Destination: Europe
The Travel Bookshop Turns 30
by Eva Holland | 08.10.09 | 9:05 AM ET
The Notting Hill landmark, which has the distinction of being the only travel bookstore—that I know of—to play a role in a Hugh Grant romantic comedy, celebrates its 30th birthday later this summer. Travel Bookshoppers Saara Marchadour and Julian Mash shared their top 10 travel books with the Guardian to mark the occasion. It’s an excellent list—a couple of the authors overlap with our own fifth anniversary list of the top 30 travel books.
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Yahoo! BuzzAdventures in Unfortunate Place Names
by Eva Holland | 08.07.09 | 2:39 PM ET
Fill in the blanks: Residents in F**king, Austria, are sick of tourists flocking for lewd photo-ops with the town’s signage, but across the border the folks in W**k, Germany, think F**king should learn to embrace the crude humor—and cash in. That’s what W**k’s tourism leaders have done: Said one W**k spokesperson, “There are W**k postcards on sale although many people prefer to take their own W**k holiday snaps standing beside Welcome to W**k signs.” And understandably so. I’ll leave the DIY jokes to less refined bloggers.
A Resuscitated Keats House Reopens
by Eva Holland | 08.06.09 | 3:59 PM ET
The Hampstead house where John Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and spent some of his final, tubercular days has reopened to the public after a two-year, $700,000 restoration. This Wall Street Journal story has some nice details about the house, and about Keats’ own literary pilgrimage to the one-time home of Robbie Burns.
Travel Song of the Day: ‘Albion’ by Pete Doherty
by Michael Yessis | 08.05.09 | 3:48 PM ET
British Tourists: Still ‘Pissing About’ in Latvia
by Eva Holland | 08.05.09 | 12:27 PM ET
And Riga’s mayor, Nils Usakovs, has had enough. Usakovs spilled to the Guardian about his frustration with the British stag parties that arrive via low-cost carrier, get good and drunk and, more often than not it seems, take a moment to urinate on the city’s Freedom Monument before flying home. “We have a stigma about British tourists,” said the mayor’s spokeswoman. “They are probably not the ones we want to see.”
Yet somehow, Americans are the ones stuck with the “ugly” label?
Buckingham Palace: Jazz Landmark?
by Eva Holland | 08.04.09 | 4:25 PM ET
So did you hear the one about Louis Armstrong and King George V? Satchmo shocked the court, in a 1932 gig at the royal residence, by offering His Majesty the following shout-out: “This one’s for you, Rex.” And that’s just one of several bizarre anecdotes in this story from the Telegraph, about the unlikely history of jazz at Buckingham Palace and its resulting nomination to a list of seminal U.K. jazz venues.
I’ve never had much urge to visit the palace when I’ve been in London, but suddenly I’m intrigued.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘The Tourist’
by Eva Holland | 08.04.09 | 3:18 PM ET
The French thriller Anthony Zimmer is being remixed for English speakers as “The Tourist,” starring Charlize Theron and Sam Worthington. Theron will play an agent who seduces an unwitting American tourist in order to lure a criminal mastermind out of hiding, while Worthington will play either the tourist or the agent’s dastardly quarry—either way, if the trailer for the original is anything to go by, there will be plenty of intrigue on TGV trains and other French eye candy for armchair travelers. The movie is due out in late 2010.
Here’s that original trailer, un-subtitled I’m afraid:
Harrods: ‘The Ultimate Bespoke Travel Agency’
by Eva Holland | 08.04.09 | 11:54 AM ET
Forget about those discount holiday packages on sale at the grocery checkout counter: Travel-retail fusion has gone upscale. The personal shoppers at Harrods, the venerable London department store, are now offering customized holiday bookings—with a low, low minimum purchase of £2,500. And the maximum? There isn’t one. Over the course of a few phony phone calls, the Times Online’s Mark Rudd took the new travel service for a test drive.
Contiki: ‘Backpacking is so 1997’
by Eva Holland | 08.03.09 | 1:23 PM ET
So said a message that the popular bus tour company posted on Facebook awhile back, with the added boast that Contiki holidays were “hundreds of dollars” cheaper than independent travel in Europe. Nomadic Matt objected—and now he’s crunched the numbers to prove Contiki wrong, on the savings claim at least. As for backpacking being “so 1997”? I guess that’s subjective.
Moon-Gazing Around the Globe
by Alicia Imbody | 08.03.09 | 10:32 AM ET
From Puebla to Paris, 12 photos by moonstruck world travelers
See the full photo slideshow »
Homeless Polish Men Build Ship, Plan to Sail Around the World
by Michael Yessis | 08.03.09 | 10:05 AM ET
Nicholas Kulish has the details in a terrific story in the New York Times. The two dozen homeless men are building the ship in the yard of a former tractor factory in Warsaw, and “their story strikes deeper chords because, for all the modern tools in the building and corporate sponsors providing the raw materials, their endeavor echoes mythic themes of escape, adventure and redemption that can seem out of reach in a world of biometric identity cards and debt-collection agencies.”
Marcel Theroux Rides the Rails
by Eva Holland | 07.31.09 | 12:02 PM ET
Looks like a love of trains runs in the family? The Guardian has a fun video—part one in a series—from second-generation travel writer Marcel Theroux’s recent train ride into northern Russia. (Via @elihansen)
Brunel-Spotting in Southern England
by Eva Holland | 07.30.09 | 12:16 PM ET
If you’ve taken a train in London or southwestern England, chances are you’ve passed through or across one of Isembard Kingdom Brunel’s bridges, tunnels or railway stations. The Victorian engineer arguably did more than anyone to shape public transit in Britain, and his creations are hard to avoid.
I’ve been a Brunel fan ever since I accidentally wound up at his 200th birthday party at the foot of Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge in 2006, so I was pleased to come across this excellent slideshow from the Telegraph, mixing paintings and photographs to depict Brunel’s greatest surviving structures. I’ve made it to four of them—how about you?
National Geographic on ‘Vanishing Venice’
by Eva Holland | 07.29.09 | 12:22 PM ET
The latest issue of the magazine includes a lovely story on the city, and the rising flood of tourists that threatens to destroy it. (Via @italylogue)
New Travel Book: ‘Oxford Revisited’
by Eva Holland | 07.29.09 | 10:42 AM ET
Justin Cartwright’s new travel memoir, about returning to his alma mater in an effort to understand how it shaped him, lands in bookstores next week. Bookslut has a mostly positive review.
Chelsey Philpot writes: “As a young man arriving from South Africa, Cartwright recounts how he was romanced by Oxford even as he still felt himself to be an outsider. His winding tour of old haunts and Oxford landmarks is interrupted by his memories as well as philosophical ruminations ... Under a less skilled writer, such leaps would be clunky. However, Cartwright manages to meld both grand themes and small observations by remaining unabashedly cerebral even as he discusses drunken girlfriends or the tourist appeal of J. R. R. Tolkien (one of Oxford’s celebrated professors).”