From food and hotels, to where to find the best jenever, here’s our guide to the perfect long weekend in Antwerp Antwerp is the largest city in Flanders and a cultural Pandora’s box. It’s home to the largest diamond district in the world, whose official language of trade was Yiddish until the 1930s. It is also in this city that the printing trade was invented, and where artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked for [...]
Cochin, Kerala: The Indian town with all the beauty of Goa without the tourists The road from the Cochin airport is lined with enormous signs advertising wedding silk and jewellery shops. Is this India’s biggest wedding depot? “Saris!” was all I could get out of the driver for an explanation. But soon enough, bright pink and turquoise beach shacks began to line the road, Zen-looking men in nappy-like skirts [...]
Working women have never had it so bad: discuss Mothers have a tough time juggling everything, but should we feel sorry for them? For decades, feminists have talked about working women’s “second shift”, the extra work they do in the home after they have finished their day’s work in the office. It seems that things are much the same now as they were in [...]
Summer is the time to drink yourself cool August 14, 2008 Never mind the weather, you can get a bit of sunshine in your glass with fresh and seasonal cocktails, says Zoe Strimpel The past week may have been dodgy weather-wise, but we’ve still got a month till summer’s officially over. Rain or shine, there’s no better way to grasp that summer feeling than a good [...]
Crazy in lobe August 13, 2008 In the world of earrings, bigger and bolder is definitely better, says Zoe Strimpel Times are changing; we’re not quite the over-mortgaging, champagne slugging society we once were. And, odd as it may sound, earrings are as good a sign of the times as any. New figures from John Lewis show sales of jewellery are [...]
High Altitude Health August 12, 2008 Zoe Strimpel tells you how to keep sharp when you’re flying At this time of year, people are flying more than ever. If you are lucky, that’s because you are getting away on a well-earned holiday. If you are still taking business trips right now, well, you probably need to make sure you are arriving [...]
The buck stops here: the pressure is on for the US coffee shop giant August 6, 2008 With Starbucks posting its first ever losses, is our love affair with Americanos finally over? Starbuck is weird. It comes from Seattle, which means it is only the third thing ever to come out of that city that anybody has heard of, after Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. It also takes [...]
10 Ways to avoid stress August 5, 2008 Relaxing during a busy day need not take up time and money, says Zoe Strimpel There’s a lot of stress out there at the moment, what with holidays being cut short and cancelled, workloads ratcheting up and lunchtimes shrinking even more than normal. You probably need to de-stress, but sometimes popping out a massage or [...]
Budget airlines have become a part of modern life, for better or worse August 1, 2008 Rising oil prices mean that cheap flights are under threat. But is that a good or a bad thing? Such arcane things as the price of oil were until recently beyond the ken of most ordinary folk. But the workings of massive Kazakh exploration companies and the politics of laying pipelines across Uzbekistan are now [...]
Don’t let the sunshine ruin your holiday July 16, 2008 Too many people still don’t understand the damage sunburn can cause, says Zoe Strimpel The sorry English weather has most of us giddy with excitement at the prospect of our August holiday somewhere sunny and hot. And though we all know that baking in the sun is bad for us, many of us are going [...]
