Destination: France
Administering the Beer Test in Europe
by Jim Benning | 04.22.03 | 3:32 PM ET
James Gilden wondered how Americans would be received in Europe these days, so he went to Paris, Berlin and London to find out. He interviewed Americans about their experiences, and he ordered beer at bars in each of the cities and dutifully studied the bartenders’ responses. What did he find? Despite the controversy over the war, he writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, the Americans he talked with were having a grand time, encountering no ill will. As for the beer, “My beers were delivered with no more or no less aplomb or foam than in any of my previous visits to London,” he writes.
Whew. We’d hate to think that politics could get in the way of a good beer.
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Yahoo! BuzzFrance: The New Adventure Travel Destination for Americans?
by Jim Benning | 04.15.03 | 3:40 PM ET
It sounds ridiculous, I know. But for all the tough talk you hear from so many Americans these days, post-Saddam, it seems that quite a few of them start quaking in their walking shoes at the mere thought of traveling to France. Apparently they’re worried they might be mocked or abused as a result of the diplomatic rift over Iraq, but for all their worrying, you’d think the French had just taken up cannibalism. The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn takes up the subject in his column Sunday (he’s heard from a number of concerned readers), and he offers this fine observation: “[W]hat most Americans really fear, I think, is that the Europeans—particularly the French—might begin to act as sophomorically petulant toward us as some Americans have been acting toward them.” Can anyone say “freedom fries”?
Is the U.S. Quarrel with France Merely a Lovers’ Spat?
by Jim Benning | 04.07.03 | 3:56 PM ET
American writer Josephine Humphreys hopes so. As she confesses in Sunday’s New York Times, she loves France. “Somehow the French manage to meld reason and passion, a combination I like,” she writes. “They strike me as witty, tough, quirky and kind. I’ve tangled with only one snappish French person, but his annoyance was justified; he was stuck with me in a revolving door I couldn’t get the hang of. Others have been so hospitable that when I came home I missed them, and I consoled myself with baguettes and cornichons, some Edith Piaf, a little Voltaire.”
The Power of Critics and Guidebook Writers
by Michael Yessis | 02.26.03 | 3:38 PM ET
I once stopped into a budget hotel in Malaysia that had earned a mediocre review in a Lonely Planet guidebook. When I arrived at the hotel, unaware of the critical write-up, I found that the hotel’s management had posted several signs in the lobby explaining why the place was better than the guidebook had claimed. I wasn’t sure if the hotel’s response was an effective sales strategy—I never would have known about the bad review if it hadn’t been pointed out to me—but the guidebook writer had clearly struck a nerve. Still, I was astonished to come across a report on the BBC Online yesterday that a top French chef apparently committed suicide after his restaurant earned a diminished rating in GaultMilllau, a prominent French restaurant guide. “I think GaultMillau killed him,” restaurateur Paul Bocuse told the BBC. “When you are leader of the pack and all of a sudden they cut you down, it’s hard to understand, it hit him hard.”
Travel Warning: Visiting the U.S. May Be Hazardous to Your Health
by Jim Benning | 01.13.03 | 11:32 AM ET
It’s important to be aware of threats to one’s safety when traveling abroad, but take one look at the U.S. State Department’s travel warnings for a given country—or the blanket warning for the whole world—and you may never want to step foot on foreign soil again. It’s frightening! So we were happy to see Jane Engle turn the tables in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, pointing out just a few of the warnings that foreign countries offer to their citizens about travel to the U.S.
Canada, for example, notes the potential for carjackings in Santa Monica, California. France offers tips on avoiding shark attacks. And, on a lighter note, what about fashion? “Leave it to the French to fret over fashion,” Engle writes. “Their government says Americans are tolerant about clothing but forbid even little girls to wear a monokini—the topless bikini invented in the ‘60s by designer Rudi Gernreich. Further, children must wear swimsuits and must use toilets corresponding to their gender. Mon Dieu! You can almost hear the French exclaim. Those crazy Americans!”
World Tourism Revenue Down 2.6 Percent
by Michael Yessis | 06.25.02 | 12:03 AM ET
The Madrid-based World Tourism Organization reports that the September 11 terrorist attacks in America helped cause travel revenue to slump throughout the world in 2001. Still, travelers spent more than $463 billion (U.S.) during the year. France was the world’s top tourist destination, drawing 76.5 million visitors, followed by Spain (49.5 million) and the United States (45.5 million).
‘They Say that Truth is the First Casualty of War, Yet This Time it Seems to be Rational Thought’
by Jim Benning | 04.07.02 | 3:59 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Thomas Swick is keeping a “wartime diary of a travel editor,” and Sunday’s offering includes a real gem: “On my way to lunch I stop at the Brasserie and tell the hostess that I am not eating there until they give up their anti-French policy. (They have taken everything French off their menu.) ‘We’re just trying to support the troops,’ the hostess says. I’ve seen pictures of our soldiers caked with dust, blurry from fatigue, and my heart crumbles for them. But I don’t understand how refusing to serve a bottle of Bordeaux is going to help their situation. All it’s going to do is hurt some vintner who may be the most anti-Chirac man in France.”
I Admire Eggs. They Teach Travelers About Packing in One Container, With No Loose Ends Hanging Out.
by Michael Yessis | 04.02.02 | 7:43 PM ET
Susan Spano has eaten eggs in Scotland, Scandinavia, Japan, France, Spain, China and many other countries near and far. Even at fancy resorts or on a cruise ship known for magnificent breakfast spreads, she goes straight for the eggs. Spano likes them for their nutritional punch, sure, but that’s not the only reason why. “I love finding the egg in some of the most outlandish places and seeing how differently it is prepared and served,” she writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “The egg is global but no instrument of globalization.”
Have Hammer, Will Travel
by Michael Yessis | 03.20.02 | 9:52 PM ET
The ranks of Germany’s wandergesellen—skilled craftsmen who wander around the country in search of work—are growing as a result of high joblessness and a nationwide construction slowdown after the frantic first decade of reunification. “The first year of the walz must be spent in German-speaking territory, which includes Austria, Switzerland and the Alsace-Lorraine region of eastern France,” writes Carol J. Williams in the Los Angeles Times. “But after the indoctrination year, the wanderers are allowed, even encouraged, to range as wide in the world as their earnings can take them.” According to wandergesellen code, the men must remain 50 kilometers away from home for at least three years and a day.
Seeking the Joie de Vivre of “Amelie”
by Jim Benning | 03.13.02 | 9:36 PM ET
The Joy of Procuring Exotic Stuff from Really Far Away
by Jim Benning | 02.19.02 | 2:32 PM ET
After she returned home from her Bora-Bora vacation, Debbie Seaman contacted Tahiti to special-order the same soap stocked in her hotel room. Why? Not because it gets her any cleaner than the stuff she can buy at the local store, she writes in Sunday’s New York Times, but because its scent takes her right back to an azure lagoon. Seamen doesn’t confine such pleasures to soap, either: “When I eat bona fide Dijon mustard, for example, I like to pretend I’m back at the Paris bistro where, following the lead of the French, I first tried it on my frites instead of ketchup. I want my eyes to tear up, my nostrils to quiver, and my taste buds to revel in recognition.”
A Bench in London
by Michael Yessis | 11.12.01 | 9:27 PM ET
Paris was Marylin Bender’s town. Her husband’s was London. When he died nine years ago, Bender began visiting some of his favorite places. At London’s Berkeley Square, she noticed that plaques adorned the benches. Bender decided to try to secure one in her husband’s memory, resulting in an unexpected journey of errors, persistence, sweetness and heartbreak. “As a teenager, after my family had moved to Manhattan, I had a few park bench trysts with impoverished students in Central Park,” Bender writes in a New York Times essay. “None ended happily until, years later, a man I had met a few months before proposed that I accompany him on a business trip to Europe and Asia as his wife. I accepted instantly, we married, and thereafter we snuggled on benches in the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, in the Tuileries in Paris, along the Hofvijver in The Hague and regularly in Berkeley Square.”
Checking In: Americans Living Abroad
by Michael Yessis | 10.29.01 | 8:39 PM ET
The New York Times tracks down U.S. residents in Italy, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and other countries to find out how lives of ex-pats have changed in the six weeks since the terrorist attacks. Some anecdotes sound like benevolent urban legends: “Most Americans in Saudi Arabia live on enclosed compounds…At one recent dinner the conversation inevitably turned to security concerns. The couples traded stories, like the one about two Americans whose car broke down on a stretch of desert highway. They were immediately wary of two Saudi men who stopped to offer help. Sensing their unease, one Saudi turned to the Americans and said, ‘By the way, we hate Osama bin Laden.’ ” Other stories are a bit creepy and, possibly, paranoid: “Not long ago, [24-year-old English teacher Gabrielle Parnes] said, she was with two girlfriends [in Paris], giggling and talking loudly when a group of Arab-looking men walked by and purposely elbowed each of them. ‘I can’t be sure they knew we were American,’ she said. ‘But I think so. Before I might have thought they were just nasty guys. But now I can’t help thinking it was because we were American.’”
The White Zone is for the Immediate Loading and Unloading of Pilots and Contortionists Only
by Michael Yessis | 08.24.01 | 9:10 PM ET
Musician, artist and frequent flyer Peter Gabriel, and director Robert Lepage, have teamed to create Zulu Time, a “theater piece” set in an airport. According to Rolling Stone, the work features pilots, stewardesses, terrorists, drug traffickers, dancers, robots, acrobats and contortionists. “I think it’s surprising how little mythology there is about airports,” Gabriel says. “If you look at what there used to be about trains and stations. There’s so many road movies that it’s a genre in itself, which isn’t the case with air movies, aside from Airplane.” Zulu, which has already been performed in Zurich and Paris, debuts in the United States September 21 at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom.
What a Difference Between the Quality of the Items Handed Out by Air France and at the Shelters!
by Michael Yessis | 07.23.01 | 11:25 PM ET
Judie Jones used to live in a Boston homeless shelter known as “The Fright Center.” She hated it. “‘I thought, `Where else could I go that I would be shown humanity and treated with the graciousness of an international traveler?’” Boston’s Logan International Airport was the answer. Boston Globe reporter David Abel writes (readers must now pay a fee to view the complete story) about the 66-year-old Australian who, with several other older homeless women, spends just about every night in terminal waiting rooms. Jones says it’s not such a bad scene.