Happy New Year: 2024 take 3

We spent the remaining days of Italy back in Vicenza.

My very clever mother-in-law made afternoon tea and crème brûlée for us – amazing! Cakes on the top layer were from a local patisserie.

We went to see the fabulous lights in Vicenza town centre – beautiful as always. It feels so magical and they are everywhere.

We had hot chocolate which in Italy means thick and can be eaten with a spoon. I much prefer this to the hot chocolate that is common in the UK which is usually also very sweet.

We headed to a park where there ...

Happy new Year: 2024 take 1

Well, I went back to Manchester for Christmas, got a chest infection and it all kind of ended up as a blur in my head. We managed to get to the theatre at Home MCR to see Little Women and it was great. It’s one of my favourites anyway, so I was pretty much guaranteed to like it.

After Manchester, it was off to Italy and we spent New Year in Turin.

We drove over from Vicenza and stopped off at an outlet on the way – I didn’t buy anything but we went to Venchi to have a ‘ ...

Manchester: Castlefield Viaduct, pizza and Manchester Museum

Back in town and today we had booked to go to the Castlefield Viaduct. I used to think Castlefield was miles away and would refuse to go to that part of Manchester. It’s about a 15 minute walk – how lazy!

You don’t have to book if you don’t want to do the tour, you can just go. We wanted to do the tour (only about 5/10 mins) and there were some people who just joined on the day. It’s aiming for similar to The High Line in New York. The lady giving the tour said part of the ...

sweltering in the hot hiroshima heat: day one

We went to Hiroshima last week – Thur 27th – Sat 29th July. We got the shinkansen from Tokyo Station at 7:30 and arrived in Hiroshima at 11:27. It was hot! It said it was the same temperature as Tokyo but it felt boiling. We got the bus (we could use Pasmo) to the hotel ANAクラウンプラザホテル広島・Crowne Plaza – ANA Hiroshima, an IHG Hotel (it was a really nice hotel).

We headed off to have lunch, we’d decided to have okonomiyaki the Hiroshima style which neither of us think is that good but kind of felt like we had to. We ...

2022 golden week trip to hagi, yamaguchi: part 3

stone lantern with purple azalea

Day five and we were temple hopping. We started off at Daishōin Temple・大照院 which has a lantern festival in August and is a very pretty time to go.

Then we headed back to ‘town’, to go for lunch at CotoCoto. They had pictures of a vegan lunch menu on their instagram, but unfortunately when we went, the lady said that the person doing those had left, so they’d stopped doing them. We just ended up getting drinks – it was disappointing. The shop itself is really nice and they have a beautiful garden at the back. If you eat ...