No it’s not a typo. Walking Tours Manhattan has dessert-themed walking tours. They guide you around, feed you, and walk you. It’s like you’re their dog — their sweet-toothed dog.
It’s called their Recessional Special: Free NYC Dessert Fest. And it is indeed free! They request a $1 donation or whatever you feel is appropriate, and the purchase of any desserts is additional, but all you have to do to participate is show up.
The next Free NYC Dessert Fest tour will be on Sunday, March 1st in Harlem.
Meet our tour guide with the red ball cap saying Walking Tours Manhattan on Sunday March 1, 2009 at 11:30am at Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. and Frederick Douglass Blvd. Then we?ll visit Sylvia’s Soul Food Restaurant, Lee Lee’s, and our last stop will be Make My Cake. Tour lasts 2 hours. Walking distance is 1 mile.
This is a great way to trek (safely) through historic Harlem and get sweetened up along the way! For more information, visit Walking Tours Manhattan. Their regular walking tours are just $25.
I love being an island girl and everything, but I’ve longed to live in the Big Apple. Now there’s another great reason travel junkies who live in NYC to cheer: Idlewild Books, the hippest travel books and international literature store in the city, is offering up some cool events and mixers to wash the “stuck in the city” blues away.
Idlewild Books, New York City’s newest travel- and world-literature bookstore located on the second floor of 12 West 19th Street, caters to literary travelers seeking worldly inspiration. Books are organized by country, with guidebooks, nonfiction, and fiction mixed together.
This (Thursday, February 19th) evening at 7 p.m., Idlewild will host the READRUSSIA.COM LAUNCH PARTY, celebrating the launch of Russia! magazine’s new daily lit blog. The party is sponsored by Jewel of Russia. Russian vodka punch will be served, Russian music will be played, and Russian snacks will be available. This new website will provide broad coverage of all Russia-related topics.
Shortly following this launch party, Idlewild will host INTERNATIONAL NOIR NIGHT on Tuesday, February 24th at 7 p.m. The editors of PARIS NOIR and ROME NOIR will be on hand to engage in readings and disucssions of the latest volumes of Akashic’s terrific city noir series, which are set in Paris and Rome (obviously!).
If those two events are enough, Idlewild will be hosting WANDERLUST MIXERS in March! Where else can frequent fliers and globally-minded singles find love? In an international bookstore, of course! Tickets to these mixers can be purchased at Idlewild Books or on the store’s website, www.idlewildbooks.com. Wine and snacks and a $15 Idlewild gift card is included with each $35 ticket. The MIXER FOR STRAIGHT SINGLES AGED 25-44 is on Wednesday, March 4 at 7:30-9:30 p.m., and the MIXER FOR LGBT SINGLES AGED 25-44 will be on Wednesday, March 25, at 7:30-9:30 p.m..
I’m so excited about these Wanderlust Mixers! What a cool idea — and great way to meet some cool travel-inspired, and literary people.
Idlewild Books owner, David Del Vecchio, a much-travelled former United Nations press officer opened this independent bookstore in the Spring of 2008. If you can’t make it to one of the events listed above, there are certainly more cool soireés to come. Check the frequently updated website for the upcoming readings and activities.
We’ve covered the best places to eat inside certain airports, and have given a big nod to the In-N-Out Burger just a mile from LAX Airport in Los Angeles, but here are other dining options in case you have a layover and want to find food that’s worth a bit of effort to get to.
In this Washington Post article, Joe Brancatelli gives a rundown of major airports in the U.S. and where he heads to eat if he has some time. In-N-Out Burger is one of his suggestions.
Here are the first 10 of his other suggestions, along with their distance from the airport. If you’re flying out of one of these cities, I’d also consider these as ideas for where to eat before you head off on an airplane. There’s nothing like a good meal to help face the uncertainties of air travel. Eating close to the airport helps food digest instead of attempting a mad dash across a city to catch a plane.
Atlanta—The Brake Pad. This is a converted gas station that serves up “pub grub.” It’s four miles from the airport.
Chicago— Here are two suggestions for Chicago-style pizza that are not at O’Hare airport. The Rosemont branch of Giordano’s is four miles from the airport and the Park Ridge branch of Lou Malnati’s is seven miles. If you’re heading to or away from Midway, try Giordano’s on South Cicero. It borders the airport. About five miles away is Lou Malnati’s on West Ogden.
Charlotte–Eight miles from the Charlotte/Douglas Airport is Villa Antonio on Southern Blvd. where you can find a pork sandwich, Italian style.
Dallas/Ft. Worth–Brancatelli suggests taking at 10 mile drive for the Mexican food at Via Real in Las Colinas.
Denver–I concur with Brancatelli about this airport. There is not much close by. He did find Blue Bay Asian Café and recommends the Thai food and the dumplings.
Detroit–To find good food here, you don’t need to go any further than the Westin hotel that’s connected to the McNamara terminal at the airport. Dema’s serves decent food any time of day.
Honolulou–If you can call ahead, try Mitch’s Fish Market and Sushi Bar. It’s only a mile from the airport’s runways. I’d say you can walk, but it might be further than it sounds.
Houston— Chez Nous is in a converted Pennecostal church and dishes out French food worth the seven mile drive from Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Los Angeles–Along with the In-n-Out Burger, Brancatelli suggests Mariposas at the Hacienda Hotel for Mexican dishes and breakfast. It’s only two miles from LAX.
Minneapolis/St. Paul–Café Levain, about eight miles from the airport only serves dinner.
For Brancatelli’s suggestions for New York/Newark, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and San Francisco, click here. [The photo is from Mitch’s Fish Market and Sushi Bar.]
Most of the time you can find yourself in Cologne, Germany, and not really know why you’re there — that’s how relatively unexciting and nondescript Western Germany’s largest city is.
But say you find yourself on the platform of Cologne’s main train station at around 6 a.m. on a Thursday (this Thursday, for example). You’ve just arrived after a night journey and your eyes are trying to snatch some focus in the early morning darkness. You move through a constant clamor: screams, shouts, yawps , laughter. You see figures, more than you should for this hour, crisscrossing, boarding and alighting from trains. Further into the station the din grows louder, and you can see the people more clearly: Everyone’s in costume, and most are carrying crates of beer.
Welcome to Day 1 of Cologne’s Carnival (or Karneval in German).
This is a Carnival celebration that is not on many people’s radar screen, even though, with more than 1 million people annually in attendance, it amounts to one of Europe’s biggest street festivals, and certainly Germany’s largest after Oktoberfest in Munich.Officially, Cologne Carnival starts every year at 11:11 p.m on November 11. But it hits its full celebratory stride starting this Thursday, the beginning of the “crazy days,” and won’t end until next Tuesday — so-called Fat Tuesday, for all you Mardi Gras fans out there.
In fact, Cologne’s festival has much in common with other Carnival celebrations around the world, like Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the carnivals in Rio and Trinidad and Tobago. Historically, they are essentially Catholic celebrations ahead of Ash Wednesday, the official start of the Lenten season. In reality, of course, such revelry doesn’t seem very religious, but the celebrations all include the same basic ingredients: Costumes, parades, drinking and music (though I’ll admit, the Cologne Carnival lacks music with the same beat as, say, samba in Rio and is decidedly less sexy — see the video at the end of this post).
All throughout Germany’s Rhineland towns will be holding their own carnivals. Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, gives Cologne a good run for its money with its festival and one of the best ways to experience the party in this region is to divide your time between the two cities (they’re only 30 minutes apart).
This Thursday is known as Weiberfastnacht (Wieverfastelovend in the Cologne dialect), which translates roughly as “women’s day,” a day dedicated to the fairer sex, some of which seek to seduce male Carnival-goers by dressing in provocative, playful nurse and devil costumes, which traditionally means they are looking for some, em, attention. The following days feature small parades in the region’s various towns. Saturday night is a big night in Cologne, with several major carnival balls and an unofficial bar crawl through many of the pubs and breweries of Old Town.
Carnival’s biggest day is Rosenmontag, or Rose Monday, which features the festival’s major parade through Cologne, followed by street parties and an evening in the Cologne bars.
I find myself mentioning pubs and bars a lot. The few times I’ve been to Cologne Carnival, I’ve always thought of it as primarily a beer festival, one to rival Oktoberfest.
In this part of Germany, the traditional beer is Kölsch, a light, fruity draft that is notable in that it’s one of the only beers in Germany actually appellation-controlled: Only beer from Cologne can be called Kölsch (for Köln, Cologne in German). The same light beer brewed 30 minutes down the road in Bonn is known as Bonnsh.
I know Cologne Carnival is about much more than drinking. Still, it seems every year each day’s festivities ultimately come down to kölsch: That is, huddling with friends in a packed pub, dressed in something embarrassing (I was a cow one year; at right, a devil), plucking eagerly at tall, thin kölsch glasses (called stange) that are cradled by the 10 in a round wreath or kranz, and singing traditional Carnival songs at the top of your lungs, no matter how many times you’ve heard them that day: Da simmer dabei! Dat is prima! Viva Colonia! Wir lieben dat leben die Liebe und die lust wir glauben an den Lieben gott und ham uch immer durscht!
Fact: Americans love tube steak. Fact: I am wildly amused by the term “tube steak.” Fact: You’re reading SkyMall Monday. This week we solve the age-old problem that has flummoxed chefs, cooks and food preparers for, well, ages: How do I cook a hot dog? It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma on a toasted bun. Thankfully, our favorite catalog has, once again, come to the rescue. Because now we can finally relax our gag relflexes and enjoy all the tube steaks that we can handle. Now we have the Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker.
I know what you’re thinking. “But Mike, I can think of several ways to cook a hot dog. Why do I need a device that only serves one purpose and isn’t the least bit necessary or convenient?” Well, sure, I could “think” of ways to do things until I’m blue in the face. But you can’t think a hot dog into my stomach. And as for being convenient, well, that sounds like a made up word. However, I’ll indulge your fantasies and consider these other alleged ways that you could cook a hot dog.
Microwave: Yeah, it’s fast. But if you mistakenly leave your hot dog in there for 20 minutes it will explode. That’s a risk that I’m just not willing to take. Grill: Nothing says summer like a hot dog with some gorgeous grill marks. But what happens when I want a hot dog in the winter? You expect me to put a jacket on and grill outside? That’s ludicrous. Boil: Sure, you could boil a hot dog on your stove top. But have you ever drank the leftover hot dog water? It’s terrible! And pouring the used water down the drain just seems so wasteful. Oven: This seems convenient, but you’re going to need an oven mitt. That’s how they upsell you. Who’s “they?” Shhh, they’re probably listening to us right now. Campfire: My landlord frowns upon me using this method.
As always, I defer to the sage masters who provide us with the product description:
Operating much like a pop-up toaster, this unique kitchen appliance lets you easily prepare two hot dogs (complete with toasted buns) in minutes. Its 660-watt electronic heating coil has time settings for heating hot dogs and buns to your taste preference. Crumb basket removes for cleaning.
All of the other cooking methods that I listed above allow you to cook a seemingly unlimited number of hot dogs at one time. The Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker can only handle two hots dogs and buns, so now you don’t have to worry about portion control. It’s taken care of for you. Plus, you’re middle child will finally get the hint that you don’t like him when he sees that there’s just no hot dog for him to eat.
See, as usual, I’m right. You need the Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker. You need to stop using logic and reason. You need to pass the relish.
Check out all of the previous SkyMall Monday posts HERE.