Travel Blog
US Airways to Sell Ad Space on Barf Bags
by Michael Yessis | 07.19.06 | 8:30 AM ET
So this is how airlines are going to try to dig themselves out of financial trouble: by slapping ads on air sickness bags. “Little things like that work,” Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an aviation consulting group in Evergreen, Colo., told the AP’s Chris Kahn. “People would love to pay to have their names on the side of a barf bag. Barf bags have a lot of shelf life—people aren’t barfing as much in planes as they used to.” Still, what kind of business would want its product advertised on the side of a barf bag? Oh, yeah. Makers of anti-motion sickness medication. Kudos to Kahn for getting some great quotes on the ground at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, a US Airways hub. My favorite: “I would honestly pay no attention to an ad if I got sick,” said Nathan Vierra, 19. “But hey, if skateboarders can sell ad space on their T-shirts, I guess why can’t an airline sell ads on barf bags?” Brilliant logic, Nathan.
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Yahoo! BuzzZidane and the Head Butt Debated Around the World
by Terry Ward | 07.19.06 | 8:00 AM ET
Along with a billion-plus World Cup watchers, I was tuned in to the last minutes of the final between France and Italy when Zinedine Zidane nailed Italian player Marco Materazzi with that now infamous head butt. More than shocked, I felt instantly sad. And then, strangely, embarrassed, because I could just imagine the emotions on the streets of France, in that Berlin stadium, and around the world at that moment. I doubt many people truly enjoyed watching a star like Zidane go out on that note. The next night, when I watched the nightly network news (France’s loss was largely blamed on Zidane for being ousted with a red card), it irked me how the American anchorman had denounced Zidane as having gone “from legend to lout.” Where was the middle ground, I wondered? Or at least some hint that Zidane’s action could lie somewhere between salvation and sin? The anchor’s quick condemnation brought to mind a certain French friend of mine who always insisted that Americans (particularly, perhaps, yours truly) are too quick to see things in black and white.
Anthony Bourdain in Beirut*
by Michael Yessis | 07.19.06 | 7:27 AM ET
As we mentioned the other day, Anthony Bourdain and the crew of his Travel Channel show No Reservations were caught in Beirut when the violence between Hezbollah and Israel began. He told the New York Post, among other things, that he just wanted to have a drink at the bar. “The mojitos here are great,” he said. His comments rubbed some people the wrong way and inspired a lot of posts at the eGullet and No Reservations message boards. In response, Bourdain has apparently posted his further thoughts on the situation. He writes at eGullet: “I’m very aware of how flip my response to the Post was (made last Wednesday, very early in the crisis)as I sought to reassure family and friends that we were safe and okayand in good cheer. . It was—at the time—very representative of the (outward) attitude of Beirutis themselves, who pride themselves on their resilience and their determination to ‘keep the party going.’”
China’s Environmental Woes
by Jim Benning | 07.18.06 | 5:27 PM ET
Several years ago I visited China, and I enjoyed just about every minute of it. This photo I shot at a McDonald’s in Xian—Chinese food is great, but a guy needs a break now and again—captures a hint of the juxtaposition between old and new that is becoming such a common sight in the country. But the gorgeous, centuries-old building out the McDonald’s window here looks so gray because in Xian I encountered thick, gray-brown, throat-burning, eye-stinging air, the worst I’d ever seen. It was so bad I bought a cloth cover to wear over my nose and mouth, as many locals do, hoping to filter out some of the pollution. It’s ugly. The World Bank reports that China is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. This week, the public radio show The World is airing a four-part series on China’s environmental problems, entitled “Paying for Prosperity.” The first report, broadcast yesterday, focused on air quality, among other issues. Listening to it, I almost felt like coughing as I recalled Xian and the kind of air that so many people in China have to breathe daily.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Pre-Trip Preparation
by Tom Swick | 07.18.06 | 11:35 AM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Pre-trip preparation: As soon as you’ve decided where to go, you start your research. You read the guidebooks, just like a tourist. But you also read history books and novels set in the place. (If it’s a foreign country, read both those by English-language authors—you will not be at this long before you run into Graham Greene—and those in translation.) Travel books are, of course, also important, but stick with the older ones; anything written within the last few years will be too close for your own visit, and you don’t want another person’s impressions coloring your own.
New Perceptive Travel Stories
by Jim Benning | 07.18.06 | 11:16 AM ET
Sven Lindblad, the Traveler Behind Undulambia Lindbladi
by Jim Benning | 07.18.06 | 11:00 AM ET
We recently interviewed travel writer Jason Wilson about the three dishes named after him around the world. Now, Matt Elzweig of the New York City weekly paper Our Town downtown has interviewed Sven Lindblad, who is not only the well-traveled president and founder of Lindblad Expeditions, but a man with an insect named after him in the Galapagos—a highly enviable feat. Elzweig chats him up about travel, expeditions and, of course, Undulambia lindbladi.
“Are Cities the New Countries?”
by Michael Yessis | 07.18.06 | 7:27 AM ET
As cities turn into megacities—often defined as metropolitan areas with more than 10 million citizens—many academics are asking if, given their size and power, they are becoming more important than the countries that contain them. “Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too,” the BBC News Magazine’s Finlo Rohrer writes. “These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.”
Stefan Gates: “Cooking in the Danger Zone”
by Frank Bures | 07.18.06 | 6:46 AM ET
Food writer Stefan Gates has a stomach stronger than most of us. For his new BBC series Cooking in the Danger Zone, “a series of culinary travelogues filmed in crisis zones around the world,” Gates eats everything from yak penis to scorpion kebabs to silk worm larvae to deer penis juice (not very nice, he says). So far, the show has gotten raves across England. Clips can be found on Gates’ blog and the BBC has some photos. The show starts tonight in the U.K. at 8:30 p.m.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Where to Go
by Tom Swick | 07.17.06 | 1:43 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Where to go: Only amateurs think that writing begins when you sit down at the computer. The professionals remember Sir Joshua Reynolds who, on being asked how long it took him to do a painting, answered: “All my life.” Travel is a genre of writing that encompasses, not surprisingly, the world: flora and fauna, architecture, language, history, food, music, religion, politics, art. All of a writer’s experience goes into his or her writing; it’s just that travel writers, because of their chosen form, need to experience more than most.
Israel and Lebanon: The Traveler’s Perspective
by Michael Yessis | 07.17.06 | 12:27 PM ET
We often say that we travel and read travel writing to discover more about the world. So this week, we turn our attention to Israel and Lebanon, where a violent conflict shows no sign of letting up. To get a different perspective, we thought we’d link to some of the best travel stories we’ve seen from Israel and Lebanon in recent years. Slate, for instance, had a great Talking Tour of Beirut Well-Traveled feature last year, a five-part series by Lee Smith. Slate also published a story by Negar Akhavi a few years ago about “Hezbollahland,” a place “where Islamic fundamentalism meets Dollywood.” Here at World Hum, we posted Lynn Cohen’s reflective story, Blooming in Jerusalem, and Jenni Kolsky’s excellent photo essay taken on a beach outside of Tel Aviv. She writes: “Here it felt safe, in the moments when life is about the pursuit of pleasure, in the moments when you can forget that you are in the midst of war.”
Inside ‘The Most Schizophrenic Job in All of Travel’
by Michael Yessis | 07.17.06 | 7:07 AM ET
Steve Hendrix calls himself a professional mercenary. His fight? Working as an assistant tour guide on a 14-day European bus tour, a journey he chronicled Sunday in the Washington Post. It’s a great piece of you-are-there journalism. Funny, too. “There are two words that we tour guides hate to hear when checking into Budapest hotels with 30 road-whipped passengers waiting in the bus, all limp from their third change of cities in six days and footsore from hours of sightseeing in 93-degree heat in a country without air conditioning amid a group-dynamic that is just barely propped up by the prospect of a much-anticipated ‘Hungarian feast’ in the hotel dining room an hour from now,” Hendrix writes. “Those words are: ‘What dinner?’”
Travel Section Letter of the Week
by Jim Benning | 07.17.06 | 6:25 AM ET
Wrote reader Mary Margaret McGuire to the Los Angeles Times travel section: “Would someone please buy the Travel section editors a blue pencil. Why? Because I (and I am sure many other readers) am sick of the irrelevant references in most, if not all, travel articles to the authors’ mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, spouses, partners, children, roommates and pets. What is this penchant of a seeming obligatory mention of everyone and anyone the writer has communed with in the last 48 hours in every article?”
James Mutti
by Michael Yessis | 07.16.06 | 9:05 PM ET
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) has recently returned from his third trip to India. He has a master’s degree in South Asian Studies, and has written for INTHEFRAY and Travelmag. He will be returning to India this fall as a Fulbright Fellow.
Speaker’s Corner:
* Story Link TK.
Gere on the China-Tibet Train
by Michael Yessis | 07.15.06 | 10:11 AM ET
Richard Gere, the actor and chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times about the new train from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet and its consequences. “[It] is a staggering engineering achievement and a testimony to the developing greatness of China,” Gere writes. “But it is also the most serious threat by the Chinese yet to the survival of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity. In the words of a well-known Tibetan religious teacher who died after many years in a Chinese prison, the railway heralds ‘a time of emergency and darkness’ for Tibet.”
