Category Archives: Blog

Holidays in London

The funny thing about the holidays in the USA is that everything seems to begin around Veteran’s Day. The Christmas music starts to rear its ugly head and while decorations do not go full-in until the week around Thanksgiving, there is that sense of a relentless march towards the big day. It is the holiday season after all– Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas – it just requires a couple of months to sell its various brands. But what it does not need is global warming which seems to have happened while we were all sleeping, driving our diesel and gas cars, ignoring calls for solar and wind power and maxing on our air conditioning use. Now, as I sit in Boston, watching somebody skateboarding by in a t-shirt, I wonder if I will ever see snow again!

On the other hand, London seems to embrace Christmas like no other place. It has the people (lots of them), every street in the center is full-on lit up with beautiful or funky lights, there is the huge Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, and big bonus, no sun and it gets dark so fabulously early that the entire city is in nighttime glow most of the time. It’s cozy! While there is absolutely no snow ever to be seen and lots of rain, it somehow feels Christmassy. It is probably because London has so many shops and every shop has a Christmas window and everybody walking around London seems to be holding bags that indicate they have been shopping. There are pubs on every other corner jammed with revelers and the occasional jolly drunk and all of the restaurants have Christmas menus in addition to the usual a la carte stuff. This place full-on celebrates!

So grab a Christmas cracker, put your paper crown on, grab a piece of Christmas pudding or mince pie, or even go to Pret-A-Mange (the popular take-out place) for a Christmas lunch sandwich – yes, Christmas lunch complete with stuffing can be contained within two pieces of sliced white bread! While you are at it, grab a bag of Christmas crisps and then take the kids to see Father Christmas and a Pantomime. It’s the most popular entertainment over the holiday period. I grew up on them. Based in history on 17^th century Commedia dell’arte characters, panto means to imitate all in Greek. Everyone has fun, kids laugh, men dress up as woman and woman as men. Shakespearean really! Although it’s mainly for kids, it’s huge! It involves music, topical and saucy jokes, and slapstick comedy and is usually based on a fairy tale or nursery story. Plus everyone gets to go to the theatre!! Good for the soul!

Image Credit: londonconnection.com

Image Credit: VisitLondon.com & Featured Image: LondonTown.com

Vancouver – Hit or Miss?

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Having spent several days on the West Coast – a little Seattle earthiness, a bit of the gorgeous climate of San Diego, and a touch of L.A. – I had this absolute desire to go to Vancouver. I am not really a Canada freak but I do enjoy it. I quite like Montreal partly because you get to try your French skills out. Quebec is old world charm and the restaurants are not bad. Frankly, it’s also not far from Boston. But Vancouver, I had heard, was a fun, vibrant, and cool city with an incredible ski resort not far away, Whistler. So off I went.

Canada has an incredibly efficient entry and exit customs clearance facility. It is orderly, there are people who direct you with a smile, the machines all work and it is relatively quiet and highly civilized. The journey in from the airport is pretty stunning. We could make out beautiful waterfront glass skyscrapers that faced the mountains on the other side of the bay. The mountains were huge and there was snow on the top. It really was a breathtaking setting. We came in through the charming Granville district and then headed through a bunch of boutique shop fronts before getting to our hotel, the Rosewood Georgia. I was liking this place. The Rosewood was right in the center of the city and I have stayed at Rosewood properties before and I like the chain. The hotel was, as is always the case at Rosewood properties, excellent on service and detail and I felt sure that this was going to be a fun few days.

We had planned to do sightseeing the following day, visit the Granville Island famous for the marketplace, take a little ferry ride around, head over to the Vancouver Convention Center, and maybe even try a seaplane ride. So why did I find myself going to a James Bond movie at 7 o’clock the following day? There was something about Vancouver that was not quite making sense. It was a bit dull and there were not that many people around. There was a phenomenal exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery highlighting the Group of Seven and Canadian painters influenced by them. But after that, it got a bit thin out there. We did not go for the seaplane but we did discover a great seafood restaurant called Coast. They had dover sole!

The next day we went to Whistler and it snowed. The drive up was absolutely spectacular but Whistler was one of those fake villages that had been put up a few years ago and it did not look like there was much of a scene beyond the usual blah blah. The snow did look great, although I was not skiing, but it was fun to be in the thick of skier talk in the gondola. So, the scenery is stunning, the snow levels are higher than comparable ski resorts in Colorado but it still was not convincing.

I felt a bit sheepish about it. Everyone had said that this place was beautiful but I seemed to have missed it. Maybe it was the seaplane I should have taken or maybe it was just a weekend when everyone was away. The city had no edge to it. Maybe I will go back and look for it again next time.

Image credits: Vancouver Sun and HelloBC.com

Teachers: Pioneers of Cultural Bridge Building

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Recently at the ACTFL conference in San Diego we listened to Rick Steves talk about the power of travel. It was a compelling conversation that got me thinking a lot about language and the pioneers of cultural bridge building that we call teachers. I am not sure we focus enough on the power of teaching languages in schools, the impact of immersing the student in a culture and giving them a set of tools so that they can communicate in that culture. How encouraging it is to see how students’ lives and career decisions can change as a result of a teachers guidance, enthusiasm, and care.

I remember my French teacher to this day and I wasn’t a great student. He taught me the power to take chances, to take risks in communicating, and he told me never to feel foolish. Mistakes are part of the fun in coming to grips with the language. I have made many mistakes – some funny and some with dire shopping consequences! But it never stopped me from going for it!

We had a reception that evening in San Diego and I said that for me it all started with a verb conjugation. It was sort of like getting your passport. It opened up the world and then I got to connect all of those things that I had memorized (and I had to memorize a lot) into real life situations – being there, practicing, making mistakes, and understanding that it was fun. Here’s the thing, language cannot be taught effectively in a vacuum. Yes you may get a 10/10 on the test, but if you have not experienced the interactions, smelled the scents of a marketplace, taken the risk of talking to a vendor, or asked directions, then what purpose is the language for. In this day and age especially.

So I say, imagine a world where we all get a 10/10 for our Spanish, French, German, and Italian, but we never actually speak to a Spanish, French, German, or Italian person. We had never connected nor ever experienced the culture. It all started and basically ended with a verb. Not good. Travel is essential to connect the dots and connect the culture. Sometimes to go bravely where “no man” has been before a la Captain Kirk. What fun it is to hack at a language, make a complete fool of oneself, and yet somehow, the miracle of miracles, through a combination of sign language and mimicry, we get there. 1/10 on the language test but 10/10 for the connection that you make.

Update on Cuba

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We have a lot of surge in Cuba for business for 2016 and 2017. Everyone got hot on Cuba at the same time. Now, Cuba is turning into a high-demand, little supply destination. Hotel rooms are sold out months in advance. With talk of more restrictions being phased out, the 36% increase in American tourists will grow and grow.

But where to?

Here’s a brief update on Cuba:

Over 2 million people traveled to Cuba in the first part of this year alone. There are about 61,000 hotel rooms in Cuba and many are booked 18 months in advance. Americans still have to travel under a People-to-People status so it is difficult to sneak in and sneak out for a quick weekend in Havana. Bottom line is that tour operators are starting to turn people to other destinations which is a drag but understandable given the lack of infrastructure and available bednights. With places like the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica waiting in the wings, Cuba has better get its act together or there will be plenty of hotel beds and not much demand.

Hotel Innovation – Their Loss or Ours?

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It is fascinating to think about missing the boat. Blackberry missed the boat and they have been waiting at the port ever since. Myspace missed the boat. Digital cameras, except for the professionals, have all but disappeared. Embedded GPS systems in cars are useless. Not only do you save $1,800 for the GPS and add-ons that you might not want, but on your smart phone you have the best GPS system in the world.

So when I was staying at a hotel the other day, I was thinking of how hotels have also missed the boat in terms of ‘hotel innovation.’ Instead of adapting fast, they still hold on to all of those things we do not need. The telephone in the room, the clumsy alarm clock that nobody can ever work, room service that sucks, and is not available when you want it, dry cleaning and washing facilities that are so horribly expensive that you start to wear your underpants inside out every other day, and who pays for movies on tv? Nobody unless you are a loser. What about the gym? One treadmill, a tired looking universal weight system, and a mat that has not been replaced for four years does not compete with the state of the art gym I can grab using my phone to locate. Incidentally, I do not have to ask somebody to call a cab, I already Ubered it and it’s waiting outside for me. Fact is, armed with my iPhone and my Netflix account, I can get everything that I want.

Why don’t hotels get into our groove and stop trying to provide us with things that we do not want or need and rather sink into what we’re doing and access information? Incidentally, if I have to walk by another discarded plate of somebody’s breakfast, lunch or dinner in the corridor, I’m going to lose my mind. What do hotels need to do? Provide great beds, decent lighting, a great shower, charging facilities, a hotel app so that I can easily access things that are close by, and provide products that you can see and use. The rest I will take care of myself.

Image courtesy of boardingarea.com

World Travel Market

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Held every year in London’s east metropolis full of new buildings that dot themselves around the river, the World Travel Market is like a huge bazaar, a maze-like walk across the world. I love the fact that you get to start your day in London Town and end your day in the far reaches of Bhutan. In between, you have every single country in the world – even Saudi Arabia that does not want you to come! They are all here.

More than 20,000 people visit the World Travel Market. There are seminars and exhibitions, but for me, the biggest thrill of all is to walk across the world and listen to thousands of languages being spoken from stand to stand. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today although 2,000 have less than 1,000 speakers. However, at the World Travel Market everybody seemed well equipped with English. It was absolutely brilliant to walk through Italy, then Greece, to Turkey, and then France, and onto the Arab countries. Entrance into the World Travel Market for trade is free which means that you can travel around the world for nothing. As it turns out, the good old London Underground was on strike and so Emirates airlines was transporting everybody across the eastern London sky in their Emirates cable cars.

Bad News Returning to Israel

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The news was bad. The rains had washed away the border crossing and so there was no way back to Israel at the southern crossing. Instead, we had to drive north to the Allenby Bridge crossing and we had to leave our hotel at 3 am. It was sort of exciting because that particular crossing required a visa from Israel because it originated in the West Bank and there had been some issues at the crossing before.

We stopped along the Dead Sea on the Jordanian side at an awful café where I had a falafel and a coffee and was convinced I would have dysentery within the hour. I laced my coffee with a Pepto-Bismol to ensure I made it. I popped into the bathroom but simply could not stay. It was dreadful and I felt myself longing for the souvenir shops with the toilets the day before. Jordan was no Israel and I realized we had to get to the border crossing. It was our only hope!

We organized a VIP status at the crossing and that expedited most things. Again, it was as if we were in a spy movie – passports were exchanged, we said goodbye to our Jordanian guides, jumped into a neutral vehicle, crossed over, and our Israeli taxi driver was waiting for us. We drove across the King Hussein Bridge and there was a primitive bunch of roadblocks with nails to stop anybody from hurling themselves into Israel. The actual drive across the Jordan River seemed to last forever. We spilled into Jericho and then drove past the settlements, through the West Bank, and into Jerusalem for a late stroll and another plate of hummus.

I was beginning to like hummus with a cappuccino. Am I really saying that? We were back in Israel and the toilets sure looked good to me.

Petra

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It was cloudy when we left Aqaba but all of the forecasts predicted that rain would cease around midday when we were set to arrive in the ancient city of Petra. Situated in the Wadi Musa, Petra was established by the Nabateans around 400 years before Christ. In its heyday, it was home to 30,000 people.

What happened here?

The Romans came and colonized and built their amphitheaters, baths, and shopping colonnades and then the earthquake took care of the rest. It was a well-kept secret for over 1,000 years until a Swiss explorer rode into the city disguised as a holy man. The game was up and it was on the tourist map. But this is no ordinary place. Cut into the sandstone and chiseled into huge blocks of pink and red cliff, this place has everything….except decent places to grab a bite to eat and a cup of tea!

Standing by the main palace entrance, walking into the tombs, or wandering down the narrow, towering vertical walls are some of those extraordinary moments in travel when you pinch yourself. Running through the Siq is one of the great walks of travel. It is a walk of anticipation that was made into a sacred way by the Nabateans who had their eye for a dramatic moment or two clearly.

You don’t know whether to put your camera down or just keep hitting the shutter. Then you spill out onto the masterpiece called the Treasury. It is like a movie set. It is a movie set and the tour has not really begun. We spent the best part of six hours there.

The houses carved into the cliffs go on and on. You can get lost as you wander down that valley. Imagine that this place was practically shut down for 1,500 years? No water (the aqueducts were broken) and no civilization. Just a few Bedouin’s holding one of the great secrets of time. Somehow most of it hung in there. If you have never dreamed of going to Petra, go! We came in on a horse and we left on a camel. Incidentally, it was only an hour ride on the camel but it felt like a month. I had so much more respect for Peter O’Toole than ever before!

Back to Aqaba for an evening dinner and an early departure.

Wadi Rum

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The morning was glorious although there was talk of rain coming in the afternoon. We drove out to an unspectacular roadside café where everybody was smoking cigarettes. Here we were supposed to switch into a four-wheel drive vehicle and begin an adventure into the Wadi Rum. As it turned out, the four-wheel drive was an old, banged up Toyota Land Cruiser. With the driver and the guide in the front, we were jammed in the back desperate to keep the windows open because of the smoking. We were on the highway for no more than a few miles when he turned off and suddenly we were in a world that I could not believe.

The landscape here is known as the valley of the moon; a valley cut from sandstone and granite rock. It is like nothing that you have ever seen. This was a cinematographers paradise. Lawrence of Arabia had called it, “Vast, echoing, and Godlike.” This was his domain, his patch, and it was easy to imagine this sprawling landscape of fine sand and incredible rock formations populated by Bedouin tribes and camels. If we had thought that we were in the desert in the West Bank or in the Negev, then this was the desert that I had imagined. The strange thing was that there were no tourists, no other four-wheel drive trucks, just us alone in this vast landscape. It was breathtaking. We climbed the rocks, we saw an oasis, and eventually we came to a lunch spot. That’s when the sandstorm hit.

The blue sky had started to disappear, the wind picked up, then it whipped up the sand, and like a tsunami, it caused us all too run like crazy back to the jeep. We had to wait to get out of there. It made the fog on a bad day in London seem like a clear New England day. I got to appreciate the keffiyeh since my Boston baseball hat was not doing the trick.

The Wadi Araba Border Crossing

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It was a bit like one of those spy movies. You arrive in the car, there’s no one there, the driver waits and has a cigarette, we hang around, and then out of nowhere, a van appears and another guy comes out. A conversation takes place, passports are exchanged, and we are all walked to the border. This was the Wadi Araba border crossing. Our helper guide was an English guy who lived in Eilat. He clearly did this all of the time, mainly for day trippers from Eilat, but we were going deeper; three nights at Aqaba, Jordan’s Red Sea resort. The crossing did not take long. We woke up a few border guards, walked our bags across a dead zone, and men in black and white camouflage fatigues welcomed us on behalf of the Jordanian Army. Pictures of the Jordanian royal family were everywhere and on the other end a transit van, driver, and guide picked us up and drove us to the Kempinski Hotel.

The Red Sea. There it was in between the lights of Eilat and the distant lights of the Sinai in Egypt. We were in Jordan’s 22 kilometers of access to the open sea. Welcome to Aqaba.

A Night on the Town, Aqaba vs Eilat

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If Eilat is a sprawling, disco inferno, dance until dawn, restaurant-infused, party machine, then Aqaba is not. There is a bazaar, a few terrible restaurants, a pub called the Rover’s Return named after the pub on Britain’s long running soap opera, Coronation Street, for some reason, and a scattering of Chinese restaurants. Finding any place that accepted credit cards or served fish was going to be challenging. Of course, alcohol was often in short supply.

So this is the Jordanian Riviera – a sparkling mosque, some run down restaurants, and a couple of hotels that looked out of business. Tomorrow it would be the Wadi Rum and the day after Petra. But this evening, it would be a dodgy Chinese restaurant and a warm beer. How I long for the lights of Eilat.

Heading South into the Negev

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The idea was that we would drive down to Eilat, the hedonistic playground for Israelis searching for even more sun, on the glorious Red Sea. In between, we would stop and take in the spectacular scenery that featured heavily in my guidebook. Of course, what we had not planned for was our driver who was a smart 70 year old man with 5 years of military history and had seen it all. He had that clipped Israeli accent and his English was not brilliant. Worst of all, he liked to drive fast – like 100 mph fast. Getting the guide to stop at a vineyard here or a rock formation there was like bargaining in the bazaar. In the end, I had to pretend that I was car sick to get him to stop at important historical sites. He wanted to speed down to Eilat and dump us at the border crossing. I wanted to stop serendipitously because the scenery was so incredibly spectacular. It would be a difficult day but the reward was that we got to see Avdat and the Makhtesh Ramon.

Today was about the Nabataeans and frankincense and myrrh in Avdat. This was the desert where the incense traders moved their stuff from Yemen to Petra and across to the Mediterranean ports. I have some frankincense in my spice jar at home and everything that sits inside of that spice jar reminds me of the scents of Arab lands like Morocco, Egypt, and all of these magical places I have been to. So trying to imagine being on a camel 1,000 years ago, bringing the riches at that time for onward sale to the Europeans, was an amazing thought. This is the land of David Ben-Gurion’s desert home; Ben-Gurion being the founding father of Israel. It is a land of vineyards on carefully irrigated land. It is a lunar landscape of “grand canyons” that reminded me instantly of the western part of the USA. And I had to negotiate with the driver who clearly had seen it all before.

The Makhtesh Ramon reserve is the largest protected area in Israel. It is vast with multicolored sandstone and volcanic rocks and is 300 meters deep, eight kilometers wide, and 40 kilometers long. The visitor’s center was one of those strange places often encountered in Israel where the service was less than optimal again. The information booth was staffed by pretty uninterested people and the lunch place had arguably the worst service we had encountered so far. No one seemed to care and they just seemed tired of dealing with tourists. The funny thing was that there were not that many of us! No matter, we grabbed more hummus, took some fresh juice, and watched some crazy guys cliff diving.

It was difficult to leave but the driver could not wait to pack us into his fancy Mercedes and get us into the drop-off point by the border. He spoke rarely except to point out the date palms which were prolific, the milk farm trucks which amazed me, and when we said that we were heading to Jordan, he looked back at us and said, “…Why?” He will be back in Tel Aviv in less than two hours. I think that he felt sorry for us.

The Coastal Road

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The funny thing about Israel is that the roads are so darn good; Massachusetts Turnpike should take note. The exit north of Tel Aviv was very smooth and we passed a whole bunch of mega factories and Silicon Valley-type high-tech places on the coastal road, close to very upmarket residential beach areas.

Today we had elected to drive as far north as we could get to check out a town called Akko. In between we would pass the principal port of Israel, Haifa, which had been written up in my Lonely Planet book as a “very picturesque city with spectacular views from the top of Mount Carmel.” The views were pretty nice and there is obviously history in the hills. The Bahai Gardens are world famous and stunning. But, at least on first reflection, it seemed like a good place to move on from. Anyhow, our principal destination was Akko which is very close to the Lebanese border.

Akko is a town that Marco Polo passed through and it was mentioned in sacred Egyptian texts and in Greek mythology. From a history buffs point of view, Akko has it all – Alexander the Great, the Egyptians, the Romans, and the Arabs who conquered Akko in 638 AD until the nasty Crusaders came by and seized the city in 1100 AD. It was the principal port of access contested by Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and Philip II of France.

Today, Akko is a very mixed city – 70% of the residents are Jews and 30% are Arabs – but the population of the old city with its winding souks is about 95% Arab. Akko has a seawall, ramparts you can walk on top of, and a dry moat. We dove into the towering Knights’ Hall built 800 years ago and a tunnel just big enough for one person that leads out into the bazaar. You can also take the Templar Tunnel which is around 350 meters long. Suffice to say, this place is a treasure trove of history and worth a visit, if not an entire day.

We headed down to Caesarea to look at the amphitheater and the aqueduct and walk the sandy beaches. In less than an hour, we would be back in Tel Aviv. Everything in Israel is close by. Every piece of history and every conflict is no more than an hour and a half away. For better or worse, for richer or poorer.

Jaunt in the Desert

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The excursion spiel was that we would ride four-wheel trucks in convoy, in a jaunt in the desert. It frankly sounded like the caravan of gondolas that you see when you walk across the bridges of Venice and look down as 100 tourists are being serenaded by disinterested gondolieri. In other words, I had my gondolieri radar on high alert. We put on our helmets, submitted our driver’s licenses dutifully, piled into a whole bunch of trucks, and off we went. After all, we were in the West Bank and there was nobody around except for us. It was amazing. Not a tour I had thought.

We took pictures and of course there was, out of nowhere, a Bedouin and his son with two camels. That took us on a short journey and back. There were some caves, a lookout point across the hills to Jerusalem and on the other side to Jericho. For some reason, we lost the light and ended up driving back in the darkness, passing a couple of Bedouin villages and feeling a little vulnerable I must confess. A couple of the cars broke down but were easily repaired. At some point, we had to bail out of the desert and get onto the super highway to cut short the trip because we had run out of time and daylight. Imagine a trail of vehicles doing 20 mph on a 70 mph modern highway. It was a funny end to a phenomenal day. We concluded with a campfire and a typical dinner with what looked like roasted lamb but could have been goat and had been cooked in a clay oven. That, and the usual lashings of hummus, and I must say, it was a perfect day.

Pietro Place

Out there somewhere…

Category Archives: Blog

Holidays in London

Vancouver – Hit or Miss?

Teachers: Pioneers of Cultural Bridge Building

Update on Cuba

Hotel Innovation – Their Loss or Ours?

World Travel Market

Bad News Returning to Israel

Petra

Wadi Rum

The Wadi Araba Border Crossing

A Night on the Town, Aqaba vs Eilat

Heading South into the Negev

The Coastal Road

Jaunt in the Desert