Seven ways to explore the world without leaving home

by Katie Hammel on

Travel can be an escape – a chance to get away from the stress of our daily lives – but it can also be much more. Travel is about exploring a destination (new or familiar), understanding and connecting with the local culture, and seeing how people in a different place live.

Even more than the physical act of moving to a new place, traveling is about discovery, and just because you can’t get away from home at a particular time doesn’t mean you can’t still embrace that philosophy of adventure. Here are seven ways to “travel” without leaving your hometown.
Movies
Movies can take us to other worlds – real or imagined, of this Earth or not. Next time you are suffering from serious wanderlust, pick up a movie set in a foreign land. Explore the sweeping grasslands of Kenya with Out of Africa, ride the back roads of South America with Che in The Motorcycle Diaries, wander the chaotic streets of Tokyo through Lost in Translation, or explore India by train on The Darjeeling Limited.
Public transportation roulette
Travel is all about exploring a foreign place. For most of us, that doesn’t mean we need to venture far to discover a place that is new to us. I’ve lived in Chicago for three years, but there are still pockets of the city I’ve yet to step foot on. It’s easy to fall into a routine and only visit the same reliable places in your hometown, but this can lead to a feeling of boredom. Spice up your daily life by seeking out new places in your own city.

If you live somewhere with a good train or bus system, pick a weekend to play what I like to call “public transportation roulette.” In Chicago, I hop on one of the El lines and get off at a stop I’ve never visited before. Then I spend the afternoon checking out the area’s restaurants and shops. If your city has an ethnic enclave, like a Chinatown or Greektown, spending an evening wandering the streets there can also feel like a mini cultural journey.

Books
Just like movies, books can take us places (see, that poster in the Library didn’t lie!). Whether you prefer to read creative nonfiction set in a specific place or places – explore the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese with J. Maarten Troust in Lost on Planet China, ride the rails through Asia with Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar, or return to the Paris of the 1920’s in Earnest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast – or to read more about the idea of wandering (try The Little Price by Antoine de Saint Exupery), books can help keep us in a traveling state of mind.

For a whirlwind tour of the world, try an anthology like the Best American Travel Writing series. Or for a mini shot of travel inspiration, I keep a copy of Make the Most of Your Time on Earth: A Rough Guide to the World on my coffee table and flip through it often.


TV
When I start to get itchy feet but know that I don’t have a trip scheduled for a few weeks, I start renting all my favorite travel shows. I explore the world through food with Anthony Bourdain on No Reservations, or laugh along with Ian Wright and the Globe Trekker crew as I learn about destinations I plan on visiting in the future.

Food and drink
Traveling through my taste buds is one of my favorite ways to “virtually” experience a destination. In most countries I visit, I try to schedule a cooking class to learn to make at least one local dish. When I get home, I can then make that meal any time I am feeling nostalgic for the country. I can’t make fresh pasta without being transported to my honeymoon in Tuscany. Empanadas and some Malbec wine take me back to Buenos Aires, and fresh paella recalls my days in Barcelona.

Even if you didn’t learn to make a special dish while you were in a country, you can try to recreate memorable meals at home, or just pick a local specialty from a country you’d like to visit, and make it with the help of a recipe found online. If you can’t cook more than a piece of toast, no worries – just head to your local ethnic restaurant. You might not be fooled into thinking you are really in Ethiopia as you spoon up stewed meats with spongy injera bread, but a little taste of a foreign country might satiate you until your next trip.

Theme nights
Remember that episode of the Gilmore Girls when, after Rory’s big trip to Asia was cancelled, Lorelei turned the living room into a tour of the continent with food and decorations from various Asian countries? Just like that, you can host a theme night to celebrate a destination you’ve been to or are planning a trip to. Heading to Japan? Host a Japanese night, complete with sake, anime movies, sushi and geisha costumes. If you have friends of various ethnicities, take turns hosting and ask each person to tell a story about their culture’s traditions.

Cultural centers and events
A large part of traveling is learning about another culture, and while nothing can really substitute for the experience of being there, a trip to a local cultural center can help you explore the history and traditions of a culture in your local area. Fore example, in Chicago, the Irish American Heritage Center hosts traditional Irish music at the onsite pub. When I sit there and drink a Guinness, I know I’m still in the US, but if I close my eyes and listen to the the proliferation of Irish accents around me, I almost feel like I’m back in Dublin.

Cultural festivals, which often feature food, music, and art from the home country, are another festive way to immerse yourself in a foreign culture.

Get out and go: Events around the world (November 25-30)

by Brenda Yun on

If you’re living in America, you know what’s happening this Thursday. For those of you who aren’t in New York to catch the Thanksgiving Day Parade, there are other awesome activities going on this weekend. If you’re close and have time, then you have no excuse to get out and go!

  • Charlotte – The Carolinas Thanksgiving Day Parade will be held this Thursday, November 26. This 62th annual parade is one of the largest get togethers of Carolinians that takes place during the year.
  • Brunei – Brunei’s annual Festival of Sacrifice will be held this Friday, November 27. This is also known as Hari Raya Korban or Hari Raya Aidiladha. Goats and cows are sacrificed to commemorate the actions of the Islamic Prophet Ibrahim. The meat is then distributed among relatives, friends and the less fortunate.
  • England – The Draught for Drought Winter Beer Festival will be held at the New Inn in Witney from November 26-29. The festival will have an extensive selection of ales, traditional cuisine, and live entertainment. The event is a benefit for the African Children’s Fund’s “Draught for Drought” program. The proceeds help East African communities to find sustainable ways of capturing and storing water.

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

South by Southeast: Taunggyi Balloon Festival

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Daily life is a struggle in Myanmar. For the average local, working days are filled with long hours of backbreaking manual labor, meager pay and no weekends or vacation time. Considering this exhausting schedule, festivals and holidays are special times – a chance to kick back, relax and let loose. In Myanmar’s Shan State, one of the most important of these festivities is the annual Taunggyi Balloon Festival.

Over the course of this annual eight-day event, teams compete to design and launch the most impressive hot air balloons: some shaped like giant birds, zebras and cows; others filled with a potent mix of fireworks; still others elegantly lit by flickering candles. Each balloon’s launch is symbolic of Buddhist hopes for the purging of human sin, gently gliding off and disappearing into the heavens. More than 200 such entries are launched each festival season, continually rising throughout the day and night.

Surrounding this magnificent hot-air balloon spectacle is a chaotic and festive carnival sideshow: drunken men shout at giant gambling wheels, open cooking fires sizzle with pots of Mohinga soup and pig entrails and children scream with joy on huge Ferris Wheels (powered solely by jumping men). It’s as if the Fourth of July, Las Vegas and a giant refugee camp had suddenly collided in one huge, heaving, wonderful mass of humanity and celebration.

During my visit to Myanmar this past month, I had a chance to visit the Taunggyi Balloon Festival and get first-hand taste of this awesome event. Wondering what happened? Keep reading below for more…

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Getting There
Upon arriving in Myanmar, I immediately began planning my visit to Taunggyi. This was easier said than done: the event is among the most popular in all of Myanmar and hotels in Taunggyi are fully booked for weeks in advance. Even finding a bus to Taunggyi during festival time presents a problem: as many are jammed with eager locals.

As an alternative, I arranged to begin my Taunggyi visit from the nearby Shan State town of Kalaw. The town has its own smaller balloon festivities and is about a 3 hour taxi ride from Taunggyi. Many visitors also consider Nyaungshwe, the main city on Inle Lake, which has plentiful lodging options. Both cities make convenient bases to begin your exploration of the festival. A taxi to/from the event costs around $40-50.

The Balloons
Though Taunggyi is most famous for the nighttime balloons, the daytime balloons are equally impressive. Unlike the evening launches, which explode with colorful fireworks, the daytime launches show off Myanmar craftsmanship, with each colorful entry shaped like a different animal. On the large festival launching grounds, amorphous piles of fabric slowly rise into fantasy creatures of heat and shape: curious pigeons and lazy cows emerge and drift away, carried at the whim of the warm winter breeze. Some entries are not so lucky: an errant gust of wind or careless touch of the torch and the fragile creations are consumed by flame.

Soon the sun began to slip behind the nearby hills, bringing with it a growing anticipation for the evening’s main event: the fire balloons. Before launch each entry is brought to a judging station to be weighed. A typical balloon contains about 75 pounds of explosives, bringing with it the potential for both delight and catastrophe. Several days before my visit an errant balloon exploded too low to the ground, showering spectators with a bath of molten paper that injured 200. My guesthouse owner advised to bring a hat to protect my hair from catching fire.

Suddenly the evening’s first fire balloon began to rise from among carpet of tiny humans, a glowing, undulating mushroom of explosives silhouetted against the blackened sky. The crowd let out an excited gasp. The balloon inflated towards its maximum size, anxiously tugging at its tethering below. The handlers nervously gazed up at months of work and preparation, and released their offering to its fate. The balloon’s rise was unspectacular at first: lazily floating along, unsure of its purpose. Then suddenly, as if triggered by some celestial epiphany, the balloon’s base exploded in a massive powderkeg of light and sound and color and activity.

Nothing prepared me for that first explosion, bigger than any Fourth of July shell I had seen back home. It blanketed the sky and sent me running for cover, awed and delighted by what I had seen. Over the course of the next several hours another 6-8 balloons were slowly launched, but nothing compared to that first explosion. I spent the night lost beneath the festival’s many carnival tents, playing and drinking and celebrating with the locals until dawn. Then it was time to head home. All too soon, the vivid dream I had witnessed at Taunggyi was gone: floating off into my memory like the fragile fire balloons, slowly disappearing in the sky.

Curious to read more about visiting Myanmar? Read the initial post on my recent trip HERE.

Gadling writer Jeremy Kressmann is spending the next few months in Southeast Asia. You can read other posts on his adventures “South by Southeast” HERE.

Get out and go: Events around the world (November 18-21)

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!

  • Mexico – Birders will unite in the Yucatan Peninsula for the Yucatan Bird Festival from November 19-22. For the 8th consecutive year, the festival offers a wide range of field trips, exhibits, conferences, and a “birdathon.” Objectives of this annual festival include promoting the rich diversity of bird species found in the Yucatan and developing a conservationist culture among tourists and tour providers.
  • California – The California Surf Festival celebrates awareness and support for surf history preservation this weekend from November 19-22. It is an international event destination bringing people from all over the world to Oceanside, California, to experience surf culture through films, music, art, photography and interaction with those who embody the culture as well as highlight the surf community of California.
  • Amsterdam – The International Documentary Film Festival begins this Thursday, November 19. The film extravaganza will present over 300 documentaries over the course of 10 days, ending on the 29th.
  • Israel – Shalem Dance Festival will begin this Thursday, November 19 in Jerusalem. Over 50 Israeli and guest dancers perform in original contemporary dance works. This year’s highlight will feature contemporary dance ensembles from Africa. The festival ends on the 21st.

  • India – The Mim Kut and Pawl Kut Festival will be celebrated this Friday, November 20 in Mizoram. Celebrated in the last week of November or the first week of December, the festival celebrates the completion of the harvesting season.
  • Helsinki – This year Helsinki’s Chocolate Festival has a larger “box,” as it is held at Wanha Satama fair centre November 21-22. The festivali celebrates the diversity of the sweet stuff. Choco-connaisseurs share their sweet wisdom about the impact of chocolate on health, wellbeing, history of chocolate, production and variety.

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

Hawaii delights with a 10-day international film extravaganza

by Brenda Yun on

For ten glorious days (which began yesterday), Hawaii will host its international film festival until October 25. The film line-up is chock full of Asian films as well as other international cinema delights.

This year’s centerpiece films on opening, mid-festival, and closing nights demonstrate the diverse films that make up this year’s deep line-up. The one I’d like to see is “Red Cliff” – a John Woo film that is based on the famous Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” You can watch the Red Cliff trailer below.

The Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF) started as a project of the East-West Center at the University of Hawai`i Manoa campus in Honolulu in 1981. Back then, only seven films were screened from six countries to an audience of 5,000. Today, HIFF is the premiere cinematic event in the Pacific that has had more than one dozen screening sites on six Hawaiian Islands and draws an audience of 80,000 or more from around the state, the nation and throughout the world.
HIFF is unique in discovering features, documentaries and shorts from Asia made by Asians, films about the Pacific made by Pacific Islanders, and films made by Hawai`i filmmakers that present Hawai`i in a culturally accurate way. The film festival also conducts seminars, workshops, special award presentation receptions with top Asian, Pacific and North American filmmakers.

Most of the films will be playing at the Dole Cannery Theaters in downtown Honolulu. For a complete film listing or to order tickets in advance, visit the HIFF website.