Valentine’s Idea: Chocolate Tours

by Willy Volk on

What better way to celebrate this sweet occasion than by stuffing your face with the sweetest sweet on earth — chocolate!

  • Every Saturday, Boston’s Chocolate Tour takes guests on a trolley ride through Boston’s finest culinary landmarks. Of course, guests enjoy a sumptuous array of decadent chocolate desserts from the city’s best chefs, and are treated to the history, myths, trivia, and legends surrounding chocolate.
  • Chocoholic Tours has a variety of options for sampling Melbourne, Australia’s rich history and stunning chocolate. Bonus: since the tours are walking tours, you can burn off calories as you consume them!
  • Join culinary guide/pastry chef David Lebovitz, author of The Great Book of Chocolate, for a chocolate-y exploration in Paris. An expert on the chocolate shops and bakeries of the City of Lights, David treats guests to a memorable tour featuring the best of what France has to offer. Private tours are also available.
  • Chicago Chocolate Tours provides guided walking and tasting tours of some of Chicago’s finest chocolatiers. What’s more, they even have a special Valentine’s Package.
  • London’s Chocolate Ecstasy Tours offers 4-hour long tours (guided by a Chocolate Ecstasy Chocoholic Guide), through London’s side streets and alleys. Participants sample chocolates, enjoy chocoholic chats, take a lavish hot chocolate break, enjoy special prices on the ultimate chocolate luxuries, and receive a goody bag!
  • One day isn’t enough for your chocolate-loving mouth? InTrend offers 7-day Escorted Tours for real chocolate lovers! Spend a week in Brussels participating in chocolate-making demonstrations at chocolate factories, and sample chocolate desserts after sumptuous meals.
  • Looking for a more affordable option? San Fransisco’s Sharffen Berger requires a reservation but offers free walking tours through its factory.

Chocolate tours sound like my kind of holiday celebration. Yum!

Valentine’s Day: Fanning or Finding Love at an Art Museum

by Jamie Rhein on

Art museums make me feel amorous. It’s true. A walk through rooms filled with paintings, particularly if they’re from the Impressionism art movement, soften me right up. The sounds of shoes on marble or wood floors, the polite guards making sure people don’t get too close to the artwork, the creativity and genius of human beings in an outpouring of color and images. Yum!

Evidently, I’m not alone in my mushiness. According to a survey done by the 24 Hour Museum in the United Kingdom, 65% of the respondents said they would take a person to an art museum to make a favorable impression. (Hmm. impression. Impressionism. Is there a connection here?) Some (20%) said they had fallen in love in a museum. Was it in front of a Renoir, I wonder?

In this one research article I came across by Courtney Spousta, she points out that in the movie Play It Again Sam, Woody Allen’s character goes to the Modern Art Museum in NYC looking for love. Throughout the article, she cites examples of how certain nights at art museums are geared to help people mix and mingle. At the Milwaukee Art Museum there are even speed dating events. The last one was on February 2, it seems.

This month there are some art museums I came across that are capitalizing on the romance and love theme.

If you do head to a museum with that special someone or you’re out looking for that special someone at an art museum, it wouldn’t hurt to read “Cupid on the prowl” by Mary Louise Schumacher. She gives some tips on what to say to impress particular types of people and what not to say.

Oh, and the most romantic art museum in London according the the 24 Hour Museum survey? It’s the Victoria and Albert.

Valentine’s Idea: Visit A Rose Garden

by Willy Volk on

Valentine’s Day is a special day, when we take the time to slow down, look around us, and appreciate the loved ones in our lives. Maybe, in addition, we also want to stop and smell the roses — literally. There are rose gardens — beautiful, vast, eye-popping rose gardens — the world over. And what could express your unending love more dramatically than a tour through one of these olfactory wonderlands? Here are five of the planet’s most beautiful rose gardens, just waiting for you to come a-calling. Warning: I don’t think they’ll let you snip a souvenir for yourself!

  1. Australia’s National Rose Garden is located on the banks of the Macquarie River at the historic Woolmers Estate in Longford, Tasmania. With varieties dating back to the 18th Century, the roses are available for viewing every day except Christmas.
  2. Hertfordshire, England’s Royal National Rose Society boasts more than 30,000 roses. A major program of bulb plantings has extended the garden season, so that visitors can enjoy the feast of color and beauty from Spring through late Summer. When its current renovation is complete, the Garden will feature an exhibit that demonstrates the History of the Rose.
  3. The Gardens of the American Rose Center, located just outside Shreveport, Louisiana, is the world’s largest rose garden. Five dollars gains you entry into this stunning, stunning, scented scene.
  4. Zakir Hussain Rose Garden is Asia’s largest rose garden. Located in Chandigarh, India, it is spread over 30 acres and features over 1600 different species of roses. If you can hold off your amorous tour until late February, you can participate in the Rose Festival, during which 20,000 people visit the garden.
  5. Though it may not be the biggest, Atlanta’s Carter Center features a beautiful rose garden overlooking the city. Grab a bottle of bubbly, and enjoy the best place in the city to watch the sunset.

Know of another beautiful rose garden? Share your knowledge with us!

24 Hour Museum website: a resource to tour for hours

by Jamie Rhein on

If you are in the United Kingdom or if you are heading there anytime soon, the website “24 Hour Museum,” is a handy reference guide. This is where you can find out about the listings and features of 3,000 museums and heritage sites around the United Kingdom from the large to the small venues. Instead of just listings with brief descriptions, there are downloads of art, other websites and articles about what is going on pretty much everywhere.

One thing I like about the site is that you can find places you may not have thought about. Sure the British Museum in London may be on your list of places to go, but how about The Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester? There’s an exhibit going on with the theme Collective Identity that features the work of 10 Chinese artists.

The 24 Hour Museum also has a feature called Trails. Each trail has a theme that shows travelers what museums and cultural spots have a particular connection to each other. For example, the trail “A History of Enlightenment, Buddhism in London” leads travelers to various museum exhibits, temples and gardens that show a Buddhist influence. There are detailed descriptions of each place so you can brush up on each site’s importance beforehand.

I wish I had known about this site when I was in London for just a day. It would have been great to know what exhibits to look for when we popped in and out of museums in a mad dash to see as much as possible.

Stonehenge: A Neolithic Woodstock

by Erik Olsen on

It is pretty much impossible for me to think about Stonehenge, that magnificent, 4,500 year old rock garden 100 outside of London, without thinking also of a scene from Spinal Tap. If you are not familiar with that scene, well, you either have been living under a stone slab of your own, or perhaps you are tuning in from one of those far-off and distant countries that just got connected to the Internet. If that is the case, then, welcome. Now I urge you to go watch the film Spinal Tap.

And so it is was I listened this story from NPR about all sorts of new revelations about that famous rock clock. While you might have thought that a monument of this size and fame would have been largely studied to death by this point in time, the fact is that enterprising British scientist are still uncovering clues about Stonehenge, and in this report, we learn that the builders of the structure actually lived in a large village around it and, here’s the interesting part, were actually hard-core partiers.

Yes, the grounds around the area are strewn with gnawed animal bones and fire pits and lots of those little drinking hats (made out of granite) with the two tubes (made out of sheep’s intestine) that go right from the beer can to the mouth. OK, I made that last part up, but never underestimate human ingenuity.

Anyhow, I thought the story here was damn fascinating. I listened to it on the subway and despite my mind’s inclination to picture midgets dancing around on a stage, I did manage to learn a lot about a place where I figured all new learning had been exhausted.