Flash Forward

I know everyone is joined at the hip to their digital cameras these days, but here is a cool alternative.


The Fish Eye No. 2 Camera has a sleek look and versatility. It has settings for long exposures and multiple exposures. When you pair those with the fish eye lens, you have the perfect recipe for some special pictures. It's worth wait for the film to get processed to find out what happened when you pressed the button. Remember when you never know exactly how your pictures were going to turn out?

The Case of the Mystery Bones

On one of our walks around London, more of a forced march if you ask my boyfriend, we walked along the Thames from the Tower Bridge down to Westminster Abbey. On the way we leaned over the railing to look down at the banks of the Thames. There were stairs and we decided to go down and look. It was deserted down there, but we did find something interesting. When we looked closely at the gravel underfoot we noticed it wasn't made out of rocks.


It's got shells in it, coral bits, some pieces of brick, and bones. Yeah, look closely, those are bones. The whole bank as far as we walked was bones bones and more bones. C'est creepy non? My first question was, whose bones are these? And the next question, how did they get here? Well, we came up with theory. The pay toilets with the automatic doors are portals. When you put your coin in and the door closes you are sucked down the drain and delivered to the alien headquarters, which is hidden in plain view right here:


The aliens in the egg building, which is also a space ship ready for take off at any time, eat the people and then expel the bones into the river where they wash up on the shore. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Plug and Go

This is a seriously practical accessory. In these days of multiple electronic devices, you shouldn't go anywhere without your very own World Traveller's Plug Set. It includes plug adapters for North America, South America, UK, Down Under, Europe and Japan. And they plug in Lego-style to this yellow block so you can keep track of them easily. We have at least two sets of loose travel plugs and now that I have seen this one I am looking forward to losing the ones I have so I can get my hands on this neat little package. Tri-band phones, iPod chargers, and digital cameras are always ready to go with the Traveller's Plug in tow!

London Eye

Two years ago, I went to London to visit my better half while he was there for work. It was a short trip, it was March and it was windy, damp and cold, just like it was supposed to be. We got an up close view of the weather from the London Eye.


The other thing that is true is that finding good food in England is challenging. Good Indian food does exist, and I have heard tell of other good food if you are able to pay some big moneys, unfortunately my wallet wasn't that deep. I loved the city though and had a great time wandering the streets and navigating the Underground. The recorded train announcements had such soothing accents in contrast to the ragged rasping yelling that passes for announcements on the NYC subways. We had a few adventures on our London walks, including grappling with door of a pay toilet (also known as a public convenience) to keep it closed while traffic was racing by. My trip included a weekend so on Sunday we made our way over to the Brick Lane Market and then onto Columbia Road. Brick Lane was bustling with people cruising a huge variety of shops and stalls, including delicious looking breakfast spots (on the way to the market, I had the misfortune of being dragged into a scary place for runny eggs and sawdust sausages, lesson: do NOT follow London construction workers to their greasy spoon). Columbia road was magical, all types of plants were on sale, the streets were lined with green in every direction.


The plant stores were interspersed with sellers of beautiful antiques, and the winding streets felt old and cozy. It is definitely worth the hike even if you are only browsing. We wandered back that way on another day and found the charming streets shuttered and deserted.

Time Out

This clock is for people that are really going places. It has twelve sides, each side has two cities on it. All in all it covers all twenty four time zones of the globe. To find the time in any given time zone, just orient the clock so the city representing that time zone is on top. You'll be set to hop from Paris to Chennai, then call Sidney at 4am and when they ask if you know what time it is you can say "Yes!". If we have to know the time, we should know all the times! Get it here at the MoMA store online.

Eire Sights

Since our main purpose Ireland was to locate people who might be related to us, we didn't spend too much time doing traditional sight seeing. We spent a lot of time in cemetaries trying to decipher gravestones. We were fortuante to meet the local undertakers who called up everyone they thought might be able to help us. At first weren't sure where to start, we were wandering aimlessly around the village of Upperchurch when we came caught sight of this sign. We should have known that grocery stores and grave digging went together.



We did take a couple days off from the genealogy project. One day we went south to the Rock of Cashel, a historic site of very cool crumbling buildings, and then down to Cobh, one of the ports from which boats left Ireland during the potato famine (none of my relatives left from there though). Cobh is a beautiful little coast town where you can see the effects of the gulf stream currents in the palm trees growing along the sea wall. We visited the Cobh Heritage Center, a nice museum with all sorts of info about the emigration. A little farther west along the coast is Kinsale, "the fine food centre of Ireland" , where we went to eat lunch.



I had been told to go to Crackpots but it was closed, so we ate at the Cafe Blue, which has a nice cozy interior and the food was tasty if not spectacular.

On another, very rainy day, we took the trian up to Dublin. We rode around on one of those hop-on, hop-off tour buses and we went to check out the Guinness Storehouse and Kilmainham Gaol. The Guinness Storehouse is kind of like a Disney-fied presentation of the beer brewing process. It's a cute exhibit but the best part is the bar at the top of the museum where you get to drink your complimentary pint and look out at the 360 degree view of fog blanketing the city.



Kilmainham Gaol, on the other hand, was very affecting. At first I had wanted to go just to look at the building. When we got there we found that you have to be excorted by a guide and I was so glad that we were. I had only been vaguely aware of how important its role had been in Irish history. The thick stone walls keep the place chilly and damp, but you get an extra chill when you find out all the things that happened there.

Note Worthy

In general I am a fan of the good old fashioned postcard and I also still have a real live paper address book. Having to keep a palm pilot charged and relearning how to write the alphabet seemed more trouble that it was worth after a while. I have a simple moleskine address book that serves me well. A carefully selected postcard can say a lot about your state of mind while you are tripping around the world, but if you are looking for something that requires little to no thought, these travel self mailers from Knock Knock could be just the thing. They have the retro feel of an aerogramme and all you have to do is fill in the blanks. They're also available at Anthropologie.

Sky Eire

When we got back from Ireland, my mother asked me to send her a disc of all my photos. When she got the disc in the mail she called to tell me there were too many photos, somewhere around 400. And a lot of them were of the sky. But take a look at these pictures and recognize!



Everyone always tells you about the weather before you go to the British Isles, but nothing really sinks in until you have gotten battered by winds and soaked by surprise rainstorms at least five or six times in one day. It's only natural to give the skies their due. More than one person in Ireland told us that there was no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes, and umbrellas are just playthings for the wind.



When you see the rain rolling towards you it's time to button up your anorak. Don't be fooled by a clear blue sky and don't even think about trying to predict what the rest of the day will be like. If you just watch, you'll see that every sky has something to offer.

Photo Real

I wandered into Urban Outfitters today, not a place I go for clothes shopping but I like to look at their tables of random stuff. This photo clutch caught my eye. When you open it up, it has photo pockets inside. At the end of the 20th century, whenever I went on a long trip I collected a packet of essential photos to take with me. They were talismanic and they usually included pictures of my family, one of Levi - our cat, a boyfriend picture,a best friend picture, and a picture of whatever house we were calling home at the time. These were pictures to flip through and make care-worn on the other side of the world. Now in digital-land, pictures are imprisoned in i-Pods and phones, and you can carry so many, none of them seem special. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE LOVE LOVE my digital camera but I miss carrying a handful of real live photos. Seeing this little item reminded me that I still can!

More Eire

When we went to Ireland, we stayed at the Holycross Cottages in Holycross, County Tipperary (yes, it is a long way...). Definitely off the beaten path. A cosy two bedroom cottage in a town with all the modern amenities: a general store, a pub and a church. The former being attached to the latter and very full after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Thurles is nearby, a larger town with a beautiful town square and a legendary hurling pitch. That's like rugby and field hocky put together or something, we missed a big match by one day (for the real dirt on hurling go here). Our cottage was centered on a huge fireplace (very old school Irish style) and my father loved stoking the peat-brick fire every night. The lady at Croke's (the general store) laughed as we came back day after day for more peat, apparently the Irish don't burn much peat anymore, she thought we were quaint.

Build Your Own Guide

Moleskine has these new Citybooks. They have maps and basic city information along with blank tabbed pages for you to fill in all of your favorite food, hotels, sights, and boyfriends in London, Paris, Barcelona and other major cities. I haven't used one yet but it seems like it would be a great thing, especially for a place you are visiting for a second time or go to regularly. Doing away with clunky guide books is always my goal. I gave a Rome Citybook to my father for Christmas, he'll be coming back to the US at the end of the month - I'll have to get a report. If he didn't use it ... he'll be in trouble! In New York I have seen Citybooks at the Conran Shop, one of my favorite places to spend an empty afternoon.

Cover Your Passport!

I have a one of these with a different picture on the front (mine has a giant stag on it with huge antlers - it makes me feel very majestic!). It is good looking, sturdily made and has card slots - perfect for carrying frequent flyer cards, so you are more likely to give the check in agent your FF#. Get those points! This passport cover is available at Flight 001, an all around great source for travel necessities and frivolities.

My Eire

I am going to start my blog with some pictures from a family trip to Ireland to find our roots. We found them here:



This is the tree on Cody Hill, it belongs to Harry, my third cousin once removed, who we found after an exhaustive search and much tea in the homes of generous strangers. Harry wants to bulldoze the hill and sell the gravel. Hopefully he hasn't gotten around to it yet. He laughed when he saw me taking pictures, beauty for me, cash for him.



We had tea and biscuits with Harry and Ned, in front of their coal burning stove. A Christmas ham is boiling away in the pot on the left.