Alnwick Castle, or how the Duke of Northumberland is very skilled in tourism marketing

I must confess, I didn't even know that Alnwick Castle existed.

It's been Ginger Cat who, when we were organizing our trip in North-East England this year, has discovered that not only it's been the castle that has been used for the external shootings of Hogwarts, but that, among the many attractions that it offers to its visitors, there are also broomstick flying lessons, just like you do during the first year of the Magic & Wizardy School.

Broomstick flying lessons?? Shoot me.

Since the nerd inside of me doesn't do the slighter effort not to show up (and actually I'm not even sure that I do have a not-nerd part, to be honest), we have immediately put it in our itinerary.

[My Top 10] Bergen: fjords, salmon and wooden houses

For as much as I might be into making Top 10 lists like the "High fidelity" protagonist, if somebody might ask me to do a Top 10 of my very favourite cities I would be in serious trouble.
Same thing would happen with an absolute Top 10 of my favourite books or movies.
It's just a too big and wide field, I prefer focusing on a niche.
But Bergen would surely enter quite many Top 10's.
It would feature in my Top 10 cities where I'd like to live. In my Top 10 places that can make you feel in another time. In the Top 10 cities which have positively surprised me the most.
And perhaps also in the absolute one, pretty much for sure.
I've been here in 2009, together with Ginger Cat, and we've spent 5 very pleasant days in this fjords capital, steep, wooden, silent but not gloomy, colorful but introvert, that smells of smoked salmon and that in just a couple of steps makes you dive into a wild and awesome nature.
So here is what I would recommend you to see, if you'd happen to pass from there...
But, actually, I'd say that the very first thing I'd recommend you would be not to "happen" to pass from there: plan & decide to go there, it's totally worth it!

10 ways London has managed to surprise me

Cities are like people.
When they have well defined personalities and lots of interests going on, they will always hang you up in interesting conversations, no matter how often you meet them.
Then, with cities this gets on an even bigger scale, since anyway their lives are much longer than those of humans, and they are way much more multitasking - with a lot of activities and events going on in every single corner of them, with millions of single minds thinking ideas, millions of hands making them real and millions of single lives summing up and giving breath to the soul of the city.
And London definitely belongs to this category.
We meet almost every year, since our first rendez-vous in 1998, and, although there are some good oldies of it that, just like favourite subjects in a conversation, I never manage to miss, every single time I've been there I've managed to discover something new - a different side of its personality, a place, an experience.
Something that makes me definitely agree with Samuel Johnson when he was claiming "A man who is tired of London is tired of life".

The magic of Harry Potter

Did you know that Hogwarts actually exist? That Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade and the Ministery of Magic do exist and that, even if you are a Muggle, you can visit them?
Now that the filming of the Harry Potter's movies is over, just dismantling all the scenographies and/or donating them to cinema museums would have been quite a pity; so Warner Bros Studios has decided to transform the whole Leavesden assembly where the filming of the 8 episodes took place in a huge museum.
And not only the idea itself has been brilliant, but it has also been put in practice in a brilliant way.
If, like me and my friend Ginger Cat, you are a fan, you can't help but feeling in awe while walking around and seeing in front of you all the places, creatures and props that you know very well from the movies (and the books... and your own daydreaming).