Get out and go: Events around the world (December 9-14)

by Brenda Yun on

It’s time to look at the festivals and events happening around the world, and this week has a particularly international selection of happenings. If you’re close and have time, then you have no excuse to get out and go!

  • Toronto – The Festival of Carols, a holiday tradition, will be held in Toronto this Wednesday, December 9th.
  • Oslo – The Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony will be held in Oslo Thursday, December 10th. The Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony takes place every 10th of December, the date on which Alfred Nobel died in 1896.
  • Cape Town – The Hout Bay Harbour Festival will take place in Hout Bay, Cape Town on Friday, December 11. The festival will continue until December 13.
  • St Lucia – The Festival of Lights Celebration will take place for two days in St Lucia starting this Saturday, December 12. Saint Lucians celebrate this day by going to church services, attending parades and rallies, organizing sports meetings and staging cultural presentations. December 13th is the National Day of St Lucia.
  • Auckland – Coca-Cola Christmas in the Park will take place in Auckland on Saturday, December 12 . This is a free musical event that begins at 7:30 p.m.
  • Tokyo – Gishi-sai takes place on Sunday, December 13 in Tokyo, Japan. This is a festival honoring the forty-seven loyal retainers (ronin) in Akoh, who were made popular in movies and dramas.
  • Tanjay City – The Bod-Bod Festival will take place Monday, December 14th in Tanjay City in the Philippines. The festival celebratesto the Bod-bod, a native delicacy made of glutinous rice, coconut milk, sugar and salt. The festival will continue until December 16th.

If you make it to one of these events, let us know how it was, or if you know of an even that’s coming up, please let us here at Gadling know and we’ll be sure to include it in the next “Get out and go” round-up.

Fake fingerprints let woman slip through customs

by Sean McLachlan on

A Chinese woman who had been deported from Japan for overstaying her visa wanted to get back in so badly that she had plastic surgery to change her fingerprints. Japanese customs officials never discovered Lin Rong, 27, was back in the country until she was arrested on a different charge and her true identity revealed.

When police arrested Ms. Lin last month for allegedly faking a marriage to a Japanese man, presumably to guarantee her stay in Japan, they noticed she had odd scars on her thumbs and index fingers. Investigators said she confessed to having paid $15,000 to have her fingerprints switched by removing the skin of her fingertips and grafting it back on the opposite hand.

She’s now being charged for the very new crime of biometric fraud. Japan is one of many countries to use a biometric recognition system to check fingerprints, and so it’s inevitable that something like this would happen sooner or later. In fact, it’s not even the first time. Last year a South Korean woman managed to fool the machines by putting a special tape on her fingers.

The United States uses a biometric recognition system too. There’s no word on what expensive piece of hardware is going to be needed to replace what’s already become a beatable system.

Japanese hotels offer track-side views for trainspotters

by Sean McLachlan on

Most owners of a hotel next to a train station would curse their luck, but some Japanese entrepreneurs have turned their noisy locations into profitable ones by marketing the track-side rooms to trainspotters.

Trainspotters, who prefer to be called “railfans” much like comic book readers insist they read “graphic novels”, constitute a growing subculture in Japan. National organizations claim more than 20,000 members, there are several glossy magazines, and a lucrative industry serving the hobby, so the tourism trade was sure to pick up on the trend.

One popular destination is Shinjuku station, the busiest station in the world. The Odakyu Hotel Century Southern Tower right next to it not only caters to business travelers, but railfans with a special rate, guaranteed views, and a paperweight made of a piece of track. With an average of 3.64 million people going through the station every day, railfans are sure to see plenty of action.

While hotel owners next to Shinjuku station may have a great location, they can’t compete with the Dream House lodge in Ueda, which is made Azusa limited express train cars similar to the one pictured here.

If you can’t swing the airfare to Japan, you might want to try Ohio, which seems to be the most train-happy state in the Union.

Visitors from outside the U.S. down 9 percent, spending a lot less

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Visits from outside the United States continued their slide in August. The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that 5.4 million people visited the United States from other countries in August this year. Unfortunately, that’s a drop of 9 percent from August 2008. And, the smaller number of people is spending less money when it comes here. In August 2009, international visitors spent $10 billion. This sounds like a lot, but it’s off almost 21 percent from last year. For the first eight months of this year, spending by foreign visitors reached $79.5 billion, down 17 percent year-over-year. The fact that the year-to-date decline isn’t as bad as what we saw in August suggests that the situation has been worsening.

Trends in visits from Canada and Mexico are consistent with the global trend. Canadian visits fell 6 percent in August and are off 8 percent for the year through August. Meanwhile, visits from Mexico surged in August, gaining 23 percent, with land arrivals up 37 percent and air arrivals down 7 percent. This wasn’t enough to change the situation for the year, however. For the first eight months of 2009, visits from Mexico fell six percent relative to the same period in 2008.

Visits from overseas (not including Mexico and Canada) were off 6 percent in August and 9 percent for the year. Of the top 20 countries sending visitors to the United States, 11 sustained decreases for the month of August, with five of these declines hitting double-digit levels. Along with Mexico, China, Brazil and the Bahamas posted double-digit increases. Year-to-date, 17 of the top 20 countries showed declines in visitation to the United States, eight of them reaching double-digit levels.

Europe certainly isn’t sending as many visitors to the United States as it once did. For August, visits are off 11 percent — the same rate posted for 2009 so far. The United Kingdom‘s visits to the United States were down 13 percent in August, which is disproportionately powerful, given that the United Kingdom accounts for 34 percent of all Western European arrivals in the United States. Through August, visits to the United States from the United Kingdom were off 16 percent, with Germany down 6 percent and France down 3 percent.

The trend is improving in Japan. While visits so far this year were down 16 percent by August, the month of august itself showed an improvement, with visits from Japan down only 8 percent. Japan accounts for nearly half of all Asian visitors to the United States. Year-to-date, visits from South Korea and India fell 11 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

It’s clear that travel to the United States continues to suffer from the effects of the worldwide recession, particularly since, the Department of Commerce says, business travel is falling faster than leisure travel this year.

[Chart courtesy of the U.S. Department of Commerce]

In Japan, they bathe in beaujolais

by Annie Scott on

The Japanese love their beaujolais nouveau so much, they’re bathing in it.

At the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun Spa, a hot springs spa resort in Hakone, Japan, they’ve just celebrated the yearly uncorking of the new wine by pouring bottles and bottles of it into an open-air hot spring bath. The result is happy people in hot pink watered wine stinking of booze and loving it. Photo here.

Much like the way chocolate used all over the body in spas delivers endorphins without the calories, bathing in wine surely delivers antioxidants through absorption. It probably also gets you a little drunk, but just in case, they sip the wine while they’re in there, too.

This is an annual tradition (this was the fourth of their little bacchanals), so wine lovers, make your reservations for next year.

[via AFP]