One of the joys of going anywhere outside your borders is leaving behind the big city and experiencing places off the beaten track. This is the case whether you are strolling through villages in Armenia, as I was fortunate enough to do recently, or if you’re heading out of a big city like Prague. In this entertaining piece in the International Herald Tribune, writer Ruth Ellen Gruber check out three little-known towns in the Czech Republic: Telc, Kutna Hora, and Mikulov, and finds the sights and sounds of these obscure places the kind of superb little surprises that make traveling worthwhile.
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum
Thanks to Roadside America those wanting to pay homage to President Ford can head out to Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. Their write-up on the attraction is so superb I feel like I’ve already made the journey there myself. Seriously! According to their notes the museum was nothing more than a presidential bore up until 1997 (ten years back) when millions in cash poured in and enabled the place to get a much needed face-lift. Now visitors can experience light shows, surround-sound, and holographs. Included in their Sight-of-the-Week feature are some pretty nice photos from the inside which show shots of the faceless Betty Ford dummies modeling her hairstyles at the time and a picture of an ATM set into a wall. For those who do not know, Ford was the president who signed the legislation that made it legal to get money from a machine.
How my mind has expanded so much from just reading this piece! If you don’t have plans to go and don’t plan on making plans at least plan on visiting the Roadside America site sometime sooner than later. If you do plan to go or have been, please share your thoughts.
iPod Listening When U Travel
Like a lot of people, I have fallen so in love with my ipod that, after my wallet, it’s the one thing I HAVE to carry with me when I leave the house. And before I go, I always make sure that it is loaded up with the most recent podcasts from NPR, as well as my Charlie Rose subscription on Audible.com AND many audio books from audible. I was happy to see Iva blog about audible’s content, especially about Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which I actually have in its atom-based, tree-pulp form and am enjoying immensely.
But for those who travel and are looking for walking tours and such to put on their ipods and other listening devices, here are a couple of ideas.
A company called AudioSteps offers audio walking tours of various cities around the country including New Orleans, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. For the internationally-inclined, especially those traveling to London, a company called BlueBrolly has a fine selection of audio walks for areas including Westminster, Soho, Chinatown, Greenwich, Covent Garden, St Paul’s and other spots around the English capital. Finally, PodGuides takes a step further and offers digital maps and small pictures, along with the audio tracks. A fine idea, and one I’m sure we’ll be seeing a LOT more of.
What We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Know
Let me quote…or rather paraphrase…the now-retired Donald Rumsfeld on how he might have described this site.
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Breath-taking, is it not? The delicate flourish of these words. The chilling subtext about unknown unknowns? The man was a true poet.
Looking back on 2006, what do we know that we didn’t know? Why didn’t we know it, and how could we have not known that we knew what we didn’t know? Do you know? I know one thing. This list from the BBC of the unknown knowns…or would that be the known unknowns? Anyway, this list is superb and great for a few laughs. A sample herewith: Did you know (which we do now) that (number 5) Standard-sized condoms are too big for most Indian men? Or that (number ) Fathers tend to determine the height of their child, mothers their weight? Who knew?
There’s a whole bunch of other gems here, and I urge you to check them out.
Friday Funny: Lifestyles of the Rich and Fascist
For today’s Friday Funny, we bring you an entertaining, tongue in cheek piece from Radar Magazine on how the rich and autocratic live.
From Libyan dictator Muammar al-Quaddafi, whose personal bodyguards are made up of an all-girl Amazonian unit alleged to be virgins to Myanmar’s repressive Senior General Than Shwe, who has been taking cooking classes with a leading French chef in Rangoon, to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, whose escapades and eccentric tastes have been well documented, the list is a wonderful slice of egotistical life. There are ten dictators in all. Be sure to collect all ten! I have no idea how accurate this stuff is, but it IS funny in a sick kind of way.