As the history geek in me is still alive and well, one of the main draws of Jordan for me was Petra…Southern Jordan’s most dramatic cultural and archaeological sight, famous for lavish buildings carved into the rock. One of the seven wonders of the world, Petra definitely lived up to it’s reputation for me…I was totally mesmerised by the temples and buildings punctuating the dramatic natural landscape.
Although you can fly from one end of Jordan to another, there are so many phenomenal sights packed into this tiny country that I couldn’t recommend a leisurely road trip more. There are three roads in Jordan, the slowest of which – the King’s Highway – is by far the most spectacular.
A trip to Jordan has long been on my bucket list so I used the fact that the boy is living in the Middle East as an excuse to organise a short trip while I was out there visiting. Thinking that Jordan must be a hop, skip and a jump from Dubai I swiftly booked onward flights only to realised that Jordan is actually pretty equidistant from Dubai and the UK…clearly I’m not as geographically-minded as I thought! Having made this slight error I set about being more organised about our time there and planned a full itinerary…first stop the Dead Sea.
On Saturday night we ate at Madrid’s place to be seen – Ten Con Ten. My friend suggested and booked this restaurant months ago and while I trusted her to recommend the best of Madrid to us, we were all pretty excited when the restaurant also popped up on Oliva Palermo’s blog post a few weeks later – clearly we were on the right track!
A couple of years ago one of my closest friends lived in Madrid for a period of time but as I was living in Tokyo at that stage I didn’t get the chance to visit. Luckily, she was really keen to return to her old haunts and a group of us decided to head there for a long weekend.
Madrid boasts a very high concentration of Michelin star restaurants and we thought it would be rude not to sample at least one of them on our girly weekend. We opted for the two star Sergi Arola Gastro as it’s website offered an inventive, tasty looking and very reasonably priced lunch menu.
After reading a few reviews I was really excited to try Fera – Simon Rogan’s London venture within Claridge’s. As you might expect, the restaurant’s name (which means wild in Latin) is a reflection of the concept – Fera uses a lot of high quality, natural, seasonal ingredients. The abundance of vegetables and edible flowers weaved through the menu meant it took some persuading to get the boy there but a couple of weekends ago we settled in for a Friday night tasting menu.