The Sounds of Travel 7: So Flute

by Anna Brones on

Here at Gadling we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs.

Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the Comments and we’ll post it at the end of the series.

France. This is a country known for its music. The stereotypical accordion tunes from atop Montmartre embodied in the soundtrack of Amélie, the ballads of Edith Piaf, and the intense lyrics of adopted icon Jacques Brel (he was actually Belgian, but the French like him so much they seem to forget). But beyond those symbolic melodies that scream French roots, there’s another side to French music. One that is much more urban, cosmopolitan and chic. It’s the smooth, electro-jazz, slightly funky sounds of contemporary bands like St. Germain.

I was spending a semester in France in college and had fortunately been placed in a very cool attic apartment with an equally cool Frenchman; one who had a penchant for red wine, dinner parties and top of the line background music to complement the food and company. St. Germain’s Tourist album was played at one of the first of these dinner parties that I ever experienced.

It was a quintessential French evening: a bottle of regional Muscat to start the night, a whole chicken, cooked in butter and herbs fresh out of the oven, a salad with fresh greens and a homemade vinaigrette, a Burgundy to go with the chicken and a cacophony of French voices all giving their politically charged opinions on everything from GMOs to the American President. The upbeat sound of the saxophone in “So Flute” hung in the air, dancing around in the vibrant ambiance.

All of a sudden I felt instantly chic and European. Just listening to “So Flute” let me shed my hippie college roots and automatically develop into that classy, cultured young adult I’d always wanted to be. From that night on I couldn’t stop listening to St. Germain.

When I returned home after my semester abroad I would try and recreate these dinner parties. I would tell people that we would eat at nine, they looked at me as if I was crazy and sad they would come at six; Americans unlike the French are not trained for late night dinner parties. I got frustrated that the only white wine I could find for an aperitif was a Californian Chardonnay; trust me, after wine of Alsace, it’s not the same. But thanks to my pre-departure stop at FNAC (the French Borders) at least I could have “So Flute” play in the background. Maybe I didn’t feel so chic in my shared college house, but at least I could import the French urban vibe. At least it was better than drowning my sorrows in a bottle of bad red.

Returning home, especially after extended stays when you have completely immersed yourself in your host culture, can be hard. Sometimes, to get over that culture shock — no matter how long you’ve been back — all it takes is a melody reminiscent of your time there. Instantly you are taken back to a certain moment, a certain feeling and for a second all that cultural confusion just slips away. “So Flute” is that song for me and whenever I play it I am whisked away to my favorite vibes of France.

Click here for previous Sounds of Travel.

Weekly Euro watch: we’re still making ground

by Grant Martin on


I just can’t help but feel giddy about all of the progress that the Dollar has been making against the Euro over the past month. Sure, this is the direct effect of a near worldwide financial meltdown, banks are failing left and right and Iceland was briefly for sale on Ebay. But the slim silver lining to the whole debacle is that we, as Americans, now have more buying power overseas.

As of this morning, you can now officially buy a Euro for a $1.25, down from nearly $1.50 in September. That means that if you’ve got some late fall (say, Thanksgiving) travel to the EU lined up, it just got 17% less expensive.

In case you’re wondering, Iceland’s Krona started trading again a couple of weeks back after the government effectively froze trading for a little while to let the market stabilize. One now earns 126 Krona / Dollar instead of the 76 from earlier this summer.

Ten things you didn’t know about Dublin

by Grant Martin on

Visiting any city for the first time is an exercise in setting expectations. You can only read so much about the culture, nightlife and food in a guidebook before you need to experience the locals first hand, order a pint of Guinness or eat shepherd’s pie and really visit a destination. Setting foot out into the city streets, you begin to compare your first hand experiences against everything that you thought you knew about a destination. In some facets, you’re surprised and impressed by the difference; in others, you’re underwhelmed.

Taking advantage of some weekend work in the Emerald Isle, I recently spent some time in the capital city for my first trip to Ireland. I was moved most by the ten things below:

  • You’re never going to want to eat Shepherd’s Pie at your local Irish pub again. No, Dublin isn’t known for its pinky-up food culture, but the things that they get right they really get right.
  • The city revolves around drinking. To that end, bar crawling in Dublin can be performed quite literally. One only needs to mosey down two or three store fronts before he or she discovers another pub almost identical to the one that was just left. It’s disorienting enough having a bar on all four corners of every intersection in the downtown area – now try doing it with 17 pints of Smithwicks in your stomach. Currently, the drinking problem has become so profound that there is a massive public effort to curb binge drinking, the majority of which is found in telly and bus ads trying to guilt people out of overindulging.
  • There isn’t really that much to see besides the 976,000 bars. Yes, Dublin has a couple of excellent museums, Trinity College, Phoenix Park and the Guinness factory (does that even count?), but compared to some of the heavy hitters in the EU like Rome or Paris, Dublin’s “cultural” fodder is a bit anemic — which isn’t to say that the city isn’t worth visiting, either. I’m personally a bar and cafe sort of person, so I found the area quite charming.
  • Temple Bar is not an enormous tourist trap. It’s a tourist trap, yes, but in the same sense that Times Square is. Just like everyday New Yorkers visit 42nd street, real Irish can be found in the district just south of the river, you can get a good shepherd’s pie and there is plenty of cultural flavor in the area. Make sure you stop by at least once during your stay.
  • Phoenix park is the largest city park in all of Europe. Just Northwest of the hailed Temple Bar, you can walk around Phoenix for an hour and barely scrape the surface of the massive plot. Much of the perfectly tailored grass is on limits, so you can feel free to walk awry from the winding paths, take your shoes off and really absorb the fertilizer into your bare feet. Contrast this to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, where hundreds of locals pull up chairs to the edge of the path just to watch the grass silently sit there undisturbed.
  • Skyscrapers are nonexistent downtown. In fact, the tallest series of buildings around town happen to be in the network of Guinness buildings. Which leads us to:
  • Guinness sponsors everything. In addition to their near omnipresence in every pub (and hence on every corner in the city,) the beer company also has independent retail stores where you can buy branded underwear and sheets, sponsors athletic teams and appears to be the impetus behind 9 out of 10 business deals in the country.
  • Shamrocks, Leprechauns and pots of gold are all out. We think that Guinness bought the patent on each of these ideas and swallowed them into the beer empire.
  • It’s going to rain. Really. They don’t call it the Emerald Isle because it’s known for arid plains and rolling deserts. It rains here like the heavens just broke up with their long term girlfriend. A good rule of thumb is to take any precipitation forecast you saw on the news and multiply it by four.
  • Riverdance is ridiculous. But it does happen. And people eat it up like pigeons fighting for popcorn. Several of the more touristy hotels even offer the spectacle nightly, where hundreds of tourists amass during the evening hours to watch a few poor sots dance their hearts out and spin in circles. If you’re really interested in finding something of this sort in Dublin, just follow the mess of fanny packs at around 9PM and you’ll inevitably reach a venue.

When a nation becomes a commodity: The Country Brand Index 2008

by Anna Brones on

We live in an era of global brands. McDonald’s, Starbucks, H&M, Coca Cola, Australia… Wait, what???

You read correctly, Australia recently won the top spot of the 2008 Country Brand Index. Nation branding, as it’s officially referred to, is the theory and practice of measuring and building the reputations of countries; basically applying standard commercial brand management that you’d find with commodities and using it to analyzing everywhere from Austria to Zimbabwe.

The 2008 study conducted by Future Brand, a global brand consulting firm, used rankings from 30 different categories to come up with the final index. Among the categories were History, Standard of Living, Friendly Locals and Environmentalism. It’s like a beauty pageant for countries, with the most well-rounded coming out on top. Here are the top ten:

  1. Australia
  2. Canada
  3. USA
  4. Italy
  5. Switzerland
  6. France
  7. New Zealand
  8. United Kingdom
  9. Japan
  10. Sweden

When you look at that list, referring to countries as specific brands starts to make a little sense. Don’t we all have pretty concrete associations with France for example? Wine, croissants and cheese. And what about Sweden? Meatballs, moose and blondes. Looks like what we once referred to as stereotypes has a new name.

Batman, Turkey accuses Batman, Superhero of identity theft

by Mike Barish on

Let’s play word association. I’ll say a word and then you tell me the first thing that comes to your mind (I can hear you, trust me). OK, ready?

Batman.

Great. I heard “Robin,” “cape,” “Batmobile” and a something that sounded like “kablam.” While there are no wrong answers, you are all so very wrong. The correct response, of course, is “Turkey.” As in, Batman, Turkey. Batman is the capital of Batman Province in southeast Turkey and is an important oil-producing area which is home to the country’s oldest oil refinery.

Batman, Turkey also happens to be in the news lately because its mayor, Hüseyin Kalkan, is planning to sue Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan (director of the most recent Batman films) for unauthorized use of the town’s name. That’s right. Batman ripped off Batman. And now Batman wants Batman to pay. Are you following along?

According to The Guardian, Mayor Kalkan said, “There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us.” He also blames several unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate on “the psychological impact suffered by the town after being placed under the spotlight by Nolan’s film.”

So, dear travelers, I urge you to pack up your gear, catch a flight to Istanbul and then hop aboard a puddle-jumper to Batman’s regional airport (yes, it exists). You’ll want to avoid becoming the victim of an unsolved murder and perhaps you should be a good samaritan and try to cheer up the ladies. I bet they like men in masks and tights.

Good luck, Mayor Kalkan. May I suggest that you form a class-action suit with Bat Cave, North Carolina?