After such depression in 2016 caused by the brace of serial unfriendlies plus the wannabe GuruGod stalker, I quit travel completely. For the second time in my adult life I didn’t visit any new countries for a 7 month period, nor did I have any desire for anything other than honest friends and survival. But…
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Long before I had this blog, and when I was also single, back in 2004 as a student at Bournemouth University, in England, I went to a “Speed Dating night” with my friends Lock in Lee, Mad Mike and Jody. At the time, reality events and TV shows were all the rage, I appeared in…
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Readers of my blog will be extremely surprised to hear that I didn’t stay in a hostel in Warsaw until November 2016. It was my fourth visit to the city (fifth if you count a train change) and on all previous visits, I had stayed in hotels, nurses quarters or with friends. I honed in…
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My return to the gaping Polish capital city of Warsaw in December 2016 saw me reunited with one of my most visited cities (visit number 6) and with a stay in one of my favourite hotel brands from recent years – Ibis. I booked into the Ibis Warszawa Centrum. I know what to expect with…
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“This; a present from Stalin’s Reign, but you have your life again” – Jonny Blair. Most people reading this travel blog will know me as a travel writer, or as someone who writes about a lifestyle of travel. But that’s not really what writing was about for me when it all began. I started life…
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I thought recently about all the capital cities I’ve been to and how they don’t always live up to expectations. I’ve been to capital cities in about 55 of the 80 countries I’ve backpacked through and thought it was a good moment to do a top 5. I write this post from one of them…
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Well in a way, it has taken me well over three years to condense this amazing trip into words for a weblog, so here goes, and bear with me, we bunged a hell of a lot in here. This post is basically the third out of a four part 25th birthday celebration for me during…
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Back in 2005, for my 25th birthday I got pissed up in a 4 star hotel in Warsaw, Poland drinking with Northern Ireland stars Keith Gillespie, Warren Feeney and Maik Taylor. That hotel was a posh one – The Intercontinental Hotel. It fitted the occasion, but the hotel itself looked out over a building much…
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I first visited post-communist Poland in 2005, getting a train from Berlin to Warsaw. I stayed there for two nights with my Northern Irish friends and sampled only a teeny bit of the Polish culture, as I was there to watch the Northern Ireland football team and quite honestly to get pished on cheap beer…
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