What I ate in Venice

It already feels as if our trip to Venice was about two years ago after a crazy busy couple of weeks. One way of keeping the memories alive is to blog about them, so here's another holiday blog post!

I posted a photographic summary last week, so this week I've decided to focus on what we ate (and drank) during our time in Venice.

We ate breakfast at the hotel every morning as this was included in the price of our room. I've loved the breakfasts we've experienced at every Italian hotel we've ever stayed in, and Hotel Savoia & Jolanda is no exception. They offer a huge buffet breakfast with loads of choice, and you can be as light and healthy or as deliciously indulgent as you like. I had a hot chocolate every morning along with various combinations of fresh bread rolls, meats, cheeses, pastries, yoghurt, granola, and lots of other sugary beauties. Don't be fooled by the photo below... this isn't an accurate representation of the size of my breakfast!

Breakfast kept us going until late morning which conveniently meant we were hungry again just in time for lunch. We usually had something quick from a little side street, such as a pizza slice or a filled wrap, which we took away to eat as we walked. These lunches were really cheap but so fresh and tasty.

We decided to have a sit-down lunch one afternoon at Hotel Londra Palace's Bistrot 4172 which was spectacular. We sat outside in the sunshine with a glass of Prosecco and a Mojito, and we were given a massive bread basket to start. I ordered the Ravioli dell'alto Veneto and I could honestly have eaten it three times over because it was so perfect.

As if that wasn't enough food to be getting on with, we also went out for a nice dinner every evening while we were in Venice. Due to the great location of our hotel, we didn't have to stray very far to find amazing and varied restaurants. On two evenings, we simply walked downstairs to eat in our hotel's Ristorante Principessa. The other restaurants we tried (Conca d'Oro and Trovatore) were only a short walk away.

Do you know what I really love about Italian restaurants? It's perfectly acceptable to order pasta for your first course and steak for your main, and you can still order a starter and/or dessert if you fancy it. SO MUCH FOOD.

You might think we had more than enough food between our breakfast, lunch and dinner, but you'd be wrong. We also needed to make sure we kept ourselves going with little (and large) snacks throughout the day. We had a scoop or two of gelato most days, and we also had a lovely pastry and hot chocolate in a little cafe one afternoon. I also treated myself to a rum hot chocolate from Venchi which I had to eat with a spoon because it was so thick. Yes, really.

As you can see, we ate rather a lot of food during our holiday. We also made sure we sampled several cocktails along the way, and we had some lovely Prosecco and wine with our dinners.

We stopped off at the hotel bar for a happy hour cocktail nearly every afternoon, and we had some amazing after-dinner cocktails at the LondraBar. 'Amazing' doesn't actually feel like a powerful enough superlative to describe them... they were definitely up there with the best cocktails I've ever had. Cocktails in Italy tend to be served with a selection of snacks, so our constant stream of eating was never interrupted.

I think this blog post proves that our food and drink escapades in Venice get an eleven out of ten (at least). 

Have you visited any of these restaurants, or have I convinced you to try them on your next trip to Venice? 

Venice in 15 photos

We spent an amazing 5 days in Venice at the beginning of March.

As this was our second visit to Venice, we took things at a more relaxed pace and didn't worry too much about blitzing all the big landmarks as we'd already done them first time around. Our first visit to Venice was the last leg of our Italian honeymoon four and a half years ago, so we thought it was about time we returned to this beautiful and unique city.

I always find it difficult to blog about holidays in their entirety because there's so much to cover and I end up running out of superlatives, so my first post-holiday blog post is usually a photographic summary. Looking back over my recent holiday blog posts, I seem to favour sharing 15 photos so that's what I've done here. As always, the most difficult part was narrowing it down to 15 from over 400 photos.

As I did with my 'New York in 15 photos' post, I've tried to summarise all the main things we saw and did with a photo and a title to give you some context. There are some beautiful buildings missing from this list and I could comfortably have featured double the amount of photos, but I wanted to make sure I kept it to 15. Some might say I'm a little obsessed with following a specific formula.

So, moving swiftly on from words to photographs, here's our trip to Venice in 15 photos!

Piazza San Marco

Palazzo Ducale

Basilica di San Marco

Ponte dei Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs) 

View of the Venetian lagoon from our hotel

Rooftop terrace at T Fondaco dei Tedeschi

Ponte di Rialto

View from Ponte dell'Accademia

Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute

Burano

Campanile di San Giorgio dei Greci (one of Venice's three leaning towers)

San Giorgio Maggiore

Scuola Grande di San Marco (this is a hospital, believe it or not)

Grand Canal

View from a random bridge, just because...

Look out for more blog posts about Venice over the next few weeks! 

What I wore in New York

I've been meaning to blog for a while about what I wore in New York. However, I must admit that my main motivation for publishing this post today was the lack of time and opportunity to take photos for any of my other potential posts. Roll on the lighter evenings!

While I'm busy admitting to things, I thought I'd talk about the military operation of me packing to go on holiday. It starts with a big Word document (set up immediately after we book a holiday) which details every single piece of clothing, every accessory, every toiletry and every miscellaneous item I'm planning to take with me. The packing itself usually commences about three weeks before we leave. Although part of me is very jealous when Neil somehow manages to pack his suitcase in 25 minutes, I do secretly enjoy my long-winded and highly organised packing process.

The photos of me in New York were all taken outside, so I'm only going to detail my coats, boots, hats and scarves because that's all you can see. To complete my outfits, I took a pair of jeans, a few jumpers, warm dresses, leggings and tights, along with some nice dresses for the evenings. I packed light on shoes and bags (for me), but definitely didn't pack light on hats, scarves and gloves.

I've linked to the relevant items where I can in the photos below, but most of them are either sold out or not in existence any more.

Parka from Dorothy Perkins, scarf from Joules' Ebay store, and
black boots from Shoe Zone 

Kate Spade hat from Ebay, scarf from Joules, coat from Debenhams,
bag from Kate Spade and boots from Ugg

Hat from New Look, scarf and gloves from Asda, coat from ASOS,
and bag from Kate Spade 

Hat and gloves from Accessorize, bag and scarf from New Look

The hat was a gift from Italy, and the scarf is from Primark 

Hat from New Look and scarf from ASOS 

Hat, scarf and gloves from New Look, bag from Kate Spade 

Is your packing process a bit like mine, or do you pack like a normal person? 

Rediscovering my reading mojo

I've always loved reading.

I used to completely devour books when I was in school. I'd read at the dining table, in the bathroom, in church, while everyone else in my family was watching TV, and in bed late at night with the help of the handy streetlamp outside my window. I also used to read in the car if I was in the middle of a particularly good book, even though I knew it would make me feel horribly sick by the time I got to the end of the journey. That's dedication for you.

After finishing school, I decided to study English Literature at Cardiff University. My degree was entirely focused on reading and writing and I absolutely loved it.

Quite predictably perhaps, I fell out of love with reading for a few years after I finished my degree. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to read for pleasure without needing to analyse and annotate significant words and phrases, and I found it quite difficult to get out of the habit.

Thankfully, after I had a Kindle for Christmas in 2012, I very quickly became a bookworm again and went on to discover lots of new authors and genres over the next few years.

I set myself a target of reading 50 books in 2015, and I did it! I set myself the same target for 2016 and fell four short, but 46 books in such a turbulent year still felt pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, in 2017 and 2018, I really struggled to lose myself in my beloved books. 2017 was a horribly difficult year where I only managed to read about 20 books. 2018 was a better year on the whole, but a lot of my brain space was taken up with starting and settling in to my new job which meant I only read 14 books throughout the whole year. These might sound like big numbers to some people, but for me they were pitifully low.

I started 2019 with a firm determination to rediscover my reading mojo, and I'm pleased to report that it's going well so far. I've already read 6 books since the beginning of January and I've got a couple of pre-ordered books arriving this week from two of my favourite authors.

My main motivation for rediscovering my insatiable love for books was realising that reading is a huge part of who I am. It helps me to escape into another world when I've had a stressful or upsetting day, it keeps me away from aimlessly scrolling through my phone, and it provides my introverted brain with valuable 'recharge' time.

I've started documenting the books I've read in 2019 on my Instagram stories with a little one sentence review. I'm always looking for recommendations, so if you're reading this and you also share the books you've read on Instagram or on your blog, please let me know!

On that note, I'm going to turn my laptop off and get back to my book.

Remembering what makes me 'me'

Lately, I've started to realise that significant life events can change the way you define yourself. In fact, if you let them, they can quickly become the only things that define you without you even realising it.

These events and their consequences can taint all the interests and accomplishments you had before they crashed into your life, forming unhelpful associations and thought patterns. When these thought patterns are prolonged and become second nature, you slowly start to lose sight of your authentic self.

Photo by Anton Gorlin on Unsplash

These events can be big, small or seemingly insignificant to other people, and everyone's story will be different. For me, this momentous event was my cancer diagnosis in August 2016.

The traumatic impact of the diagnosis and everything that's followed has been pretty damaging. It's had an overwhelming impact on so many aspects of my life, both emotionally and physically.

As a result, I've let the cancer and the situation I now find myself in completely overshadow me as a person until it feels as if that's the only thing that defines me. I struggle to think about myself and who I am without bringing my diagnosis into the equation. My friend Fee has written about this struggle of losing all sense of who you are far more eloquently than I ever could if you're interested in having a read.

On top of this potential loss of identity, we live in a world where there's a lot of pressure to be a certain way, to look a certain way and to get angry about certain things. You often get swept along with the tide and end up trying to be what everyone else thinks you should be rather than just being 'you'. All this pressure combined with the aftermath of those life-defining moments can make you completely lose sight of who you really are.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

I was on this earth for 30 years before cancer barged into my life. I had hobbies, quirks and passions just like everyone else. There's no denying that I've been through a traumatic time and that it still affects me in a big way, but I'm ultimately the same person as I was before my diagnosis.

With this in mind, I thought it would be useful to try to summarise all the things that make me 'me'. Over the next few weeks and months, I'm going to try to grab hold of these things with both hands and remind myself that my diagnosis doesn't have to define me. It's undeniably given me a new perspective on things which is often unhelpful, but I was a whole person before it happened and I can still be a whole person now.

Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash

I'm very introverted and my 'recharge' time is really important to me. Although I feel as if this has magnified over the last couple of years, I was definitely still that introverted person before my diagnosis. I have always been and will always be an introvert, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I love words. Reading words, writing words, proofreading and editing other people's words... I love anything to do with words. However, I don't love words which have mistakes in them. I'm a stickler for accurate spelling, grammar and punctuation and I make no apologies for that. It's my thing.

I'm very organised, to put it mildly. I have to-do lists for everything and I (try to) plan all aspects of my life with military precision. If you ever want to buy me a gift, pretty stationery to support my planning obsession will always go down well.

I love going for walks. I particularly love cold, crisp and sunny days, and I love seeing beautiful trees and white wispy clouds against a bright blue sky.

Catching up with family and my best friends always makes me feel a bit more 'me'. Although my aforementioned introverted self sometimes struggles to summon up the energy to catch up with people, spending time with my favourite people is vitally important because they know and like the real me. This proves that the real me is still there, deep down.

I take a lot of pride in everything I do, and I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Whether it's my work, my blog, my Instagram posts, my house or my gym sessions, it's important to me that everything I do is the very best it can be. This does mean that I'm often too hard on myself when I don't live up to my own high expectations, but I'm glad I still have that passion to succeed.

I have a firm set of values and a strong moral compass. These values serve as constant markers in my day-to-day life, and they're a helpful reminder of who I am and what I really care about. Their rigidity can sometimes be unhelpful when I feel as if I've compromised on those values (see above point about being a perfectionist), but for the most part they help to keep me grounded.

I love the fact that Neil and I go out for a hot chocolate every weekend. It's something we've always done since we first started dating nearly eight years ago, and there's something very comforting about keeping this tradition alive.

I love sleeping. I need a lot of sleep to be able to function like a normal person, so it's lucky that I love it so much. As a very important aside, I also love pyjamas, cosy socks and my dressing gown.

I'm a big fan of accessories and always have been. Give me shopping for jewellery, hats, scarves and handbags over shopping for actual clothes any day.

Disney makes my world go round. I love old Disney films, new Disney films, Disney princesses, Disney animals, Disney merchandise, Disney parks, Disney music... you get the picture.

I'm fiercely patriotic and am hugely passionate about the importance of respecting the Welsh language and keeping it alive.

I completely conform to the 'girls love pink and glitter' stereotype. I'm perfectly fine with that, and I don't need to pretend otherwise or to justify it to anyone.

Jessie, food and cwtches from Neil can instantly put a smile on my face, however bad my day has been.

I worry a lot about what people think of me, and that's definitely not a new thing. However, I'm trying hard to remember that I'm fundamentally a kind, caring and empathetic person. I make mistakes like everyone else, but above all I always try to be nice to people. I don't think many people will remember me as a particularly remarkable person, but if people say 'she was nice' then that's good enough for me.

Photo by Federico Bottos on Unsplash

What makes you 'you'?

What I ate in New York

Now that my Christmas and new year blog posts are done and dusted, I thought it was about time I wrote another blog post about New York.

January feels as if it's dragged on for about a hundred years, and it genuinely feels like a lifetime ago since we experienced the magic of New York during the festive season.

We really love eating (shock horror) so we researched lots of places to eat before we went and plotted all the possibilities on a Trello board. We also added a few must-do-again restaurants to our list after falling in love with a few on our first trip to New York six years ago.

If you know me at all, you'll know that my days are always structured around food whether I'm at home, in work or on holiday. We started every day with a classic American breakfast which usually kept us full until mid afternoon, then we'd have a snack and a hot drink before going out for dinner a few hours later.

After reading the title of this post, I know you all just want see some food photos rather than scrolling through my ramblings. Your wish is my command...



Breakfast 

We ate breakfast at our hotel on the first morning. It was a good breakfast but was very expensive, so we decided to eat at Tick Tock Diner every morning for the rest of our trip. It was only a ten minute walk from our hotel, and we had a bonus view of the Empire State Building from our table if we were given a window seat. The pancakes at Tick Tock Diner are my absolute favourites, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm salivating just thinking about them.

Fast food 

One of the many excellent things about New York is the sheer amount of places where you can eat on the go. There's a huge variety of cuisines to choose from to suit every possible dietary requirement and appetite. Our most difficult decision was figuring out how to try as many places as we possibly could during our trip without over-eating and making ourselves sick.

We discovered a place that sold huge pizza slices for two dollars on our first afternoon so we promptly went there for our first snack of the holiday. Obviously you can't go wrong with a pizza slice for two dollars, so we visited a couple more times before the end of our trip.

We couldn't go to New York without getting a takeaway cheesecake to eat in our hotel room over three days, so we made sure we went to Junior's to get the biggest slice of cheesecake I've ever seen. True to form, it did last three days. 

The next two snacks were absolute must-dos after our last trip. The best hot dog I've ever had from the food court in Grand Central Station, and a giant burrito from Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Lastly on the snack front, no day in my life is complete without a hot chocolate stop. Although we tried to go to coffee shops we wouldn't find in the UK for the most part, I did succumb to a Starbucks one afternoon when I had a sugar low and was freezing cold. 

Dinner 

We'd scouted out all the restaurants we went to for dinner on TripAdvisor beforehand and they definitely lived up to the hype.

My favourite find was Bareburger on 46th St, and we ate here on our first evening and our last evening. If America does one thing really well, it's big fat burgers. And just look at the size of those onion rings! There are lots of sweet potato fries hiding under there too which were equally as delicious. 

After trying Junior's last time we visited New York and rating it as our best meal of the trip, we absolutely had to visit again. The photo makes my meal look a bit beige and bland, but I can promise you that it wasn't. However, I will grudgingly admit that it was far too big for me to eat the entire thing. 

Pure Thai, a little hidden gem on 9th Avenue, was another firm favourite. We would easily have walked past it without a thought if we hadn't looked it up on TripAdvisor. It was a tiny little restaurant with fewer than ten tables so we were lucky to get seated without a booking. The food was so simple but SO TASTY, and the service was fantastic. 

We splashed out on an expensive meal at K Rico Steakhouse, a few doors up from Pure Thai. We had three courses and a couple of glasses of wine, and it was well worth the price. The waiter helpfully warned us that the desserts were big enough to share, so I didn't eat that entire slice of cheesecake myself (just in case you were wondering). 

I well and truly miss New York and its amazing food, and I'm absolutely starving after writing this post. Have I inspired you to try any of these places if/when you visit New York? Let me know!