Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Julia Roberts: Eat, Pray, Offend the Locals
by Eva Holland | 09.24.09 | 9:51 AM ET
There’s trouble on the set of “Eat, Pray, Love” in India: Apparently, local villagers were banned from praying in their ashram during an important religious festival because filming was going on inside. Said one local police officer:
There are more than 100 policemen outside the Ashram Hari Mandir and almost equal number inside the premises, both uniformed and in civilian disguise. Nobody can breach this cover and no outsider is allowed to enter the ashram, no matter whosoever he or she is. We have strict instructions.
Now that’s what I call a “hearts and minds” strategy.
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Yahoo! BuzzIn Praise of Hot Locals
by Michael Yessis | 09.23.09 | 3:34 PM ET
It comes from Guy Trebay and his essay in the latest Travel+Leisure:
Naturally, we all hope when we are away to find fine hotels and good food and clement weather and merry encounters with charming locals. But we also, secretly, want the strangers in the places we visit to give us something good to look at. If not flat-out beautiful, we want them to be comely or stylish or to have something about them to please that most promiscuous of organs, the eye. At any rate, that’s what my eyes desire.
This approach may seem politically incorrect, at its worst, and baldly superficial, but getting to know inner beauty requires intimacy. And intimacy takes time to develop, and travelers generally have little time to spare.
China Closes Tibet to Foreign Travelers
by Jim Benning | 09.23.09 | 2:25 PM ET
Why, you ask?
According to the AP, the closure is designed to ensure stability during celebrations of the 60th anniversary of communist rule in China, which will be marked Oct. 1. The closure will remain in effect through Oct. 8.
Officials have also curtailed kite flying in Beijing.
Critics will shake their heads, but I can think of no better way to celebrate authoritarian rule. Nicely done, China.
It’s Been a Great Year for America’s Parks
by Eva Holland | 09.23.09 | 12:15 PM ET
The travel industry as a whole may have struggled through 2009, but the country’s national parks are on track for record attendance numbers this year. The AP offers some thoughts on what’s driving the increase.
The Rise of America as Culinary Destination
by Michael Yessis | 09.23.09 | 9:55 AM ET
Just a few decades ago, America was a culinary wasteland. Now, it’s foodie central. Why? Jerry Weinberger points to, among other things, the Great Woman theory of history:
The first wedding gift my wife and I received, in 1965, was a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). It still sits on a shelf in our kitchen, bound now by tape, with almost every page earmarked and blotched. Published in 1961, Child’s book brought the techniques of French haute cuisine to the American kitchen, teaching us how to soak and sauté sweetbreads, how to make soufflé au Grand Marnier, how to cut up a duck—all within the limits of the American supermarket of the period. But it was Child’s later TV show, Boston PBS’s The French Chef, that really changed things. It was unintimidating French cooking: the chef was a goofy-talking giant who dumped in the butter and occasionally spilled things and whacked stuff with mallets and sometimes burned the sauce.
But Julia taught us how to master French cooking, not American. American food had to be invented before it could be mastered. And the inventor was another Great Woman, this one on the opposite coast. In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. This was the great transformative event in American culinary history. Chez Panisse grew out of Waters’s experience not with the butter and fat of Parisian haute cuisine, but with the foods of Mediterranean Provence (based on olive oil, the fresh fruits of the earth and sea, and the general habit of going to the market with a string bag every day). The principle of Chez Panisse was that food—both animal and vegetable—should be absolutely fresh, and that meant absolutely local. So it’s not quite right to say that Waters had to invent American food; what she did was rediscover and then elaborate on pre-canned, pre-supermarket, pre-tomatoes-all-year-round regional American food.
The Birth of a Travel Anthem: ‘Born to Run’
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 5:05 PM ET
Slate takes a look back at the making of the song, which landed in the sixth spot on our list of the top 40 travel songs.
Here, in case you need a refresher, is Springsteen live in 1975:
‘Why Do Russians Drink Vodka?’ and Other Google Queries
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 3:54 PM ET
The Telegraph has a funny slideshow of screenshots from Google searches in progress, showing the drop-down menus of suggestions generated by popular searches. So a search for “why do british” pulls up “why do british have bad teeth,” “why do british drink so much” and other national stereotypes. My favorites? “Why do Japanese people do the peace sign” and “why do germans love david hasselhoff.” Why, indeed?
Happy 70th Birthday, ‘The Wizard of Oz’
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 1:57 PM ET
One of the all-time classics is celebrating its 70th anniversary this month, with a brief return to theaters and a fancy new Blu-Ray disc. Beyond all its other accomplishments, the film deserves a mention for summing up the feelings of many a traveler over the years: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
The Medieval Icelandic Guide to Marauding
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 12:35 PM ET
The Telegraph highlights the mostly intimidating descriptions of Scotland that pop up in a series of 13th-century Icelandic chronicles. “Icelanders who want to practise robbery are advised to go there,” reads one section. “But it may cost them their life.” The chronicles, the story explains, “were often used as route guides for raiders, traders, crusaders and explorers, effectively a road map of medieval Europe and the Middle East.” Apparently, they’ve remained accurate enough over the centuries that they’re still used by archaeologists today.
Real Madrid: The Theme Park
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 11:07 AM ET
According to Reuters, the big-name Spanish football club is planning a “Disney-style” theme park near Madrid’s Barajas airport. The only hint about the park-to-be’s attractions so far? They will reflect the club’s “history, legend and values.” Bring on the carnies in Cristiano Ronaldo masks, please.
The Decline of the Traveling ‘Food Anthropologist’
by Eva Holland | 09.22.09 | 10:01 AM ET
Over at the VQR blog, Michael Lukas offers a lament for the days when cookbook authors—instead of being celebrity chefs sharing their singular visions—were more like “food anthropologists”: “They visited home cooks and chefs in their kitchens, beat the pavement, and found recipes in dusty archives.” The last generation of food writers, he argues, “had an entire world to discover.” (Via The Book Bench)
William Dalrymple on Travel Writing, Past and Future
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 4:02 PM ET
The author of “In Xanadu” and “City of Djinns”—which landed at number 16 on our list of the top 30 travel books—has a thoughtful, if fairly grim, essay in the Guardian on the changing state of travel writing. Dalrymple opens with the story of his visit, with Patrick Leigh Fermor, to the spot where Bruce Chatwin’s ashes had been scattered:
Inevitably, it was a melancholy visit. Not only were we there to honour the memory of the dead friend who had introduced us, but Leigh Fermor himself was not in great shape. At dinner that night, it was clear that the great writer and war hero, now in his mid-90s, was in very poor health. Over dinner we talked about how travel writing seemed to have faded from view since its great moment of acclaim in the late 1970s and 80s, when both Leigh Fermor and Chatwin had made their names and their reputations. It wasn’t just that publishers were not as receptive as they had once been to the genre, nor that the big bookshops had contracted their literary travel writing sections from prominent shelves at the front to little annexes at the back, usually lost under a great phalanx of Lonely Planet guidebooks. More seriously, and certainly more irreversibly, most of the great travel writers were either dead or dying.
He offers a little hope further in. The whole thing is worth reading.
China: 60 Years of the People’s Republic
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 1:33 PM ET
The People’s Republic of China will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary on October 1. The Big Picture has yet another stellar photo essay of the elaborate preparations for the big day.
What are the 50 Greatest Foods in the World?
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 11:30 AM ET
The Guardian thinks they have the answers in this mouthwatering list. It’s a bold claim even by the standards of the lists-making-bold-claims genre, but still worth a browse.
Julia Child, French Cuisine and the Empirical Method
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 9:59 AM ET
There’s an interesting nugget in this New York Times story about the French cooking community’s views on Julia Child. One cookbook author, after calling Julia Child’s recipes “academic and bourgeois,” grudgingly admits that Child’s methodical American approach—she spent years carefully testing her recipes—has its advantages. “The French think that they are natural-born cooks; they prepare a dish off the top of their heads, without testing it,” she told the Times. “In France, we rush over explanations.” (Via The Book Bench)
