Destination: Europe
Anthony Lane in Europe: “What Country, Friends, is This?”
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.06 | 1:19 PM ET
He’s got a pretty good day job as a film critic for The New Yorker, but in the magazine’s current Journeys issue, Anthony Lane focuses his considerable talents on a story about traveling via Europe’s low-cost airlines. As usual, the London-based Lane is hilarious. “[T]he best thing to happen to Great Britain in the past decade is the increasing profusion of ways to get the hell out of the place,” he writes. And so he does, recapping a few of his excursions on the Continent, including a great opening sequence about flying to Vitoria-Gasteiz, a place he’d never heard of and had no idea where it was located. He did know, though, that he could pay for things with euros.
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Yahoo! BuzzChodová Planá, Czech Republic
by Ben Keene | 04.14.06 | 9:45 AM ET
Coordinates: 49 50N 12 44E
Annual beer production: 2,378,000 gallons (90,000 hectoliters)
Clever advertisers may have come up with the slogan “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach” for the Dutch brewer, but it took Czech ingenuity to turn a tagline into reality. Perhaps in an effort to cater to a local population that leads the world in per capita beer consumption, the Chodovar Family Brewery in Western Bohemia recently began offering a unique type of therapy in the form of real beer baths. Bizarre as the notion of soaking in a hot tub of yeast and herbs may sound to some, the owners certainly chose their location well—the geothermal activity beneath this forested region of the country has drawn people to its salubrious spas and mineral springs for centuries.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Think All McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets in the World Are Created Equal?
by Jim Benning | 04.13.06 | 10:52 PM ET
In our About Us section, we celebrate travel in the Age of Globalization, noting, “A visit to a McDonald’s in Shanghai is still nothing like a visit to a McDonald’s in Durban or Auckland or Newark.” We were thinking in cultural terms, but it turns out the same is true when it comes to nutrition, too. According to an AP story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, a study of KFC and McDonald’s restaurants around the globe found that the same menu items—including McDonald’s chicken nuggets and KFC hot wings—varied widely in artery-clogging trans fat content from country to country, and even from city to city. It turns out, for example, that hot wings-and-fries in New York had far less trans fats than in Poland and Hungary, and that a chicken nuggets combo in New York City had far more trans fats than the same combo in Denmark, Spain and Russia. Researchers blame the different kinds of oils used.
France, Interrupted
by Terry Ward | 04.10.06 | 10:20 PM ET
Photo by Terry Ward. In a lake house near Rodez, the wine was flowing and party-goers were immersed in a rugby match on TV. Terry Ward was chatting with locals, enjoying the moment. Then the telephone call came from home.
Russia Plans to Implement Lie Detector Tests For Airline Passengers
by Michael Yessis | 04.07.06 | 1:52 PM ET
A lie detector system could be in use at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport by July, according to Adrian Blomfield’s story in the Telegraph. Travelers’ voices will be analyzed for stresses as they respond to four questions. Blomfield writes: “The first is for full identity; the second, unnerving in its Soviet-style abruptness, demands: ‘Have you ever lied to the authorities?’ It then asks whether either weapons or narcotics are being carried.”
Peter Mayle: In Provence, I’m Regarded as “a Fairly Benevolent Oddity”
by Jim Benning | 04.05.06 | 9:20 AM ET
British Secondary Schools Add Michael Palin’s “Himalaya” to Required Reading List
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 1:54 PM ET
It’s part of an effort to bring students up to speed on their geography studies, the worst taught subject in British schools, according to the country’s Office for Standards in Education. “You can travel the seas, poles, and deserts and see nothing. To really understand the world you need to get under the skin of people and places. In other words, learn about geography,” said Michael Palin, a member of Monty Python and a well-traveled author, according to a report in the Mirror. “I can’t imagine a more relevant subject. We’d all be lost without it.” In Himalaya, Palin chronicles a six-month trek through India, Pakistan and China.
Which City Has the Worst Drivers?
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 1:45 AM ET
Is it Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Kuwait City? Rome? Los Angeles? London Times correspondent Chris Ayres devotes his latest So L.A. blog entry to his opinion on the subject. “[T]his week I returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city whose entire population seems to be trying to break the land speed record in a 1984 Renault 9 GLS,” he writes. “And I concluded that the lapses of concentration demonstrated by motorists in Los Angeles is far preferable to the sociopathic stare of the average Porteno cab driver, who considers it his duty to accelerate towards stationary objects (including human beings) at double the speed limit, before averting multiple homicide by stomping on the brakes or swerving violently.” Sounds horrible, but I’m going the other way on this. I’ve seen some dreadful drivers here in Los Angeles. Just tonight, for instance, I was traveling a busy two-lane street when the guy in front of me swerved into the oncoming lane and stopped cold, just to drop off his passengers. No hazards. No signal. No brain.
Into the Heart of Sisu in Finland
by Jim Benning | 03.29.06 | 11:06 PM ET
Bill Thomas visited Finland in January and, in the painfully chilly conditions, discovered the secret to surviving a brutal Finnish winter: sisu. “In the five years since my last visit I’d almost forgotten about sisu, a Finnish word for something that’s hard to translate,” he writes in a delightful story in Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine. “The equivalent in English might be ‘determination.’ Sisu, however, implies a trait much deeper in the Finnish character, so deep, in fact, that it’s best observed in the dead of winter, when added reserves are needed just to make it from one five-hour day to the next.”
Las Letras: Madrid’s Literary Quarter Copes With a “Trendy Onslaught”
by Michael Yessis | 03.29.06 | 4:44 AM ET
“Americano”: A Backpacker Travel Movie Worth Seeing?
by Jim Benning | 03.24.06 | 11:42 AM ET
Too few travel-themed movies capture the spirit of travel as we see it at World Hum. “Before Sunrise” did. So, too, did “The Motorcycle Diaries.” This new film in limited release, Americano, sounds like it has potential. It focuses on a recent college graduate played by Joshua Jackson who is contemplating his future as his trip to Europe winds down during Pamplona’s San Fermin festival. Interestingly, actors in the movie were filmed as they participated in the actual Running of the Bulls. In a three-paragraph review in today’s Los Angeles Times, critic Kevin Crust praises the film: “Writer-director Kevin Noland effectively utilizes his fine young cast and the natural beauty and rich culture of northern Spain in amiably posing timeless questions of youth.”
The Australia Tourism Ad Controversy: ‘Has the World Gone Mad?’
by Michael Yessis | 03.24.06 | 11:04 AM ET
Now that the Canadians have joined the Brits in objecting to Tourism Australia’s “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign, and the U.S.-based American Family Association is poised to make its concerns known, Australians are asking themselves, “Is the ‘bloody hell’ ad campaign a growing embarrassment for Australia? Or is it the greatest marketing ploy of all time?” The comments are flowing on both sides at the Sydney Morning Herald news blog.
Guernica and “Picasso’s War”
by Jim Benning | 03.24.06 | 9:35 AM ET
Since our contributor Ben Keene featured the town of Guernica as his Place of the Week today, I thought I’d mention a terrific book about the attack on the town and the extraordinary Picasso painting of the same name. It’s Russell Martin’s Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece That Changed the World, published in 2003. Martin recalls the Nazis’ attack on the Spanish village, Picasso’s work on the painting, its move to New York’s Museum of Modern Art until the death of Franco, and then its post-Franco return to Spain aboard an Iberia Airlines flight in 1981.
Guernica, Spain
by Ben Keene | 03.24.06 | 9:34 AM ET
Germany’s Ostfriesland Hotel to Charge Guests By the Kilo
by Michael Yessis | 03.21.06 | 10:58 PM ET
The cost: half a euro per kilogram. At current exchange rates, that’s about $.60 for every 2.2 pounds. A bargain if you’re tiny. Not so much if you’re jumbo sized. And that’s hotel proprietor Juergen Heckrodt’s point. “I had many guests who were really huge, and I told them to slim down,” the owner of the three-star establishment in Norden told Reuters. “When they came back the year after and had lost a lot of weight they asked me, what are you going to do for me now?” Heckrodt hopes his gimmick will help inspire Germans to become healthier.