Restaurants

Restaurant Review: Ratanà, Milano

wareontheglobe Leave a comment

Dan and I found ourselves with one night in Milan, Italy last September after spending a week in Bolzano, (highly recommended Italian city!), Oktoberfest, and Innsbruck. Why Milan on that itinerary one may ask? Emirates flights from JFK to Milan, sole reason.

In any case, we have been to Milan a few times, and I always find eating in Milan a little odd. While Milan has excellent food and offerings from all over the world (similar to New York), I want what I think of as Italian food (i.e. Southern Italian food!) in Italy. And well, good southern Italian food is not super easy to find in Milan. As such, I branched out and scoured the internet for a good Milanese restaurant. I discovered Ratanà, which has apparently already been discovered by many, many people (LOL), and I made a dinner reservation. No pressure! In any case, our meal turned out to be really delicious and Ratanà even served a bottle of wine from the town where Dan’s great grandfather was born, Lessona!

Ratanà’s outside seating area. We ate indoors.

Ratanà is located on the edge of a park, BAM Tree Library Milan, close to Bosco Verticale. A trendy little area. But then again, all of Milan is pretty trendy.

Ratanà’s menu.

Continue reading →

Hotel Review: A Week at the JW Marriott Masai Mara!

wareontheglobe 9 Comments

***The JW Marriott Masai Mara was devastated by severe, once in a lifetime flood on April 30, 2024. The lodge is currently closed pending renovations, without a confirmed reopening date.  No one staying or working at the lodge were seriously injured according to first hand accounts. We are thinking about all the staff and hoping they get back on their feet quickly.***

Dan and I went on our third safari last month at the brand new JW Marriott Masai Mara lodge in Kenya! Having opened exactly one year ago, the JW Marriott Masai is modern, shiny, and extremely popular with Americans. This post reviews our stay at the JW Marriott Masai Mara in March 2024. In brief, we had a lovely time with fantastic animal sightings! Keep reading for a super in depth review, starting with how we arrived at the safari lodge!

A lioness sighting on a game drive with the JW Marriott Masai Mara.

Continue reading →

Eating My Way Around Rome In A Golf Cart With My 80 Year Old Mother!

wareontheglobe 1 Comment

One of my favorite things to do in Rome is a food tour, and I have previously been on great ones in Testaccio and Trastevere with Eating Europe, as well as one in the Centro Storico with another company (really good!). This holiday season we were traveling in Rome with my mother and decided to try Eating Europe’s food tour via golf cart, as it would have been difficult for her to do a full walking food tour in the December evenings. We all really loved this tour, as it was really fun and allowed us to explore several areas of Rome via an open air golf cart, from Prati, Gian, Trastevere, and Testaccio!  Our tour met at our first stop near the Vatican in Prati and then we legit drove around Rome on a golf cart until the tour ended! Be sure to bring a coat, but the experience in the golf cart was pleasant and I would absolutely recommend this tour. This post reviews our tour, including what and where we ate!

Our trusty golf cart for the evening!

STOP ONE: A TRAPIZZINO AT AL SORPASSO

The first stop of our tour was for a new Roman food (for Rome and me!), the Trapizzino! And by “new Roman,” our guide described the trapizzino as a Roman food created in recent Roman memory. A trapizzino is similar to a pizza pocket; a triangle of bread stuffed with your choice of pizza “toppings,” meant to be eaten on the go. I loathe “eating on the go” so I was very happy that were sitting down a table with cutlery for my first trapizzino. I was also super excited to try a trappizzino on this food tour, as I had never had one despite visiting Rome many times.

Your classic trapizzino.

Continue reading →

What to Expect on a Day on Safari!

wareontheglobe 1 Comment

We just returned from our third (!!) African safari in Masai Mara National Park in Kenya (after spending a couple days in Nairobi). Despite having safari-ed in different parts of Africa, all three safaris have kept a common daily schedule, which is quite different from most vacations. This post details what one can generally expect on an African safari vacation when staying in a safari lodge.

Welcome to safari!

4:30 – 6:00 AM: WAKE UP CALL

Depending on where you safari and the time of year, you will likely wake up between 4:30 and 6:00 AM. Yes, extremely early. This is because morning safari drives depart either before sunrise (popular on private conservatories) so that you can watch the sunrise on safari, or as soon as the national park you are visiting opens, which is often right at sunrise. How much time you give yourself to get ready for the morning safari drive is up to you, but we prefer 30 minutes (although we will cut it to 10 or 15 if its super early). And by place and time of year, I mean that the sun rises at different times throughout the year in places such as South Africa, but remains more consistent in places near the equator like Kenya and Tanzania. On our recent safari in Kenya, we woke up every morning at 5:50 AM and departed for our drive at 6:30 AM. We set our alarms for this but at our previous safari, guides came and knocked on your door about 30 minutes before departure.

A hippo just outside our room as we were waking up!

Continue reading →