Gent Turning Troll: Bonny Brighton

So despite what the order of these posts suggest, Brighton was the first stop in our recent holiday extravaganza. I talked about the Music festival first as it was the catalyst to the rest and therefore seemed to deserve first dibs in my opinion.

Brighton is a city I've heard so much about over the years and always wanted to spend time in. Its most famous tag these days is as "The Gay capital of England", now from our experience I certainly wouldn't disagree with this but there is so so much more to Brighton than its gay friendly reputation. Brighton is a large metropolitan city of culture full of awesome bars, restaurants, quirky shops and really all those cool things you look fir in a modern cultural city. Despite having wanted to visit for so long the trip there was in many ways a fortunate accident. The music festival started on the Friday and Marianne's Birthday was the Thursday, we didn't want to travel on her birthday so thought we should fly a couple of days earlier and have a little birthday romantic trip. As we were flying into London and the festival was in a neighbouring town to Brighton it was just the oblivious choice and I'm so glad we did it. The only shame was we couldn't be there longer as just a couple days really didn't do it full justice.

We stayed at a nice quirky independent hotel (which was good but not great enough to bother plugging) just a couple of minutes walk from Brighton pier. The first night we arrived quite late and searched for somewhere to eat. I was a little disappointed at first when getting turned away from several places who had already closed their kitchens as I had been told Brighton was a real lively never sleeps type city. It was only a Thursday though so we pushed on and eventually came across a little French place up a side road called "La Maison Du Van"(the house of wine, and yes this place was well worth a plug). We had a cracking meal and bottle of wine and called it a fairly early night as we wanted to make the most of the following day.

After a nice English Breakfast at the hotel we spent the whole next day walking around Brighton, it was impossible to fit it all in but we had been told about many of the best streets to see cool shops and stuff and did our best to get around those. I recall particularly well a huge shop/market full of so many interesting items that one could spend a day in there and hardly scratch the surface. There were several other unique places and just generally the city was packed full of character and beautiful architecture. The pier too while full of arcades and over priced ice creams' is a traditional must and well worth a wonder around. We had a fantastic day exploring and occasionally dipping into the most interesting looking pubs for a refuel.

The city was full of all different nationalities and types of people of all race and creed and yer, of course there were many gay people too. I'm a big supporter of gay rights and its a shame that gay people don't always feel comfortable being open about there lifestyle all over the world. If any gays are reading this and feeling repressed, get yourselves down to Brighton. That goes for the rest of you to actually, its a fascinating city!