"St Anton is the place to be, for fun, laughs and ski, ski, ski!!!" A quote from the poetic masterpiece created by Eloise and I at the end of the week. Definitely true - a wonderful week of skiing and laughing in Austria. The trip started off fairly shakily. After getting up at 5am to catch a 7am train to Geneva I was not one bit impressed when 7am changed to 20 past, which changed to 7.45, then 8, then 8.25 and I STILL hadn't left. Luckily ('lets be g...

Its funny how easy it is to forget what travelling, or maybe more so backpacking, is like. How could I have ever put my bag away? How could I have forgotten that feeling of stepping off a plane/train/bus and being somewhere completely new? This week long trip to Scotland was the result of one of my quite rare but pretty miserable 'why does france hate me?' days. Having my wallet stolen in Italy turned out to be pretty hideous when faced with re-collecting all my ...

So the french have such a reputation of arrogance, of rudeness, super chic-ness, of being ridiculously bureaucratic, stylish, sexist etc etc etc. And having lived in France for over 2 months, all the while doing some serious people observing, I’ve decided that they aren’t so much the above (apart from the bureaucratic part - that is undoubtedly and highly annoyingly true!) as much as they just really don’t care what people think. I reckon they are stylish b...

I LOVE Florence. I love it I love it I love it. I am so tempted to miss my train, find some cute appartment by the river and live out the rest of my life eating chilli chocolate flavoured gelato, amazing risotto and drinking amazing coffee while speaking such a gorgeous language! Milan on the other hand... well, it was a um... interesting experience. Quite disasterous from the start to be honest. Missing our train connection in Geneva thanks to the typical late...

The dilemmas I have encountered so far as une étudiante etranger: The 'Which Side to Kiss' question. This dilemma involves choosing at speed which side to do the peck on the cheek thing that is oh so French. Problem is, which side to go to first? Generally in Lyon it seems to be the left but then there are people who are from different parts of France or different countries where they go right… quite tricky mastering this motion without doing the 'side to...