Ladies, does your fashion sense come into play when you park your car? Someone in China’s Hebei province seems to think so. File this one under “Things That Make you Go ‘What the eff!’”
Remember when we first heard about this earlier in the year? A shopping center in the Chinese city of Shijiazhuang has opened up an underground parking lot exclusively for women.
You can read the BBC story on their original plans here.
I thought it was a joke. It’s not. The link is provided on the off-chance that you think I make this stuff up.
This falls in line with the women-only train carriages in Japan and more recently, Mexico City’s pink taxis, not only exclusively for women, but exclusively driven by women. And like Japan, the Mexican capital’s Metro trains have set aside rail cars for women only.
The rationale behind the gender-exclusive trains and taxis is readily understood. Female passengers feel safer in the taxis, and they’re less likely to get groped by modern-day troglodytes on the trains.
The Chinese venture, on the other hand, seems to be following that old cliché about “women drivers.”
If you love jazz and long to travel, are you ever in luck. Every year, hundreds of the world’s best travel destinations also just happen to host some of the world’s best jazz festivals.
Jazz is one of the few cultural creations America can truly call its own, a lively, soulful, passionately expressive style of music that has spread and is respected the world over.
Why then does it seem that people in other parts of the world have more respect for jazz than we do? These, it’s all about rock,country and hip-hop.
Among black kids in particular, jazz seems to be thought of as old folks’ music. When you consider that it was black America that gave jazz to the world in the first place, there’s something especially sad about that.
These days, you often have to hunt for a good jazz station on commercial radio — and in much of America, you won’t find one. Were it not for Internet radio, a lot of Americans might never hear a jazz broadcast.
In your typical music shop, the jazz section will be among the smallest in the store…and you may have noticed it shrinking over time.
AMERICAN MADE, RESPECTED WORLDWIDE
But jazz was more than just America’s first homegrown cultural artifact. It also was America’s first cultural export, and it has spread just about everywhere.
Outside the United States, there is no generation gap when it comes to jazz. It’s as popular with the young as it is with their parents, and new waves of jazz musicians around the world are pushing it forward.
What does all this mean to you as a traveler?
It means that if you want to pack your bags and see the world while you listen to some of its greatest jazz artists in the world — old and new — at the same time, you have a delightfully dizzying array of destinations from which to choose.
All over the world, virtually any time of the year. Straight ahead jazz, Dixieland jazz, “smooth” jazz, Latin jazz, acid jazz, and everything in between. It’s all out there for you.
TOO MANY TO COUNT
My first plan for this blog entry was to count up all the major jazz festivals around the world so you could have your own list of options. When I got to a hundred with no end in sight, I stopped.
Your best bet is to choose a region and pick a season, then do a Web search on your chosen destination along with the term “jazz festivals.” Unless you’re contemplating a vacation in Antarctica or North Korea, you’ll probably find at least one.
One? Between them, the United Kingdom and France at least 30.
Theoretically, you could easily do a summer jazz fest in Britain one night, then hop the Eurostar train under the English Channel the next morning and catch one somewhere in France the next.
After stopping for a leisurely lunch and a kir in a Paris cafe.
Equally short rail runs could take you to major jazz gatherings in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria.
Denmark? Norway? Sweden? Russia? Ja, ja, ja and da. Finland? Jep! Montreux, Switzerland and island of Malta. Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Europe is awash in jazz.
Not in the mood for Europe? What about Asia or the Pacific? China. Japan. The Philippines. Thailand. India. Indonesia. Hong Kong. Australia. New Zealand.
Prefer to stay a just closer to home? The Caribbean is dotted with gorgeous destinations — and jazz festivals. The Dominican Republic, Aruba, Jamaica, Barbados, Anguilla, Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba.
Want to catch a major jazz festival on the Mother Continent? The Cape Town Jazz Festival in South Africa has got you covered.
If you’ve got some favorite jazz artists, and a part of the world you’ve always wanted to see, the odds are pretty good that at least one of them is playing in festival in at least one of those places in any given year.
GO CLUBBING
If the timing of your vacation won’t allow you to hit the big jazz fests — and given the number of options you have on both side of the Equator, that’s frankly hard to believe — the world’s great cities also are home to many of the world’s great jazz clubs. Especially London and Paris.
Paris, in particular, has a love affair with jazz that goes back to the days of World War 1, when black American soldiers and expatriates introduced it to them, along with gospel music (and you’ll find festivals in Paris for that, too).
For black Americans, Paris is as much the City of Sound as it is the City of Light.
At these varied festivals around the planet, you’ll hear the best jazz artists on the planet — not just the established superstars of the music world, but local and regional greats, up-and-comers whom you might never hear if you had to rely strictly on American commercial radio.
The only downside to that is that your monthly budget for music may go drastically up. But really, is that such a bad thing?
So when you’re ready, start packing, pick your destination, and go take a listen to the sound that America gave to the world!
When it comes to major risks you face while traveling the world, Osama bin Laden has got nothing on Osama bent Fender.
Like most Americans, I treat driving as if it were a God-given right. But when it comes to traveling the world, I become a big believer in mass transit, and for good reason.
According to USA Today, the State Department has calculated that the Number One killer of American travelers since 2003 is neither terrorist strikes nor natural disasters. It’s traffic accidents.
Over those past seven years, more than 1,800 Americans traveling abroad have been killed in road crashes, roughly one every 36 hours.
Forty percent of those road fatalities were in Mexico — which means that if you come to grief south of the border, you’re much more likely to be taken out by a car than a cartel.
Thailand is second, followed by the Dominican Republic. Germany and Spain round out the top five.
As a traveler, you face a lot more danger from ordinary road hazards than terrorism, plane crashes or strange diseases. According to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, 1.3 million people around the world are killed in accidents every year. That’s one victim every six seconds.
Within ten years — if the United Nations is right in its estimates — more people will be dying in accidents worldwide than dying of AIDS.
I’ve seen my share of full-contact motoring. Driving in Mexico or the Dominican Republic can put the fear of God into you. The concept of the kamikaze is not dead; it simply migrated to drivers in Bangkok. If you told me that five pedestrian “kills” in Rome made you an ace, it wouldn’t surprise me.
I haven’t been to India yet, but their traffic chaos is legendary. We who are about to drive, salute you.
I especially love the frustrated motorist who likened New York City drivers at rush hour to “ferrets on crack.”
This is one big reason why, whenever I travel outside the United States, it seldom even occurs to me to rent a car.
Driving is scary enough in places where the scenery is familiar and I’ve got every pothole committed to memory, much less in a distant locale where everything around me is new and potentially fascinating.
Also, I’d rather spend my time taking in the sights and meeting folks than having to focus on learning the local rules of the road game.
There are times when you have no alternative to renting some wheels and taking your chances, but for the most part, I’m perfectly happy to take el autobus or le Metro — and leave the driving to someone else.
Hell, I’m still trying to figure out those zig-zag lines painted onto the streets of London!
Part 1 of this two-part series looked at beer and brewery tours as a travel theme within the United States. Part 2 concludes with a taste of beer travel around the world.
You can easily spend all your vacations in breweries and brewpubs at home. Eventually, though, your tastebuds may develop some serious wanderlust.
You find yourself sampling imported beers, just to see if they’re worth all the hype. By and by, you start to wonder what these international brews taste like at the source.
There’s only one way to find out. Time to dig out that passport. Beer is as good a reason as any to see, and taste, the world.
That’s especially true if you decide to delve into the origins of beer, which dates back to ancient Iraq and a good six millenia before the birth of Christ.
Every region seems to produce some good beers. Continental Europe is all but saturated with them, but you’ll find worthy brews in the Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa.
(“Africa?” you say. A cold Tusker Lager on a hot summer day will answer your question.)
All brewery tours are not created equal. In addition to those prized free samples, some offer knowledge, in everything from how to properly pour a beer to hands-on steps in the beer-making process itself.
And when it comes to breweries, you’ve got more destination choices than vacation days. A lot more.
GERMANY
The country that gave us Oktoberfest(see the pic above) has more than 1,300 breweries, half of them in Bavaria. Together, they crank out a dizzying 5,000 different brands in 23 different varieties…at least.
The Bavarian city of Bamberg in southern Germany supposedly has the largest concentration of working breweries in the world, so you might want to start there.
(Another reason for visiting Bamberg is to get a feel for what a German city was like prior to World War 2; it was one of the few that Allied bombers left alone.)
Or you might want to check out the Benedictine abbey at Weihenstephan, which has been making the stuff since 1040.
And yet, all those breweries and Oktoberfest notwithstanding, Germany is neither the largest maker nor the biggest consumer of beer. They’re third, behind Ireland.
So who’s Number One? An Eastern European country that not only produces some of the world’s best beers, but also happens to be very high on the tourism radar these days.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Since the end of the Cold War, Prague has become one of the hot new travel destinations in Eastern Europe, and that’s exposed a lot of Americans to some incredible Czech beers.
After all, these are the folks who invented pilsner, the light, golden beer most familiar to Americans. That’s a good reason to visit the town of Plzeň.
We know it better by its Germanic spelling: Pilsen.
JAPAN
The first non-American beer I ever tried was Kirin. It was first brewed, and still is, in Yokohama.
Yokohama is where where Americans introduced beer and brewing to Japan back in 1870. It’s also the place where America’s Adm. Matthew Perry sailed into the harbor with a fleet and opened Japan to the Western world — more or less at gunpoint.
Other brands that brew beer throughout the country and do brewery tours include Asahi, Orion, Sapporo and Suntory.
In Japan, you may literally get a chance to double-dip, since beer is not the only alcoholic beverage brewed there. Sake, Japan’s deceptively potent rice liquor, also is the product of breweries, which also conduct tours. Far too many to list here.
IRELAND
The grand-daddy of brewery tours doesn’t even take you into the brewery itself, but that doesn’t stop beer lovers from flocking to with near-religious fervor.
The Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland is a slick multimedia presentation on the makings of Guinness Stout. that, when I was last there, included a man-made waterfall and a walk through a real, and enormous, beer cask. It also features a spacious bar that serves up not only your one free Guinness, but a 180-degree view of the Dublin skyline and maybe the best beef stew you’ll ever have.
Made with Guinness.
Whether in a bar or a brewery, if you’re new to international travel, there’s something comforting about being around beer. It’s familiar. Language, scenery and brewing methods all may vary from one place to another, but beer is beer, pretty much, wherever you are.
Comfort zone in a glass.
Some of these breweries will be in the heart of great cities, others in small towns, or abbeys in the countryside. The mere act of traveling to reach them can give you an ample slice of life to go along with your beer sample.
You do remember where you stashed that passport, right?
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
If you really want to have some fun, you’ve got to hit the brewery in the Czech town of České Budějovice. The name doesn;t ring any bells with most Americans, until you hear its German version: Budweis.
Where they’ve been brewing beer since the 12th century, which they call…
…wait for it…
Budweiser.
August Busch hit St. Louis a few centuries later and started brewing his own Budweiser over here in 1876. A-B and the Czechs have been battling in court over the use of this name ever since.
I’m not even going to try to unravel this mess. If you’re curious about all the legal back-and-forth,read it here.
Bottom line: the Czechs get to use the Budweiser name over there, A-B gets to keep it over here. A-B also cut a deal with the Czechs to market their “Bud” here in the States, under the name Czechvar.
So if you ever comes across one, you’ll know you’re drinking the original Budweiser from “the old country.”
So which do you think is better, the Czech “Bud” or ours?
Are fears of one sort or another putting up walls between you and your life? Some people out there are using travel to punch through those walls.
Andrew Couch is travel blogger writing from Germany. He’s also an American expatriate who picked up one day and left the United States to start a new life in Germany.
No friends, no plan, no nothing. Just went. Incredible, yes?
The miracle of Twitter led me to his blog, And although Mr.Couch is not black, his blog gets to the very heart of why I suspect a lot of “us” don’t travel.
Fear. Fear of how we’ll be perceived, how we’ll be treated. Fear of being met with prejudice, bigotry, racism. Fear of being seen as less than worldly. Or something even more fundamental, fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, all that talk that we can’t understand and all those signs that we can’t read.
By his own account, Mr. Couch is far from fearless himself, but he travels, anyway — not despite his fears, but because of them. He’s actually using his expat life to attack the fears themselves:
“Travel is my avenue for personal growth. I take the train to talk to people, have time to think and time learning to be alone. I go to places where I don’t speak the language and eat things I don’t recognize to expand my personal comfort zone. All of this in essence to deal with my own personal fears and anxiety.”
Most of us put up walls of emotional sandbags about the various comfort zones in our life. Mr. Couch is busily blowing his up, and travel is his dynamite:
“I tend to add one fear to work on as a goal for each trip. So I use my ability to travel with less fear to treat other fears in my life. With so many various fears of different degrees, travel can offer experiences to deal with those.”
Interesting approach, jah? Could it be that this expat has some things to teach us?
You can read more about Andrew Couch and his approach to travel here.
If we approach it in the right spirit, travel can be a good weapon against all manner of fears, be they fear of different environments, different foods, different people, nations, religions, whatever.
In that way, travel becomes something more than just “chillin’” or “seeing the sights.” And when we come back, we may find that we’ve become something more, something stronger, than we were when we left.
We’re going to look more closely at this topic later. But not much later.
And now, here’s today’s Digest:
from elliott.org
The airline industry says it needs all those irritating add-on fees to keep their businesses afloat. Consumer advocate Christopher Elliott says they’d still be profitable without them…but not by much.
from USA Today
According to the folks at Condé Nast magazine, the best airline in America is…well…British! And the way things are going with airlines in this country, doesn’t that just figure.
AFRICA from the Guardian (London UK) Cameroon is Africa unplugged, without no frills, pretenses and no special concessions to tourism. It welcomes you, but on its own terms. All of which intrigues the hell out of David Smith.
AMERICAS from Reuters via msnbc travel
How to spend a couple of days in New York City without causing your wallet to spontaneously combust.
from USA Today
Do you get your roll on with one engine and two wheels? USA Today offers up a list of ten tantalizing road trips with motorcycles in mind.
from the San Francisco Chronicle
Brace yourself: People actually walk in Los Angeles. It’s legal and everything. And if you confine yourself to the historic and revitalizing downtown, it’s even enjoyable.
ASIA from The Japan Times Naka-Meguro — or Nakame to the locals — is a virtual island of tranquility in the midst of high-octane megalopolis Tokyo, including some hole-in-the-wall restaurants that are small of space but big on flavor.
EUROPE from Monique Rubin
The Netherlands, being flat as a table, is custom-made for getting around by bicycle, even in the major cities like Amsterdam(I’m a witness; there are bikes everywhere in that burg!). But there are a few tricks to doing it right, and this American expat has the 4-1-1.
The first actual leg of our West African rail fantasy will take us from French-speaking Senegal into English-speaking Gambia, Africa’s smallest country — and living proof that size isn’t everything. The end of this leg will put us in Guinea.
Second of three parts.
The last hues of sunset are burning brightly behind the Atlantic Ocean as our train pulls into Banjul, capital of The Gambia. Now, it feels as if our West African journey truly has begun.
This is but the first of the national borders we’ll be crossing on this trip, and in the relatively short time we have to make the journey — two weeks for 11 countries — it wouldn’t be practical, or even possible, without this high-speed train. We’d be forced instead to choose a single West African country to visit, and hope we could return someday to see another.
A FLEXIBLE JOURNEY
Now, we don’t have to make that choice. The train gives us great flexibility. We can make day trips at some destinations and overnight or even multiple-night stops in others. And the ease of changing reservations makes adjusting our plans “on the fly” no problem at all.
This evening, we arrive aboard a Velaro high-speed train, designed in Germany by Siemens. Some in our group have ridden Velaros before, in Germany or in Spain. It looks like the streak that a bullet makes as it travel through water.
The Gambia is the smallest nation on the Mother Continent, with an area of barely 4,000 square miles and a population of about 1.7 million people. That makes it roughly the same size in both categories as the city of San Diego. The country takes its name from the river that defines it, and its territory is basically two narrow strips along its banks.
Theoretically, we could cover this country from end to end in a day, but we won’t test that theory on this trip.
Our hotel in Banjul is so close to the station that we decide to walk — some of us rolling our bags along, others of us slinging our cases on our backs with backpack straps, the better to keep our hands free for our digital and video cameras to capture that glorious sunset.
But we can’t spend too much time shooting. We’ve been told that Banjul shuts off its street lights after 8 p.m.
The next morning, we’re up with the sun and hit the streets. First stop, the Albert Market. Your prototypical ramshackle collection of vendors’ stalls found across most of the world. From fruit to fish to fabrics, if they don’t have it, you may want it.
GETTING IN RHYTHM
We have this thing about markets. We like to hit them early, when you’re likely to be their first customers of the day, or late, when they’re trying to make their last sales before going home. We learned that in Thailand.
We make a brief photo and video stop at the ferry terminal, then it’s off to the National Museum to learn a bit about The Gambia and its history. Later, we check out the Tanbi Wetland Preserve.
In between, we check out shops, sample local street food and drinks, chat with locals we meet along the way. We stop to admire the poetic performances of griots and the music of the kora.
It may not seem like it, but we’re taking our time today. We want to get into the rhythm of life here. When you fight the pace of a place, you feel as if you’re constantly swimming upstream. We will not be salmon on this trip.
As if to remind us of our resolve, periodic bursts of heavy tropical rain force us to take shelter in the nearest cafe, shop or covered stall, waiting out downpours with cold drinks and conversation.
The next day, we rent a couple of SUVs and take the ferry across the river to Barra on the north side, but we’re not staying here. We want to pay homage to Alex Haley’s groundbreaking book “Roots.” The village to which he traced his ancestry is Jufureh, about 20 miles away. This, along with the nearby village of Albreda, were a part of the West African slave trade.
Our stay here is brief, but long enough to make me wonder if my own ancestral home, wherever it is in Africa, looks anything like this.
It’s been a full, busy and utterly enjoyable two days. We sit down to a leisurely dinner to review the words we’ve learned in Wolof and plot travel strategy. If I have any energy left, I may spend a little time in a club, listening to some mbalax music — and possibly make a total fool of myself trying to dance to it.
On second thought, I’ll just listen!
HEADING SOUTH
The sun has barely risen when we check out of our hotel and head for the train station, with a quick side strip to the Albert Market to buy some food and bottled water for the day’s travel. Our first destination today is Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau.
Even more quickly than the train entered Gambian territory two days earlier, it heads back into Senegal, making a very quick stop in Ziguinchor in the region known as the Casamance.
We leave the train at Bissau. This is basically a day trip for us. We will explore a bit, check out the ruins of the Guinea-Bissau presidential palace and find some lunch.
After that, it’s back to the train to continue on to Conakry, capital of Guinea. It should take us about 2.5 hours, passing through Boke along the way.
We cross many bridges along the way, over the streams, rivers and inlets that flow east to west to the Atlantic. Others are single-track, barely wide enough to hold the rails we’re riding on. At times, when you look down, the train seems to be gliding on air, or water.
One last bridge and we are in Conakry. Three cities and three countries in three days.
HAVE SOCIAL MEDIA KILLED THE GUIDEBOOK?
At least one British travel writer thinks so, and he’s got a lot of compelling evidence on his side. But the guidebook may not be a total dinosaur just yet.
In today’s edition of The Observer in London, Benji Lanyado offers some pretty compelling evidence that the guidebook is about ready to go the way of typewriters, floppy discs and gasoline for 35 cents a gallon (and yes, I am old enough to remember all of those!).
I mean, when you can broadcast your location in real-time via your smartphone and instantly be showered with up-to-date tips from locals about the best cheap eats, the hottest clubs or the best “underground” doings, do you really want to spend the money to pack and lug around a weighty guidebook packed with information that was outdated the minute it was published — almost a year ago?
I didn’t think so.
But I wouldn’t write off the guidebook just yet, especially when you look at the roaming costs and Internet connection fees associated with that smartphone of yours.
Further, some operating systems for smartphones don’t operate all that well. A snail running downhill is still a snail. And the slower that OS runs, the more money your smartphone provider gets to take out of your pocket.
All this is especially true when you’re using your devices overseas.
It could be that, to remain relevant, the nature of guidebooks will need to change. Like many other elements in the print world, they may need to become slimmer, more streamlined, scaled down.
They might work better in some cases as a super-compact compendium of nuts-and-bolts data about a place that you may need at a moment’s notice, but don’t want to waste time searching for on the Web.
Or they may need to become more specialized, appealing to travelers who already have an idea of what they want to see and do, and need some focused, expert advice on how to go about it.
Meanwhile, so long as cell phone companies the world stop being so parochial and agree to universality in access and their rates — that probably won’t happen in my lifetime or yours — the guidebook most likely will still have its niche.
That niche, however, will be shrinking.
And now, here’s this week’s Digest:
from Yahoo! Travel via Travel+Leisure magazine
Looking for a few aerial thrills, without having to jump from a plane? The T+L folks have a list of bridges high enough to check anyone’s level of acrophobia. And yes, that’s fear of heights. I’ve already been over one of these bridges twice, once in the rain. And yes, I’m crazy.
from He Thought of Trains
Scotland’s Jools Stone has one of the best rail travel sites out there, and this handy list of great rail sites is one of the reasons why.A must for train enthusiasts.
AFRICA from MSNBC Travel Timbuktu is real. It once was rich. It still has the power to captivate. If you can find it.VIDEO
AMERICAS from Travel Between The Pages
In a truly great city, you can find just about anything, which explains why in New York City, you can find a coffeeshop that puts a whole new angle on books.
from Smarter Travel
The ST gang have the 4-1-1 on five hotel bargains in New York City. Just being able to say the words “hotel bargains” and “New York City” with a straight face — or without being struck by lightning — is an achievement in itself.
ASIA/PACIFIC from the New York Times
What Florence is to art, Athens is to antiquity and Paris is to je ne sais quoi, the city of Pattaya in Thailand is to sleaze. What happens in Vegas would draw yawns in Pattaya — at least until now. They’re trying like mad these days to clean up their act.
from Globetrooper.com
Now here’s a train trip for ya, a circumnavigation of India by rail, set for next Feb. Fifteen days, 7,800 miles, a whole lot in between and a party afterward. The good news: At $320, it may be the world’s cheapest rail tour, even if you still have to pay separately to get there. The bad news: You don’t have long to think about it.
EUROPE from the Guardian (London, UK)
Italy’s South Tyrol region is a wonderful place to take in alpine scenery and get a healthy taste of the cuisine and culture of…Germany?
In Mexico, the abduction of 22 Mexican tourists has sets off alarms nationwide, while Washington is set to issue a terror alert for Americans traveling in Europe. But all may not be as it appears.
So which do you want first, the bad news or the scary news?
The bad news comes from just south of the border, where authorities are trying to find 22 tourists reported to have been kidnapped in the Mexican seaside city of Acapulco.
The scary news is coming out of Washington. The New York Times is reporting that the State Department will issue an alert Sunday, urging Americans traveling in Europe to be on their guard against possible terrorist attacks.
Specifically, the warning raises the possibility of commando-style terror attacks within European cities, modeled after the 2008 Mumbai attacks in India.
There, small teams of heavily-armed gunmen, taking orders via cell phone from a shadowy terrorist leader in neighboring Pakistan, stormed two luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, a hospital, a crowded train station and a Jewish community center — setting fires, hurling grenades and firing AK-47s as they went.
The current plots, also said to have originated in Pakistan, are believed to target Britain, France and Germany, but authorities across Europe are raising their alert levels, as well.
Let’s take the Mexico report first. The little gray hairs on the back of my neck tell me there’s something fishy about this one.
According to the LA Times, the 22 missing tourists were a group of men who were abducted while looking for lodging.
First, when tourists travel in a group, even in Mexico, they usually consist of both men and women. Second, Acapulco has been a major tourist destination for decades, and Mexican travelers know how to make reservations as well as anyone else.
Anything is possible, but for a group of guys to suddenly show up in a busy tourist venue like 22 Biblical Josephs, looking for room in the inn during the off-season, simply does not compute.
And third, spontaneous abductions of a group this size are about as common as an honest politician.
“Oye, muchachos! There’s a groups of hombres wandering around, looking for a place to stay! Let’s go kidnap them, compas!”
Possible? Yes. Likely? Not really. Somebody knew these guys were coming.
I can’t help but wonder if the person who reported this incident to the authorities described the victims as “tourists” because he didn’t wanted to say what they were really up to. There may be a lot more to this story than we know so far.
The European situation is another matter altogether, especially with the threat said to be coming out of Pakistan.
Al Qaeda is operating more or less with a free hand in the lawless northern regions of Pakistan, but they’re not the only player in the terrorist game. They may not even be the biggest threat right now.
The Mumbai attacks were organized — and pulled off with gruseome effect — by a homegrown Pakistani terrorist set called Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Like al Qaeda, they are considered to be Islamic extremists. And like al Qaeda, they’re not playing. Even after Mumbai, few Americans are really aware of them, but Indians can tell you all about them.
Their beef is more regional than global, and at the heart of it is Kashmir. India has it, Pakistan wants it.
Could it be that these guys want to make an al Qaeda-sized splash somewhere in the world?
So I’m reading this press release about a new pitch being developed by one of the cruise lines, Royal Caribbean International. The theme: “Cruise them or lose them.”
The “them” refers to your vacation days, and the tendency of we Americans to kiss off far too many of them. Yeah, they’ve got cruise ship cabins they’re desperate to fill, but behind the funny pitch are some serious issues.
It’s long been known that the average working adult in the United States gets the least amount of vacation time per year in the industrialized world:
Italy, 42 days
France, 37
Germany 35
Brazil 34
Britain 28
Canada 26
Japan and South Korea, tie 25
United States 13
The Japanese and South Koreans, neither of whom have a reputation for slacking off in the workplace, are the next lowest — and they still average almost twice as much vacation time as Americans.
What’s more, workers in many countries, including Japan, have a certain mininum number of vacation days required by law. Not here.
THE $19 BILLION GIVEAWAY
And of his or her 13 average vacation days, the typical American will give three of those back to their employer. According to the folks at Expedia (another outfit with a vested interest in getting us to travel more), that saves American employers an average of $19.3 billion a year.
Did you even get a thank-you card last Christmas for your share of this $19 billion gift? I’m betting you didn’t.
According to some numbers crunched from 2009 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we Americans collectively worked through a whopping 459 million vacation days last year.
That’s shade over 1 million years of time off you could’ve taken, America, and didn’t.
It gets worse.
A travel industry survey showed nearly half of those polled, 45 percent, blew off vacation time last year, and 78 percent expect to forfeit ten days of vacation in 2010.
Such surveys have even shown that more than a few Americans actually feel guilty about using their paltry vacation time.
The rest of the world looks at this and thinks we’re nuts. I look at it and think they’re right.
MORE PRODUCTIVE, MORE STRESSED
Nor is this a function of the Great Recession. We’ve always been like this. You know, that whole Puritan work ethic thing? And we wonder why we constantly feel weary in body and spirit?
(Perhaps somebody should’ve reminded our ancestors that the Puritans were religious extremists who basically got run out of England.)
Juliet B. Schor, Harvard economist and author of “The Overworked American,” was tracking this stuff back in 1990:
“Since 1948, productivity has failed to rise in only five years. The level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled…Yet hours have risen steadily for two decades. In 1990, the average American owns and consumes more than twice as much as he or she did in 1948, but also has less free time.”
We as a nation are among the most stressed out people on Earth, and we have no one to blame for it but ourselves. To paraphrase an old TV commercial from back in the day, we’re creating more and earning more, but enjoying it less.
Some folks, especially those in the mental health business, might well look at all this and wonder: What is the point?
Many of us actually love our jobs; the problem is that the job will never love you back.
KILLING OURSELVES
Face it, it’s not as if your workplace can’t go on without you. The 6.3 million men and women laid off in the last three years can attest to that. So why are you killing yourself for an employer who not only doesn’t love you, anyway, but who may not even know your name?
And if you’re one of those Americans who routinely gives away vacation days every year, you are indeed killing yourself.
John de Graaf runs a non-profit outfit that calls itself Take Back your Time. He has some stats of his own.
“Men who take them are 32% less likely to suffer from heart disease than those who don’t. For women, it’s 50%. And women who don’t take vacations are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression.”
So if your doctor ever writes you a one-word prescription that just says “MAUI,” he may just may be trying to save your life.
Being both below sea level and flat as day-old beer, the Netherlands is an ideal country for touring either by bicycle or barge.
Bike touring offers a lot of benefits, especially in bike-friendly European countries. For one thing,it lowers your local transportation costs down to nothing. When you’re traveling, “free” is one four-letter word you’ll always love hearing.
For another, you get to experience what it’s like to ride a bike in a place where folks on two wheels aren’t treated as the enemy by those on four. Drivers there tend to treat cyclists with courtesy and respect (what a concept!), if only because when they’re not behind the wheel, the drivers are often cyclists themselves.
And constantly burning calories with all that pedaling means you can partake of all that delightful European food and drink (almost) without guilt.
If nothing else, you’ll fit a lot easier in that Coach seat on the flight home.
The other good way to see the Netherlands is by boat — specifically, a barge tour. The country — including its capital, Amsterdam — is laced with canals, making a barge a very cool alternative to a bus.
While at this year’s Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show, I came across an outfit up in Redmond, WA that actually combines the two into a single trip. They’re called Bike & Barge Holland Tours. They’ve got trips going through the end of September.
Not surprisingly, most of their tours focus on the Netherlands’ capital city, Amsterdam, but they also offer trips to multiple Dutch cities and a sweep through the classic (and gorgeous) tulip country, as well as tours that range into nearby European countries like Belgium.
DID YOU KNOW?
Amsterdam is the world’s largest flower market. Most of the flowers you see in your favorite florist on in your local supermarket either came from or through here a day or so before.
The city’s flower trade ranges from a massive warehouse operation buzzing with forkifts, to the world’s only floating flower market, spread out along a row or covered canal barges.
Just try to resist the temptation to pick up one of those cannabis starter kits as a souvenir, okay? Just sayin’…
They even offer a four-country swing through the Netherlands, France, Germany and Luxembourg.
They aren’t cheap — $3,000 to $3,200 — but for the money, you get the use of a bike, a ride leader, almost all meals, museum and ferry fees, and returns to the airport or train station at the end of your trip.
Check here for more information…and tell ‘em I sent you! Text by G. Gross | Bike pic by Diego Cervo
