Destination: Europe
South Queensferry, Scotland
by Ben Keene | 08.18.06 | 6:42 AM ET
Coordinates: 55 59 N 3 23 W
Population: 9,370 (2001 est.)
Mad dogs and Englishmen may be unable to resist the midday sun, but it’s the Scottish who will venture into the heat covered head to toe in 10,000 prickly seed pods from the burdock plant. For centuries now, August in Scotland has marked the reappearance of a strange creature known as the Burryman, a somewhat masochistic, yet tradition-bound resident of South Queensferry, who spends a day wandering the streets (assisted by two attendants) petitioning neighbors for whiskey and money. In the words of John Nicol, this year’s lucky honoree: “It is agony to wear the suit as it is as uncomfortable as it looks.” Once a flourishing port just northwest of Edinburgh, the small town of South Queensferry is also the site of the Forth Rail Bridge, an 8,296-foot engineering marvel spanning the Firth of Forth that was the largest such structure on the planet upon its completion in March of 1890.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
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Yahoo! BuzzVideo: Travels with “Laguna Beach” Star Jessica Smith
by Michael Yessis | 08.16.06 | 1:17 PM ET
Last year we noted that guidebook publisher Let’s Go named Jessica Smith of MTV’s “Laguna Beach” as a spokesperson. Part of the gig apparently included shooting video during a spring-break trip to Europe, which recently debuted on uthtv.com. In the first episode, the cameras follow Smith through London. The result: one not-so-discreet plug for Let’s Go, and lots of yawn-inducing mingling with people who recognize her from the TV show. Still, parts of the video offer an interesting look at someone embarking on a trip to Europe for the first time, dealing with what to pack, navigating new cities and what it feels like to stand out in a foreign place. More of her travel videos are on the way.
Moscow vs. Lonely Planet
by Michael Yessis | 08.10.06 | 4:08 PM ET
Politics, business and travel often intertwine. Take, for example, Lonely Planet. Recently, the guidebook giant has lobbied the United States Congress to support a National Passport Month. In 2002, Hong Kong took issue with Lonely Planet’s guidebook coverage. In 2004, Burma Campaign UK called for a boycott of the guidebook giant simply for publishing a book about the country. Now it’s Moscow’s turn to take some shots at LP. From a story by Tom Parfitt in the Guardian: “Moscow officials have launched an attack on Lonely Planet, saying the backpackers’ guide portrays the Russian capital as a gangster-infested Gotham and presents an image of the city that is at least 15 years out of date.”
‘Young and Restless’ Travel Column Debuts
by Jim Benning | 08.07.06 | 1:52 PM ET
Terry Ward debuted her promising new monthly column for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s travel section Sunday, aptly titled “Young and Restless.” The first piece focuses on the pleasures and challenges of studying French in Toulouse. Among the highlights, she recalls her early conversations with Emmanuelle, the 48-year-old woman she lived with: “[W]e found ourselves laughing at our ‘Franglish’ over steaming bowls of verbena tea. We pondered the irony of my ‘L’oreal Paris’ cream that I bought at an Orlando Wal-Mart, and her ‘Vichy New York’ cream purchased from a pharmacy in Toulouse.” Terry is a contributing editor of World Hum and has written about France for the site. Terry’s stateside now, but for how long nobody knows. She is young and restless. As she told me today, recollecting her time in France, “I wanna go back.”
Photo courtesy of Terry Ward.
Club Gulag: Inside Post-Soviet ‘Extreme Tourism’
by Michael Yessis | 08.07.06 | 7:41 AM ET
Care to stay the night in a former KGB prison in Latvia? How about a weekend in an abandoned gulag 100 miles above the Arctic Circle? Or do you just want to make like a Volga boatman, pulling a barge up the river? According to The Age, the night at the KGB prison is already a hot destination for masochistic tourists. “On some nights, for extra money, they call out the guard, and the shivering guests can witness a mock execution, with the ‘corpse’ being flung like a sack of potatoes into a lorry before being driven away, presumably for a reviving cuppa,” Allan Hall writes. “Once past the humiliating stripping and donning of prison garb, the gruelling physical exercise regime, the interrogation and the solitary confinement cell—for those that answer back to Ivan—there is dinner. It is a delicious melange of stale rye bread, pickled fish heads, pressed meat from some unidentifiable mammal, pickles and black, sweet Russian tea.”
De-Politicizing the French Fry
by Terry Ward | 08.03.06 | 9:48 PM ET
Francophile that I am, I was glad to hear a short snippet on the NBC Nightly News yesterday evening mentioning a menu change on Capitol Hill. “Freedom fries” and “freedom toast”—so dubbed on congressional cafeteria menus when tensions rose between Washington and Paris during the looming invasion of Iraq in 2003—have quietly reverted to their original monikers, French fries and French toast. A USA Today blog noted that, back in 2003, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, angry about France’s anti-war position, “wielded his legislative authority over the House cafeterias and mandated a change of menu, which had been suggested by Republican colleague Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina.” The blog goes on to say that there are no official comments from the hill on the decision to re-Frenchify the names.
Writers on Ruins: An ‘Anthology of Archaeological Travel Writing’
by Jim Benning | 07.25.06 | 5:31 PM ET
Most contemporary travel writing focuses on the here and now, with only brief glimpses back. But recently, Oxford University Press published a collection of travel stories about visits to ruins entitled From Stonehenge to Samarkand: An Anthropology of Archaeological Travel Writing. The book features old and relatively new stories by such writers as Tom Bissell (a World Hum contributor), Paul Theroux, Robert Byron and Mark Twain. The New York Times called it a “smart” collection, and the Washington Times declared it “an admirably well-produced survey of the personalities and accomplishments of those pioneering people eager to recapture past relics of human history.”
Tallinn, Estonia
by Ben Keene | 07.21.06 | 7:43 PM ET
Coordinates: 59 22 N 24 48 E
Population: 401,502 (2005 est.)
Novel as it may seem, some places in the world are actually attempting to make their governments more efficient and their societies more open. Across the Gulf of Finland, not quite fifty miles from Helsinki, the Estonian cabinet conducts its paperless meetings entirely online in the capital city of Tallinn. Nearly four times larger than the country’s next biggest city, Tallinn is the center of an electronic society as well as an e-government. Internet access is considered a constitutional right and throughout the city blue traffic signs with the @ symbol direct citizens to hundreds of free Public Internet Access Points (PIAPs). Every school, along with 82 percent of home computers, is connected to the web, supporting the results of a recent survey showing that over half of the population uses the Internet nationwide.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Berlin’s DDR Museum: ‘There Must Be a Microphone Around Here Someplace’
by Michael Yessis | 07.21.06 | 7:50 AM ET
A museum chronicling life in the former East Germany recently opened in Berlin, and Richard Bernstein of the New York Times writes that it captures what it was like to live in the German Democratic Republic, aka the D.D.R., under the thumb of the Stasi. “By the time you leave the museum, you’ve been both a perpetrator and a victim,” museum founder and director Peter Kenzelmann told Bernstein. It’s not all about oppression and murder and eavesdropping. “Other exhibitions are on the East German mania for nude bathing, a freedom that was considerably reduced by new regulations after reunification,” writes Kenzelmann. “There are displays on East German rock bands, ordinary consumer products and on the press, with this barbed comment: ‘Despite 39 newspapers, two television channels and four radio stations, there was only one opinion.’”
How to Find Good Gelato in Italy
by Valerie Ng | 07.21.06 | 6:41 AM ET
Photo by David Turner. No trip to Italy is complete without savoring a little gelato, but all gelato is not created equal. Valerie Ng reveals how to find the best and avoid the mediocre. (Hint: don't let bright colors fool you.)
Zidane and the Head Butt Debated Around the World
by Terry Ward | 07.19.06 | 8:00 AM ET
Along with a billion-plus World Cup watchers, I was tuned in to the last minutes of the final between France and Italy when Zinedine Zidane nailed Italian player Marco Materazzi with that now infamous head butt. More than shocked, I felt instantly sad. And then, strangely, embarrassed, because I could just imagine the emotions on the streets of France, in that Berlin stadium, and around the world at that moment. I doubt many people truly enjoyed watching a star like Zidane go out on that note. The next night, when I watched the nightly network news (France’s loss was largely blamed on Zidane for being ousted with a red card), it irked me how the American anchorman had denounced Zidane as having gone “from legend to lout.” Where was the middle ground, I wondered? Or at least some hint that Zidane’s action could lie somewhere between salvation and sin? The anchor’s quick condemnation brought to mind a certain French friend of mine who always insisted that Americans (particularly, perhaps, yours truly) are too quick to see things in black and white.
“Are Cities the New Countries?”
by Michael Yessis | 07.18.06 | 7:27 AM ET
As cities turn into megacities—often defined as metropolitan areas with more than 10 million citizens—many academics are asking if, given their size and power, they are becoming more important than the countries that contain them. “Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too,” the BBC News Magazine’s Finlo Rohrer writes. “These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.”
Inside ‘The Most Schizophrenic Job in All of Travel’
by Michael Yessis | 07.17.06 | 7:07 AM ET
Steve Hendrix calls himself a professional mercenary. His fight? Working as an assistant tour guide on a 14-day European bus tour, a journey he chronicled Sunday in the Washington Post. It’s a great piece of you-are-there journalism. Funny, too. “There are two words that we tour guides hate to hear when checking into Budapest hotels with 30 road-whipped passengers waiting in the bus, all limp from their third change of cities in six days and footsore from hours of sightseeing in 93-degree heat in a country without air conditioning amid a group-dynamic that is just barely propped up by the prospect of a much-anticipated ‘Hungarian feast’ in the hotel dining room an hour from now,” Hendrix writes. “Those words are: ‘What dinner?’”
Happy Bastille Day!
by Michael Yessis | 07.14.06 | 3:33 PM ET
I’ll be commemorating the beginning of the French Revolution tonight at a French restaurant here in D.C. with a three-course prix fixe meal that’s an excellent price for so many reasons. That price? $17.89.
Vanuatu Tops “Happy Planet Index”
by Michael Yessis | 07.14.06 | 11:42 AM ET
And the nations with the world’s largest economies finished down the 178-nation list. Way down. Germany ranked 81st, Japan 95th and the United States 150th. The New Economics Foundation, which bills itself as a “think-and-do tank,” says its inaugural Happy Planet Index “moves beyond crude ratings of nations according to national income, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP).” The new index, they say, produces “a more accurate picture of the progress of nations based on the amount of the Earth’s resources they use, and the length and happiness of people’s lives.” A BBC News story quotes Richard Layard, director of the Well-Being Programme at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, as saying that the index “was an interesting way to tackle the issue of modern life’s environmental impact.” Layard continues: “Over the last 50 years, living standards in the West have improved enormously but we have become no happier.” So which countries besides the island nation of Vanuatu are happiest? Colombia and Costa Rica round out the top three. Burundi, Swaziland and Zimbabwe finished at the bottom.