Vienna is not a city that reveals itself all at once. Its beauty unfolds gradually, through imperial palaces and hidden courtyards, through music drifting from open windows, through elegant cafés where time …
Migration is not only a Greek story, or an Italian one. It belongs to everyone, everywhere, and it always has: the leaving, the packing of a whole life into one suitcase, and …
Bonjour art lovers! 🌸 Paris is not only the City of Light, it’s also the birthplace of Impressionism, a movement that changed the course of art forever. In the late 19th century, …
I loved the first one. Loved it enough that when a sequel was announced, twenty years after Andy first walked into Runway with the wrong shoes, I was equal parts thrilled and …
A few days earlier I had stood in front of the Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum and admitted that I had never understood it. I knew it was a Rembrandt. That was …
I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …
Hola, beautiful travelers! After exploring Madrid corner by corner and sharing so many stories with you on BubblyLiving, it finally felt like the perfect moment to bring everything together into one sparkling, …
I studied history. That is most of the explanation for this blog, and it is the whole explanation for why I will happily give an hour to one room in the Rijksmuseum …
I do not drink beer. I have said so in print before now, and it is still true, so the honest place to start is that I booked the Heineken Experience in …
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam takes a few hours to get through, and by the end of mine the paintings had stopped landing. The garden outside fixed that faster than a coffee would …
We went to Flow on the morning after King’s Day. King’s Day falls on 27 April and is the Dutch national holiday for the King’s birthday. The country spends it outdoors and …
People call the Rijksmuseum the Louvre of Amsterdam, and I understand why. Both are national collections in enormous nineteenth-century buildings, both are built around one painting everybody has come to see, and …
I do not drink beer. I booked a beer tour anyway, paid extra for the upgraded version of it, and spent an hour in a bar hidden behind a refrigerator door. That …
Every May I go to the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa. It is a fixture of my spring, and after enough visits I thought I had a reasonable idea of what a …
We went up twice during our stay. Once in the late afternoon, when the doors onto the terrace had been folded back and the sun was coming in low across the room, …
We had breakfast first, at Locals, a few minutes away, and then walked over to Stadhouderskade because the tour was booked for a specific time and the VIP one does not wait …
I crossed Dam Square four or five times over a week in Amsterdam and it never once impressed me. That is not what the guidebooks say. This is the most important public …
Amsterdam on 27 April is orange. King’s Day empties the offices and fills the canals, and by mid-afternoon most of the city is on a boat, on a bicycle, or sitting on …
I will be honest about my first impression, because it was wrong and it took an hour to correct. From the square, the Royal Palace underwhelmed me. I had come to Amsterdam …
