Paris Airports Help Passengers Groove

by Josh Lew on

A service at Paris area airports will have people dancing in the terminals. Literally.

As a special summer promotion provided by Aeroports de Paris, dance classes will be offered to passengers before they hop, or samba, onto their flight. Call it France‘s version of the reality hit So You Think You Can Dance. Styles include tango, salsa, modern jazz, and mambo. There is even instruction in hip hop and rock and roll.

You are imagining a teacher wearing a leotard and leg-warmers prancing around Charles De Gaulle critiquing each step that students take, aren’t you? It’s not quite like that. Passengers are given a set of headphones on which instructions and music are played. They are pretty much on their own after that. The classes run for about 15 minutes and are only offered during weekend daytime hours.

According to airport authorities, over 4,000 people have used the service since it began at the end of June. No word yet on whether these ground-breakers participated willingly or not.

Are in-terminal dance classes the wave of the future? Or is it simply a ploy to get people talking about something besides how high oil prices are making air travel so damned expensive?

Source

Daily deal – up to 40% off the SeV summer collection

by Scott Carmichael on

My daily deal today is for the “Scottevest summer sale”. If you have never heard of Scottevest (SeV), let me give you a brief introduction to what they make.

SeV has created a lineup of clothes specifically targeted towards people who tend to carry (too many) gadgets and other items. Most of their products have extra pockets (as many as 25 of them), and some products even include what SeV refer to as a PAN – Personal Area Network.

The PAN is essentially a way to route your headphone cables inside your garment, without having those stupid wires get in the way when you run down the concourse trying to make your connecting flight. In every possible way they are the perfect garments for traveling in.

Every single one of their products goes way beyond just making you look cool. Take for example their “Ultimate Cargo Pants”, which are on sale for just $60. These pants look pretty regular on the outside, but hidden away are 14 pockets, including a key holder, battery holders and even an “airplane pocket”, which is located mid-shin and lets you access your gear when you are crammed between 2 people back in row 87.

The pants are Teflon coated, so when your seatmate spills his or her drink all over you, it should be a pretty easy cleanup job. Also if things get too hot, you can unzip the pants legs and turn them into ultimate cargo shorts.

Since summer is slowly coming to an end, SeV is offering a great 40% discount on some of their top selling products:

To get the discount, you’ll have to enter a “secret” coupon code at checkout. The coupon code is SUMMERSALE. All products ship for just $5 each. The coupon code is valid until Monday August 4th, or until they run out of stock of the sale items. To learn more about the other products SeV makes, be sure to check out their site.

Men are not allowed to walk dogs (or cats) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia due to newly passed law

by Jamie Rhein on

The reason why men aren’t allowed to walk dogs or take cats out on a stroll in Riyadh as of Wednesday is because they aren’t allowed to buy pets there any more. A hamster, maybe. A goldfish, probably, but not a dog or a cat. If a person has a pet already, the person can keep the pet, just not take it outside. As of Wednesday, the ban went into effect.

According to this AP article, some men, it seems, were using their furry friends as a way to get up close and personal with women and bother families–a big no no in Saudi Arabia. The sexes are to be separate from each other. Dogs and cats are ice breakers for bridging the divide.

As bans go, this one sounds a bit loosey goosey since as of the writing of the article, people didn’t know about the ban, including a pet shop owner. The other detail the article pointed out is that it’s not often that people walk dogs in Riyadh anyway and when do people really walk cats?

From what the people who were interviewed said, it doesn’t sound as if people are planning to follow the ban, just like what happened when there was a ban on cell phones with cameras back in 2004. The fear there was that people of the opposite sex would use the cameras to take pictures of each other. People didn’t go along with that ban so it was dropped.

If you are planning on heading to Saudi Arabia, I’d leave the pooch or kitty at home unless you don’t mind them having a stay under the care of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the name for the religious police who are doing the pet confiscating.

One thought about this ban is that it’s really to control pet ownership which is seen as a Western influence. Dog ownership has not been part of Saudi culture until more recently. Cats, though, have, so it is unclear why they are being picked on.

Dispatches from around the world


This weekend in Berlin, beer rules

by Jeffrey White on

O.K., this post will only be helpful to those currently tooling around Germany, or elsewhere in the vicinity (so, France, Denmark, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria) who might be looking for something to do this weekend.

If you’re thinking about checking out Berlin, this is a great weekend to do so. The 12th annual International Berlin Beer Festival starts today at noon, Central European Time, and runs right through Sunday.

Germans know how to do festivals in general. If you’re a beer fan, the IBBF is a much more authentic beer party than the larger, and infinitely more kitschy and touristy, Oktoberfest in Munich, which will kick off later next month. At the IBBF, Berliners are in much greater abundance than tourists, so you get the feeling that you’re sitting at one really long, full beer garden with the local and out-of-town Germans on any typical summer day.

Organizers of the festival claim it is the world’s longest beer garden: It stretches 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles) down Berlin’s imposing Karl-Marx-Allee, from Frankfurter Tor to Strausberger Platz. This year, 260 breweries from 86 countries will be present, offering 1,800 different beers. Turnout is expected to hit 800,000.

While the festival always draws a lot of international beers, its main focus is usually on German beers.

Not so this year. For the first time, the festival is throwing its spotlight on a foreign beer producer: The Czech Republic. Thirty-two Czech brewers will be here, and many of them small breweries that are not always easy to find even in the Czech Republic.

So, make sure to check the festival out, especially if by luck you’re just now passing through Berlin.

Hours are:

  • Friday: Noon – Midnight
  • Saturday: 10 a.m – Midnight
  • Sunday: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

All times local.

Hacker installs video camera in checked luggage

by Grant Martin on

Ever wonder what happens to your luggage after you give it to the ticket agent and it gets swallowed by the conveyor belt system? Or why you always seem to have that note from the TSA after you get your bag back saying that they dug through your bag and helped themselves to your gummy worms?

Computer programmer Algormor was curious about why his bag kept getting molested by the TSA every time he traveled, so he finally got fed up and installed a camera inside of it. Leaving the film rolling, he checked his bag on a few trips and recorded what happened in the airport innards. His talk on the whole setup and execution was featured at The Last Hope conference earlier this year, but until a few days ago he hadn’t posted the video.

For all of your conspiracy theorists, what he found unfortunately won’t floor you. His videos show a lot of time on conveyor belts, the camera vibrating all around and the general boringness that many would expect from a luggage system. No fiddling, rifling through or malice from the TSA.

Perhaps the most interesting (least uninteresting) parts seem to be on the leg between Indianapolis and Chicago where you see a TSA fella pick up the bag, flip it over and go back to text messaging. On next trip around on the conveyor belt he’s taking a break.

Big deal. But for those curious about baggage handling systems, a fun little tour. Check out the videos at algormor.org.