Travel Blog
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)
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzAboard the ‘Ladies Special’ in India
by Eva Holland | 09.18.09 | 9:36 AM ET
The New York Times reports from a new women-only commuter train in Delhi, part of a pilot program spanning four major Indian cities that’s aimed at cutting down on the harassment of female passengers. I’m thrilled to hear about the program, but here’s hoping it will only need to be a short-term solution—as one interviewee noted in the story, “You really need to make every train as safe as the Ladies Specials.”
Photo We Love: Purple (and Green) World Heritage Windmills
by World Hum | 09.17.09 | 5:04 PM ET
REUTERS/Jerry Lampen Energy-efficient LED lighting illuminates the World Heritage-listed windmills of Kinderdijk, Netherlands.
The Swedish Novel has ‘a Passport in its Back Pocket’
by Eva Holland | 09.17.09 | 3:58 PM ET
A group of Swedish writers have published a manifesto for Swedish literature in the 2010s. “We want to write books which are read, thumbed, torn out of the hands of angry taxpayers, borrowed and distributed to the max, quoted, imitated and translated,” they wrote. “The Swedish novel has brown eyes and black hair, it’s bald, green-eyed, blind and hook-nosed. It carries a collection of poetry in its breast pocket, a passport in its back pocket, and wears high heels.” (Via The Book Bench)
Budget Travel Breaks Some Weird Foreign Laws
by Eva Holland | 09.17.09 | 3:16 PM ET
With some help from their intrepid illustrated adventurer, Bud Travel, of course. It’s a fun slideshow.
Travel Song of the Day: ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ by Peter, Paul and Mary
by Michael Yessis | 09.17.09 | 2:03 PM ET
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.
‘Could iPhone Apps Change the Way We Travel?’
by Michael Yessis | 09.17.09 | 11:22 AM ET
Over at Slate, Tom Vanderbilt takes “a broad and by no means exhaustive look at the most promising—or at least most intriguing—apps to date.”
Travel Movie Watch: ‘A Moveable Feast’
by Eva Holland | 09.17.09 | 10:29 AM ET
Hemingway’s classic Paris memoir looks to be getting the book-to-big-screen treatment: The author’s granddaughter, actress Mariel Hemingway, has acquired the film and TV rights and is moving ahead with the project. There are no details yet, but plenty of intriguing questions. For instance, how might the movie handle the editing controversies of the book’s two dueling print editions? And who will play Hemingway, not to mention the cast of literary all-stars—Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more—that surrounded him in Paris?
As always when a favorite book is being adapted, I’m nervous and skeptical. But I’m also very, very curious to see how this one plays out. (Via EW’s News Briefs Blog)
Visit Denmark! Knock Somebody Up!
by Eva Holland | 09.16.09 | 5:03 PM ET
Forget about Australia’s “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign. There’s a new winner in the controversial tourism campaign sweepstakes, and it comes from, of all places, Denmark.
The Danish ad plays like a homemade webcam clip, featuring a young woman who claims to be looking for her baby’s father—a foreign tourist whose name she can’t remember. I’m not totally sure how it’s intended to entice visitors to the country—I don’t think accidental parenthood is on most folks’ dream itineraries—but, predictably, the spot was greeted with indignation and has been removed from VisitDenmark’s YouTube channel. The AP quotes a VisitDenmark representative as saying that it was meant to be “a nice and sweet story about a grown-up woman who lives in a free society and accepts the consequences of her actions.”
Of course, the ad didn’t get yanked before copies, parodies and responses started popping up. Here’s a re-posting of the original:
Travel Song of the Day: ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole
by Jim Benning | 09.16.09 | 3:38 PM ET
Flags of the World—Made From Food
by Michael Yessis | 09.16.09 | 2:34 PM ET
These ads for the Sydney International Food Festival are stunning. Right now, this one is my favorite:
(Via Coudal)
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)
Slate Takes a Ramadan World Tour
by Eva Holland | 09.16.09 | 12:02 PM ET
Writer Jason Rezaian has spent time in five different Muslim-majority countries—Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Iran and Turkey—during the annual month of fasting, and in a short essay he reflects on the subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences in the ways each one celebrates their shared holy month.
New Addition to the Travel Lexicon: ‘Hyperforeignism’
by Eva Holland | 09.16.09 | 11:09 AM ET
Per Kottke, it’s “the mispronunciation of words borrowed from foreign languages…but it’s actually a sort of an over-pronunciation, so correct that’s it circle [sic] back around to incorrect again.” So for instance, instead of mispronouncing “prix fixe” as “pricks ficks” you might go with “pree fee”—when the correct version is actually something closer to “pree ficks.”
