Roaming Tales

I’m delighted to be hosting the Carnival of Cities for a second time on Roaming Tales. This is the 30 April edition and we have a bumper crop of great posts. We seem to be confined to North (and Central) America and Europe this week, though we still have a lot of diversity, from Carcassonne to Miami. Happy reading!

Carnival of Cities is a blog carnival - where one blog hosts and other blogs submit posts on a particular theme. The theme for Carnival of Cities is cities and towns. You can see the 23 April edition of Carnival of Cities on Family Travel. I look forward to seeing Carnival of Cities on Leslie Carbone’s blog next week.

Anywhere

Any city: Ecosalon on new guidebooks that highlight a city’s independent businesses.

Europe

Stockholm: EuroPride is one of the biggest events on the gay and lesbian calendar in Europe and this year it’s taking place in Stockholm, Sweden, according to Eyeflare.

Alicante/Valencia: Information on the ferry service (or lack thereof) from Alicante to Valencia in Spain on Costa Blanca Webcast.

Barcelona: Me, My Kid and Life has a post about an open-air market in Barcelona, Spain, including pics of all the yummy food from fish to ostrich eggs.

Edinburgh: A review of the Red Fort Indian restaurant in Edinburgh on the Europe A La Carte blog. A £6 buffet sounds like good value!

Rome: Culture Shock finds accommodation in Rome last minute - and it was surprisingly nice.

Carcassonne: France Tales pays a visit to the medieval French city of Carcassonne. (This has been on my list since reading Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth - not a brilliant book but it did bring the setting magically to life).

Vienna: Mes crazy expériences has written about a visit to Vienna on a rail trip of Europe in 2005.

Salisbury: Traveling Mamas passed through London and stayed in Salisbury as a base for a visit to Stonehenge.

The Americas

San Francisco: CatSynth on a weekend filled with art, music (and cats) in San Francisco.

Washington: Leslie Carbone on the very wonderful Smithsonian museums in Washington DC.

Miami: Photo post of the South Beach in March on the Seabird Chronicles. And a review of South Beach bar Ocean’s Ten on SoloFriendly.

Honululu: Homespun Honululu gets political with a post on the grassroots protest against plans to build a rail network in Honululu.

Cincinnati: If you have a taste for the finer things in life, check out Cincinnati Locavore - this week’s submission has a post on an award-winning distilled vodka only available in the Ohio city.

San Antonio: Intelligent Travel has a post about the River Parade in San Antonio, Texas - lovely pics too.

Granada: And finally, my own post on Granada in Nicaragua - a colonial city on Central America’s biggest lake.

Submit your blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form. Please only submit one (non-spammy) post and keep it on the topic of cities and (midsize and bigger) towns. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Like its famous namesake, Granada in Nicaragua is worth visiting for its relaxed atmosphere and beautiful historic architecture. It might not have the Alhambra but the streets are lined with Spanish colonial buildings in vibrant colours, from blue to cherry red. The town was founded in 1524 and the town has kept its historic flavour, with Spanish-style columns and facades adding a touch of grandeur, while terraces and garden courtyards provide a welcome retreat from the heat.

Granada Cathedral, a splendid building in yellow and white, sits opposite the town square, while municipal buildings and grand hotels line the other three sides. A few streets away, the Guadelupe Cathedral, an unrestored but no less imposing building, has a bell tower with fantastic views of the city.

The Old World Granada has the dramatic mountain backdrop of the Sierra Nevada. The New World version is perched on the edge of a vast freshwater lake with views of the nearby volcano. Lake Nicaragua is the largest freshwater lake in Central America and is almost the size of Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia. It’s worth taking a boat trip in one of the long covered motor boats to explore ‘Las Isletas’ - the islands - where many of Nicaragua’s richest families have holiday homes. Or you can rent a kayak or take a sailing lesson instead.

It’s also the cleanest lake in Central America and in a cafe by the water you can eat delicious freshwater fish caught wild that day, then lightly battered and served with salsa. Granada itself is packed with restaurants, with everything from fusion tapas to Italian on the menu. The city is only 40km away from Managua, the rather less charming Nicaraguan capital, so it gets a lot people coming for the day or the night. This also makes for a buzzing night life, with establishments such as Cafe Nuit and the Safari Lounge providing entertainment in the wee hours.

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I didn’t need 80 days to travel around the world but the last month still feels pretty epic.

Since leaving London in early March, I have been to eight countries on four continents. First stop was Australia, where I spent a couple of weeks visiting friends and family in and around Sydney and Brisbane. I then flew to Houston via Los Angeles to make connections to Nicaragua for a week researching a travel story. Back to Los Angeles for one night, and then a 15-hour flight to Hong Kong. Still on assignment, I went from Hong Kong to Thailand, then a loop around South-East Asia that also took in the Angkor Wat area in Cambodia and a day in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, before returning to Bangkok. I flew back to Hong Kong for my flight home to London (the itinerary had changed but the ticket didn’t).

I was only in London for one day - just long enough to visit the laundromat since the washing machine had packed it in during my absence. Then I caught the train down to the Arvon Foundation centre in the Devon countryside for a fiction writing course. It felt like a retreat after all that time on the road, staying in a pre-Domesday thatched cottage, with lots of time to be creative and go on long rambling walks across the fields. The hope of seeing otters in the river did get me down there at 6.30am - I didn’t see the otters but I did see this beautiful sunrise.

Now I’m back in London, very glad to see my partner and looking forward to getting back to normal life - and the eight stories I have to write from the trip. Travelling is fab, even though the schedules can be intense, but I’m always happy to return, knowing that the next adventure is not too far away. Mongolia might be next.

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This is a guest post from Roger Norum, a travel journalist and cultural anthropologist based in Oxford. He writes regularly for British and American travel magazines and newspapers, and is a frequent author for Rough Guides. Roger is leading a four-day-long travel writing seminar in western Norway with Creative Escapes. He will teach similar writing courses in France and Morocco in the fall. Visit www.creative-escapes.co.uk for more information.

It was Yeats, if I’m not mistaken, who once waxed romantically, “I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.” Yeats, who taught at Oxford after World War One, was very familiar with the sandstone Gothic spires and quiet streets of this most graceful, ravishing and operatic of cities. Now that the banks of the Thames once again at ante-diluvian levels and student life in full bloom, lazy spring Sundays are perfect for taking in all the romance of the world’s most magical university city.

Thanks to daylight savings time, the Oxford sun now rises around 7am, making an early morning jog through the sprawling Port Meadows the perfect wake-me-up. You’ll run along the pebbled bank of the Isis, a Thames tributary, passing canal houseboats, thatched whitewashed villages and elderly tweed-clad locals puttering about the town allotments – small patches of public gardening space handed out to whomever wants to tend them.

9am The only souls singing on a Sunday are the talented, radiant few who make up the Christ Church Cathedral’s mixed choir. After the non-denominational service, stroll about the manicured grounds of Christ Church, one the university’s oldest colleges and known best for inspiring the characters in Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll taught maths here).

11am A late brunch at the Covered Market is as good an introduction to student life as any. Snag a corner seat, order up a rich breakfast of beans, toast and greasy English bacon and watch as the colorful cornucopia of local student life streams in: posh, well-coiffed Brits rubs shoulders with the swarthy sons of Emirate sheikhs and ascotted Erasmus students.

1pm Hop aboard a red double-decker bus for a tour of the university colleges and departments. Cheesy and formulaic? Maybe. But in just two hours you’ll have covered what on foot would have taken weeks and will command more local history than most Oxford dons.

3pm Head down Cornmarket, the city’s central pedestrian walkway, towards some proper High Street window shopping (most shops are closed on Sundays), then get lost among Oxford’s narrow, cobbled medieval alleyways, sandwiched between buildings built of glimmering local sandstone. Nip around to Brasenose Lane off Turl Street to take in Bodleian Library and the adjacent Radcliffe Camera, two gorgeous Gothic buildings. But you need to be a student to see inside (the lengthy application for entrance to the university can be picked up a few blocks away at Wellington Square).

4:30pm Oxford’s most famous local lagers, ales and bitters flow freely on Sundays, and a drawn out weekend afternoon pub crawl among the city’s age-old pubs is a local tradition for would-be academics and locals alike. Pop in at the King’s Arms to eavesdrop on the latest college gossip and ogle would-be Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners sipping on Addlestone’s, a local cider that tastes so close to freshly squeezed apple juice that you’ll barely realise it’s 8% alcohol.

5:45pm Dodge the students pedaling giddily about the quiet, leafy streets of North Oxford on your way to the Gardners Arms on Plantation Road, one of the city’s best spots for classic intellectual ambience. If it’s cold enough out, they might just light the stone fireplace. The pub is the site of Oxford’s best known vegetarian restaurant – last order taken at 6pm on Sundays.

8:30 Post cibum (Latin for ‘after the meal’), what better way to test your knowledge against local smart alecs than flaunting your wits at the Gardners Arms’ weekly pub quiz. To keep your intellectual powers at their peak, order a Reverend James, a Welsh pale ale popular with local theology students.

10:15pm Stop in just in time for last call at the Eagle and Child, a short walk away and Oxford’s second oldest pub. Perch yourself in the same seat where J.R.R. Tolkien met for years every Sunday with colleague C.S. Lewis. The pint of choice here: Wadworth, a hoppy wheat beer that goes down surprisingly smoothly with very little bitter aftertaste.

11pm Return to your creaky wooden canopied bed at the Bridgeox Bed and Breakfast, a tiny inn run by a family that has occupied the building for over 600 years running.

Photographs by Caitlin Fitzsimmons

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