Nigeria is a difficult market, with shoddy infrastructure and few decent shopping malls.
5 p.m. 7) SHOPPING STREET Cities can't earn their cosmopolitan stripes without decent shopping, and Westminster Street rises to the retail challenge.
Conveniences include three metro lines, four bus lines and several cinemas, cafés and bakeries, as well as a decent shopping mall just across the square.
Once-bustling retail strips like West 8th Street are now lined with empty storefronts, but neighborhoods like SoHo, the East Village and Union Square are so close by that decent shopping isn't hard to find.
Physically, they might be quite isolated – neither spoke much Russian – but decent housing, the proximity of quite decent shops and markets, foreign TV (most German stations could be watched in and around Kaluga, and some French ones, too), and the internet, all made for a much easier ex-pat life than 20, and even 10, years ago.
Like many locals, they wanted a few concrete things: for the Westfield shopping centre to be built in the centre so they don't have to go "all the way to Keighley for decent shops"; for the Odeon cinema to be restored.
The Portes du Soleil is an obvious place for them to head: handy for Geneva, part of a huge ski network, with a near perfect resort base boasting two cinemas that show English-language films, skating and hockey ice rinks, decent shops, restaurants and cafes around quaint squares, plus laid-back après ski.
The lord mayor of Manchester, Sue Cooley, notes that decent restaurants and nice shops spring up in the favoured haunts of the old, just as they do in the trendy, revamped boroughs of London.
Cheese is the one item on your New Year's Eve shopping list where you can't go wrong, as any decent cheese shop will let you try the produce before buying.
