Travel Blog: News and Briefs
JetBlue Flight Attendant Flees Plane Via Emergency Chute
by Eva Holland | 08.09.10 | 6:59 PM ET
The New York Times City Room blog has the details on today’s drama on the tarmac at JFK:
One passenger got out of his seat to fetch his belongings from the overhead compartment before the crew had given permission. Mr. Slater instructed the man to remain seated. The passenger defied him. Mr. Slater approached and reached the passenger just as he pulled down his luggage, which struck Mr. Slater in the head.
Mr. Slater asked for an apology. The passenger instead cursed at him. Mr. Slater got on the plane’s public address system and cursed out all aboard. Then he activated the inflatable evacuation slide at service exit R1, launched himself off the plane, an Embraer 190, ran to the employee parking lot and left the airport in a car he had parked there.
And then the puns began. NYT commenter Dave Ryan chimed in just 26 minutes after the story went live: “In this case, I’m hoping that the authorities just let it slide…”
Gawker’s always-reliable readers followed up with several more: “Yeah, the FAA is never gonna let this slide.” “Airplane security is a very slippery slope.” “Sounds like he blew his slid.”
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Yahoo! BuzzBennies and Shoobies: A Guide to Beach Blanket Lingo
by Eva Holland | 08.09.10 | 5:26 PM ET
In the New York Times, Ben Zimmer unpacks the vocabulary of beach tourism from coast to coast. Turns out, nearly every American coastal region has its own term for the summer invaders:
Old-time New Englanders have disdain for the summer people. On the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland, the come-heres are pitted against the from-heres. Hawaiians call white visitors to the islands haoles. West Coast surfers, a territorial lot, have a plethora of terms for nonlocals: Trevor Cralle’s “Surfin’ary: A Dictionary Of Surfing Terms and Surfspeak” lists put-downs like hondo, inlander, flatlander, valley and casper. (The last one is reserved for tourists whose pallid complexion resembles that of Casper the Friendly Ghost.) On the Jersey Shore, the two main terms for unpleasant outsiders are bennies and shoobies.
Feliz Cumpleaños, Dora the Explorer
by Jim Benning | 08.09.10 | 2:02 PM ET
Our favorite cartoon vagabond, Dora Marquez, is turning 10 this month. A fine Los Angeles Times story pays tribute to Dora and notes her global reach:
The animated series is now broadcast in more than 100 countries—it’s the No. 1-rated preschool show in many of them, including France—and dubbed in 30 languages, such as Russian, Mandarin and German, with Dora mostly teaching English (in some cases Spanish).
We love Dora the Explorer—so much so that we once named her one of our top 10 greatest fictional travelers. Here’s what we wrote about Dora then, which is equally true today:
Kids need travel role models as much as adults, and the animated Latina vagabond Dora the Explorer is an exemplary role model. With her trademark purple backpack, wash-and-wear bob (perfect for the tropics) and monkey sidekick, Boots (Sancho Panza to her Don Quixote), Dora wanders a lush countryside, navigating around strawberry mountains and chocolate lakes, embarking on all manner of quests. Along the way, she consults her trusty map, breaks out handy Spanish phrases, asks viewers for help and sings out, “Come on, vámonos!” The message to kids is clear: The world is yours for the exploring, and with a little effort and help from your friends, you can surmount any obstacles that get in your way.
Another Reason to Plan Your Next Trip in Advance
by Jim Benning | 08.09.10 | 11:05 AM ET
By doing so, you’ll derive more pleasure from it.
So says a New York Times story about the benefits of spending money on experiences rather than material goods.
It’s not exactly breaking news, I know, but it’s a good reminder:
In other words, waiting for something and working hard to get it made it feel more valuable and more stimulating.
In fact, scholars have found that anticipation increases happiness. Considering buying an iPad? You might want to think about it as long as possible before taking one home. Likewise about a Caribbean escape: you’ll get more pleasure if you book a flight in advance than if you book it at the last minute.
What We Loved This Week: ‘Shipping Out,’ Joan Didion and the Last Roll of Kodachrome Film
by World Hum | 08.06.10 | 4:48 PM ET
Frank Bures
I loved this story about Steve McCurry (of green-eyed-Afghan-refugee-girl fame) going around the world with the very last-ever produced roll of Kodachrome film, shooting pictures on it in Italy, Turkey, India and other places. The end of an era.
Jeffrey Tayler
I’m afraid I’ve had a very negative week, with Czech Airlines fouling up my return reservation to Moscow from Paris, and then arriving in Moscow itself. It’s now so smoky we’ve closed our windows, and it’s almost 100 degrees inside. ... So there isn’t anything I’ve loved in travel this week.
Jim Benning
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s heartbreaking memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. I loved this anecdote she included about her daughter, Quintana: “All PSA planes had smiles painted on their noses. ... When Quintana at age two or three flew PSA to Sacramento to see my mother and father she referred to it as ‘going on the smile.’”
Michael Yessis
A list of all-time best magazine articles has been making the rounds online in the last couple weeks. Yup, David Foster Wallace’s Shipping Out (pdf) is on it and, yup, I got sucked in yet again by the all-red leisure suit with flared lapels and the image of 500 upscale Americans dancing the Electric Slide.
Eva Holland
I loved bringing home leftovers from a tasty restaurant meal in Skagway, AK—certainly the first time I’ve taken a doggy bag across an international border. Somehow, despite the frequency with which I cross the Yukon-Alaska border these days, I still get a kick out of it each time.
Daisann McLane: Gem Dealer, Jazz Singer, Archaeologist?
by Eva Holland | 08.06.10 | 1:13 PM ET
In her latest column in National Geographic Traveler, the World Hum contributor spills on a secret travel habit of hers: lying. Here’s McLane:
I wasn’t always so footloose with the facts. For a very long time, the only travel lie that crossed my lips was the one that is necessary in every traveling woman’s toolkit: “I’m married.” However, when I began to travel to more off-the-map destinations, I started prevaricating about my profession for security reasons: In many nations, identifying yourself as a journalist, even when not working as one, is tantamount to putting a big sign on your back that says, “Take me to the nearest police station now.”
One lie, two lies, and soon I was tumbling down the rabbit hole. The next thing I knew, I was in a café in Salvador, Brazil, drinking a caipirinha and telling the owner I was an ex-jazz singer who’d come looking for a school teaching the martial art capoeira. Disconnected from my everyday self, I exhilarated in the freedom of trying on new lives, new personae.
What it Means to Travel Back to the Future
by Michael Yessis | 08.06.10 | 12:21 PM ET
Another great piece by Peter Jon Lindberg, who returns to London and a pub he called home 20 years ago. He finds “not the workaday tavern of memory but a roomful of attractive people sipping Pinot Grigio” and lingers for “12 uncomfortable minutes.” Among his findings:
Good Lord, listen to me. I’ve become a bad novel: Aging crank revisits lost youth; cue strings, bittersweet regret. Forgive my maudlin self-indulgence. (If it’s any excuse, I just turned 40.) But really, what on earth did I expect? Only a child—a 20-year-old—could have wished London not to evolve, not to grow up.
Of course, this isn’t just about London, is it? It’s about the feeling any traveler has returning to a place he once knew as well as any: A city that seems to hold you in it, or some earlier incarnation of yourself. Going back, you become again that long-ago person, even while the city changes utterly around you. As it is I’ve spent most of my post-London life in New York, 5,000-odd days of it, such that I’ve scarcely noticed the incremental, wholesale transformation of Manhattan over the past 15 years. Yet an Englishman returning here after a decade away might feel the same about New York as I do about London: that it looks like an artist’s rendering; that “it’s all about money now”; that glamour has eclipsed grit, and something has been lost in the process; that the city no longer belongs to me, but to other, younger, wealthier, more exciting people.
Dispatch From the Moscow Heat
by Michael Yessis | 08.06.10 | 11:23 AM ET
World Hum contributor Jeffrey Tayler recently returned from Paris to his Moscow home, where soaring temperatures and wildfires have crippled the city and other parts of the country. Tayler reports from the brutal—and alcohol-soaked—scene for the Atlantic:
Another Russian saying has it that, “Heat isn’t vodka, but we feel drunk from it all the same.” Which hasn’t stopped a good number of metaphorically heat-wasted Muscovites from turning literal and tippling their way through this interminable zharishcha. I walked outside this morning to find a gang of bare-chested fellows, with shaved heads, sweaty snouts, and stretchmarked potbellies, sitting on the guardrail near our doorway, guzzling beer and smoking, and for good measure, belching and swearing about the heat. Any walk around town reveals similar scenes: men have at times dispensed with much of their clothing, and carrying a beer (plus lit cigarette) is now de rigueur. This is legal: there’s no law banning open containers of alcohol in Russia. Except that in Russia, beer hardly qualifies as alcohol. (Unless possibly it’s that 12-proof brew marked krepkoye.) Beer is more like a training beverage. But vodka is considered alcohol, and thus possesses, many would point out, curative properties for whatever ails you. So fighting noxious heat with medicinal doses of vodka makes perfect sense. And I don’t mean some dainty cocktail, like, say, a vodka collins. The idea of mixing vodka with anything except more vodka is an abomination. Why dilute the healing fun?
Book Passage Travel, Food & Photography Conference 2010
by Jim Benning | 08.05.10 | 1:07 PM ET
Travel writers and aspiring travel writers, take note: The four-day Book Passage Travel, Food & Photography Conference kicks off a week from today in Corte Madera, California, just a short drive from San Francisco.
It’s a great chance to learn the tricks of the trades from some of the best in the business, including legendary adventure writer Tim Cahill.
I’ll be teaching a class on digital travel writing and blogging with Jen Leo. We’ll cover audio slideshow production, writing travel essays, how to create and maintain a compelling travel blog, and travel-writing ethics in the digital age. Among other highlights on the schedule, World Hum contributor David Farley will teach a class on writing personal travel essays, and columnist Jeff Pflueger will be among those teaching travel photography.
The conference is always one of the highlights of the year for me. As conference chair Don George has said, it’s kind of like summer camp for travel writers.
Beyond that, “The conference’s track record is pretty amazing,” Don said in a recent interview. “Every year at least a few graduates start getting published in newspapers, magazines and web sites as a direct result of lessons learned and contacts made at the conference; in fact, a number of this year’s ‘faculty’ members started out as ‘students’ at the conference.”
We’ve published a number of alumni on World Hum.
‘The End of Food Tourism’ in Barcelona?
by Eva Holland | 08.05.10 | 11:34 AM ET
Food writer Sarah Elton went looking for local seafood and fresh seasonal produce in the Spanish city—and, as she writes in The Atlantic, she came up blank:
I traveled to Spain with my parents when I was 12 years old, and I had vivid memories of some of our meals. I ate green beans with olive oil for the first time on that trip, and I still remember the flavor of the warm oil with the just-picked beans. These days when I travel, I am interested in getting to know places through what I eat, which means choosing foods that capture the terroir and offer a taste of place.
But on this holiday, when I searched for local food, I found long-distance industrial instead. From the hole-in-the-wall joints to swish tapas bars near the Passeig de Gracia, imports ruled.
Uncornered Market: ‘Sh*t I Wouldn’t Eat Again’
by Eva Holland | 08.05.10 | 10:40 AM ET
Foodie traveler Daniel Noll dishes on the overseas meals he wouldn’t like to repeat. Fair warning: The accompanying photos are harrowing. I’m not sure which is scarier, the Laotian blood bouillon or Argentina’s “anti-pizza.”
The Red Eye: A Visual Diary
by Michael Yessis | 08.04.10 | 4:28 PM ET
Peanut stacking! A remote with a delete neighbor button! Clouds that look like a Henry Moore sculpture! Yup, more travel-related brilliance from Christoph Niemann.
Niemann previously mapped the hokey pokey, an omelet and Rumsfeld’s Iraq.
Dear Gumbo: ‘You Haunt Me’
by Eva Holland | 08.04.10 | 3:46 PM ET
Intelligent Travel’s Aimee Brown, currently traveling on the Gulf Coast, has an open letter to the Louisiana stand-by. Here’s a sample:
I find you rich with a depth that speaks to an unknown source. You haunt me. I taste in you hope and fear. There is darkness in your roux, and your scent suggests all that Louisiana is. Lust, love, dark alleys, open arms, bayous that hold within them hidden threats of danger and beauty.
Made of simple ingredients—shrimp, crab, crawfish, and spices—you are more than the sum of your parts. You are formed by the hands of people who belong to this place. Because of that so do you.
Christopher Hitchens and United Airlines’ Million-Miler Club
by Jim Benning | 08.04.10 | 12:26 PM ET
Christopher Hitchens’ touching piece about his battle with cancer in the latest Vanity Fair notes that he learned of the cancer after he reached a couple of milestones, including one on United Airlines:
Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
Here’s hoping Hitchens is around to write more best-sellers—and to enjoy many years of those free United upgrades.
‘No Character in a Movie Has Ever Welled Up and Sighed, ‘We’ll Always Have Stuttgart’’
by Michael Yessis | 08.04.10 | 11:42 AM ET
That line comes from a great story by David Segal that explores the pluses and minuses for Italy as it maintains tradition amid the rush of progress and globalization.
In the eternal contest between the meticulously honed and the nationally franchised, Italy knows where it stands. As a matter of profit and loss, it doesn’t make sense to store wool in a spa and let it convalesce for six months, but the methods of Luciano Barbera were never destined for a get-rich-quick guide to manufacturing. His business will make sense only to customers, and for them, quality has a logic of its own.
And of course, the worship of growth has its limitations. The American economy is vastly more robust, but instead of family-owned bakeries, which seem to dot every hectare of Italy, we’ve got Quiznos. And for all the efficiency and horsepower in Germany, no character in a movie has ever welled up and sighed, “We’ll always have Stuttgart.”
