Travel Blog
A Short History of Americans and Brown Sauce
by Eva Holland | 07.08.10 | 1:05 PM ET
Over at The Atlantic’s food channel, Andrew Coe looks into the origins of Chinese brown sauce and the undying American appetite for the stuff. Here’s Coe:
Color matters in Chinese food. You can tell the difference between, say, Sichuan and Cantonese restaurants by the palette of dishes at their tables. Sichuan dishes are often tinted by the red sheen of chili oil, while the many clear sauces of Cantonese cuisine allow the natural colors of meats and vegetables to stand out. But on the steam tables of the more than 40,000 Chinese-American restaurants that dot this land, the predominant color is brown, as in the ubiquitous beef with broccoli drenched in a brown sauce. According to the Chinese food maven Michael Gray, there’s an ancient epigram that describes what these steam tables offer: “100 dishes, all with the same taste.”
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Yahoo! BuzzThe World’s Worst Theme Parks
by Jim Benning | 07.08.10 | 11:27 AM ET
Foreign policy offers up an amusing list: six of the world’s worst theme parks.
Among those making the cut is China’s Shijingshan Amusement Park outside Beijing. It’s home to a knock-off Sleeping Beauty Castle and costumed Disney characters strolling the grounds. A banner that once hung outside the park declared, “Disney is too far, so please come to Shijingshan.”
As Foreign Policy’s title over that pick notes: “It’s only a small copyright violation after all.”
We’ve written about Shinjingshan before. Here’s a Japanese news report we published in 2007 with video taken in the park. Note the creepy looking stuffed cat characters, too.
Newsweek Takes a Road Trip Through Pop Culture History
by Eva Holland | 07.07.10 | 2:25 PM ET
Travel-themed works featured in the slideshow run the gamut from “The Odyssey” to “Saved by the Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas.” A few of our favorite summer vacation movies and favorite fictional travelers make the grade. (Via @SophiaDembling)
Maureen Dowd: ‘A Girl’s Guide to Saudi Arabia’
by Eva Holland | 07.07.10 | 1:41 PM ET
In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, the longtime New York Times columnist heads to Saudi Arabia to explore the country’s slowly growing tourism scene from a woman’s perspective. The story’s not online, but this VF Daily preview described it as “one part travel romp and one part history lesson—with a healthy dash of moxie thrown in.”
It’s already stirring up criticism—the comments on the preview are uniformly negative, questioning everything from the story’s tone to its accuracy regarding legal restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia. Dowd spoke to NPR about the experience earlier this week. A slideshow from the trip is also available online.
‘Lots of People Buy Books in the Airport Every Day’
by Eva Holland | 07.06.10 | 1:41 PM ET
The Book Bench goes bookspotting at O’Hare, and comes back with a slideshow of travelers and their airport reads.
‘Was Canada Too Boring for Queen Elizabeth II?’
by Eva Holland | 07.06.10 | 12:44 PM ET
Gawker goes there, digging up a series of straight-faced shots from the Queen’s just-wrapped visit to make the point. Of course, we know that Canada is the furthest thing from boring—and I’m betting the Queen would agree.
‘It’s a Kind of Magic Place. You Go in One Door, You Go Out Another.’
by Michael Yessis | 07.06.10 | 11:56 AM ET
Those are the words of 11-year-old Adrien Venturi, an aficionado of the Paris Metro. He’s one of the sources for NPR’s lovely look at the system. “To ride it,” says Jacki Lyden, “is a visual carnival, a living history, an urban love story about the chemin de fer.”
Scenes From the Golden Age of Airplane Food
by Michael Yessis | 07.06.10 | 11:10 AM ET
I guess there’s a Golden Age for everything. Marketplace turns back the clock to the post-WWII glory years of “platters laden with hors d’oeuvres” and “heaps of brisket.”
What We Loved This Week: TBEX, Wholphin and Joan Didion
by World Hum | 07.02.10 | 2:59 PM ET
Michael Yessis
The Travel Blog Exchange conference. A lot has been said about it, so I won’t say too much about it except it was terrific to spend a weekend surrounded by hundreds of passionate travelers. Bonus when the location is New York City.
Jim Benning
Joan Didion. On my flight to New York for the TBEX conference (which was amazing), I read a few pieces in her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Her essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” has been a favorite for years. On this flight, I read “Letter from Paradise, 21* 19’ N. 157* 52’ W.” for the first time. It’s about how Hawaii changed after World War II, and it’s typically beautiful writing.
TBEX ’10 Revisited: Reflections From Around the Web
by World Hum | 07.02.10 | 12:29 PM ET
We revisited our time at the Travel Blog Exchange with quotes, stories and fake tweets. What did other TBEXers have to say? Here’s a comprehensive round-up of responses.
TBEX ’10 Revisited: The Lost Tweets
by Jim Benning | 07.02.10 | 11:33 AM ET
During my morning talk at the Travel Blog Exchange conference in New York last weekend, I showed screen shots of “lost tweets”—Twitter posts from prominent travel bloggers that I claimed to have spotted late at night over the previous week, and then found to be deleted by morning. (Lest there be any confusion now, they were all made up; the next TBEX conference, for the record, will be held in Vancouver.)
Here they are:
‘Thrill Ride Alternatives for the Anxious’
by Michael Yessis | 07.02.10 | 10:47 AM ET
Some theme park comedy from World Hum contributor Kate Hahn. Try riding the “Pit of Comfort”:
For something a little different from Disneyland’s “Tower of Terror.” In this softly-padded shallow crater, riders lie prone and watch a condensed three-minute episode of a classic sitcom where everything turns out all right in the end and the jokes aren’t too hard to understand. Then everyone looks under his or her seat cushion to find a “winning lottery ticket” which can be used to purchase comfort food in the adjacent snack area. Actually lowers heart-attack risk.
The rest of the rides are over at McSweeney’s.
Guggenheim Bilbao: ‘The Greatest Building of our Time’
by Jim Benning | 07.01.10 | 3:12 PM ET
Philip Johnson declared that of Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim museum in 1998, and 52 experts polled by Vanity Fair just agreed.
Paris: Pedestrianizing the Seine?
by Eva Holland | 07.01.10 | 1:43 PM ET
Good news for fans of dreamy riverside strolls: Paris city councilors will vote next month on a vehicle ban along the Left Bank. The ban would apply to a mile-plus stretch of riverside real estate, from roughly the Musee d’Orsay to the Eiffel Tower, and according to This Just in, “[p]ermanent foot and cycle paths ... 35 acres of new cafés, parks, sports facilities, and floating islands” would also be part of the package.
TBEX ’10 Revisited: Seven Quotations on Writing and Travel
by Jim Benning | 07.01.10 | 11:43 AM ET
I gave a talk last weekend at the Travel Blog Exchange conference in New York on travel writing and the story of World Hum. At the end of it, I shared several of my favorite quotations that I think help explain why so many of us are drawn to traveling and telling stories about our travels.
Several people have asked for them, so without further delay, here they are:
- “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”—Ursula K. LeGuin
- “To be a person is to have a story to tell.”—Isak Dinesen
- “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”—Robert McKee
- “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”—Joan Didion
- “If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”—Barry Lopez
- “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”—Freya Stark
- “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”—Bill Bryson
