Danger on the Golden Gate Bridge

Only the blind could possibly miss the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge on a visit to San Francisco. It’s everywhere. Even when you’re on the wrong side of a hill or behind a building, it’s omnipresent – on postcards and tee shirts and coffee mugs and posters. Rather than content ourselves with the varying…

California Heaving

Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Monsieur and I were sitting in a beautiful dining room that I’d been dying to visit, surrounded by people who, like us, fully appreciate their food. We had a romantic table in a quiet corner and we’d just started the second of four tasting…

Parc Caillebotte

When I was a child, we always had prints of famous paintings on various of the walls at home. It’s little wonder I grew up with a taste for things French (including a certain man), because most of these prints were of works by French painters – from Chardin to Lautrec. One of my favourites…

The Dwellers of Descending Dragon Bay

As the Vietnamese crow flies, Ha Long Bay looks like a short enough distance from Hanoi (170km), but when you take into account the intermittent traffic and terrible roads en route, it takes a good four hours to get there, one way. Monsieur and I weren’t to be dissuaded from visiting this UNESCO World Heritage…

A Vietnamese Lesson in Crossing the Road

(Traffic in Ho Chi Minh City) Monsieur and I had seen how dense Hanoi traffic was and we’d had a brief lesson on how to cross the road from the caring concierge at the Metropole Hotel. Now we just had to do it. Easier said than done. You see, the traffic just keeps coming. It…

Hanoi – from Honking to Hairdressers

(Hoan Kiem Lake in Central Hanoi. Don’t be fooled by how calm it looks; there are tens of thousands of mopeds buzzing around its perimeter!) Flying into Hanoi saw my nose pressed firmly against the window, craning to view the Red River in all its glory. With such a bird’s eye view it was possible…

The Wedding That Wasn’t – Part 3

To read the previous instalment please click here. So far, so good. Monsieur and I may not have been walking down the aisle, hand in hand, or trying to knock our female friends unconscious with a low-flying bouquet, but we were certainly enjoying our private celebration of The Wedding that Wasn’t. In one afternoon we’d…

Bloggers support Fashion Targets Breast Cancer

On Tuesday night there was another of our Bloggers’ Meetups, this time at the Silk Route-inspired Shish bar and restaurant in trendy Hoxton. This meant quite a trek from one side of London to the other following a hard day’s work, but it helped that the sun was shining and the tubes were all working. For…

The Return of Frenchified

For a while now, Frenchified has been Stultified, i.e. on the back burner whilst I’ve been struggling with unprecedented workload and exhaustion. No longer. I miss writing about France, so I’m dusting off the blog and preparing to give it some renewed OOMPH. Thank you for being patient with my recent lack of posts. Here’s…

Krispy Kreme Kraze-y

The Epicurienne weight-loss regime was going quite well until the day a certain someone at Edelman PR (you know who you are) gave me a voucher for a mixed dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts. In a flash I found myself at a Krispy Kreme outlet, handing over the voucher on exiting a sugar-free daze and entering…

Bangkok se-date

If you ever find yourself in Bangkok, even if it’s just cooling your heels on a stopover like Monsieur and me, you should go on a Bangkok date. In our typically conservative style, there were no lady-boys or she-hes involved in our Big Night Out in Bangkok recently. Nor did we see the need to…