Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. …
Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, at the base of the CN Tower in Toronto, is a lot of fun, and the Dangerous Lagoon is the best of it. It is the aquarium’s largest …
I am usually disappointed by airport food, and by airport coffee even more. So Café Flor, on Schiphol’s D pier, was a surprise. We stopped there in May while we waited to …
We came to Street Pizza straight from St Paul’s Cathedral, which turns out to be exactly the right order of events. You spend an hour craning your neck up at a dome, …
There is a figure on the upper floor of the British Museum that stops people in a way the labels never quite explain. It stands about two and a half metres tall, …
There is one room in the British Museum where wonder and unease sit side by side. Room 18 is a long, top-lit hall lined with marble, and the carving in it is …
The British Museum in London holds one of the largest collections of Egyptian material anywhere outside Cairo, and you meet it on two floors. The monumental stone sits downstairs in the long …
I have now been to the British Museum in London twice, in 2019 and again on a cold afternoon last November, and I still have not seen all of it. That is …
Harrods in December is a different kind of crowded. Not the steady busy of a Saturday afternoon at a busy department store, where people are moving through with purpose. This is slow …
I have stayed at Sea Containers London twice. Once in 2019, when it was still in its first design era. Again this past December, just before Christmas. Both stays were in a …
I had not planned to stop here. After Trafalgar Square, the plan was to find a cab back to the hotel and call it a day. Then I crossed the Strand, looked …
Trafalgar Square in December is a different place than Trafalgar Square in July. The Christmas tree is lit. The carol singers are gathered around its base. The lions at the foot of …
I walked into the Natural History Museum on a December afternoon expecting to see Dippy. I had forgotten that Dippy had been gone since 2017. What was hanging above the central staircase …
I had expected the crypt to feel eerie. It doesn’t. The first time you walk down the stairs from the cathedral floor and turn the corner into the main chamber, what strikes …
After a morning at the Tate Modern, I walked east along the south bank of the Thames toward Borough Market. The walk takes about fifteen minutes if you stay along the river. …
