Travel Blog
The All-American Train Ride?
by Eva Holland | 07.08.08 | 10:45 AM ET
Doesn’t have the same ring to it as “the all-American road trip,” does it? With the possible exception of the (nearly lost) art of freight train hopping, riding the rails in America has never been mythologized the way some other modes of travel have. Guardian writer Ruth Fowler recently rode the train from New York to Los Angeles, and in this essay she argues that we’ve got it all wrong: Amtrak really is the way to go, and not just because of the high price of gas.
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Yahoo! BuzzMichael Palin: Travel Makes One ‘Less Afraid of the World’
by Julia Ross | 07.08.08 | 10:40 AM ET
At lunch with the Financial Times, the amiable BBC travel host chats up a Moldovan waitress, expounds on his love of atlases and tells tales about filming on the Pakistan border.
Great American Road Trip (Prematurely) Declared Dead
by Michael Yessis | 07.07.08 | 5:07 PM ET
“You want a road trip?” writes Michael Paterniti in the New York Times. “Try Google Earth.” Yeah, he’s a bit smug. He’s also wrong. We can have Google Earth—one of the Seven Wonders of the Shrinking Planet—and the road trip. Despite the $4 gallon of gas, the American road trip will continue to thrive for many reasons.
Cambodians Wary of Angkor Museum
by Julia Ross | 07.07.08 | 4:33 PM ET
A new Thai-backed museum/mall complex located a few miles from Angkor Wat is drawing fire from Cambodians skeptical of the enterprise’s motives. The New York Times reports that restoration specialists are unhappy with the Angkor National Museum’s “aesthetics” and lack of scholarly content, while others suspect that the Thais have designs on Cambodia’s architectural heritage. In fact, anti-Thai riots erupted in 2003 over the issue of Angkor’s provenance.
U.S. Airports are Hotbeds for Laptop Loss
by Elyse Franko | 07.07.08 | 3:29 PM ET
Flustered flyers leave behind an astounding 12,000 laptops in U.S. airports each week, according to a recent study (pdf) sponsored by Dell. But here’s the really scary part: The Economist’s Gulliver blog reports that less than 35 percent of those lost laptops are returned to their owners.
World’s Worst Tourists?
by Julia Ross | 07.07.08 | 1:55 PM ET
Once again, it’s the French, Indians and Chinese, according to an annual survey of hoteliers by the French version of Expedia. The latest poll of 4,000 hotel employees in Europe and North America calls the French out for being impolite and unwilling to communicate in foreign languages, deems the Japanese most liked and declares the Italians best dressed.
Moose and Midnight Sunsets: A Father-Son Drive up the Alaska-Canadian Highway
by Eva Holland | 07.07.08 | 12:00 PM ET
Fifty years ago, Roger Norum’s father and grandfather drove the Alaska-Canadian Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. In this Guardian essay, Norum and his father re-create the trip—and drive each other just a little crazy in the process. It’s a fun read.
Photo by stevelyon via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Berlin Embassy: Critics Not Impressed
by Julia Ross | 07.07.08 | 11:27 AM ET
German architectural critics are having a field day with the new U.S. embassy in Berlin (pictured), skewering the design as “banal” and “monstrous.” It’s an unfair rap, says University of Maryland architectural historian Jane Loeffler.
Slate’s ‘Guide to the Hitchhiker’s Galaxy’
by Michael Yessis | 07.07.08 | 11:19 AM ET
World Hum received a shout out this weekend as a “repository of fine travel writing” in June Thomas’s comprehensive look at the “best books, articles, and Web sites for planning your vacation or living vicariously through others.”
The Making of an ‘It’ Music City
by Eva Holland | 07.07.08 | 11:03 AM ET
There’s an interesting tidbit in this Maisonneuve article about the second wave of Montreal indie rock, explaining how the music industry’s spin machine creates the latest “it” city. “Here’s how ‘it’ works,” Michael Chadwick writes. “Every three or four years, the music press comes to a consensus on a city. Magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin assemble a few bands from that city and classify them to a rigid ‘sound,’ no matter how accurate that designation is. The press, in conjunction with the labels, market them ad nauseum until there is an inevitable backlash, at which point they report on the backlash. They then move on to a new city. Rinse, repeat.”
Jack White’s Poem for Detroit
by Michael Yessis | 07.07.08 | 10:33 AM ET
The singer and songwriter for The White Stripes penned Courageous Dream’s Concern in an effort to make clear that he bears no malice toward his hometown and to express the “Detroit that is in my heart. The home that encapsulates and envelops those who are truly blessed with the experience of living within its boundaries.” The Detroit Free Press has the exclusive. Lyrically, it’s no “My Doorbell” (listen below), and that’s a good thing.
Can ‘Burning Man’ Go Green?
by Joanna Kakissis | 07.07.08 | 9:59 AM ET
Sierra’s Matthew Taylor is skeptical. North America’s most well-known gathering of counterculture enthusiasts seeking radical self-expression attracts more than 40,000 people to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert annually, climaxing with a symbolic incineration of something very giant. Last year it was a 99-foot-tall wooden oil derrick, intended to symbolize the “crash of our fossil-fuel-addicted civilization.” But some volunteers from the Burning Man festival, which takes place for eight days ending each Labor Day weekend, say the pyrotechnics demonstrate environmental irresponsibility in seriously troubled times.
Happy Fourth of July
by World Hum | 07.03.08 | 3:37 PM ET
We’ll be enjoying a long weekend—and perhaps even a patriotic breakfast burrito or two—and will return next week. If you’re in the mood for some World Hummy Fourth of July reading, please allow us to recommend Exits and Entrances. We published it back in June 2001, but we think it’s as relevant as ever.
Photo by goldberg via Flickr, (Creative Commons).
World Hum’s Most Read: June 28-July 3
by World Hum | 07.03.08 | 3:33 PM ET
Our five most popular features and blog posts for the week:
1) Audio Slideshow: Inside Slum Tourism
2) How to: Use a Squat Toilet
3) One Man’s Odyssey into ‘Eat, Pray, Love’
4) As a Woman, Can I Really Travel Without Much Fear for my Safety?
5) How to: Break Bread and Brie in France
What We Loved This Week: Def Leppard in Greece, Austrian Competence and Freedom in Colombia
by World Hum | 07.03.08 | 2:45 PM ET
Joanna Kakissis
I had a 20-year reunion with Def Leppard, who, along with Whitesnake, played at Karaiskaki Stadium (usually the raucous home of the Olympiakos soccer team) in Athens on Tuesday. It was great to hear the Greeks sing along to “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” a song that somehow sounds far less kinky in Athens than it did that summer in 1988 in South Dakota. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer a prissy high school student or because Greeks are far more in touch with their inner rocker than the prairie kids. By the time the Lepps played “Armageddon It” and “Rock of Ages,” my faves, I had somehow morphed back into the high-school me, with my giant perm, South Dakota flannel and hopeless crush on bass player Rick Savage. But this time, I was singing “Animal” with the Greeks, who knew all the words.
