Destination: Europe
Meet Heathrow Airport’s New Writer in Residence
by Eva Holland | 08.02.11 | 2:58 PM ET
Novelist Tony Parsons is the latest writer to sign up for a week at Heathrow. According to the Evening Standard, Parsons will “roam around the airport, among passengers and staff, as inspiration for his 13th book which will be a collection of short stories based on his experiences there.”
“The Art of Travel” author Alain de Botton was the airport’s first writer-in-residence back in 2009. We interviewed him about the experience.
(Via @johnleewriter)
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Yahoo! BuzzThe ‘I Ate at El Bulli’ Genre of Food Writing
by Jim Benning | 08.01.11 | 11:40 AM ET
Famed Spanish restaurant El Bulli closed Saturday. Among its many legacies, the Telegraph notes, it created a new genre in food writing:
Over the years, however, hundreds of restaurant critics from all over the world made the pilgrimage to northern Spain, establishing a distinct genre of review that has become known in the trade as the “I Ate At El Bulli Piece” (IAAEBP).
A pioneering example appeared in the New York Times Magazine: “Welcoming cocktails of a frozen whisky sour and a foam mojito were accompanied by popcorn that had been powdered and reconstituted as kernels, and a tempura of rose petals. A ‘Kellogg’s paella’ consisted of puffed Rice Krispies to which the waiter added an intense seafood reduction; on the side were a small, flash-fried shrimp, a piece of shrimp sashimi and an ampoule containing a thick brown extract of shrimp heads that you were instructed to squeeze into your mouth.”
Anthony Bourdain’s April blog post about his El Bulli meal would have to stand as a masterful example of an IAAEBP.
Tonight: Bourdain Goes to El Bulli for ‘Greatest Meal’ of His Life
by Jim Benning | 08.01.11 | 11:05 AM ET
The Spanish restaurant many critics considered to be the best in the world served its final meal Saturday night. Travel Channel host Anthony Bourdain visited Ferran Adria’s El Bulli recently, and his show about it airs for the first time tonight.
Bourdain called the meal he had there during that visit “the single greatest restaurant meal of my life.”
I don’t know if Monday’s episode is the best depiction of what the Adrias did at El Bulli-though I’m pretty damn sure it is. I do know that our producers and camera people and editors and post production people went all out-did their very best work. This show was a labor of love and much gratitude. We were determined to get it right.
Tales of a Travel Chaperone
by Michael Yessis | 07.26.11 | 7:14 AM ET
Funny story concept well executed by the man doing the chaperoning of fifth graders to Spain: Dave Barry.
Our group consisted of four dads, 18 moms and approximately 27,000 children. There was no way to get an exact count: They move too fast.
Our group assembled at Miami International Airport (motto: “Our Motto Has Been Delayed”). All of us wore identical ill-fitting T-shirts with our group name printed on them. That’s how you let everybody know that you’re a group of sophisticated world travelers.
The Washington Post Magazine covered similar ground this weekend. John Kelly joined a group of junior high students touring Washington D.C.
I began to recognize the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome about four hours into my day touring Washington with the eighth-graders of Centreville, Mich. I was starting to identify with my captors.
Stilettos in Paris
by Eva Holland | 07.20.11 | 10:21 AM ET
Eva Holland did the Bohemian backpacker thing in Paris. Paris Las Vegas gave her the chance to act out a different role.
If Hemingway Were Alive, Which European City Would He Go To?
by Michael Yessis | 07.14.11 | 11:05 AM ET
Eight writers and academics make their pitches in the New York Times’ Room for Debate. The leading cities? London and Berlin.
Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg, picks London:
By way of elimination, it is London—Europe’s global city, in the way New York, L.A. and Mountain View are global cities. London has the money (coming mainly from financial services). It is a city of a myriad nationality. It leaves you alone even as it offers a thousand points of distraction. Though no longer the capital of an empire, London draws the best and the brightest from all over the world—which highlights another critical condition: language.
When Paris was queen in the 18th and 19th century, every educated person in Europe spoke French, a trait that lasted into the 20th century. Today, everybody speaks English, or at least Bad English, which is the world’s fastest growing language. But who now has a command of German, let alone Dutch or Italian? If the rest of the world ever takes to Chinese as it has taken to English, Shanghai might join the roster. But the 3,000 signs of Chinese are a bit harder to master than the 26 letters of the English alphabet.
Writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulic makes a case for Berlin:
In more than two decades after the collapse of Communism, a flood of eastern Germans as well as citizens from other eastern European countries (refugees from the Balkan wars, Russian Jews), young Americans and other Westerners have moved to Berlin. Together with the old “guest workers”—Turks from Kreutzberg—they turned the city into an exciting mixture of people of which real Berliners are but a few.
But this alone would not be enough to make Berlin the center of cultural life. So many artists flock to Berlin because living there is cheaper than living in any other big city in Europe. It also helps that Germany is one of the few countries left that cares about the arts and sponsors culture through various institutions, grants, awards, festivals and conferences. Imagine, writers there get paid for their readings!
‘Europe’s First Travel Guide’ Missing From Santiago de Compostela Cathedral
by Michael Yessis | 07.07.11 | 6:33 PM ET
The Codex Calixtinus was reported missing Wednesday by distraught staff at the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. The 12th century illustrated manuscript was “compiled as a guidebook for medieval pilgrims following the Way of Saint James,” according to the BBC.
This is the oldest copy of the manuscript and is unsaleable on the open market.
Only a handful of people had access to the room in which it was kept.
This edition of the Codex Calixtinus is thought to date from around 1150.
Its purpose was largely practical—to collect advice of use to pilgrims heading to the shrine there. It also included sermons and homilies to St James.
The Guardian adds:
The local Correo Gallego newspaper reported that distraught cathedral staff spent hours searching for the manuscript before contacting police late that night.
“Although security systems have been improved considerably it is true to say that they are not of the kind one might find in a bank or a well-protected jewellers,” the newspaper reported.
Only five security cameras were used to watch the archive area, according to the newspaper, and none were pointing directly at the safe where the priceless manuscript was stored.
NYT on Luca Spaghetti’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Spin-off Memoir: ‘Pasta, Pasta, Pasta!’
by Eva Holland | 07.07.11 | 5:27 PM ET
Who is Luca Spaghetti? In case you’ve forgotten, he’s one of the dreamy Italian men who shows Elizabeth Gilbert around town during the Roman section of her bestselling memoir. He’s also, now, an author—his own memoir, Un Amico Italiano: Eat, Pray, Love in Rome, was released this spring, and the New York Times had a really funny gem of a review.
Here’s Sam Anderson:
It has a strange integrity: the purity of an actual, unremarkable guy telling his actual, (mostly) unremarkable story. Aside from a few Gilbertesque cutesy touches (“That Marlboro tasted a lot like life”), there’s no pretense of educating humanity or saving a soul or discovering a self. It’s just: Hey world, this crazy thing happened where someone put me in a book—so here’s my story! Pasta, pasta, pasta! Spaghetti’s only ulterior motive is right on the surface: he hopes the memoir will make James Taylor, the American folk musician he reveres above all other humans, notice him.
I count myself among the legions of EPL fans, but even as a cheerleader I can’t help thinking this is all getting a bit surreal.
Splitscreen: A Love Story
by Jim Benning | 06.30.11 | 1:48 PM ET
Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.
Mesmerizing travel video shot entirely on a Nokia mobile phone.
(Via Kottke)
In Italy, a Toast to American Breakfasts
by Rick Steves | 06.27.11 | 1:17 PM ET
On eating in Europe, and what Europeans have to say about American cooking
China Beyond its Borders
by Michael Yessis | 06.17.11 | 11:08 AM ET
Caught up with NPR’s series about the ways China is asserting itself throughout the world. It’s excellent. The latest piece looks at Italian response to the changing textile scene in Tuscany, “home to the largest concentration of Chinese residents in Europe.”
Sylvia Poggioli says:
On Via Pistoiese, shops are Chinese—hairdresser, hardware store and supermarket. There are few Italians. It’s 2 p.m. and all shops are open—there’s no time for siesta in Chinatown.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘The Trip’
by Eva Holland | 06.16.11 | 8:47 AM ET
NPR notes that British comedians Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon have put together a travel-themed comedy that sees them playing themselves (or, versions of themselves) on a restaurant tour of northern England. The film is mostly improvised and, says Coogan, “what makes it interesting is that there’s an edge to it and a discomfort to it that makes it engaging. It’s not just a couple of actors saying, ‘Get a load of me. I’m laughing at myself.’ There are a couple of moments where I find Rob irritating—genuinely—and I respond naturally, but not the way that I would in reality.”
I’ve been a fan of Coogan’s since his Alan Partridge days, and the movie will take place in my old expat stomping grounds, so I’ll hope to catch this one when I can. “The Trip” went into limited North American release last weekend.
Vanished Friends, Love Lost and My Old Address Book
by Jeffrey Tayler | 01.20.11 | 11:45 AM ET
Photo: Jeffrey Tayler Jeffrey Tayler found a relic from his first trip overseas. It brought back a flood of memories -- and regrets.
The European Grand Tour, Chinese Style
by Eva Holland | 12.30.10 | 2:29 PM ET
The Economist takes note of a new variation on an old theme: a Chinese take on the classic “grand tour” of Europe. From the story:
China’s newly mobile middle classes like to visit established spots like the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Venice’s Grand Canal. But the visitors have also marked out a grand tour all of their own, shaped by China’s fast-developing consumer culture and by distinctive quirks of culture, history and politics. The result is jaw-dropping fame, back in China, for a list of places that some Europeans would struggle to pinpoint on a map: places like Trier, Metzingen, Verona, Luxembourg, Lucerne and the Swiss Alp known as Mount Titlis.
(Via @reidontravel)
World Travel Watch: Hundreds Killed in Phnom Penh Stampede, Dutch ‘Coffee Shops’ Closing to Tourists
by Larry Habegger | 11.24.10 | 12:03 PM ET
Larry Habegger rounds up global travel news