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Category / Don’t Be A Tourist

November 13, 2018

Manhattan’s Secret Shoppable Loft

It wasn’t until the end of my stay in New York that I realised I’d been living in an entirely shoppable dream apartment. The enviable furniture and covetable design accents might be hiding the price tags, but the decorating ideas are on the house. The Witness Apartment is a unique New York City loft that sheds its skin…

November 9, 2018

All Aboard the International Express, New York City

You can go to Paris for beauty school, and the Philippines for lunch. You can find your dream Diwali dress and a 200lb Ganesh statue on one block, then put your feet up at a kitsch Irish pub. The glory of New York has always been its diversity, but nowhere is it as dizzyingly, colourfully…

November 6, 2018

Three NYC Bookshops That Will Steal Your Heart

New York City has no shortage of vast bookstores where you can easily spend an hour peacefully browsing the endless shelves and genres, but what I’m looking for is a bookshop that makes my heart ache a little; one that makes me want to swap lives with the bookseller and live inside their world. So…

November 2, 2018

A Kitschy Weekend Guide to the Australian Outback

We’ve got that itch for a little road trip once again, and this time it’s taking us to the Land Down Under, specifically, to the town of Broken Hill— no sandy beaches, no respite from a sun that (literally) shines longer and brighter than most places on earth, but it’s the keeper of some of…

November 2, 2018

Unlocking the Secrets of Vinegar Hill, New York

How can you escape from the New York City grind on an MTA card budget? Make a break for Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill, the sleepy neighbourhood that’s managed to safeguard its 400-year-old, cobblestone streets from the clutches of big development. It’s on small but hallowed ground, bound together by a tight-knit community whose homes look like…

November 1, 2018

So What’s the Deal with Those Quakertown Pyramids?

We just love it when two utterly opposite worlds collide, which is precisely the case with the mysterious pyramids sitting smack in the middle of Quakertown, USA. That’s right, States-bound folks: you can now eschew a visit to Cairo and just head to rural Pennsylvania to get a taste of an esoteric society, the “Rosicrucian Order”,…

October 31, 2018

Interview with a Vampire in Paris

It was a dark and stormy night – or, at least, I had hoped it would be. The quaint and sleepy residential streets appeared an unseemly location for some of the most terrifying creatures imaginable to reside, until I arrived at a rusted cast iron gate overrun with foliage that also claimed every inch of garden…

October 26, 2018

Rocky Horror Picture Show in the Paris Catacombs

For our latest adventure on the Don’t be a Tourist in Paris web series, we go 30 feet beneath the city to discover the subculture of iconic midnight movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show just in time for Halloween. Below ground, we’re in the subterranean cinema of Alexander J E Bradley a photographer, filmmaker and catacomb-dweller (aka. cataphile).…

October 25, 2018

Edgar Allan Poe’s Cottage Is Just Sitting There in the Bronx

Finding it there seems improbable. Absurd, even. Yet, on a sunny day in Sector G of the Bronx, amidst cheap Thai massage parlours and “99¢ Only” stores, stands the final home of the king of American macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. That the house stands after 221 years is a miracle alone. It’s been a quiet…

October 24, 2018

A Brief Compendium of the Iconic American Motel

Among my favourite things are mid-century kitsch and tiny houses. Put the two together and you basically send me into overload. I’m aware that the faded glamour of American motels is much more appealing to a European road-tripper like me who hasn’t stayed in enough of them yet to have encountered bed bugs. But what I wouldn’t give to go back…

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