experience

Afternoon Tea at Fortnum & Mason in London

January 10, 2020 By Kat

I got to spend my birthday in London on our honeymoon, and the ONE thing I wanted to do was have Afternoon High Tea at the famed Fortnum & Mason.

If you aren’t familiar, Fortnum & Mason is the Queen’s favorite grocer – it’s an upscale grocery / department store with fancy teas, cookies, and many other beautiful things. You walk in and want it all!

They are a couple of locations in London, but their 300-year-old flagship store in Picadilly is where the magic is.

On the top floor is The Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon, where they serve their afternoon tea complete with cakes, sandwiches, scones, and of course, tea!

Make a Reservation

First of all, to get in, you need to make a reservation. As soon as you know you’ll be in London and want to go, you should book a table. It was all full when we checked, and I was so sad! But luckily a couple spots opened up that morning when they opened for business. We immediately snagged one of those tables using OpenTable. Score!

The Store

When you arrive at the store, wow, it is a sight to see! It looks majestic even from the outside. Since it was near Christmastime when we went, it was also beautifully decorated for the holiday season.

Since the tea salon is on the top floor, you go up these red carpeted staircases from one amazing floor to another until you get to the top.

The Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon

Once you arrive to the salon, you walk into this big open space with comfortable seating in the waiting area and a counter to check in. You feel like a VIP walking in here!

We waited for our table to be ready and then got graciously seated with menus. The service is impeccable and all the staff is so polite.

So excited!

From the menu, you can choose different sets: Afternoon Tea, Savory Afternoon Tea, Vegetarian, or High Tea. I chose the classic Afternoon Tea, which comes with the all the below items.

If you come with someone, I recommend one person getting Afternoon Tea and the other person getting Savory so that you can try each other’s. The food and tea are unlimited!

Next you choose a tea flavor from their extensive menu. I’ve never seen so many tea options in my life!

They have all different types of teas (black or green) and special blends that are named after royal occasions like the Queen’s Jubilee or Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Royal Wedding!

My tea arrives! They pour it into this silver tea strainer that looks like it has fish fins, and it catches all the loose tea leaves. Then you put it into the container on the left and enjoy your tea.

It looks like ordinary tea but boy, it tastes so delicate and rich.

Then our food came. It’s hard to see the other person with the 3-tier cake stands on the table, ha!

This is the top layer of tiny cakes. They were so delicately made and very rich, but not too sweet. Each was better than the next!

Middle tier. The scones. One is plain and one has fruit in it. Very dense and filling. There are different spreads and jam you can eat with them. The clotted cream was amazing!

Sandwiches – my favorite part! They were so good. We asked for refills on these!

Vince’s savory tea set came with this egg thing called “Oeuf Drumkilbo” with lobster in it. It was impeccable. Got seconds of this too.

Pretty soon, I was feeling incredibly full. From tiny sandwiches, how is that possible??

With Vince’s savory tea option, you can also choose a slice of cake from the cart afterwards. We couldn’t even imagine eating anymore, so we packed it home.

They pack it for you in this beautiful to-go box. It’s like a gift!

Okay also the bathroom is really nice! They have this pomegranate rose hand soap that smells magnificent. You can conveniently buy it downstairs from their store, but sadly it was closed by the time we were done eating.

So that was our high tea experience in London! It did not disappoint! Lots of people were celebrating their birthdays there too and the waiters would go around singing for them.

His first time having afternoon tea. I think he liked it!

Later in our trip, we visited the Fortnum & Mason store at St. Pancras and bought some gifts to take home like shortbread and tea bags. We ended up getting this assorted set of 120 tea bags, so we could take a little bit of London home with us! 😉

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The Drybar Experience – A Hair Blowout for Special Occasions

October 26, 2018 By Kat

Drybar is a salon where you can get a blowout. A blowout is where you can get your hair styled (no haircut – just shampoo and styled). Hence this is great for when you want to get your hair done for a special occasion like a night out.

Note: I think the experience can be highly dependent on who you get for your hairstylist and which location you go to. We went to the location in Vegas in the Cosmopolitan hotel. For us, the price is a flat rate of about $49 (not including tip), and if you want a special updo or braid, then that costs extra. The price may differ depending on location as well.

Visiting Drybar is a whole experience.

First off, the decor is so bright and happy with pops of yellow that it lifts your spirits.

They have their own line of hair products which they use, and the pastel colored bottles add a cool look to the place as well.

Also they had the movie Eat Pray Love playing in the background with subtitles. They know their target demographic! 😉

HOW THE PROCESS WORKS

1. First off, I recommend booking an appointment ahead of time. Especially if you’re going in a group, I went with 2 girlfriends, you want to make sure they have time available for all of you at the same time.

2. There’s a menu of different styles you can choose from – straight, loose curls, beachy waves, etc.. You can look through the menu / lookbook and each hairstyle has a fun cocktail themed name like Cosmo, or Mai Tai, etc..

3. First you get your hair washed. WOW this was an experience! It was so amazing and relaxing. They shampoo you twice (with some charcoal shampoo and something else) and add conditioner (it was to promote volume in my case because my hair is so straight and flat).

4. Then they blowdry your hair while styling it at the same time, depending on which look you chose. My hairstylist was super nice and would explain what she was doing as she moved through each step. I can’t recall what she did, but she knew what she was doing! LoL She did all these complex steps to prep my hair so that it would have volume and hold the curls for a long time. There was lots of spraying different products and using rollers and a curling iron and more.

Don’t I look like an oompa loompa? Haha!

By the way, they give you a complimentary drink (mimosa or wine), so this is my drink, with a glass of water too. Even the water looks chic here!

THE FINAL LOOK

Here’s how it turned out! The hairstylist helped me decide on a Cosmo Tai – a mix of the 2 looks in the lookbook, and also parted my hair down the middle. She also told me not to touch my hair for at least half an hour afterwards to maximize how long the curl would last. She said the curls should last 3-4 days. I ended up washing it out after the second day because I was traveling, but yeah, those curls stayed because of the enormous amount of hairspray used lol.

For me, I think I like my curls a little bigger and more relaxed so it feels like there’s more movement when I run my hand through my hair. But regardless, it was a fun experience to do with girlfriends!

To look for a location near you, check out the Drybar website.

Lessons Learned from 30-Day Podcast Challenge

August 7, 2018 By Kat

I finished my 30-Day Podcast Challenge! It all started on a really hot day when I was sitting in my car in a parking lot in downtown San Jose. I had time to kill before my meeting, so I hit the record button and recorded my first episode.

I released it and committed to a goal of recording 1 podcast episode per day for 30 days. I wanted to try out podcasting as a platform, and I felt like a 30-Day Challenge was a quick way to see if I liked it or not.

Caveat: I started the challenge on June 1 and completed it on July 25, so it took me 55 days to create 30 episodes, but better late than never! I skipped some days or was too tired on other days, but nevertheless, I powered through and completed it!

Amassing a large number of subscribers was never a primary goal, I wanted to have zero expectations for my podcast, so I am pleasantly surprised that I have some listeners! Thank you, you know who you are!! I don’t mind sharing my analytics – everyone starts off with humble beginnings – so here are they are:

If you’re interested in doing your podcast, check out my earlier post on How to Start a Podcast. My friend Orlando mentioned he’s interested in doing a podcast now too, yay! It makes me super excited that I can encourage folks to do a podcast too and get their voice out there! 😀

Now to the main point of my blogpost. Here are the lessons learned from completing 30 episodes of my podcast:

1. Done is better than not done

I’ve always struggled with perfection, spending hours proofreading my blog posts and editing YouTube videos. When recording these podcasts in the Anchor app, you can’t edit individual audio segments. In cases like these, having limited functionality in an app is great! When I was recording, if I didn’t like the direction that I was going in, or I had a very long pause, then I would stop / delete the recording, and restart again. My episodes were around 5 minutes long, so that was one continuous audio recording. I learned to be okay with brief pauses or tiny stumbles because I didn’t want to record from the beginning again. This process could take me anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 mins to do an episode – much less time than doing a blogpost or YouTube video. Having a quick”win” by publishing an episode also gave me a high and a sense of accomplishment to keep me motivated to move onto my next work task during the day.

2. Having a podcast gives me a chance to practice speaking

I got lots of practice “public speaking” on my podcast. Technically I was talking into a phone by myself, but later other people would listen the podcast episode, so I would say it is somewhat like public speaking. I usually don’t like having the spotlight on me. Even in a 1:1 setting, sometimes I won’t know what to say, so I’ll redirect the focus onto the other person by asking them a question. Doing that habit over the course of my life means that I’m not used to having lots of blank space to fill with my own words. By having a one-woman podcast (monologue style), in a way, I was forced to fill the blank void and verbally express my thoughts and feelings. Over the 30 episodes, I noticed (and other people noticed), that I started to stutter / stumble / pause less. Hooray for progress! Now I do find it easier to talk on YouTube videos when I’ve had recent and consistent practice of doing my podcast.

3. When I admit my weaknesses or struggles, I feel less burdened by them

Through podcasting, I found an outlet for me to be pretty raw and vulnerable but in a safe way. It is scary to put myself out there, but with audio only, it’s a little easier. Maybe it’s because people can’t see me that I feel a little safer. Regardless, I’ve found podcasting as a place to open up and chat. Sometimes I ramble. Sometimes I talk about things that inspire me. Sometimes I talk about things that confuse me, or things that I’m not very good at (i.e. cooking), or the life skills I’m still working on (i.e. remembering to eat 3 meals a day). But in admitting all these imperfect sides of me, it gives me relief that I don’t have to hold up the mask of perfection of having it all together – because that is just tiring to keep up. And interestingly enough, once I admit these things publicly on my podcast, I feel that I’ve acknowledged/ accepted it as a part of me. Then I can take a deep breath and move onto other things.

WHAT’S NEXT

I’m sure there are more lessons that I’ve learned, but those will continue to unfold over time. I will continue creating podcast episodes because it brings me many positive feelings and benefits as mentioned above. But I probably won’t be publishing on a daily timeline. I’m happy to do it at my own pace, when I feel like I have something to share.

If you’re curious to check out my podcast, search for “What Kat Found Out” in your favorite podcast player or listen here: https://anchor.fm/katkuan

Have you thought about creating your own podcast? If so, what topic are you thinking of?