What We Loved This Week: London, New Jersey, ‘Heima’ and More

Travel Blog  •  World Hum  •  02.13.09 | 4:11 PM ET

World Hum contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.

Rob Verger
I love my new Canon G10 camera. Hello, 14.7 megapixels. It gave me an excuse to roam around my neighborhood over the weekend, taking pictures. Here’s the 125th Street subway stop in New York City:

new york subway 125th street

Adam Karlin
London: a stopping-off point between assignments, and possibly my favorite travel transition space in the world. Not because London is a great air hub, but an international one—the whole-world-in-one-city thing exists here like nowhere else. In fact, I can’t think of another city that better screams “city”: cosmopolitan, diverse, gritty and glorious.

Frank Bures
I loved these prize-winning photos, which are kind of a trip around the world.

Julia Ross
You know that weird Western Union ad with the yellow blobs floating through the air? Turns out the woman singing the ad’s theme is Moroccan musician Hindi Zahra. I tracked down her MySpace page and have been listening to her haunting ballad, “Beautiful Tango,” all week. I’m addicted.

Valerie Conners
North Jersey. Despite having lived there for a year, I tend to forget Jersey as a whole, taking notice only when I’m riding the train between NYC and Philly. However, I got to hang out in Montclair this week, while visiting my college roommate. Granted her company was an invaluable bonus, but our dinner at the Orange Squirrel in Bloomfield was truly delicious. Still the highlight of the trip came during dinner when the music at the Squirrel switched without irony to the Garden State soundtrack, and (unrelated to the switch of tunes) a fight broke out among patrons—complete with rampant swearing and waiters playing bouncer. Oh, Jersey—it does have its unlikely charms. 

Joanna Kakissis
I celebrated the great Charles Darwin’s birthday by daydreaming about the Galapagos and watching a 1996 documentary, Galapagos: Beyond Darwin, on the Science Channel. Oh, how I want to visit! But would a visit hurt the place I’ve long admired from afar? I’m bumming myself out.

Eva Holland
I visited Lake Placid this week and accidentally stumbled onto a training session for the U.S. national bobsled, luge and skeleton teams. Standing on an empty mountainside, just a few feet away from the track while they rushed past, was pretty remarkable. This short clip I took gives some sense of the speed (and sheer insanity) involved:

Jenna Schnuer
Tucson treated me to a beauty of a storm. I fell asleep to the sound of rain and hail pelting the roof of my room at Tanque Verde Ranch and woke to see a backdrop of snow-covered mountains behind the saguaro cactus and jumping chollas that decorate the Sonoran Desert with their prickly goodness.

Bronwen Dickey
It may not be news to the super tech-savvy, but Google Ocean was news to me when I heard about it on a recent dive trip. I spent a huge amount of time during my childhood watching underwater documentaries, so I’m pretty excited that soon I’ll be able to zip over reefs, wrecks and trenches from my laptop.

Jim Benning
The wanderlust of the flight attendants aboard a cross-country JetBlue flight I took last week, evident in this tableau I shot at the back of the plane:

Michael Yessis
While sitting on a delayed night train from Washington, D.C., to New York, I finally watched the first part of the Sigur Rós tour film Heima. The Iceland footage is beautiful and the music is, as always, extraordinary.



1 Comment for What We Loved This Week: London, New Jersey, ‘Heima’ and More

Zuri 02.15.09 | 4:25 PM ET

Joanna,

You will love the Galapagos Islands because it is the most incredible living museum of evolutionary changes, with a huge variety of exotic species (birds, land animals, plants) not seen anywhere else. The landscapes are also out of this world.

Zuri

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