Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Classic Album Covers—With Tacos
by Jim Benning | 09.02.10 | 3:42 PM ET
Brilliant.
Just one example of many:
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Yahoo! BuzzNew Travel Book: ‘Dreaming in Chinese’
by Jim Benning | 08.31.10 | 6:42 PM ET
Anyone who has ever tried to learn even a few words of Chinese will appreciate the difficulty of the task. It turns out it was a serious challenge even for a woman with a Ph.D. in linguistics and six languages already under her belt.
That would be Deborah Fallows, author of the new book, Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language.
NPR just profiled her. My favorite passage from the radio piece concerned her attempt to order take-out Taco Bell, of all things:
Her tones weren’t very good at that point, though, so Fallows’ request for “takeout”—dabao—was met with a blank stare from the Taco Bell employee. Fallows tried saying dabao with every combination of tones she could think of—rising tones, falling tones—and when that didn’t work, she started pointing at the menu, and then miming the action of walking out the door with a bag of food. After a consultation with several other employees, finally—eureka! Yes, dabao! Yes, of course, they did takeout.
Jonathan Gold and Rick Bayless Tweet Off Over Mexican Food in L.A.
by Jim Benning | 08.31.10 | 11:49 AM ET
What was it? A battle? A shot over the bow? Maybe, looking back, it was just a misfire. But it got L.A. Mexican foodies pretty excited for a few days.
At a talk in Orange County last week, Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold—a hero of ours who has made a career of championing great hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants in SoCal—took a shot at PBS TV host and restaurateur Rick Bayless. The chef, whose Frontera Grill in Chicago gets rave reviews, just designed the menu for a new upscale Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, Red O—his first project in the region.
Now, L.A. loves its homegrown Mexican food. It’s a source of pride. So the arrival of Bayless earlier this year was bound to raise eyebrows.
The Los Angeles Times gave Red O a favorable review. Then Gold took the mic at a gathering of journalists last week.
Gold said Bayless was a “good” chef who knew his way around Mexican recipes, but he sneered at Bayless’ nerve in coming to Los Angeles and opening a restaurant—Red O—that presumed to introduce Angelinos to “authentic” Mexican cuisine. In particular, Gold zeroed in on Bayless’ inclusion of chilpachole—a glorious seafood soup from Veracruz—as some rarity, when Gold said the soup was easily available in the Southland, along with dozens of other Mexican regional specialties.
Word reached Bayless, and he tweeted:
@thejgold Thought a Pulitzer meant you checked facts. Sneering at me for something I never said is either mean or sloppy. I’m offended
He also posted this comment on the OC Weekly’s article:
I know it’s all the rage for journalists to go into unsupported hyperbole, but I never said I was going to introduce Southern California to “authentic” Mexican cuisine. I said I was going to bring the flavors of Frontera Grill to Los Angeles.
Ouch.
As of today, however, both sides are tweeting that the spat is behind them.
Gold’s tweet:
@Rick_Bayless and I have kissed and made up, I think. Further thoughts will have to wait for the full review.
Bayless’ reply:
Yes, i think we have :) RT @thejgold @Rick_Bayless & I have kissed & made up, I think. Further thoughts will have to wait 4 the full review.
Taco détente.
Whew. Now we can all go back to eating our enchiladas in peace.
Thinking About Language Across Cultures
by Jim Benning | 08.30.10 | 2:07 PM ET
Fascinating story in the New York Times about how language shapes our thoughts and feelings.
Here’s but one interesting nugget:
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
For some reason, all this reminds me of Al Shamshoon.
Cruise Passengers Rescued from Northwest Passage
by Eva Holland | 08.30.10 | 10:57 AM ET
The Canadian Coast Guard removed 110 passengers from a cruise ship stranded in the Arctic Ocean this weekend. The ship was exploring the Northwest Passage when it got hung up on an unmapped rock—presumably, we’ll see more of these incidents as the passage becomes increasingly viable, so Canada, keep your icebreakers sharp.
‘The Amazing Race’ Ends Seven-Year Emmy Streak
by Eva Holland | 08.30.10 | 10:55 AM ET
The travel-themed show had won every year since the reality TV category was added. This year’s upset winner? Top Chef.
What We Loved This Week: Jonathan Raban, Ricardo Arjona and Ernest Hemingway, Humor Writer
by World Hum | 08.27.10 | 5:18 PM ET
Eva Holland
“At Sea,” Jonathan Raban’s ode to the simultaneous isolation and civility of the seagoing life. It’s a 1996 magazine story that I came across in The Best of Outside—here’s a favorite section:
In the society of the sea, it is the duty of every member to keep his distance from all the others. To be alone is to be safe. It’s no coincidence that those two most English of attitudes, being “standoffish” and keeping aloof,” are nautical terms that have long since passed into the general currency of the language. Standing off is what a ship does to avoid the dangers of the coast; aloof is a-luff, or luffing your sails, head to wind, to stay clear of another vessel. The jargon of the sea is full of nouns and verbs to describe the multitude of ways in which a ship can keep itself to itself.
The Case for Analog Travel Directions
by Michael Yessis | 08.27.10 | 1:44 PM ET
Giving directions is an art form, one we’re losing in the age of GPS and Google Maps. Renée Loth makes the argument:
In this season of vacation travel, I would like to issue a plea for a return to analog directions. This isn’t just a matter of technophobia. Writing good directions is not unlike poetry: an exercise in awareness, requiring an eye for detail and succinct but evocative language. It’s a delight to read something like “Travel over the old stone bridge—built in 1764!—until you see the brick library and Odd Fellows Hall on your right. Turn right there and go down the hill to the water.” Isn’t that so much better than “Head NW on S Main St/MA 1A N .5 miles toward Market Street,” or some similar digital version?
If you care enough and pay attention, you can learn a lot about people by the way they give directions. Are they nostalgic, mentioning phantom buildings or parks that were razed decades earlier? Are they crabbed and secretive, refusing to let you in on the shortcut? Landmarks give meaning to our surroundings, and everyone will emphasize a different place. One woman’s salt marsh is another man’s soccer field.
From Paris to New York—in 1906
by Eva Holland | 08.27.10 | 9:26 AM ET
Conor Friedersdorf digs up an old gem from the Atlantic’s archives: a dispatch from a native New Yorker, returning to the city after an extended stay in Paris. It’s a must-read for NYC-philes. Here’s a taste:
In a word, this returned New Yorker finds few familiar landmarks; and the few he does find seem to have lost most of their original meaning. He is as much dazed and puzzled by his surroundings as Rip Van Winkle after his twenty years’ sleep. Nobody resides, does business, dines, or drinks in the same places as before. Nobody frequents the same pleasure resorts. Nobody saunters along the same walks. It is not safe for him to make a business or social call, or to set out for a restaurant, a chop-house, a theatre, or a club, without consulting the Directory in advance; and, even so, he risks having his trouble for his pains, inasmuch as there is more than a chance that a move has been made since the Directory was issued.
After he so far recovers from the shock of his initial disenchantment, however, as to be able to take note of details, he finds that there is some balm in Gilead, after all. At the end of a month he begins to catch the spirit of New York; and at the end of six months he has come completely under its spell, and loves it, as Montaigne loved the Paris of his day, “with all its moles and warts.” The radiant white city by the Seine still appears to him at intervals, like the memory of a favorite picture or poem; but it has lost the power to disquiet him with desire. Paris is no longer a perpetual obsession,—the absolute norm by which he judges everything he sees. Indeed, it has passed so far out of his life that he is in danger of being as over-lenient in his judgments as he was at the outset over-severe.
What Happens When CBS’ ‘Survivor’ Goes to Nicaragua?
by Jim Benning | 08.26.10 | 1:53 PM ET
For starters, the television company hypes the country’s “savage wildlife.”
A crew has been filming the next season of the hit TV show in the beach town of San Juan del Sur—it will debut on CBS next month.
Reports the Los Angeles Times:
Government officials apparently think “Survivor” could be good for foreign business investment and tourism, even though the CBS commercial for the show proclaims Nicaragua a land of “impenetrable terrain, smoldering volcanoes and savage wildlife.” (Savage wildlife? The mosquitoes?)
Yes, tourism to Nicaragua could skyrocket—and so could unfathomably horrific mosquito bites.
Vacation Rentals and the Joy of Snooping
by Eva Holland | 08.26.10 | 11:34 AM ET
Susan Orlean is on vacation in Cape Cod, where she’s been keeping busy by snooping around the house she rented from a local, trying to learn more about her host. Here’s what she’s put together so far:
I always start with the bookshelves, which makes me worry about my future vacations, when all reading material will have migrated to an electronic format and the bookshelves are empty except for Hummel figurines. Then what? Where will I begin my snooping—in the spice cabinet? Fortunately, the owner of this house is obviously a dead-tree kind of reader, and I have deduced that he is a physician. (I do think I’m a genius, but the stacks of diagnostic manuals would have been a pretty big clue even to lesser minds.) The Leo Rosten books are a religious giveaway—did Rosten ever sell a single book to a non-Jew?—and while the majority of the books are high-toned and intellectual, they are leavened by the yeasty Steve Martini thrillers half-hidden under the night table. My guess? A Jewish doctor who travels and buys the thrillers for diversion during flights, even though he was really and truly planning to use the time to read something serious, like the Beethoven biography that sits on a prominent shelf, untouched.
(Via The Book Bench)
Do You Travel With a Teddy Bear?
by Eva Holland | 08.26.10 | 9:18 AM ET
According to a recent Travelodge survey, at least some of you do. The survey found that 25% of adult men bring stuffed animals with them when they travel for business. “I travel enough that it’s a nice reminder of home,” said one respondent.
I’d like to offer some snark here, but I’d be a hypocrite if I did. My bear doesn’t come on short-haul trips, but she has been on longer visits to Malaysia, the U.K., Barbados and New York City. So there.
Ohio: The Bedbug State?
by Eva Holland | 08.25.10 | 3:09 PM ET
With bedbug infestations apparently on the rise across the country, the Daily Beast has put together a list of the top ten buggiest cities in America—and burgs in Ohio landed in the first, second and eighth spots. If you’re headed to Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, or any of the other cities on the list, you may want to put this retro travel technique to use.
P.J. O’Rourke Goes to Afghanistan
by Jim Benning | 08.25.10 | 11:50 AM ET
The occasional travel writer takes a fun shot at parachute journalism:
If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter.
Ouch.
Life on I-95: ‘The Road Most Traveled’
by Michael Yessis | 08.25.10 | 10:00 AM ET
NPR’s Weekend Edition launched an ambitious series Saturday, a three-weekend-long look at the most trafficked interstate in the U.S. It’s not this trafficked, but it’s pretty busy. And it plays a huge role in American life:
All along the Eastern Seaboard, Interstate 95 has helped shape the daily lives and vacation dreams of the roughly 100 million people who reside alongside it. They live in dense cities and rural counties in the 15 states through which I-95 passes on its nearly 2,000-mile, north-south path.
The Department of Transportation says that each year I-95 gets more VMTs—that’s vehicle miles traveled—than any other road. The traffic on I-95 peaks in August as legions of vacationers and college students join commuters, truckers, migrant farm workers and others on the road.
As an accompaniment, NPR recommends 95 songs for driving on I-95.
