Destination: North America
It’s Been a Great Year for America’s Parks
by Eva Holland | 09.23.09 | 12:15 PM ET
The travel industry as a whole may have struggled through 2009, but the country’s national parks are on track for record attendance numbers this year. The AP offers some thoughts on what’s driving the increase.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Oregon-Guanajuato Connection
by Jim Benning | 09.23.09 | 11:22 AM ET
Nice story in the Global Post about a particularly potent sister city relationship between Ashland, Oregon, and Guanajuato, Mexico:
While other cross-continental matchings are largely symbolic, this relationship has fostered academic and musical exchanges, helped build houses—and even led to 79 marriages.
I gotta say, Ashland couldn’t have picked a better sister city than Guanajuato. The Spanish colonial city doesn’t get the attention it deserves—it’s one of my favorite places in Mexico.
The Rise of America as Culinary Destination
by Michael Yessis | 09.23.09 | 9:55 AM ET
Just a few decades ago, America was a culinary wasteland. Now, it’s foodie central. Why? Jerry Weinberger points to, among other things, the Great Woman theory of history:
The first wedding gift my wife and I received, in 1965, was a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). It still sits on a shelf in our kitchen, bound now by tape, with almost every page earmarked and blotched. Published in 1961, Child’s book brought the techniques of French haute cuisine to the American kitchen, teaching us how to soak and sauté sweetbreads, how to make soufflé au Grand Marnier, how to cut up a duck—all within the limits of the American supermarket of the period. But it was Child’s later TV show, Boston PBS’s The French Chef, that really changed things. It was unintimidating French cooking: the chef was a goofy-talking giant who dumped in the butter and occasionally spilled things and whacked stuff with mallets and sometimes burned the sauce.
But Julia taught us how to master French cooking, not American. American food had to be invented before it could be mastered. And the inventor was another Great Woman, this one on the opposite coast. In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. This was the great transformative event in American culinary history. Chez Panisse grew out of Waters’s experience not with the butter and fat of Parisian haute cuisine, but with the foods of Mediterranean Provence (based on olive oil, the fresh fruits of the earth and sea, and the general habit of going to the market with a string bag every day). The principle of Chez Panisse was that food—both animal and vegetable—should be absolutely fresh, and that meant absolutely local. So it’s not quite right to say that Waters had to invent American food; what she did was rediscover and then elaborate on pre-canned, pre-supermarket, pre-tomatoes-all-year-round regional American food.
Video We Love: David Byrne Cycles Times Square
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 12:41 PM ET
0:19—“Lady, if I was a truck you wouldn’t be doing that.”
1:31—“Times Square, crossroads of the world.”
2:27—“Sometimes when I tell people I ride around New York they think I’m crazy. That may be.”
3:52—“If this were a bike lane, there would be a truck from New Jersey in it.”
Cycle Killer
by David Byrne | 09.21.09 | 10:27 AM ET
iStockPhoto In his new book, "Bicycle Diaries," David Byrne reflects on his travels on two wheels. Herewith, an excerpt.
Travel Song of the Day: ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ by Gladys Knight and the Pips
by Eva Holland | 09.18.09 | 12:32 PM ET
NYC: 30 Mosques in 30 Days
by Eva Holland | 09.18.09 | 11:03 AM ET
First came the Ramadan world tour, and now the Ramadan tour of New York. Two Muslim New Yorkers are just wrapping up a very cool project—visiting 30 mosques in the five boroughs over the 30 days of the holy month. They’ve been blogging as they go, and the result is a fascinatingly complex picture of the city’s modern Muslim community.
Here’s a quick sample from day twenty-seven in Astoria: “I looked around and saw people from all over the world coming in cracking jokes among one another. A litmus test I use to see if a mosque is serving the needs of a community, is checking to see if people are smiling.” (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
The Voyeurs of New York’s High Line
by Michael Yessis | 09.17.09 | 12:37 PM ET
New York City’s new High Line park looks out at, among other things, the Standard Hotel, which, writes Geraldine Baum, “became New York’s hot attraction this summer after guests were photographed in the buff prancing about, even having sex, in front of floor-to-ceiling windows.” Baum looks at the phenomenon, and puts it into context:
This 21st century urban voyeurism is the next logical step in a society that has been peeping and poking into private lives, with all of us participating, on reality TV, through social networking, and in confessional interviews and memoirs.
Travel Song of the Day: ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole
by Jim Benning | 09.16.09 | 3:38 PM ET
What Would ‘Walden’ be Called if it Were Published Today?
by Eva Holland | 09.16.09 | 1:20 PM ET
According to this fun list of revised book titles: “Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany.” (Via The Daily Dish)
Photo We Love: Fall Leaves in Minnesota
by World Hum | 09.15.09 | 5:02 PM ET
Maple, oak and birch leaves change color in Minnesota.
The Big Picture: Hurricane Ike, Before and After
by Eva Holland | 09.15.09 | 4:15 PM ET
On the one-year anniversary of the devastating hurricane’s passage through Galveston, the Big Picture bloggers have put together a fantastic before/after photo essay—click on the photos of last year’s destruction to see the same cleaned-up locations today.
At Least One Country Really Cared About the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson’s Arrival in New York
by Michael Yessis | 09.15.09 | 9:50 AM ET
And it wasn’t the U.S. OK, that might not be fair. Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg did show up at the festivities, and New York City tourism promoted a days-long 400th anniversary celebration.
But, according to the New York Times, the Netherlands went nuts, covering the just-ended festivities by sending “about 50 reporters to New York, with a major television station running nightly half-hour updates on the proceedings during prime time. And thousands of Dutch citizens crossed the Atlantic to take part, including Crown Prince Willem-Alexander.”
All that to celebrate the achievements of a Brit. So why the hubbub? “[H]is financial backer was the Dutch East India Company. (‘Who paid for the voyage,’ the crown prince said, ‘really counts.’)”
Judging India
by JD Roberto | 09.14.09 | 10:37 AM ET
In New Delhi, JD Roberto deemed much of what he encountered backward and barbaric. But his moral compass was about to be reset.
Finding ‘Mad Men’ in Manhattan
by Eva Holland | 09.11.09 | 12:14 PM ET
With “Mad Men” mania gaining steam in the early days of season three, Travel and Leisure offers a guide to the inevitable Don Draper tourist trail. T&L’s Charlotte Savino notes the importance of the show’s setting: “[F]or many, it’s the moneyed haunts and good ol’ boy bars in Gotham that make the late-1950s and early-1960s drama so much fun to watch ... Manhattan—its energy, glamour, wealth, and, well, alcohol—plays like another character flitting around the Sterling Cooper ad agency. Manhattan is the comic foil to Don’s emptiness.”
Fair warning: The story includes some spoilers.