United Kingdom: from London to the Highlands, well fed

I came to the United Kingdom for the food, and I'll admit that's an unfashionable thing to say. British cooking still drags around an old reputation. Spend two days in a London market and that reputation falls apart in your hands, somewhere between a Bangladeshi curry, a Maltese pastizzi and a flat white made by someone who clearly cares too much. London doesn't have a cuisine. It has all of them.

I started, predictably, at Borough Market, then drifted to the noisier, cheaper stalls of Brick Lane and Maltby Street. The plan was loose on purpose: a city this dense rewards the wander. My phone stayed in my pocket most of the time, but when it came out it earned its keep — pulling up opening hours, reading a queue's worth of reviews before committing, finding the one bakery three streets over that someone swore by.

A connection trap nobody warns you about

Here's the thing I want you to hear before anything else, because it caught friends of mine off guard. Since Brexit, the UK is no longer in the EU — and the European « roam-like-at-home » that covers your phone across the continent very often does not apply here anymore. Plenty of operators quietly reintroduced UK roaming fees. It's the same trap as Switzerland: you assume your European bundle has you covered, and instead you collect a nasty surprise on your next bill.

That's exactly why I travel with an eSIM here. Coverage itself is excellent — central London is wall-to-wall 4G and 5G, and even Edinburgh and the main rail corridors hold up well. The problem was never the network. It was the billing. With a dedicated UK plan loaded before I flew, I stopped thinking about it entirely, which is the whole point.

« The UK doesn't lack signal. It lacks the free roaming you assumed you had. »

Pubs, museums, and the art of doing nothing

Between meals — there is always a between-meals — London hands you the British Museum and the Tate for free, and a pub on nearly every corner for the price of a pint. I'd plant myself in a corner of an old Bloomsbury pub, nurse something local, and let the afternoon go soft. A pub here isn't just a bar; it's a living room you're allowed to borrow. I sent a few too many photos of carved beams and crooked floors to friends back home, all of it riding on a connection I never had to babysit.

North to Edinburgh, a taste of the Highlands

Then I did the thing I'd been saving: the train north. Roughly four and a half hours up the east coast to Edinburgh, the sea flickering past on the right, and the country slowly turning wilder. Edinburgh is all dark stone and steep closes, a city that looks like a held breath. I ate too well again — fresh seafood, a bakery on every wynd — and used a free evening to book a day train deeper north, toward the Highlands, just for a taste.

That stretch is where I'll be honest about the signal: out among the lochs and glens it thins out, and there are long, beautiful dead zones where your phone simply gives up. I'd half expected it, so I'd screenshotted my tickets and saved an offline map the night before. The connection mattered at the edges — confirming a guesthouse from the platform in Edinburgh, calling home from a café with a view I couldn't possibly describe — not in the middle of the wild, where, frankly, you don't want it anyway.

What I take away

The UK surprised me twice: once at the table, where it's far better than its press, and once on the phone bill, where it's quietly trickier than its neighbours. Good food, great connection, one real catch — and once you've sidestepped the roaming trap, you're free to do the only sensible thing here, which is eat your way from a London market to an Edinburgh wynd and let the train do the rest.

— Nora, somewhere between a market stall and a train window.