Held every year in London’s east metropolis full of new buildings that dot themselves around the river, the World Travel Market is like a huge bazaar, a maze-like walk across the world.  I love the fact that you get to start your day in London Town and end your day in the far reaches of Bhutan.  In between, you have every single country in the world – even Saudi Arabia that does not want you to come!  They are all here.

More than 20,000 people visit the World Travel Market.  There are seminars and exhibitions, but for me, the biggest thrill of all is to walk across the world and listen to thousands of languages being spoken from stand to stand.  There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today although 2,000 have less than 1,000 speakers.  However, at the World Travel Market everybody seemed well equipped with English.  It was absolutely brilliant to walk through Italy, then Greece, to Turkey, and then France, and onto the Arab countries.   Entrance into the World Travel Market for trade is free which means that you can travel around the world for nothing.  As it turns out, the good old London Underground was on strike and so Emirates airlines was transporting everybody across the eastern London sky in their Emirates cable cars.