With host Dan Bachmann at the lectern we had two quite contrasting speakers – the first being on our regulars and the second a debutant for the club ! Both were well received…

The London November meeting saw Martin Featherstone give us a great talk on India, taking in paint throwing festivals, the Jaipur elephant festival and a temple full of rats!, as well as more conventional tourist favourites such as the Taj Mahal in Agra and The Palace of the Winds in Jaipur. Martin somehow packed in places all over India on his trip f

rom Amritsar and its stunning Golden Temple, to the funeral Ghats in Varanassi, where he got into trouble for taking photos, though his favourite was the erotic sex temples at Khajuraho! At Ramthambore he tried tiger spotting, without success until a chance meeting at his hotel with a relative of the park ranger, who took him on a private tiger spotting trip, he saw a tiger in the distance.

Our second speaker was Jennifer Barclay who ended up going to South Korea because her rock drummer boyfriend got a job playing in a band at a hotel in Seoul. While he rocked, Jennifer got to explore a country not on many peoples tourist itineraries. She found it a bit Seoul destroying (get it!) to begin with, as nobody wanted to talk to her, but as she got outside the city taking in the national parks and visiting the many temples, she got to meet “Mr Kim”. Kim being by far the most common name in Korea. At Pusan the locals introduced her to the delights of fish restaurants and the drinking customs that only end up one way! Jennifer has also become a fan of Korea’s national dish Kimchi, which is slightly more palatable than Dog, one of their others and easier to serve to her friends back home ! On her return Jennifer wrote her book, Meeting Mr Kim: Or How I Went to Korea and Learned to Love Kimchi, which you can buy on amazon here

For details of the forth coming meetings of the London branch, December 2008 through to July 2009 – http://www.globetrotters.co.uk/meetings/lon09it1.html.

London meetings are held at The Church of Scotland, Crown Court, behind the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden at 2.30pm the first Saturday of each month, unless there is a UK public holiday that weekend. There is no London meeting in August, but we start afresh in September. For more information, contact the Globetrotters Info line on +44 (0) 20 8674 6229, or visit the website: www.globetrotters.co.uk.