For thirteen years I had failed to return to Paris after a family holiday as a teenager in 1999. In fact it was the last time I stepped foot in the most-visited country in the world. It wasn’t that I really didn’t want to return to the City of Light. As a sixteen year-old and [...]
After a 12 hour trip that involved delayed flights and a re-routing coupled with your bag not making it all the way to your destination, you really don’t want to talk to anyone or explain things to someone. Unless they are a super hot, uniform-clad, beardy, hairy, butch army man who looks like they could [...]
God there’s nothing better than a good list to start a heated debate. Whether it is about the finest painting of all time, to greatest Star Trek episode or even the best drag queen ever on Ru Paul, they seem to delight some and aggravate others. I mean ANY list that omits my favorite song [...]
Ah Berlin! The recently restored (in more ways than one) capital of Western Europe’s largest economy,. It is a city that for over a century has been a welcome home for misfits, artists and political dissenters creating a city enriched in various nightlife options. Today is no different. While still famed for its hedonism some, [...]
Belgium, that anachronism of a nation comprising an uneasy marriage between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia is never to be found on the top of people’s must visit lists. To some if you mention Belgium they will ask you can you eat it. To others it conjures up images of Tin Tin, European bureaucracy and [...]
As a wandering Irishman it will come as no surprise to you that I have been in my fair share of bars good and bad around the world and for that reason I feel it is time for me to share with you some of them. I hope that this will be a regular thing [...]
Ah America! That great land of plenty so it is. What a vast nation, stretching luxuriously across an entire continent full of almost unlimited bounty. Oh my dear New York; that ripe, luscious Big Apple, just like its biblical kind it beguiles you, luring you in seductively with unintended consequences. It never sleeps they say [...]
In the past two years, the movement towards equal rights for gay and lesbians to marry has gathered momentum. While the passing of Proposition 8 in California in November 2008 was a major setback, it has seemed in many other parts of the United States and abroad, the narrative of the debate has become progressively [...]
For a long time, the view of Ireland was of a wet, poor island shoved out on the edge of Europe like some ugly, unwanted member in a family portrait. It was a place of Angela’s Ashes, fornicating priests and that twat Bono. Then suddenly the leprechauns found their gold and partied like it was [...]
It will come as no surprise to many that Jamaica is a country with a bit of a reputation for homophobia. While many countries have handbags at dawn fights to get the gays to visit their country, there is a noticeable silence from the island nation of just under three million people. Instead one hears [...]
