Travel Recommendations for The Office

by Andrew Evans on


Back in the olden days, long before the Internet was born, there was this thing called a travel agent–typically semi-self-aware, middle-aged ladies who helped you pick out a nice vacation destination, find a hotel that was “so you” and then book your plane tickets printed on carbon paper, folded and then stuffed into fancy airline covers. The whole process was about inside relationships, consumerist trust and catering to personal tastes. Sadly, travel agents went out of style along with high-top shoes and dual tape decks, or rather, we all became travel agents and the ones who got paid to do it lost their jobs.

As an empowered, self-proclaimed Internet travel agent, I’m offering my services gratis to the folks that need it the most: those overworked, underpaid, Vitamin-D deficient fun bunch of NBC‘s The Office, If they’re like most Americans out there, the employees of Dunder-Mifflin get only 10-15 days of vacation a year and should be using every bit of it (along with a few sick days) to get the hell out of Scranton, PA. Assuming the medicinal and therapeutic properties of travel, and summoning the travel agents’ lost art of matching personality to destination, I offer the following recommendations:

Michael Scott spent Christmas at a Sandals in Jamaica with girlfriend/boss Jan Levinson. So wrong. This was clearly a blatant case of cheesy product placement and failed to take Michael to that place where he belongs, which is on a safari in Tanzania’s Serengeti. Yes, the boss man would be just as happy at some wildlife park in Florida, but for the full range of Michael antics, you’d need him to actually be in Africa, mimicking African accents and getting a royal kick out of all the massive animals. Fast-forward to the zebra carpet on his office floor, Masai shields hanging on his wall and his new moniker “Chief.”Jim Halpert disappeared himself to Australia to avoid Pam’s pending marriage to another man. OK, we get it–Australia is the farthest place from Pennsylvania and he was nursing a broken heart, but in reality, uh, he would have been nursing some hellish jet lag. We love Australia, but it’s not a weekend getaway, or even a one-week getaway. Methinks Jim needs to go to Dublin, Ireland. Not only because he would appreciate Guinness and look handsome in tweed, but that plucky Irish spirit might counter his nervous nature. Also, as one of the better-paid employees in The Office, Jim might actually be able to afford super-expensive Dublin.

Pamela Beesley doesn’t seem that well-traveled, bizarrely. She’s camped in the Poconos and did a brief stint in artsy New York City but this new wife and mother could definitely expand her horizons. Paris for a week of art and luxury should do the trick. We recommend splurging at Hotel Fouquet’s Barrière on the Champs-Elysées (for the spa) and spending her days floating from one art museum to the next. Take your mom or a friend. Let Jim stay home and take care of the baby.

Dwight Schrute already lives in his own little world, nevertheless, he reveals a penchant for large, open spaces. Russia is such a place. Also, Russians love the martial arts and beets. In fact, in Russia there are entire collective farms that grow nothing but beets, so Dobra Pozhalovat Comrade Schrute. No matter that the new Russia is fiercely capitalist and worships pop culture, Dwight will find his own tribe and come back with some sound ideas on organizational behavior.

Phyllis Vance is a classy woman attached to a rich refrigerator-selling husband to pay for all of her audacious tastes. The Moroccan Christmas party she threw in Season 5 reveals a girlish interest in some fabled, exotic Orient, but she also needs dependable electricity and a lot of good restaurants. Hence my verdict of Istanbul. Turkey’s largest city is also one of the greatest eating cities in the world–an explosion of foreign sights and culinary delights. Also, Phyllis loves to wear shawls, of which there are many to choose from among Istanbul’s crazy bazaars. (Bob, you should stay here.)

Ryan Howard needs a double kick in the pants for his affectation and superiority complex. Yeah, he already took time off to “travel” in Thailand but anyone who’s been to Thailand knows that much of the country is just a playground for the sort of entitled backpacker that is Ryan. That’s why we’re sending short, frail, pale Ryan to sunny, sandy Kuwait and not on vacation, but Kuwait as in, “you’re in the army now, kid.” He never makes it into Iraq (imagine Ryan with war stories), but learns to answer every sentence with, “Sir”.

Kelly Kapoor is Indian-American, yes, but those of who’ve actually been to India knows she would absolutely hate it there. Kelly is a serious girl who loves anything pink and struggles with her shopaholic nature. And where is the best shopping in the whole wide world? Buenos Aires, baby, B.A. We recommend Kelly stay at this boutique hotel in Palermo Soho, surrounded by a bunch of unique clothing and jewelry stores. Also, I’m thinking Kelly is liking the Argentine gelato (and men).

Andy Bernard is the ultimate frat boy who just can’t (or won’t) grow out of it. This Ivy League manboy surely has a few pairs of well-ironed Bermuda shorts, folded nicely in his summer clothes box, and he will need them for his trip to Bermuda. In the end, all of his bros will flake on him so he’ll have to go alone, but the pink beaches, sophisticated rum drinks, and yacht culture will suit him just fine.

Angela Martin is a woman who needs to chill out, big time. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of uptight career women who’ve found their bliss in Tuscany, so Angela, Italy it is. Please take all that saved-up leave and get lost on some one-lane highway between Florence and Siena, then get found by your future Italian boyfriend. Please come back with flowing skirts and open collars, wearing your hair down and with a new-found penchant for Chianti. Grazie Mille.

Kevin Malone needs to raise hell in New Orleans, obviously. The man has a funky party side that just can’t break free in boring Scranton. As a musician, he’ll dig the jazz and as a fat man, he’ll dig the beignets, po’ boys, muffaletta, and gumbo. He will likely return bearing gifts of hot sauce for all. Go Kevin.

Meredith Palmer is a difficult client for a travel agent to please. The woman is boozy, so the Scotland whiskey tour (with designated driver) seems appropriate, however, this 6-night Carnival Cruise from Charleston, South Carolina would be perfect–if it includes drinks (Meredith, please wear sunblock). And yet, the redhead in Supplier Relations also loves going topless, so the Côte d’Azur would be just perfect.

Creed Bratton has already spent a lot of time in China and even speaks Chinese. He’s also a total whack job and kind of creepy and a schemer. Hmmm . . really old plus Chinese plus funky and scheming equals Macau. Creed will quickly lose track of the days as he gambles his way to oblivion. Once he makes his shady millions, he can go into hiding in the nearby Philipines and never come back, because really, is Creed even necessary?

Stanley Hudson is a no-nonsense kind of guy with predictable, easy-living tastes. We recommend St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands, where time moves slowly and the fruity drinks are plentiful. Stanley never has to set foot outside his resort, nor will he ever let the Caribbean go past his knees.

Toby Flenderson ran off to his escapist dreamland of Costa Rica but honestly, his skin just isn’t right for it. Really Toby, consider Canada. You’ll never get sunburnt, the people are as nice and respectable as your human-resource mind believes all mankind should be, and it’s so, so safe. I say get your daughter hooked on Anne of Green Gables and then surprise her with a trip to Prince Edward Island.

Oscar Martinez already took a three-month vacation to Europe with his boyfriend Gil in Season 3. Now that he’s single, he should really be more adventurous. You’d think Amsterdam or Sydney’s Mardi Gras but I’m gonna go out on a limb and recommend Tennessee’s Dollywood. What’s better for a gay, Mexican-American accountant than a theme park memorializing an iconic diva, right in the heart of the Smokey Mountains? Dollywood has a huge gay following and yet is so quaint and respectably Appalachian. He’ll love it.

Erin Hannon Somebody in the office doesn’t have a passport and we all know it’s Erin. Coy, naïve, and a little odd, Erin still just doesn’t see the need for a passport. Sending Erin to San Diego, California would be about as far as she could go, plus there are lots of brave Navy guys to show her around. Incidentally, I think she would really love the zoo.

Darryl Philbin represents the blue collar element on the show and yet he’s got way better tastes than most of the office. Urban, hip, and cooler than cool, Daryl would be happiest in Berlin. Germany’s capital-under-construction is the perfect mix of blue collar power, good beats, and good times.

Travel thoughts: Three polished pebbles from Pico Iyer

by Don George on

One of the most life-enriching treats of this spring for me was the opportunity to interview Pico Iyer on stage in Washington, DC, as part of the National Geographic Traveler Conversations series. If you’ve never heard Pico in person, it’s impossible to convey how breathtakingly eloquent he is – and how breakneckingly quickly he enunciates that eloquence. My belief is that he has a superhuman copy editor tirelessly at work in his brain, polishing his thoughts as he conceives them into flawless gems that he strings together into an unending necklace of diamonds.

Interviewing him on stage is challenging – for me, at least – for two reasons: The first is that my mind is always running to catch up to whatever profound thought he’s articulating, so that I’m constantly scrambling to conceive an appropriate follow-up question or remark; the second is that after he has said something particularly brilliant, I want to pick up the Reality Remote Control and press Pause so that I can write down what he’s just said. In our Washington conversation, there were at least half a dozen times when I really wanted to stop and say, “Pico, wait just a minute. I need to write that down.”

Pico’s thoughts are like polished pebbles that he drops into the pools of our minds, sending out infinite rings of ripples. Here are three thought-pebbles that particularly resonated for me in our National Geographic talk:

1. Travel to a foreign place is like flipping a switch; all your senses are suddenly alert.
This is absolutely true for me, and it’s one of the fundamentally addicting elements of travel. As soon as I step outside the familiar, everything suddenly zings and pops and trills; smells smell more pungently, sounds sound more acutely, tastes taste more tartly and sweetly and spicily. The newness of everything awakes and challenges me – I literally see, sense, anew. Partly, I think, this is because I’m trying to comprehend and order everything, and partly it’s because I’m simply celebrating – the newness pushes some deep joy-button that exults in the diversity of the world.This phenomenon is certainly one of the things that keeps me traveling, along with what I think of as its cognate: the limitless anonymity-possibility of travel. When we travel to a foreign place, we step outside our everyday reality, we can become whoever we want to be. These dual possibilities – of self-reinvention and of sensual-renaissance – are both intoxicating.

2. The act of note-taking means I’m paying attention.

I have always found that note-taking focuses me. It’s a two-step process: The first is all about perception. To take good notes, you first need to slow down and really perceive the thing you’re describing: Smell the air, hear the bird call, observe the details of branch and bud in the landscape, taste the café crème and the chocolate croissant. And then you need to find the right words to convey to your reader – and to yourself, when you peer at your scribbles three weeks or three months later – what is around you.

This is why on every trip I try to make time to simply sit in a place – a café, a park, a market, a meadow – for at least an hour and absorb the world around me. I sit and focus on what I’m observing — the waiter setting the cup of coffee with a slight nod just so, the white-shorted schoolboys pushing wooden sailboats in the sculpture fountain pool, the kerchiefed grandmother squeezing tomatoes and smelling cantaloupes under the stall-owner’s stare, the bees buzz-dipping from blossom to blossom – and then write it down.

These notes will later serve as memory-portals back into that moment, that place. At the same time, stopping and simply observing, absorbing, grounds me in the place so that I see, hear, smell, touch, taste more accurately, more acutely. And as I perceive more acutely, note-taking also makes me process more acutely. I ask questions: How can I describe the tint of this cafe latte? Is that a wooden sailboat or a plastic replica? What are those odd green spiky fruits over there and what do they smell like? What are those purple wildflowers called, and how can I capture the blue of the sky arching over them? Trying to note all these things forces me to pay attention. And paying attention, of course, repays me many-fold: in the living of the moment, in the recollection of that moment, in the writing of that recollection, and if I’m lucky, in the reader’s reaction to that writing.

3. Home is less a piece of soil than a piece of soul.

I have lived in five places in five decades: Connecticut, Paris, Athens, Tokyo and San Francisco. But I learned long ago that my address is not my home, the place where I physically reside is not my home, the timber and nails and stucco and glass that comprise my house are not my home. All of the places I have lived and loved are a part of me wherever I go: the woods behind my childhood house and the chicken coop my friends and I thought was a pirate outpost because of the skull and crossbones on the door; the rickety filigreed elevator that used to take me to and from my apartment on the rue de Rivoli and the waiter at the six-table corner restaurant who would bring me bifteck-frites and a glass of vin ordinaire without my asking; the little taverna under the pines on the hill outside Athens where we would eat tomato-cucumber-feta salad and drink retsina while we debated Platonic philosophy, and the red poppies and white fluted columns at Delphi where we picnicked and planned our endless futures; the downtown Ueno park where the cherry blossoms opened in evanescent splendor every spring and the people bloomed like them, sitting on quilts under the boughs, drinking and laughing and singing – all these are a part of me, wherever I am. All these are home.

“Home is less a piece of soil than a piece of soul.” Yes, home is a mosaic of soul-pieces from all the places — and people — we have loved: a mosaic that lives inside us and that transcends us at the same time, for its connections reach beyond us in all directions….

Thinking of these, I realize that like traveling to a foreign place, like note-taking, like a soul-piece of home, talking with Pico graced me with a new, renewed, sense of alertness, focus and connection. Thank you, Pico, for your ring-rippling insights and inspirations!

*****

While I didn’t have the Reality Remote Control handy that night, fortunately a number of people in the audience were capturing Pico’s polished thought-pebbles. If you want to read their accumulated notes, visit National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog.

Want your art in the Guggenheim? Here’s your chance!

by Sean McLachlan on

The Guggenheim and YouTube have teamed up to find the world’s most artistic short videos.

YouTube Play is a contest for Youtube videos that show something truly inventive and different. No fan vids or farting dogs need apply. Two hundred finalists will be judged by a panel of art experts and culled down to 20 to 25 videos that will be shown in a special exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York City. It will be the first of a biennial competition.

This will attract a lot of creative entries, especially by video artists and animators. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the finalists showed the wide world in all its glory? A good travel video such as this one of The Amber Fort in Rajasthan can hold its own against more consciously artistic works. Not only are there some beautiful shots, but the video subtly explores the relationship between heritage and tourism.

So get the cameras rolling and make a video that deserves to be shown in one of the world’s leading modern art museums. But hurry up, submissions close July 31!

Photo courtesy Enrique Cornejo via Wikimedia Commons.

Canterbury’s medieval town gate saved

by Sean McLachlan on

Canterbury is famous for its beautiful cathedral, but this historic city has lots of other attractions. The old medieval entrance into town called Westgate Towers is the local favorite. Sadly, lack of funding and a dwindling number of visitors to the Westgate Towers Museum made it look like it was going to be shut down.

Local businessman Charles Lambie has stepped in and leased the towers. He’s donated £250,000 ($369,000) to the city council to keep it afloat and plans improvements to the museum to make it more attractive to visitors.

If you’re visiting Canterbury you might want to stay overnight rather than do the traditional day trip from London. Besides the cathedral, there’s an early medieval abbey, a Norman castle, the remains of a Roman house, and one of the best curry joints in England.

You won’t want to miss the Westgate Towers either. More than six hundred years old, it’s the largest medieval gateway in the UK and offers a fine view of the town. The museum has displays of weapons and armor and tells the story of the city’s medieval defenses.

Photo courtesy Necrothesp via Wikimedia Commons.

Transgender American travelers no longer require surgery for passport change

by Laurel Miller on

In a landmark move of fair-mindedness, the folks at the U.S. State Department have announced a new passport policy that will make life easier for many transgender travelers.

Starting June 17th, applicants are no longer required to have sexual reassignment surgery in order to receive a gender change on their passport.

According to CNN, an attending physician’s certification will be required to confirm “passport applicants have undergone treatment for gender transition. Limited-validity passports for applicants who are in the process of gender transition will also be available.”

The State Department also noted that the policy change was made to coincide with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Month. Now if only the federal government would resolve that marriage issue…