
“The most important thing to Venetians has always been money,” social historian Monica Vidoni tells us as we begin her Venetian Renaissance walking tour. It’s something we’re hearing often – even by Venetians – but it especially resonates as we stand on Campo Santi Giovani e Paolo where Venice’s riches are on display here, as … Read more
Venice, the city built on water, is a series of 117 islands crisscrossed by canals, connected by bridges, and surrounded by seawater. The key to understanding Venice is to get beneath the surface of the ‘City of Water’, and do it by boat. With two weeks in Venice as part of our year-long grand tour … Read more
A night getting your kicks at the Moulin Rouge in Paris’ red-light district, Pigalle, is a must-do experience for many travellers visiting Paris if the nightly long lines on Boulevard Clichy are any indication. It certainly wasn’t our first trip to Paris – we’d been visiting Paris since way back in 1999 and wrote a … Read more
That couscous could be considered Paris’ quintessential dish by one of the city’s star chefs, that an American tourist told us what she most loved about Paris was its diversity, and that a ban of the full Islamic niqab or ‘burqa’ as the French call it looked set to be introduced, were all things that … Read more