Ghent is a great city to visit – with interesting things to see both old and new, in the form of cathedrals, street art, and excellent museums – as well as a lovely ambience and bucket load of cool bars  that cater for the 50,000+ students in the south! However, arguably one of the best things about the city is its quality, and often quirky, restaurants.

There’s so many favourites to choose from, but one of them has got to be Mimosa, on the Kongostraat right next to the river. It’s a real Moroccan restaurant, run by real Moroccans and the food is authentic and real. In addition to this, the service is incredible and the waiters are personal and genuinely friendly – you almost feel like a guest within their home. You  can tell the staff what meat or vegetables you like and they’ll make delicious recommendations and as they’re brilliant English speakers, there’s no danger of the order getting lost in translation.

The tagines are both enormous and incredibly tasty – with meat marinated in spices and slow-cooked to absolute perfection. With couscous and salad as an accompaniment, the food is both healthy and delicious – although you may eat so much that it becomes a little unhealthy! With some nice beers or cider to go with the food, you really couldn’t want for any more.

The surroundings are also lovely – there are loads of blankets which are really cosy, and fairy lights on the window which build a lovely ambience. Best of all, upstairs there’s a nargila lounge with pipes to smoke and a bar – with a really homely feel, with comfortable sofas which you can sink right into.

In short, Mimosa encapsulates why Ghent is great – it’s comfortable, fun and friendly with everything packed in close together for tailoring the perfect days and evenings out… It really is a must visit!

The Eurostar website

As a frequent Eurostar traveller, I use the Eurostar website to book tickets several times a month.

It’s never been a state of the art site, but over time there are little changes here and there. One of the most important changes was the introduction of print-at-home tickets, who work very well (even using the PDF on a phone display works, but you still need to carry the paper).

However, recently they seem to have introduced small user interface “enhancements” to make my life even harder.

Very annoying things

• Pages are very tall and require continuous side bar scrolling. Combined with the 800 width on a 1280 px display, my mouse covers many useless meters when using this site.
• There is a lot of text. So much text, text text… my brain has now leartn to ignore all written text and just go for the buttons. I am probably missing something important?
• The site keeps offering me “amazing hotel deals” even when I book same day return tickets… hello?
• After some 50 trips on Eurostar where I did not buy insurance, they keep trying – do you want insurance? OK for a little just in case link, but this insurance section takes another good half screen in height, which means more scrolling. Besides, what insurance is it? They just say “insurance”. Is it medical insurance, repatriation, or cancellation/refund? I am certainly not going to waste time and click through to maybe read the details.
• I am myself (a-ha), and all my details are in my profile. There is only one preferred traveller in my profile – i.e. myself. Why do I have to always reselect myself in the list of “preferred travellers” when I am one and only one?
• In my profile, I only have the choice of 3 nationalities: UK, France and Belgium. Hello?
• The seat selection process is very annoying – an extra 8 clicks and page reloads… very very annoying, this is maybe the worst part. Bugs aside (the coach number often resets to 1 – be careful), it remains useful despite the scrolling and clicks.

Things become even more annoying

• I used to be able to select multiple trips and pay all in one go. This has disappeared recently. Now for every single trip I have to reenter all the payment details one by one and go through checkout. Truly annoying. Maybe they took this decision because the sessions could become long and users would get frustrated after filling in several trips to see all lost 10 minutes later.

Good things

• the ability to view all possible prices for each train – this is a good way to quickly see and compare options. Like on most airline sites nowadays. It makes it very easy. It’s not new, it’s been around for a while, but it’s worth.
• print-at-home tickets (PDF) – they work well. Initially, my printouts didn’t work and I had to go through the manual check-in desk. But after some time the printouts started working – maybe I changed ink or they changed lasers. I even tried to go through the automated gates by displaying the 2D code on my mobile phone display. The problem is that the human controllers want to see the paper and don’t accept the PDF document on a screen. Hello?

What’s missing

• favourite seat: I always book the same seat – 14-66 out and 14-33 back. I’d like to store this in my profile and if these are available, having them automatically preselected.

Obviously, I’d be delighted to help Eurostar redesign the website.

I think the points about things that are annoying when booking Eurostar deals are valid, but slightly exagerrated. The whole web is just irritating, not just Eurostar, especially when you need to do something like book tickets fairly regularly.

Save £3 on all Eurostar deals by using the right card.

EuroTunnel, Ferries, Weather, Motorways Updates for Xmas Travel

Countdown for the holiday season is well and truly under way. As I'm trying to get to France at the moment and the tunnel information on the Eurotunnel site is singularly useless, I thought I'd improvise a few links.

1 BBC Motorway information (M20) is the key one to watch Click Here

2 BBC Eurostar update Click Here

3 SE Weather forecast from the Met Office Click Here

4 Highways Agency Motorway Traffic Flow - select M20 Click Here

5 BBC Five Day Calais Weather Click Here

6 Traffic Master National live traffic jam reporting Click Here

7 meteofrance French weather shows orange alert for North France Click Here (Thanks, maximumbob)

8 Eurotunnel phone line (UK) 08444 63 00 00 (Thanks, Catherine)

There - that took all of ten twelve minutes to assemble.

Shame that Eurotunnel couldn't do something similar.

I've switched to the Ferry.

Labels: calais, channel, dover, eurostar, eurotunnel, ferries, ferry, folkestone, france, M20, motorways, traffic, travel, tunnel, weather

Useful links from Rashbre to help you find holiday travel information.