Tag: tourism

Anna maria

The vast majority of what is now in the Uffizi Gallery, Pitti Palace, Palazzo Vecchio, the Laurenziana library, Magliabecchiana library, Palatine library, a large chunk of the Bargello and everything in the smaller suburban Medici villas would be gone. Florence as we know it today would not exist. Think of how prescient Anna Maria was to recognize the value of her family holdings to city tourism.

anna maria was one badass woman.

End of surprises

In the 60s and 70s anyone could get to anyplace for very little money and when they arrived, it was still not touched by globalization. There were no maps, no guidebooks, no cafes, ATMs, no forums, even no hotels. It was all surprises.

just wait another 5 years when everyone has smartphones, and no one will ever get lost again, or require the services of a local instead of staring into their device for information.

London postal railroad

A group of intrepid London explorers found an entrance to the long-abandoned postal rail system, which once whisked mail across the city through a network of underground tunnels. They walked km of track, stopped in several stations, and lavishly documented the journey with photos and text. What an adventure!

hidden london tunnels

Travel Without Baggage

I’ve done a few very short trips this way, and once I took a month-long journey in Sri Lanka without baggage. I would not want to travel this way all the time, but once you go with none, it is much easier to go with very little. It’s one of the oldest truism in the world: the less you travel with, the more you take back.

total nada, just pockets, day baggers and minimalist borrowers.

Eating well in Mexico

advice that probably holds everywhere.

1. Look for time-specific food. In San Miguel for instance, there is barbacoa from 8-10:00., carnitas from ~11-16:00, and wonderful chorizo after 20:00. In Mexico, if the food is available only part of the day, it’s almost always good. It’s for locals and there is no storage in these places so it’s also extremely fresh.

2. Often the best meals are served in places which have no names. In San Miguel the “brothers Bautista” run the best carnitas stands, but there is no sign and no marking. The stands are simply there on the side of the road, with some plastic tables and chairs, at a few places around town. Everyone in town knows about them.

3. Ask around with taxi drivers and be persistent. Ask the older taxi drivers. Throw away your guidebook, no matter which one you have.

4. Use breakfast and lunch for your best meals; dinner is an afterthought. Almost everywhere good is closed by 20:00 or often long before then. Always visit a place that closes by 13:00

5. Roadside restaurants, on the edges of towns or between towns, serve some of the best food in Mexico or anywhere else for that matter. Some of these restaurants even have names, though you can overlook that in the interests of eating well.

Istanbul

an ode

Beloved for its complex, layered past, Istanbul, where East meets West, may also offer a vision of what’s to come. I don’t think I’d ever stepped inside a cinema restroom to see little video screens along the wall projecting fashion runway footage until I went to Istanbul a few months ago. But then—my life is so sheltered!—I’d never seen mini-screens lining an elevator on the way to the movies, either. The hit song from Slumdog Millionaire, “Jai Ho,” was pulsing through every floor of City’s Mall in Istanbul’s Nisantasi district when I visited, and the restrooms next to the cinema lobby were marked by life-size cutouts of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie