Dalaman airport had long been a mystery to me. You may wonder why I cared about Dalaman airport in the first place, well I did, I’m one of those people who binge watch aviation videos on YouTube and reach for their phone to check Flight Radar whenever they hear the distant rumble of an airplane…
Tag: traveldiary
A King’s Fever Dream and Flaming Sausages: A Return to Sintra
I once wrote a pretty long Sintra themed entry about how I really don’t think going for a castle tour to inspect the gilded bathing quarters of royalty is worth the hassle. And then, returning to Sintra, I went ahead and very literally checked out the bathrooms of Portuguese royalty. Spoiler: they are not all…
The Ocean Was Angry That Day- Porto Diary Part Two
Since we needed to get to the centre by metro, our second day in Porto also began in the proximity of the São Bento station, and we naturally tried to land some breakfast. All the hip places along Rua das Flores had queues: there is a growing traveler’s fetish for fancy brunch spots, which end…
In Vinho do Porto Veritas- Porto Diary Part One
We flew to Porto at the beginning of summer, when rumours of impending airport apocalypse (or, as the world is going, apocalypse, full stop) were in their infancy. But if you want a taste of misery at high altitude, follow our example. Book Wizz Air. I had carefully avoided them since they cancelled on us…
Fram Means Forward- Oslo Diary Part Two
Day Three There’s an eerie quality to Easter Sunday spent in a country that doesn’t celebrate Easter that weekend. It’s a Sunday, alright, and the city is motionless and sluggish to wake, but I feel slightly out of synch, like a visitor who programmed the wrong century on the time machine. I google Orthodox churches,…
The Unbearable Lightness of Well Being- Oslo Diary Part One
Day One I try to get a glimpse of the Oslo fjord over the shoulder of the elderly Norwegian in the window seat. That should have been my seat, but in a slight outrage over the seat reservation charges of Norwegian, the airline, I only added one extra suitcase to my booking- extra luggage costs…
Food to Eat and Food for Thought- Thessaloniki Part Two
Disclaimer: You might expect, reasonably, I should add, that a post centred mostly on food and drinks would contain some photography of said items. I will therefore let you down right at the beginning. While the blog’s industrious co-photographer is an enthusiastic eater, he is generally way too concerned with consuming what’s on his plate…
Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Atatürk and A Monk Getting Pizza- Thessaloniki Part One
The plane’s path from Budapest is straight as an arrow, across the southern Hungarian plain, the whole length of Serbia, the brief interlude of North Macedonia and then one of those quintessentially Greek descents, from the sky you glimpse the sea, blue meets blue and the land seems almost secondary, an unwelcome guest among the…
A Vacation from Myself- Memories of Hydra
The English word vacation comes from the Latin vacans, the present active participle of vaco, which can mean, depending on the context, to be free, to be at leisure, or to be empty. Since Hungarian straightforwardly uses the same word, ‘szabadság’ both for freedom and vacation, and in Romanian you will say ‘îmi iau liber’,…
Our Lady of the Hot Mess- Brief Impressions of Athens
Having heard that my boyfriend was Turkish, Loukas, the Athenian taxi driver, looked straight into my eyes, took a deep breath under his mask, and imparted what he felt was a fundamental truth: Greeks and Turks are alike, and would get along just fine, if it wasn’t for meddling politicians. We need to look at…
Pocket Diary Budapest 