Where was Justin Bieber in February?

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Twitter is good for lots of things, among these: encouraging solidarity in the name of toppling governments, publicizing breaking news, finding people with similar obsessions, and tracking the travel predilections of celebrities.

And there are few bigger celebrities at the moment than Canadian singer Justin Bieber. Mr. Bieber, 17 years old as of yesterday, has become an enormous star thanks to marketing brilliance, his actual talent as a performer, and a fair bit of good luck.

So what did the world’s most famous teenager get up to over the course of the month? A huge share of Bieber’s tweets in February were focused on promoting his 3-D feature documentary Never Say Never, which hit theaters on February 11.

And where was Justin Bieber in February? He spent time in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris, though what’s really striking is how few of Bieber’s tweets are about geographic location. Instead, they revolve around sites divorced from geographic specificity: television studios, movie multiplexes, and basketball games.

Below are the most travel-oriented of his tweets for each individual day over the past month. On those days when Bieber didn’t post a location-oriented tweet (see February 7, 20, 22, 25, 27, and 28) I went for whatever came closest.

A hour reviewing a month of tweets from Justin Bieber is instructive. The kid has his eyes on the prize. The spoils of success never materialized. There was no detailing of hotel suites. He attended premieres and award shows, watched the Super Bowl, and retweeted his followers like no one’s business. And he relied on multiple exclamation points along the way.

Mr. Bieber is constantly working. At some point, he should really take a vacation. And tweet about it.

Without further ado, Justin Bieber’s February travel (or travelish) tweets:February 28. im never gonna change…i will always remember…i will always be that kid from stratford…I will always be grateful.

February 27. shoutout to all of Latin America…i got love for all my Latin Girls

February 26. just got some new gear for the #MYWORLDTOUR – we coming to EUROPE next week…after MY BIRTHDAY!!!!

February 25. zero gravity + my stomach = not so good . lol

February 24. heading to zero gravity! #adventure

February 23. Just had a great time with the ladies at The Talk…they surprised me good. Met a hero of mine…

February 22. Rockin out the new #ThatShouldBeMe Video with @RascalFlatts !! EPIC!! #NsNremixes http://yfrog.com/h796zmkj

February 21. great night courtside at the All Star game… @kingjames with the triple double and my guy KOBE with the MVP!! #greatbasketball

February 20. Dream BIG and #NeverSayNever

February 19. we flew 13 hours to make the #allstargame but the French Premiere of #NSN3D was crazy…je t’aime – http://youtu.be/0D6GADVArfI

February 18. Just landed from a 13 hour flight. Rocked #NSNremixes on the plane. @chrisbrown our song is crazy!!

February 17. PARIS Premiere of #NSN3D was INSANE!! vid coming soon!! je t’aime

February 16. In route to the London Premiere! #NeverSayNever3D in the UK! Leggo!!

February 15. Headed to the BRITS!

February 14. 2nite was a great night. I got to perform at the grammys with my mentor @usherraymondiv and I feel like we did u guys proud

February 13. gonna head out and surprise some more theatres for #NSN3D – u support us so it only makes sense we support u. #thatslove

February 12. see! the crew with me to surprise theatres….we are grateful and excited. hope u are enjoying the movie – #NSN3D http://twitpic.com/3yt8er

February 11. Just surprised another theatre.. Midnight showing! That was awesome! #NeverSayNever3D is out Now!!

February 10. grammy rehearsals with @usherraymondiv – we are gettin it in

February 9. Just surprised the entire audience at @theellenshow – everyone is coming to the Premiere!!! Leggo!!

February 8. LA PREMIERE DAY!! #NEVERSAYNEVER3D !!!

February 7. 1 more quarter. game is getting serious. #superbowl #greenandyellow #blackandyellow – who do u got?

February 6. Thanks to everyone at SNL for having me. Had a blast. #5Days

February 5. in NYC causing a ruckus with @itsryanbutler and @chazsom3rs

February 4. IN THE BUILDING at @MTV !! GET READY FOR @thesevenmtv LIVE!! LEGGO!! #7DAYS

February 3. about to head over to @106andPark and show love. #8Days #Feb11th

February 2. now getting ready for NYC Premiere for #NEVERSAYNEVER3D ….my guy LA REID told me he is bringing a special guest.

February 1. And the secret Toronto Premiere for #NeverSayNever3D is at…. Dundas Square AMC!! Leggo #Canada !!! #ProudCanadian

[Image: Flickr | Snow DQ]

Travel then and now: Travel to the USSR and GDR

by Meg Nesterov on

This year is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union and 21 years since the reunification of Germany. While citizens of the USSR and GDR were unable to travel abroad and restricted in domestic travel, foreign travelers were permitted under a controlled environment. In the early nineties, if you were a foreigner looking to go abroad to the Eastern Europe or Central Asia, you called your travel agent and hoped to get approved for a visa and an escorted tour. After your trip, you’d brag about the passport stamps and complain about the food. Here’s a look back at travel as it was for foreigners twenty years ago and today visiting the biggies of the former Eastern Bloc: the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Soviet Union/USSR (now: independent states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldovia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.)

Travel then: Before 1992, most tourists were only able to enter the Soviet Union with visas and travel itineraries provided by the state travel agency, Intourist. Intourist was founded by Joseph Stalin and also managed many of the USSR’s accommodations. Like North Korea today, visitors’ experiences were tightly controlled, peppered with propaganda, and anything but independent, with some travelers’ conversations and actions recorded and reported. Read this fascinating trip report from a Fodor’s community member who visited Russia in 1984 and a Chicago Tribune story with an Intourist guide after the glasnost policy was introduced.Travel now: UK travel agency Thomas Cook bought a majority stake in Intourist last year, gaining control of their tourist agencies, and many of the old Intourist hotels can still be booked, though standards may not be a huge improvement over the Soviet era. In general, the former Soviet Union now welcomes foreign and independant visitors with open arms. Even Stalinist Turkmenistan is softer on foreigners since the death of dictator Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006. Russia now receives as many visitors as the United Kingdom, the Baltic and Eastern European states are growing in popularity for nightlife and culture, and Central Asian states have a lot to offer adventurous travelers (including Azerbaijan’s contender for New 7 Wonders, the Mud Volcanoes). This year, Estonia’s Tallinn is one of the European Capitals of Culture. While a few FSU countries are now EU members, several still require advance visas, letters of invitation, or even guides; check the latest rules for Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan before you make plans.

German Democratic Republic/East Germany/DDR (now: unified state of Germany)

Travel then: After 40 years apart, East and West Germany were reunited in 1990. Like the USSR, travelers to the GDR had to deal with visas and an official state travel agency, the Reisebüro. Western tourists in West Germany could apply for day visas to “tour” the Eastern side but were very limited in gifts they could bring or aid they could provide (tipping was considered bourgeois and thus officially discouraged). Read this Spiegel article about the East German adventure travelers who snuck into the USSR to see how travel to inaccessable is often the most exciting, no matter where you are coming from.

Travel now: November 2009 marked the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Berlin is now consistently lauded as one of the world’s hippest and most vibrant cities. The city is full of museums, monuments, and memorials to document the time East Germany was walled off from the rest of the world, from the sobering Berlin Wall Memorial to the tongue-in-cheek DDR Hotel. Outside of Berlin, Leipzig’s Stasi Museum documents the gadgets and horrors of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police. For more on life in the GDR, Michael Mirolla’s novel Berlin deals with cross-border Germany travel and the fall of the republic, and film Goodbye Lenin! is a bittersweet look at life just before and after the fall of the wall.

Gadling readers: have you traveled to the USSR or GDR? Have you been recently? Leave us your comments and experiences below.

[Photo credit: USSR flags and GDR ferry postcards from Flickr user sludgeulper, Berlin Wall by Meg Nesterov]

Remembering Europe before the Euro

by Jeremy Kressmann on

American travelers often complain about the current money situation in Europe. With the Dollar/Euro exchange rate sitting around $1.40/1, along with inconvenient credit card PIN requirements, making a purchase in many European countries is downright inconvenient. But there was a time it was far more complicated – namely any date before 2002, when Europe’s common currency, the Euro, was first introduced.

My first taste of European travel came in the waning years of Deutsche Marks, Guilders and Pesetas. Every time you moved to a new country, you had to exchange your money for a new currency. For a young backpacker like me experiencing several countries for the first time, it was a confusing and expensive proposition, particularly when you were in transit among several of them at once. Traveling from The Netherlands via Belgium to France? Best not try to buy something in Brussels: that would require you to exchange money. And forget about keeping the notes, coins and exchange rates straight – each brightly colored pink note and strangely bearded head of state was a new lesson in geography, history and politics and quickly calculated math.

Europe has grown up since then. Today, I can use the same money for a pizza in Rome as I do to buy a sweater in Dublin. But despite the simplicity of the Euro, I still find myself pining for those days before the single currency began its monetary dominance. Maybe it’s no more than the naivete of youth – a simpler time in my life when those first exotic breaths of foreign culture and the feel of strange currencies in my palm suggested all the possibilities of travel and adventure.

Is travel easier in Europe now? Yes, absolutely. But with that ease of use, a distinct piece of national identity also disappeared along with it. Our globalized world marches on.

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[Photo by Flickr user viZZZual.com]

Schengen and the disappearance of European passport stamps

by Alex Robertson Textor on


Creative new use for border crossing posts at German/Austrian border.

In the late 1980s, an American spending a summer traveling across Europe with a Eurailpass would see his or her passport stamped possibly dozens of times. With a few exceptions, every time a border was crossed, an immigration agent would pop his or her head into a train compartment, look at everyone’s passports, in most cases stamp them, and move on. Every Eastern Bloc country required visas, some of which could be obtained at the border and others of which had to be applied for in advance.

Today, an American can enter the Schengen zone in Helsinki, fly to Oslo and then on to Amsterdam, proceed by train through Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, then by bus to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and then by ferry back to Helsinki before catching a flight to Athens and landing in Greece without once needing to submit a passport to a border guard’s scrutiny.

The development of the Schengen agreement across Europe has altered the geopolitical map of the continent in many ways. For tourists, the development of the Schengen zone has simplified travel by drastically reducing the number of times a passport can be checked and stamped as national borders are crossed.

The Schengen Agreement is named after the town of Schengen in Luxembourg. It was here in 1985 that five countries-Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France-signed an agreement to essentially create borderless travel between them. A model for this agreement had been created years before by the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), which eliminated border controls back in 1948. The Nordic countries also did away with internal border posts, in 1958.

In 1995, the five original Schengen countries plus Portugal and Spain inaugurated the zone. In 1997, Austria and Italy joined. Greece followed in 2000 and the five Nordic countries joined in 2001. In late 2007, nine more countries joined the Schengen zone; most recently, Switzerland signed up in 2008.


Abandoned border crossing between Slovakia and Hungary.

Today, 22 European countries are part of Schengen. Every European Union country (save the UK, Ireland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Cyprus) belongs. Other members include EU holdouts Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. The European microstates present a few complications. Monaco’s borders are administered by France, which makes the tiny principality a part of Schengen, while Liechtenstein’s accession, approved by the European Parliament in February, is pending. San Marino and the Vatican are de facto versus official members, while mountainous, landlocked Andorra remains outside of the zone altogether.

There are five EU countries not currently part of the Schengen zone. The UK and Ireland (as well as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands) operate a Schengen-like agreement called the Common Travel Area. Neither country is obligated to join the zone.

Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus, however, are all bound by treaty to eventually join. Romania has fulfilled all the criteria for joining Schengen and Bulgaria is close to fulfillment as well. These two countries will accede together, likely later this year. Cyprus presents a more complicated situation given the division of the island between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and the largely unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north.

With the coming accession of the Western Balkans to the European Union, the Schengen zone will almost definitely continue to grow. Might it one day cover the entire landmass of Europe? Check back in two decades.

[Images: top image Flickr | Mike Knell; middle image Flickr | jczart]

The aerogramme and the email

by Don George on

Once upon a time, the cheapest, most convenient way for travelers abroad to write to friends and family back home was the aerogramme. This ingenious creation was a razor-thin, super-light, roughly 6-x-11-inch sheet of blue-colored paper that was designed to be folded into thirds, creating six postcard-size panels (both sides of the paper were used).

One of these panels was pre-stamped and printed with dotted lines for the recipient’s address; four of the panels were blank, to be used for writing your message; and in the Greek aerogramme that lies before me now, the other panel features a photo of whitewashed buildings rising up a rocky brown hill against a deep blue sky.

Adjoining the stamp-and-address panel were two gummed flaps; when you finished your message, you licked and folded these flaps to seal the note. Then all you had to do was drop the aerogramme into a mailbox. No weighing, no paying, no standing in line. This was the height of epistolary convenience when I lived in France, Greece, and Japan in the 1970s.

The challenge, of course, was how much information you could squeeze into those four blank panels – how precisely and minutely could you write and still be legible? On that Greek ‘gramme to my parents, I managed 60 lines of about 11 words each, enough to cover the highlights of a spring swing through Egypt (riding Arabian stallions four hours into the desert, climbing the Great Pyramid, touring the temples and tombs of Luxor), a quick outline of plans for my just-starting summer trip (staying with friends in Nairobi and exploring Kenya on day-trips, climbing Kilimanjaro and going on safari in Tanzania with the family of two of my Greek students, then returning to the States via Santorini and Paris), plus the obligatory update on my financial situation.

Writing home is a whole lot easier in 2011. The digital equivalent of the aerogramme isn’t confined to six panels, and doesn’t take weeks to reach its intended recipient. You can write as much as you like, and send it to as many people as you like, and it arrives instantaneously! And still no weighing, paying, or waiting in line (unless you count the occasional wait for an open terminal at an Internet cafe). Though the Internet hasn’t reached every crack and crevice of the planet, I think it’s safe to say that there are vastly more digital post offices now than there were stone-and-stucco ones back in the day. And what about that evocative photo of those whitewashed hillside homes? Now you can attach your own.

Luckily, my parents kept big rubber-banded bundles of my aerogrammes so that I can peruse them now, but with emails, you don’t have to rely on anyone; you can store them yourself. And instead of having to paw through bundles of letters when you’re looking for a specific passage 35 years later, you can effortlessly search your archives to locate that stallion’s-eye view of sunset in the Sahara. So convenient!

Is there any downside to this technological evolution? Well, maybe just this one. There’s a kind of palpable poignancy to that Greek aerogramme. I hold it in my hands, trace the rough letters and creases in the page, smell its musty perfume – and it’s a pale blue magic carpet that whisks me back to the moment in the Athens airport when I sat at a small table, with a demitasse of Greek coffee, scribbling. I taste the thick, bitter coffee, the sludgy residue on my lips, feel the dry dusty heat, the anticipation in my fingertips….

Will my emails transport me that same way when I read them three and a half decades from today?