facttime

I was sad to bid farewell to my old passport this week — not just because it was an EU one (*sob*) but also because the stamps inside remind me of the many great travel experiences I've enjoyed over the past decade. To highlight some of these wonderful memories, I decided to pick out one photo from each year, and boy was that hard! (I cheated because the header image features an 11th photo. Sorry!) And at the end of the post, you can find more details about my experience of renewing my UK passport during these incredibly hectic times. 2013 — Ziplining through the clouds in Monteverde, Costa Rica My friend and I spent two weeks exploring Costa Rica  back in 2013. Ziplining through the cloud forest on a 1km-long zipline in Monteverde was definitely one of the best moments of a trip filled with great beaches, beautiful forests and diverse wildlife. Visiting a coffee farm for the first time came a close second. 2014 — (What's the story) vermillion torii? Kyoto, Japan My whistlest...

I've been writing about coffee since I started this blog in 2007, but it wasn't until the start of the last decade when speciality coffee shop reviews took on a more central role among my posts. In January 2010, I was living in Marylebone and had just taken a new job in King's Cross, which brought my commuting back to Cambridge to an end. As I've discussed before , back then I had to walk 20 minutes on my lunch breaks to get to the nearest speciality coffee shop, the original Espresso Room on Great Ormond Street. And now...well, the speciality coffee scene in King's Cross, London and many other cities throughout the world has changed dramatically. My tastes have changed too: I used to drink macchiatos almost exclusively (hence the name of this blog), and I still enjoy them (and their slightly larger siblings, the piccolo and the cortado), but these days, I drink a lot more hand-brewed filter coffee, usually light roasts from single origins. I've taken the occas...