i hate my blog. and that's okay.

I feel like I've been blogging forever. In fact, I have been blogging forever. I was one of those annoying people on Myspace who wrote bulletins and blogs. I had a Tumblr where I amassed a stupid amount of followers. A LiveJournal. Countless recreations of this blog right now, where I've been posting and "relaunching" since 2008. None of the blogs has ever "taken off" (I hate saying that, keep with me). That's been totally okay, I've blogged for me. At the very least, the blog posts were always a good way of storing photos and memories - especially as I always had an incredible talent for breaking whichever laptop I used, which was great as I also had a habit of never backing anything up. 

I stopped blogging for a long time from around 2013 onwards. I'd just moved home from living in the Netherlands and I was unemployed. I wasn't doing anything, apart from schlepping from one job interview to the next, with the added joy of heading off to the job centre. When I first moved to London, I just couldn't find the time to blog. Then I worked on the general election, which involved twelve-hour shifts, six days a week for around three months. I couldn't find time to sleep or eat let alone time to update a blog. And anyway, I wasn't doing a single thing worthy of blogging.

a little visit to copenhagen | denmark

Apologies for my fourth post on my trip to Copenhagen - possibly a little overkill but it is such a wonderful city it wouldn't have given everything justice. If you're interested, you can see my post on Torvehallerne Food Market here, Freetown Christiania here and Nyhavn Christmas Market here. Another apology has to be the sheer amount of doors I took photos of when I was in Denmark, but to be fair I don't ever pass on the opportunity to take a photo of a pretty door when I'm in London so Copenhagen wouldn't be any different! 

We picked an AirBnb for our trip, and we stayed in Islands Brygge. If we're completely honest it isn't the most interesting area of Copenhagen, but it was pretty convenient and a perfectly lovely place to stay and really easy to walk into town. During the summer, Islands Brygge gets flooded by Danes off to do some bathing in the harbour, which I would have loved to have tried had it not been winter and absolutely freezing. We had dinner at Cafe Alma, which has mixed reviews, but I loved it and would 100% recommend.

a 2016 travel recap | lifestyle

As one of my "resolutions" (I hate that word, don't you?) for 2017 is to see more of the world, I thought it would be a good idea to have a little look back on some of the places I managed to get to in 2016. Not as many as I would have liked, but I'm definitely not complaining because there were quite a few little trips - all of which I really enjoyed and were all completely different. I managed to see quite a few places in the UK too, but I'm mainly focusing on the places I went to which were across the sea in this post. 

Paris

I started off the year by heading off to Paris. I hadn't been to Paris as an adult before - the last time I went flared jeans were still in fashion and my biggest memory of the trip was the fly breaking on those jeans (the only pair I had with me) and being pretty embarrassed about the whole thing for the entire trip. This time around I had some amazing food - there was cafe gourmand, bread, macarons, custard tarts, saucisson, country pate, beef that was practically blue, frites...I could go on. We stayed in a very French hotel and I was fully converted to the beauty that is the Eurostar. You can see my posts here, here and here.

a little visit to freetown christiania | copenhagen

 

Christiania, also known as Freetown Christiania, is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighbourhood in Denmark. It began life in 1971, when a group of hippies started squatting in an old military base in Copenhagen and declared it as a state. It has it's own currency, it's own flag and it's own rules - for example, you can't buy property in Christiania, you have to apply for it, and if you're successful you're given the property. You're not allowed to take photos in various places and you do get told off (hence why I had to use my phone there, instead of my camera - that's my excuse for dubious photo quality anyway!) There are about 850 people living there, with it's own bars, shops and cafes. Old barracks have been turned into houses, nurseries and businesses. There are no cars in Christiania, just bikes. When you enter the neighbourhood, there are signs telling you you're leaving the EU. There's a completely different atmosphere to the rest of Copenhagen - there are self built homes and it's covered in graffiti. I'd never heard of it before, despite having been to Copenhagen before, until a colleague told me to go there and I knew it would have to be one of the places on my list while I was in Copenhagen.