Time-Lapse Video Shows Europe’s Changing Borders, 1000 AD to 2003

by McLean Robbins on




This quirky time lapse shows how Europe‘s borders have expanded, contracted, and expanded again. We’re pretty sure the original intent was to help those studying for a World Geography test or the like, but it’s a fun tool for travelers too – is the area you’re visiting this summer a part of the original Hapsburg empire? Has the hotel you’re staying in always been in France? Watch it. We’re sure you’ll enjoy.

In-Flight Cellphone Calls To Be Allowed On Virgin Atlantic Flights

by Meg Nesterov on

Passengers on Virgin Atlantic will soon be able to make in-flight cellphone calls, send texts and browse the web on their way home from Europe, it was just announced. The new service is part of the airline’s upgrade to the Airbus A330, which will also provide expanded in-flight entertainment, USB ports and a very spiffy upper class. Cellphone service will initially be available only on London to New York flights, but will be expanded to more cities by the year’s end. There are a lot of caveats, however: you’ll need to be on a Vodafone or O2 network, only 10 calls will be allowed at one time and service won’t be cheap. Calls will cost 1 GBP per minute and texts 20p each. You’ll also still need to turn off your devices for takeoff and landing, and turn them off within 250 miles of US airspace, so no flight-long games of Words With Friends.

Gadling readers: would you use this service? Do you think it’s any improvement over the old-school in-flight phones? Or will it just be another amazing innovation that no one appreciates?

[Photo courtesy Flickr user Highways Agency]

Torture Museums Look At The Dark Side Of History

by Sean McLachlan on


Ah, the Good Old Days, when everyone lived in a perpetual Renaissance Festival quaffing ale and shouting “Huzzah!” It must have been wonderful.

Not!

People died young, the cities were filled with rats and open sewers, and God help you if you ever got arrested. You’d be taken to a torture chamber in order to “confess” while being subjected to various imaginative torture devices, like the rack shown here in a photo courtesy Jan Mehlich. It’s from the torture exhibit in the Lubuska Land Museum in Zielona Góra, Poland. A victim would be tied to it and stretched until his limbs popped out of their sockets. The spikes on the cylinder would add an extra level of agony. This museum stands out among torture museums in that many of its objects were used in the local area.

Germany was a pretty rough place back in the Bad Old Days, and this has spawned several good torture museums in the country. The biggest is the Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg, with 2,000 square meters of displays on torture, execution and medieval law. Nuremberg has a preserved torture chamber underneath city hall.

Italy was a rough place too, and you can find out more at the Criminal Museum in Rome, the Museo della Tortura housed in the Devil’s Tower in San Gimignano and the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin. The latter museum is interesting because it reflects the 19th century belief that a person’s physical features, especially the shape of the skull, could show criminal proclivities. Hundreds of skulls, brains and death masks from executed criminals are on display, as well as the weapons they used in their crimes and the instruments of their demise.

%Gallery-155223%Many torture museums are found inside castles. The Tower of London has some nasty instruments on display, as does Gravensteen in Ghent, Belgium. Like Poland’s Land Museum, most of the items are locally sourced in a kind of Slow Torture Movement. Check out my post on Muider Castle, which offers a peek at a medieval dungeon that’s an easy day trip from Amsterdam.

If you’re in Amsterdam and don’t feel like a day trip, check out the cheesy yet interesting Torture Museum. Also in The Netherlands is the Prison Gate Museum in The Hague, which may be the world’s oldest torture museum, having opened in 1882. It offers glimpses of such fearsome places as the Jailer’s Quarters, the Interrogation Room and the Judge Chambers. One interesting detail they tell you on the tour is that imprisonment was not considered a punishment, just a way to take a criminal out of circulation until the trial. To really punish an evildoer, they had to be tortured, publicly humiliated, or executed.

In Lima, Peru, you can visit the underground prison and torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition Museum is a sobering look at what happens when a single religion gets to dominate society.

As you can see, most of these museums display the horrors of the past. One museum that doesn’t shy away from more recent crimes against humanity is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which shows what the Khmer Rouge did to systematically destroy Cambodian society. Gadling blogger Jessica Marati said it’s “one of the most maddening, saddening, and intense places you’ll ever visit in your life.” When visiting torture museums, it’s good to remember that these barbarous practices are still used by many governments today.

How To (Legally) Stay In Europe For More Than 90 Days

by Chris Owen on

Planning an extended stay in Europe, travelers are often focused on what it takes to be there longer than 90 days, what is commonly believed to be the limit for tourists. Armed with a desire to stay longer, travel blog Nomadic Matt found a way and shares it in a recent blog post.

Getting to the heart of the matter, Matthew Kepnes, founder of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site, blogs “when people talk about the ’90 day limit,’ they are talking about restrictions on the Schengen Visa, which is the visa rule that governs 26 countries in Europe.”

The easy way to stay longer than 90 days in non-Schengen countries, says Kepnes, is to vary your location when traveling in Europe, moving to a different country near the end of 90 days. That starts the clock ticking all over again.

But those 26 European countries that are covered under the Schengen Visa are really more like states and staying longer than 90 days can be tricky.

“When most people ask me about staying in Europe, they mean staying longer in the Schengen zone. After all, it covers 26 countries and visiting so many destinations in 90 days can be a little rushed (it is an average of 3.4 days per country),” says Kepnes offering a solution that tells of loopholes and other ways to hang around Europe, legally.

See more at Nomadic Matt‘s.Want to know more about the Schengen Visa? See Schengen and the disappearance of European passport stamps by Gadling’s Alex Robertson Textor.

This video from Schengen Visa Guide also contains clear instructions, examples and a step-by-step approach that will ensure your success in getting a Schengen Visa.



[Flickr photo by www.jordiarmengol.net (Xip)]

Travel For The Inexplicable Human Connection

by Grant Martin on

Editing a contribution to the site from Jill Paris the other day I was reviewing her bio at the end of the article and took note of the reason why she travels: “for the inexplicable human connection.”

Those connections affect all of us when we travel, whether we know it or not, and it’s a big part of what makes the journey so special. For me, personally, I have wonderful stories of meeting random groups of friends on the steps of Montmartre as well as terrible, dark confessions of trips gone awry and of love lost. But the threads of all of these narratives help weave the tapestry of my life, and with them, I’ve become a better and stronger person.

Luke Rudkowski’s journey through France were affected by a kind stranger named Joel, the sort of person that opens his home to travelers and greets them with kindness and compassion. It’s a story of budget travel and of short lived relationships of the road — and it’s told perfectly above.