Not enough people voted in a referendum to save Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport yesterday, dooming the iconic airfield to closure come October. Among Tempelhof’s claims to fame: The terminal, once the biggest building in Europe, was intended to be an awesome symbol of Nazi Germany. The airport also served as the hub of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49.

Related on World Hum:
* Jan Morris in Berlin: ‘Ooh, That’s Nice!’
* Extreme Eating in East Berlin With the Stasi

Photo by martinroell, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

“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)

Austria and Germany took the second and third spots in the annual Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index. The index measures 14 factors in an attempt to pinpoint which countries have the most “conducive environments for developing the travel and tourism industry.” Here are all the rankings. (via Jaunted)

Related on World Hum:
* U.N.: Iceland Rocks. Sub-Saharan Africa? Not so Much.

For only 499 euros you, too, can book a spot on the July 5 flight from Erfurt to the Baltic Sea resort Usedom. Passengers can strip down once on board; the crew will remain clothed for safety reasons. “I don’t want people to get the wrong idea. It’s not that we’re starting a swinger club in mid-air or something like that,” Enrico Hess, the managing director of the travel agency taking the bookings, told Reuters. “We’re a perfectly normal holiday company.”

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In Washington D.C., visitors can go sleuthing around the International Spy Museum. In Berlin, they can look back on the reign of the Stasi at the DDR Museum. But in Canada’s capital, and my own hometown of Ottawa, tourists aren’t allowed even a spyglass-eye’s view of the top-secret Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) museum. And they most certainly can’t buy souvenirs. 

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You don’t have to be near Mavericks, or even an ocean, to enjoy some wild surfing action. Surfers have been riding waves in rivers for years—the Amazon’s Pororoca in Brazil just might be the most dramatic example. But there are options in Europe, too. The Atlantic magazine recently covered surfing Munich’s Eisbach, a tributary of the Isar River where a standing wave has “created an enclave of borrowed California culture in the heart of Bavaria.”

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Saturday was a good time to be in northern California. Pro surfers from around the globe and thousands of spectators converged on the legendary surf spot near Half Moon Bay for the sixth edition of the Mavericks big-wave contest. The wave breaks a good distance offshore, and spectators who didn’t want to peer through binoculars had an interesting option.

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A 64-year-old man was given two choices by security at the Nuremberg, Germany airport: Dump his liter of vodka or pay to have it checked as luggage. He went with a third option: Chug it like a Sig Ep pledge. “The passenger was unable to stand or function and a doctor was called to the scene,” according to Spiegel Online. The not-too-surprising diagnosis: alcohol poisoning. The unnamed passenger was admitted to a Nuremberg hospital and is expected to be home in time for Christmas. I think I know what gift he’d like to find under his tree this year.

Related on World Hum:
* Airport Security to Lourdes Pilgrim: Your Holy Water is a Security Threat
* Russia: ‘Cold, Dark, Drowning in Vodka, and Ruled by the KGB’

Photo by inda.ca via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

German schoolteacher Richard Schirrmann started the hostelling movement in 1909, and throughout its history Australia, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan and Sweden have all honored it with commemorative postage stamps. Hostelling International USA wants the United States to join those countries for the 100th anniversary of hostelling, and it’s asking travelers to help by signing an online petition. 

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Legendary travel writer Jan Morris had a revelation about Berlin: The city “where Hitler strutted” and that had “haunted and disturbed” her all her adult life is “really rather nice.” She writes in the Financial Times: “Was it all guileless innocence? Of course not.”

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The thought of finding romance on a train from Washington D.C. to New York City—a trip I’ve made many times—strikes me as unlikely. Let’s face it: There’s nothing particularly romantic about Amtrak. But a chance meeting on a European train? On atmosphere alone, I’d give it much better odds. Two train-related events in Europe this fall are reviving the romantic image of rail travel, albeit with a 21st century spin. Reuters reports that German rail operator Deutsche Bahn has introduced speed-dating on an intercity line from Nuremberg to Munich, providing an upscale alternative to the usual pub meet-and-greet, complete with champagne and roses. 

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Bless Tom Perrotta for trying to eat local on the road, but after reading his extraordinary tale from a long-ago visit to East Berlin, I can understand why he’s hesitant to do so anymore. The author of “Election” and “Little Children” recalls that after a few beers with some locals, including two uniformed East German soldiers, he was urged to try Hackepeter, a combination of raw beef, chopped onions and raw egg. The food, he writes in the New York Times Magazine, was “quite tasty.” It was what happened afterwards that scared him. 

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