Get ready for the next A&K online sale

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Get ready for another hot online sale from upscale travel provider Abercrombie & Kent. The rules haven’t changed: you still have to book online, and the discount structure’s the same. Starting at 10 AM (EST) on December 10, 2009, nine itineraries will go on sale at a 5 percent discount. Then, every half hour, the price will drop another 5 percent. By the end of the event at 4 PM, the trips will hit the maximum discount of 60 percent. That’s a hell of a bargain … if there are any trips left by then. Inventory is limited, so sitting on your mouse means rolling the dice. It’s just like the deal run back in February.

This time around, the itineraries being offered are: Eastern Europe, East Africa, Chile, Galapagos, Egypt, Peru, Botswana/Zambia, Jordan and Turkey.

Pompeii now on Google Street View

by Sean McLachlan on

The ancient Roman city of Pompeii is the latest addition to Google Street View.

Available from Google’s UNESCO World Heritage list of street views, it’s the latest addition to a selection of famous sites that includes Stonehenge, Prague’s historic center, and the Roman/Medieval Spanish town of Segovia.

Pompeii was a Roman provincial town near the Gulf of Naples in Italy. It was buried by a massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Thick layers of volcanic ash kept the town in a remarkable state of preservation. Visitors (and now web surfers) can admire buildings, statues, wall paintings, graffiti, even furniture. The most eerie bits are the plaster casts of the eruption’s many victims. Their bodies rotted away and left holes in the hardened ash. Modern archaeologists filled these with plaster to create ghostly images of men, women, and children perishing from suffocation.

Pompeii and its neighboring town of Herculaneum give an unparalleled look into the daily life of the Roman Empire. The Italian government hopes that having Pompeii on the web it will encourage more visitors. While a walk through its virtual streets is a fun way to kill time at work, it’s nothing compared with doing it for real.

Sale on German train tickets starts Dec. 7

by Alison Brick on

Starting on Monday, December 7, German Railway train tickets will go on sale — and it’s quite the guter Kauf (bargain). They’re only 66 Euros for two one-way tickets, on local or regional trains anywhere in Germany and Austria.

The tickets will be sold at the German discount supermarket Lidl. The tickets must be for travel on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, between January 4 and March 31, 2010. Children under 14 years-old can travel free.

A standard one-way train from Berlin to Munich costs 113 Euros, and Cologne to Vienna is 146 Euros, so this is a sale with big savings.

[Thanks, GoGermany.about.com]

The world’s most haute-culture spork

by Grant Martin on

Sporks get a lot of bad press in today’s pop culture — probably because of their association with primary school cafeterias and army mess halls. So tacky have they become, in fact, that they may have come full circle around to being posh.

This gem of a spork can be found in Paris at Spoon, a gastronomic adventure created by the famous French chef Alain Ducasse. With the homemade mousse with chocolate flakes, to be exact. And somehow, it actually makes the mousse taste better.

Give Spoon a try if you’re near Champs-Elysees and don’t want schlocky tourist fare. Its at 12, rue Marignan near the Roosevelt stop on the Metro — and yes, the food is fantastic.

English town displays lamest Christmas tree ever

by Aaron Hotfelder on

“People think you can just go into the woods, chop down a tree and put it up in the high street,” says Richard Randall-Jones, a town manager for Poole in southern England. “But if it blows over and kills someone then somebody is liable.”

So instead of taking the infinitesimally small chance that the tree would put a Poole resident out of commission, the town decided to erect the world’s lamest Christmas tree. According to the Times Online, the tree has “no trunk so it won’t blow over, no branches to break off and land on someone’s head, no pine needles to poke a passer-by in the eye, no decorations for drunken teenagers to steal and no angel, presumably because it would need a dangerously long ladder to place it at the top.”

The result, as you can see from the picture above, is a giant, hideous, AstroTurf-covered traffic cone.

The tree, which cost the city about 14,000 pounds, is not exactly putting shoppers in the Christmas mood. “It’s horrible,” says 54-year-old Karen Byron. “If you are going to have a fake tree then it ought to resemble a tree. You can get some really good fake trees but this is awful. It doesn’t feel Christmassy at all.”

Another resident, Bill Scott, called the tree “a total disgrace.” “I’m an army man,” he said, “and it would be wrong for me to express my real feelings in language other people might hear.”

More here.