Destination: Europe
Martha Stewart: Travel Writer
by Eva Holland | 03.03.09 | 1:11 PM ET
The homemaking maven will soon be penning an “occasional personal travel column” for Martha Stewart Living, Mediaweek reports. Said the acting editor-in-chief: “Martha has been blogging about her trips and gets tons of hits on her blogs.” The first column, covering Stewart’s recent trip to Prague, is due out in April; the shift is part of a larger effort to broaden the magazine’s editorial content and appeal to new advertisers. In this tough publishing climate, I suppose it’s a good thing.
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by Julia Ross | 03.03.09 | 12:35 PM ET
Anyone who has frequented a suburban swimming pool or beach resort on the East Coast in recent summers should be familiar, by now, with the sound of consonant-heavy Eastern European accents piercing the salt air. That’s because thousands of college students from places like Moldova and Ukraine arrive each year to work summer gigs as lifeguards, waitresses or hotel clerks under the increasingly popular J-1 student visa program.
Now comes word that the next big J-1 wave could be from Thailand. GlobalPost reports that large numbers of Thai students have begun securing summer visas to work at U.S. fast food joints, with McDonald’s emerging as the workplace of choice. The story portrays the students as single-minded in their endeavor, trudging dutifully to the local Mickey D’s in unglamorous locales like Pittsburgh and Mobile, determined to parlay foreign work experience into hospitality-related jobs back in Bangkok. I hope they’re working in some fun as well. If the Serbian kids who staffed my sister’s pool outside Washington, D.C., last summer are any indication, I’d advise the Thais to consult their Eastern European counterparts on the finer points of letting loose.
I’m not in McDonald’s often (maybe twice a year), but I’ll keep an eye out this summer to see if the trend has reached the nation’s capital.
Galaxidi, Greece
by World Hum | 03.03.09 | 11:26 AM ET
REUTERS/Yiorgos Karahalis Revelers celebrate Clean Monday by participating in a colorful "flour-war", a traditional activity marking the end of the carnival season, in the port town of Galaxidi, some 125 miles northwest of Athens.
Morning Links: A ‘Tropical Havisham Enigma,’ iPhone Travel Apps and More
by Michael Yessis | 03.03.09 | 9:54 AM ET
- Pico Iyer investigates a “tropical Havisham enigma” in southern Sri Lanka.
- There’s a good reason why airline passengers lost fewer bags in 2008.
- Roger Yu evaluates some iPhone travel applications.
- Gulliver asks: “How will the recession affect green business travel?”
- Forbes lists America’s worst intersections.
- The fine Southwest has to pay for flying those planes that had missed safety checks: $7.5 million.
- The “very unconventional” lodging at Pixel Hotel Linz is spread all over the Austrian city. (via This Just In)
- Finally, here’s a look at the art of yarn bombing—“improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time”—in Vancouver B.C.
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Travel Nostalgia: The World in Vintage Posters
by Eva Holland | 03.02.09 | 5:23 PM ET
I’ve confessed to my abiding love of postcards before, and now I have another confession: I am a total sucker for the vintage travel poster and all its varied (fridge magnet, notebook, calendar, tote bag) incarnations. There’s something so refreshing about those old Cunard posters, or the early advertisements for transcontinental passenger rail. They have a guileless wonder to them, and a total lack of cynicism or irony—because they come from an era when nobody thought they had already seen it all. So I was thrilled to read on the Shoretrips blog about a major vintage poster auction being held in New York.
The auction’s already come and gone, but the entire collection is still viewable online. There are more than 400 posters in the sale, though, and only some of them are travel-related—so for all my fellow vintage-travel-poster-lovers (and I know you’re out there) I’ve put together a list of my favorites, and a cheat sheet for the rest.
A Traveler’s 10 Best Musical Discoveries
by Tom Swick | 03.02.09 | 10:35 AM ET
Contemplating and celebrating the world of travel
Morning Links: War Hotels, the Solas Awards and More
by Michael Yessis | 03.02.09 | 9:06 AM ET
- A major snowstorm in the eastern U.S. has disrupted travel throughout the country.
- GlobalPost began a five-part series about the favorite hotels of war correspondents.
- NPR says the “stimulus puts high-speed rail on the fast track.”
- Rome’s mayor announced an unorthodox way to fight “violence and thuggery” in the city. (via @theroadto)
- What can modern cities learn from slums?
- World Hum contributor Eric Lucas is dumbfounded that nobody tells the truth about Las Vegas.
- Some travelers are feeling guilty about traveling at all in this economic climate.
- Thailand thinks you’ll want to visit the country more if it has a signature cocktail. So it created the “Siam Sunrays.”
- Congrats to the winners of this year’s Solas Awards. David Torrey Peters took the grand prize for best travel story of the year.
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Morning Links: Walking on Broadway, Fees for Airline Toilets and More
by Michael Yessis | 02.27.09 | 9:43 AM ET
- New York City plans to turn parts of Broadway into pedestrian malls.
- The inevitable Coldplay reference comes only four seconds into this video about that ice music festival in northern Italy.
- Are the “taste police” out to get German bakers?
- The literature of men in boats vs. women in houses. (via Arts & Letters Daily)
- Here’s the latest Carnival of Cities.
- Happy belated 90th birthday, Grand Canyon National Park. (thanks for the reminder @evaholland and @AlisonSWellner)
- The economic downturn has boosted Peace Corps applications and the number of financial types snowboarding the Alps.
- Mule drivers in period costumes need TSA security clearance, too! So Boing Boing started a contest to create mule-driver TSA IDs.
- Will passengers soon need to pay to use the toilet on Ryanair? Just how ridiculous can the carrier get?
- Finally, this is fun to say: Sassy the Sustainable Sasquatch.
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Video: Jeffrey Tayler on His New Book, ‘Murderers in Mausoleums’
by World Hum | 02.26.09 | 5:27 PM ET
Jeffrey Tayler discusses traveling from Moscow to Beijing, "drink by drink."
This Just In: Britain Doesn’t Have to be Expensive
by Eva Holland | 02.26.09 | 4:27 PM ET
Sure, London can be one of the world’s most expensive cities, and the pound has offered a punishing exchange rate with most other currencies over the past few years. But, having done the “starving student” thing there in my grad school days, I’ve always believed that the U.K. remains a prime destination for travelers on a budget. For every pricey West End stage production there’s a free, world-class museum, and for every swank celebrity-helmed restaurant there’s a tasty meal in a cozy pub. Don’t believe me? Here’s proof: 10 free cultural gems, courtesy of the Guardian, and, from the Independent, the country’s 50 best cheap eats. Both are good lists—the Guardian’s in particular gets bonus points for avoiding the best-known London freebies, like the Tate Modern, in favor of more obscure (and more geographically diverse) cultural institutions.
‘World’s Brainiest Tour Operator’ Now (Sort of) Affordable
by Eva Holland | 02.26.09 | 2:36 PM ET
For all the high culture addicts out there, good news from Arthur Frommer: British tour operator Martin Randall Travel has been spotted advertising in Harper’s, which means, as Frommer writes, “that tours with profound intellectual content will henceforth be marketed to the American public; the ‘dumbing down’ of travel may be significantly slowed through this effort.” The guidebook mogul figures the shifting exchange rate, which has made Britain much more affordable for Americans in recent months, is behind the unprecedented stateside marketing effort. The tours still aren’t for shoestringers—the all-inclusive packages hover around 300 pounds per person per day—but, as Frommer notes, they’re cheaper than comparable college alumni tours, and thanks to the sliding pound they’re within easier reach than ever.
Agatha Christie’s Holiday Home: Now Open for Business
by Eva Holland | 02.26.09 | 11:48 AM ET
Britain’s National Trust will open the novelist’s beloved Devonshire summer holiday home, Greenway, to the public for the first time this weekend. The property was donated to the trust in 2000 and has undergone a 5.4 million pound restoration, with the aim of re-creating the house as it was when Christie spent her summers there in the 1940s and 50s.
Said Christie’s grandson: “What I wish most is that the people who visit it feel some of the magic and sense of place that I felt when my family and I spent so much time there ... If they do then our gift of Greenway will be worthwhile.” (Via The Book Bench)
Val Senales, Italy
by World Hum | 02.26.09 | 10:53 AM ET
REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi Norwegian musician Terje Isungset plays an ice instrument during a concert at the Ice Music Festival, in the valley of Val Senales in northern Italy.
Morning Links: A Wordy Map of St. Petersburg, the Joy of L.A. Traffic and More
by Michael Yessis | 02.26.09 | 9:38 AM ET
- New Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says yes to body scanners.
- World Hum contributor Tim Patterson chronicles the struggle of the Kachin people of Myanmar.
- USA Today looks at “what might be the most endangered airline in the USA.”
- NPR has an interview with the world-traveling ethnographers from The Linguists.
- Happy 450th birthday Pensacola, Florida.
- Matthew Polly goes to St. Petersburg, Russia, in Slate’s latest Well-Traveled.
- This map of literary St. Petersburg was created using lines from Russian writers about St. Petersburg. (Via The Book Bench)
- Daniel Fox aims to shoot more than 100,000 digital images from around the world for the Wild Image Project.
- The Freakonomics blog is in the midst of a six-part series about the facts and fiction of Los Angeles Transportation. I find it compelling, though maybe I’m just looking at the gray skies here in D.C., waiting for winter to end, daydreaming about my upcoming trip back home.
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The Worst Airline PR Ever?
by Rob Verger | 02.25.09 | 3:51 PM ET
Oh my. Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start with a story as weird as this one.
Here’s what happened: Jason Roe, an Irish freelance web designer and blogger, posted an item on his website where he claimed he had found a quirky way to make the prices on Ryanair’s booking system drop down to zero. He followed up on the same post: “I did not claim to complete the booking process for a free flight. I found a bug that showed a 0.00 price listed beside flights. Orders could not go past the passenger details page.” (Whether the original posting implied that a free flight could actually be purchased is debatable.)