Interesting conversation going on at the Sydney Morning Herald travel blog about the good and bad about traveling within the United States. Ben Groundwater started it with a mostly-positive defense of the U.S. as a travel destination. The CliffsNotes version of the conversation so far: Rocky Mountains, New York, New Orleans, clam chowder, pizza and people who are “generous to the point of being overbearing” are good. “[L]oud-mouthed, rude, arrogant, and ridiculously insular” people and getting fingerprinted upon entry are bad.

Related on World Hum:
* Why the World is Avoiding America

Photo of the Rockies by joiseyshowaa, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Sophia Dembling asks three questions to kick off an intriguing blog post: “Now that the price of flying is skyrocketing, will the world start getting larger again? Will travel become less egalitarian than it has become in recent decades, as fewer people can afford to do it? And would that be, necessarily, a bad thing?” Dembling recently wrote Traveling While Texan for World Hum.

Update: May 2, 11:09 a.m. ET: A USA Today story outlines how “[r]ecord-high oil prices are threatening to ground millions of travelers who have grown accustomed to flying for fun and business during the past 30 years.”

The Onion’s A.V. Club picked this quote from “Cat’s Cradle”—“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God”—as one of 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will. 

Terrific story in the New Yorker about the Beijing man behind “Li Yang Crazy English,” whose slogans include “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!” Evan Osnos writes that Li is “the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement.” Officials in Beijing have turned to him to teach English to his compatriots before the Olympic Games this summer, but as Osnos writes—and that slogan hints at—it’s about more than language. 

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Marie Claire, The Age and the Times UK are among the publications with recent stories about the plight of the “long-neck women,” a group of Kayan refugees from Burma who are known for wearing brass coils around their necks. Tourists from around the world flock to Northern Thailand to see them, but many of the long-neck women have apparently had enough of living in a “human zoo.” Several of the women have removed their coils and are fighting to move to New Zealand and Finland, where they have been offered resettlement. 

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Great piece in the Washington Post about a new multiplex theater opening in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The country lifted a longtime ban on screening Indian movies in February, and now the country is poised for a movie—and cross-cultural—boom. 

“What constitutes a meaningful cultural difference?” That’s the question that The Smart Set contributor Michael Gorra is faced with after a bedsheet-shopping expedition in Hamburg. What follows is a thoughtful essay on the traveler’s search for differences, our inevitable comparisons to the familiar and our efforts to make it all add up in the end. Laced with references to the peculiarities around him (Berlin’s new golf courses, or the way cashiers in Hamburg make change), the essay left me reassessing the way I take note of the world around me when I travel. It also left me craving the “cool pilsner tingle” of a mug of German beer.

Photo by Jan the manson via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Sadly, I think so. During my recent travels to New Orleans, Austin and Los Angeles, I took eight cab rides. During two of them I barely said a word to the driver. Not because I didn’t want to, but because the cabbie was on his cell phone, yapping with someone else. I was annoyed by the chatter, but also deflated. 

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Not so long ago I wrote about the last days of the postcard—now it seems my requiem for a beloved travel souvenir may have been premature. This story in the Globe and Mail suggests that postcards are actually making a comeback, noting that sales, in the UK and Canada at least, have only increased since 2003.

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Disneyland fans are abuzz—and many are up in arms—over news that changes are coming to the classic boat ride “It’s a Small World.” The attraction was inspired by a conference Walt Disney attended in 1956, at the invitation of President Eisenhower, aimed at promoting “world peace through international civilian travel,” according to Wikipedia. Slow-moving boats pass scenes depicting various countries and cultures, all set to music. (See this YouTube video.)

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Nabil Hadj Hassen, who arrived in Italy at 17 and went on to train with some of the country’s top chefs, won the heart of highly regarded reviewer Gambero Rosso with his dish of pasta, eggs, pecorino cheese and guanciale (cured pig cheek) at the restaurant Antico Forno Roscioli. But The New York Times recently explored how his triumphant carbonara also flagged a question looming over Italy’s revered cuisine: Is the food still Italian if the chef is not? 

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That’s not all that’s on the spiritual menu at Nashville’s Hotel Preston. It also offers versions of the Bible, the Torah, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Book of Mormon and other spiritual texts in an effort to “make everyone feel at home when they’re away from home,” writes one of the hotel’s bloggers. “Yes, even you Scientologists out there!” I’m writing this post from a Hilton in Los Angeles, and this story is making me feel spiritually underfed. 

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