Mardi Gras is coming, time to review and tweet

by Chris Owen on

Mardi Gras rolls around about this time every year bringing Fat Tuesday and signaling celebrations held worldwide. In the United States, the focus is on New Orleans and this year the city is sponsoring some special events including a family-friendly focus and a special series of Twitter Chats leading up to the celebration.

About a million people will take to the streets of New Orleans for the two weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday. Throughout the celebration, the traditional Mardi Gras colors of purple, green and gold can be seen around the city. Purple, green and gold officially became the colors of Carnival back in 1872 when Alexis Romanov, Grand Duke of Russia, visited New Orleans for Mardi Gras. In the Duke’s honor, the city adopted the Romanov family colors of purple, green and gold, representing justice, fidelity and power.

Also a tradition of Mardi Gras, King Cakes came to New Orleans with the French and began as round, custard-filled pastries decorated with crowns. King Cakes remain extremely popular throughout the city during the carnival season and are often compared to a coffee cake, drizzled in icing and decorated with sugar dyed the traditional colors. Tradition holds that whoever gets the ornamental baby hidden inside the cake at the first party had to give a king cake party the following weekend.While costumes are not required, most carnival revelers join in the fun with wigs and glitter making outrageous outfits welcome all carnival long.

Although a time of revelry, Mardi Gras in New Orleans is routinely celebrated with the entire family. Many local families come together on the Avenue and set up chairs, ladders, ice chests and tents for the parades.

This year, a question and answer Twitter Chat (#MGQA) will take place every Tuesday from 2:00-3:00 CST from now until the start of Mardi Gras with questions answered by the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation‘s ( NOTMC) two Twitter accounts @VisitNewOrleans and @GoNOLA504 as well as the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau’s (NOCVB) Twitter account @NewOrleans. Participants are encouraged to use the #MardiGras hashtag.

Also new this year, a special Mardi Gras New Orleans 2012 web site has been launched featuring parade schedules, tips for visitors and a live webcam during events.

There, now we’re up to speed on Mardi Gras. No test.

Flickr photo by DoctorWho


Paris postcard: Savoring the subversively seductive splendors of the Marais

by David Downie on

French star architect Jean Nouvel once gave me a ride home from his studio in Paris’ edgy 11th arrondissement. I chuckled to discover that the guru of transparency, glass and steel lives around the corner from me in a 1600s building on the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, the spinal column of the Marais. Old is better?

I was amused but not surprised: after 40 years of blanket gentrification the Marais has reportedly become theplace to live for a mix of fashion designers, artists, architects, auctioneers and other professionals–plus droves of bobos, meaning bohemian bourgeois. It’s so desirable that it’s practically unlivable.

Luckily you don’t have to move here to enjoy the Marais: wandering its patchwork of streets from the 1500s-1800s is still a magical experience.

For one thing, super-rich celebs and bobos aren’t the only ones drawn here. Trawl the gay district around Rue Vieille du Temple, the Rue des Rosiers Jewish neighborhood, or the Place des Vosges-the Marais’ centerpiece square-and you’ll discover a global festival of hip hedonism.

What’s the attraction? The Marais’ storied streets spread on the Right Bank between Beaubourg (the Pompidou Center) and the Bastille, the Seine, and the dowdy Place de la République. They’re home to enough boutiques, museums, art galleries, trendy restaurants and cafés stuffed into landmark townhouses to defeat even those born to shop (the French call such people “window-lickers”). This is a safari park for people-watchers, a study in how to preserve and gentrify a unique historic neighborhood.

The penurious few who wound up here before the Marais became trendy do what we can to appreciate the hallowed atmosphere without sounding like party-poopers. Truth be told each time I step out I discover something new and wonderful in my backyard. But I always find myself at least once a day in the Place des Vosges.Often overrun, the Place des Vosges is breathtaking no matter how many sour-sounding, faux Dixieland bands invade its symmetrical arcades, and no matter how many gawkers show up to see where Dominique Strauss-Kahn and other celebs and politicos live like pashas. One of France’s swankest Michelin-3-star restaurants is here (l’Amboisie), not that I would recommend it. So is the HQ of Issaye Miyake. The parade of human peacocks never ends.

With its 400-year-old, slate-roofed aristocratic pavilions, compact park and power-elite feel, the square has always been a microcosm, the quintessence of what makes the Marais special-love it or loathe it.

Four centuries ago Madame de Sévigné-the queen of French epistolary literature and high-society gossip-was born here, then moved nearby to the sumptuous Hôtel Carnavalet (now Paris’ historical museum). The Duc-Maréchal de Richelieu, with a pavilion at number 24, seduced a catalogue of lovers that reportedly included every noble lady then resident on the square. Does similar debauchery continue today? Such is the gossip.

It must have been exciting to be here during the first great French Revolution of 1789, when the debauched aristocrats were expropriated and exiled or lost their heads-literally. Afterwards, in came wild men like Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil). They hung out in the Marais’ dicey dives and lived in the square’s rundown flats-and turned literature and poetry upside down.

The reluctant revolutionary Victor Hugo rented a corner pavilion: his apartment is now a house-museum, one of my favorite places in Paris. From his perch he witnessed the Revolution of 1830 and penned subversive books, trying (but failing) to stop the tyrant Louis Napoleon Bonaparte-better known as Napoleon III-from taking over.
Even when the Marais bottomed after World War Two, the gloomy arcades and crumbling courtyards of this sublime square were subversively inspirational, providing the backdrop for Georges Simenon’s crime novel, L’Ombre Chinoise-also a cult movie.

So now it’s the star architects, plutocratic politicians, bankers, movie stars and moguls who grace the Place des Vosges, while the other 99.99 percent of us watch the show. That’s okay. Nothing beats sitting on a bench in the center of the square and gazing gratis at the parade or sipping a coffee-still affordable-at a plebian café. This will be the ideal spot from which to watch the next French revolution unfold. I can’t wait.

Author and guide David Downie’s latest book is the critically acclaimed “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light.” His websites are www.davidddownie.com, www.parisparistours.com, http://wanderingfrance.com/blog/parisand http://wanderingliguria.com, dedicated to the Italian Riviera.

iPhone app review: ‘Spotted By Locals’ European city guides

by Jessica Marati on

On a recent extended trip to Phnom Penh, I decided to bring along my trusty five-pound Southeast Asia on a Shoestring guide from Lonely Planet. Big mistake. In a city changing as quickly as Cambodia‘s capital, I found that nearly all of the information had become dated and irrelevant. Nearly half of the recommended restaurants had gone out of business, and the budget guesthouses, experiencing the “Lonely Planet effect“, were now half as nice, twice as expensive, and filled with people who, well, kinda sucked.

Spotted By Locals aims to be a different kind of travel guide by providing up-to-date travel advice from urban residents through blogs, PDF city guides, and a newly redesigned iPhone app. After road-testing the app, I’d say they’re well on their way.

The Spotted By Locals app is, to put it simply, awesome. Launched in December, the mobile application is 100 percent off-line, which means you don’t need to go bankrupt with data roaming or search endlessly for WiFi hotspots in order to access its wealth of information. And wealth it is. Since the app is currently only available for select European cities, I downloaded the Paris guide, clicked on the map, zoomed into my old street in the Marais, clicked on some of the map markers, and was able to access insider information written by residents about my two favorite vintage shops (Free ‘P’ Star and Vintage Desir, if you must know).


Spotted’s strength lies in its roster of local bloggers, who live in the cities they represent, speak the local language, and volunteer their services for free. The locals are hand-picked by owners Sanne and Bart van Poll, avid travelers based in Amsterdam. Plus, since the locals are active residents of their cities, they’re able to keep the guides’ information current and provide updates nearly in real-time, so you can stay ahead of the Lonely Planet pack.

[images via Spotted By Locals]

Black buns on a Star Wars-themed burger in France

by Elizabeth Seward on


Whether or not you’re a fan of Star Wars hardly matters when we’re talking about the newest additions to the burger line at France‘s fast-food chain, ‘Quick’–black buns on a Star Wars-themed burger, anyone? The ‘Jedi Burger’ and ‘Darth Vader Burger’ are now on the menu at the restaurant. And as processed as fast-food typically is, the pitch-black buns on the Darth Vader are what I would call a new low in the world of fast-food. Would you eat this? Perhaps I’d try it for the experience alone, but the older I get, the less I want to do gross things just to do them–and black buns on a fast-food burger don’t quite seem non-regrettable to me. With that said, I will try just about anything once. What are your thoughts? Of all the things to eat in France, should this be one of them?

Vacation deprivation study says beach vacations rule

by Chris Owen on

Expedia’s Vacation Deprivation study is an annual analysis of vacation habits across multiple countries and continents. Taken from the results of a survey by Harris Interactive, 7,083 respondents were surveyed in total across 20 countries with some surprising results.

“226 million vacation days will go unused this year resulting in some 50 million Americans becoming vacation deprived,” travel company Monograms reports on TravelBlackboard.

The 2011 study spans North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. It reveals who gets – and takes – the most vacation time, as well as attitudes toward vacation. Common themes impacting how and where respondents vacation include money, romance and disapproving bosses.

When asked, “How many vacation days, if any, do you receive from your employer each year?”, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark and Brazil all tied for first place with 30 days. UK workers came in a bit less with 25, Canada 16 and the U.S. 14 but in last place was Japan with 11 days. Of those 11 they only used 6 on the average too.

According to the survey, most of the world likes to take a mix of short and long vacations, mostly in the Summer months and beach locations won out over others as the most preferred kind of holiday.

The sample included a nationwide cross-section of the employed adult populations fielded the online survey on behalf of Expedia.com from September 19 – October 9, 2011. Complete results of the survey can be found on the Expedia website.

Flickr photo by Moyan_Brenn