Destination: Germany
World Cup Fans: Do You Know What Your Country Smells Like?
by Michael Yessis | 05.23.06 | 1:09 PM ET
Coca-Cola? Ripe mangoes? A piña colada? An After Eight mint? Chanel No 5? According to the Telegraph, retired perfume maker Ernst-Adolf Hinrichs of Holzminden, Germany, has identified the scents of the countries competing in next month’s World Cup tournament. Kate Connolly writes that Holzminden is “home to one of the world’s leading industrial producers of smells,” and that Hinrichs has created the scents for “smelling posts” around the city. Visitors are instructed to, of course, “follow their noses.” So which of the scents listed above belong to which country?
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Yahoo! BuzzOn German Travelers, Goethe, Reisefieber and Wanderlust
by Jim Benning | 05.02.06 | 1:13 PM ET
Thomas Swick celebrates German travelers—“The world’s greatest travelers,” declares his column’s headline—in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The urge to wander runs deep in the culture, he writes. “German, in fact, even has a word for the heightened anticipation one feels before a trip: reisefieber. Like knowing English has no word for putsch, it is a small linguistic jetway into national character.” Don’t miss the last line of the column—a terrific quote.
Germany’s Ostfriesland Hotel to Charge Guests By the Kilo
by Michael Yessis | 03.21.06 | 10:58 PM ET
The cost: half a euro per kilogram. At current exchange rates, that’s about $.60 for every 2.2 pounds. A bargain if you’re tiny. Not so much if you’re jumbo sized. And that’s hotel proprietor Juergen Heckrodt’s point. “I had many guests who were really huge, and I told them to slim down,” the owner of the three-star establishment in Norden told Reuters. “When they came back the year after and had lost a lot of weight they asked me, what are you going to do for me now?” Heckrodt hopes his gimmick will help inspire Germans to become healthier.
Berlin’s “Love Parade” Returns
by Jim Benning | 02.22.06 | 12:45 PM ET
After a two-year hiatus due to money problems, Berlin’s Love Parade is scheduled to return to Germany’s capital this year. The wildly popular techno street party, which was apparently exported to a number of other countries, is set to take place the weekend of July 15, just after the end of the World Cup. Said the owner of the parade’s new corporate sponsor of the event on CNN.com: “This brand has achieved cult status and is known worldwide.” Ah yes, there’s nothing like a little talk of the power of the brand to evoke the true spirit of the Love Parade.
What Country’s Citizens Take the Most Foreign Trips?
by Jim Benning | 01.24.06 | 12:38 PM ET
The answer is surprising. Germany is number one, and changes are coming to the number two and three slots. According to an interesting Reuters report on CNN, “Last year, Germans alone accounted for over 86.6 million trips abroad, with Britons in second place (65.3 million) and Americans trailing in third (58.3 million).”
“Far & Wide: The Golden Age of Travel Posters”
by Michael Yessis | 12.06.05 | 4:16 PM ET
That’s the name of the current exhibit at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Getty Gallery. I spent some time there yesterday afternoon, checking out the more than 60 promotional posters from the 1920s to the 1940s. They’re gorgeous artifacts of the Art Deco era, though the curators point out that the posters weren’t intended to be artistic. They were made for short-term commercial purposes, printed on cheap paper with a life expectancy of only eight weeks.
Message to Germans: You are Michael Shumacher. You are Katarina Witt. You are Depressed.
by Michael Yessis | 10.17.05 | 8:25 AM ET
Has Germany abandoned Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroeder for Stuart Smalley? The country has launched a self-help public-service campaign to cheer up its citizens. Seriously. Germany has earmarked $35 million and enlisted its most famous men and women to appear in a series of commercials and magazine ads, relaying the Smalley-esque message that Germans are good and smart and they should like themselves.
Germany Bans Smiling in Passport Photos
by Michael Yessis | 09.16.05 | 12:22 AM ET
It’s a security thing, according to the Associated Press story about German Interior Minister Otto Schily’s announcement: “Facial recognition systems match key features on the holder’s face and work best when the face has a neutral expression with the mouth closed.” Boing Boing reports that Canada and Britain have already made the same ban.
Summer Travel Reading
by Michael Yessis | 06.07.04 | 9:45 PM ET
The New York Times Book Review’s annual summer reading issue takes a look at seven new travel titles, including Elinor Burkett’s “So Many Enemies, So Little Time” and Michael Gorra’s “The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through Germany.” Reviewer Brooke Allen likes the crop of tomes. “A handful of recent travel books, featuring subjects that range from the only slightly offbeat (revisionist looks at Germany and modern Greece) to the truly mind-stretching (Kyrgyzstan, the Gobi Desert, wartime Afghanistan, peacetime Iraq), have thoroughly trumped the standard travel literature this summer,” she writes.
Mommy, Can I Have One of Those Cute Hats the Surly Border Guards Wear?
by Jim Benning | 02.28.03 | 3:34 PM ET
Further proof that everything and anything these days is fodder for a theme park: A company in Berlin plans to construct a theme park recalling life in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to a report on CNN.com. The park, believe it or not, is designed to capitalize on a wave of nostalgia for the era. Among other attractions, it would feature “surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food,” the article states. I might have a harder time believing this if I hadn’t read about it once before. In his landmark 1995 book, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” Benjamin Barber writes about just such a plan: “Whether the plan, goofy to be sure but hardly goofier than some of Disney’s projects now under way, will come to fruition is uncertain in Germany’s troubled fiscal condition. That it could even be considered suggests how far the theme park ideology has come from its inception in London in 1851 or its second coming (with Disney) at Anaheim in 1955.”
Doing 50 in the Hammer Lane
by Michael Yessis | 06.07.02 | 1:19 AM ET
It’s not uncommon for American long-distance truckers to buy motorhomes and continue to travel around the country when they’re retired. Some of them get so attached to their rigs, though, that they don’t want to leave them. Instead, they find old trucks and convert them to motorhomes. Road King correspondent Gary Bricken tracked down a few of them, including Josef and Katharina Schmitz of Dusseldorf, Germany. The couple spent five years traveling around the world in their converted 18-wheeler. “We just finished a two-year trip all over Australia, where we went completely around the country and then criss-crossed it both ways,” Josef told Bricken. “Then we shipped the truck to California and went down into Mexico then back up into Arizona. Now we are on our way to South America for another two-year journey. Everywhere we have been people have been nice.”
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.
Iowa Man Takes Road Trip to See His Orange Boxer Shorts, Jesus Night Light and Wal-Mart Jeans
by Michael Yessis | 08.14.01 | 9:13 PM ET
The idea came to John Freyer as he drove from New York to graduate school in Iowa: He would sell all his worldly goods on eBay. With the proceeds, he would then travel around the world to see his former possessions. “I want to figure out what happens to me when I no longer have all these items that supposedly define us,” Freyer, a 28-year-old fine arts student at the University of Iowa, told Washington Post writer Leslie Walker in a recent story. “I also want to know what happens to the people who buy them. I’m going on a road trip to find out.”
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