August 2017

As any Londoner would confirm, getting away from the city is one of the biggest joys of living in the capital. It’s been three weeks of our new life in London. Three weeks immersed in euphoria, thrill, new encounters, new smells and points of references – our heads couldn’t stop spinning from all the new things on this discovery path. It was high time to make a pause and to come back to the quiet British countryside to finally test the beach that we expected to be very much different from the cold and heartless sea in Saltburn.

Whitstable – an oyster paradise

During the first days in London we met some lovely people and even our friendship didn’t outlast our life in the capital, they were a very important part of that year. One of them suggested us going together to the seaside, to a small town Whitstable. We never heard about its existence before, so naturally, we accepted the idea immediately. Whitstable turned out to be a typical town, one of many on the British coast, if not for one detail, which made it stand out the crowd. I’m talking about oysters and mussels sold from little kiosks in front of the beach. A year later, we will move to Normandy, where a whole new world of pescetarian délices was waiting to be discovered, but that day such a straightforward access to oysters for me was a geniune novelty.

Whitstable is not all about oysters though. It’s also about beach and chill.

Check out: A Day on the Seven Sisters Cliffs

I think it won’t be the first time when I share this feeling within this blog, but I like repeating myself. We both love British countryside (especially on the sea!) with all our hearts, it’s just that we wouldn’t like to live there ever again. Moving to London turned out to be the best thing to reconcile us with the countryside and its remoteness. Also, it can be really dull when it’s not a cheerful summer weekend. Still, as you see, three weeks was enough to make us sort of miss it. 🤍

Whitstable’s very own Banksy provided our Queen with an impressive futurist gadget.

Broadstairs

Looking back I regret that we never gave Broadstairs the time it deserved. It’s a typical Victorian resort, still, as we discovered much later, it also had an amazing portion of its own white cliffs that we never had a chance to see for ourselves. Thus, we will remember Broadstairs as a first place on the “South Coast” where we ventured into the sea and discovered with amazement that, unlike our Saltburn experience, it was totally possible to stay in the water for more than three minutes. It was one of many beach sessions that followed, but as it was the first, if was a particularly dear experience for both of us.

As I’m posting this article four (FOUR!) years later, I feel very happy that we finally set ourselves free from the dutiful blogging and allowed ourselves a luxury of just posting a bunch of photos with zero research and useful information, with zero creative suffering and doubts. These are our memories of a very happy summer month in the South of England with so much more fun and beauty to come. I also feel euphoric that these photos finally made their way from a dusty folder on a hard-drive to the vast and endless public access. The world must know how wonderful Whitstable and Broadstairs are.