Photo of the day – Bored in Morocco

by Meg Nesterov on


Some say if you’re bored, then you’re boring (it’s even a lyric in the ’90s favorite song Flagpole Sitta). It’s something older people say to shame you when you’re being a sullen teenager. But I’d argue there are certainly legitimately boring experiences, even while traveling. Waiting for a train in the middle of nowhere. Standing in line for museum tickets. Anything in an airport. But this gentleman in Morocco doesn’t look terribly boring, or at least not his store. I shudder to think how he does inventory. Flickr user Calvin Lee has found something interesting in this man’s boredom and made it a great portrait.

Send us your best travel portraits by adding them to the Gadling Flickr pool and we may choose it for a future Photo of the Day.

How do you pass the time in airports during delays?

by Mike Barish on

With nasty weather once again enveloping the Northeastern United States and winter showing no signs of ending anytime soon, thousands of travelers find themselves killing a lot of time at airports. Flight delays are a fact of life and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it unless you want to pay the fees necessary to change your flights. That leaves us all spending much of our holiday or business trip twiddling our thumbs in crowded, boring airport terminals.

Earlier this week, we showed you how one imaginative traveler entertained herself in Pittsburgh International Airport. However, not all of us are that creative (or bold), so we have to find other activities to keep us sane. Gadling wants to know what your favorite time-killer is during a long flight delay.

Let us know by voting in the poll below and feel free to elaborate in the comments.

%Poll-42189%

Passing the time on your long flight

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Unless you’re like Gadling blogger Grant, who might have been genetically engineered by Boeing, it’s inevitable you’re going to get bored on a flight sooner or later. This is especially true on transcontinental flights, where you’re guaranteed to be stuck inside your cylindrical prison for at least 6 hours if not longer. No matter how many awful in-flight movies, magazines and episodes of The Wire on your iPod you have to amuse yourself, you can still expect to get bored eventually.

For the gaming-obsessed bloggers at Joystiq, the tedium of these long flights is just an opportunity to invent some creative ways to pass the time. If you’re desperate to hold back the boredom (or just cannot sleep on planes like me) consider the following (questionable) game suggestions:

  • BING! – This game only requires a bag of airline pretzels or snack mix. Start with three pretzels and set the rest to the side as the “house.” Each round bet one, two or three pretzels on which side of the airplane cabin will be first to ring their flight attendant call button. If you guess right, take as many pretzels as you bet from the house. If you lose, put the pretzels back. Keep playing until you’ve either won or lost all the pretzels from the middle.
  • In-flight Catalog Scavenger Hunt – As one Joystiq commenter suggests, compete against a friend to find the most ridiculous items from the in-flight catalog. The person to find the item with highest cost-to-uselessness ratio wins. Keep your eyes peeled for the remote control dragonfly.
  • Cellphone standoff – As the plane begins to land, try to guess the number of cellphones that will be turned on/make noise between the moment the wheels touch the ground to when the seatbelt light is turned off.

We don’t necessarily suggest playing these games unless you’re desperate, but with flight delays and long waits on the tarmac all but standard these days, it’s always good to have a few backup options. What do you do to amuse yourself on long flights?