New Zealander auctions off Paris Hilton’s boarding pass

by Katie Hammel on

A man flying from New Zealand to Fiji on August 12th found a little surprise at his business class seat. Slipped between the pages of his in-flight magazine was the boarding pass of celebutant Paris Hilton, who had traveled to Fiji a few days prior.

Rather than toss the pass, the man decided to put it up for sale on a New Zealand auction site. Despite his claim that is “certainly has no other value” aside from being an unusual bit of memorabilia, as it “doesn’t smell of her perfume, have anything to do with panties”, the bids started rolling in. The price increased, and the man decided to donate the proceeds of the sale to a local charity.

The auction closed Monday at NZ$710 (US$485). So how would Paris feel if she knew her boarding pass was being auctioned off? Well, she did know – she posted a link on twitter, calling the story “random”.

[via Jaunted]

The postcard goes 3-D

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Even with all the technical developments like email, Skype and Twitter that help travelers stay in touch, the urge to send postcards never seems to go away. There’s something strangely thrilling about sending and receiving one of these decidedly analog pieces of cardboard by snail mail. The physical sense it has traveled vast distances across strange lands to reach you at the mailbox outside your front door.

It’s unlikely then that the postcard is going away any time soon. Instead, it seems to be evolving in form. The fine craftsmen at Wurlington Brothers Press are taking the stodgy old postcard to the next level with their “Build Your Own” series. Much like their 2-D brethren, Build Your Own cards begin as flat pieces of cardstock, featuring famous landmarks from New York and Chicago. But each card also features an added bonus, allowing the recipient to construct a miniature 3-D model of the structure using instructions.

The postcard is already a particulary sensory experience, a tiny remant of the sights of faraway places. Perhaps now the old postcard can add one more trick to its book, adding a sense of space, size and scale to a particularly low-tech medium. Now if we could only get that next email to show up in 3-D as well…

[Via PSFK]

Do you collect souvenirs? Or “youvenirs?”

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Upon returning from many trips abroad, I find I am unable to part with what many would consider the “garbage” that accumulates during your travels. I’m not talking about banana peels or tissues – more like readily disposable items such as mass transit tickets, nightclub flyers and entrance passes to monuments.

For example, I have a used subway ticket from Stockholm that I like to keep in my messenger bag. Or there’s the pack of playing cards I picked up in Buenos Aires. Each item is relatively mundane and not really worth displaying, yet it holds a highly personal story.

Every time I stumble upon these items again during my day-to-day life, it causes me to pause for a moment, remembering where the item came from and how I acquired it. For instance, I remember the 20 random minutes I spent in the crowded Stockholm subway station office trying to buy the tickets pictured above. Or that rainy day in Buenos Aires where we had nothing to do and decided to play poker, wandering around for about an hour in search of cards and trying to explain the concept of “playing cards” to local store owners in Spanish.

What do you do with these items? The more ambitious put them in scrapbooks, but I like to think of these disposable travel items as something altogether different – as “youvenirs.” What is a youvenir you might ask? For me, it’s any highly personal travel memento with little monetary value – that fleeting item that you’ve managed to hold onto because of a memorable experience or highly personal anecdote.
It’s for this reason that a youvenir is fundamentally different than a souvenir. Souvenirs are items you purchased with the intention of remembering and commemorating your trip – that beautiful colored glass bottle, an embroided sweatshirt that says “San Francisco” or a jar of Spanish olives you bought in Madrid.

I find myself collecting fewer and fewer souvenirs these days – there’s something about artificially buying an item just to remind me of a place that rings false. But a youvenir on the other hand is grounded in my personal experiences. As artists like Marcel Duchamp or Robert Rauschenberg have demonstrated, there is something profoundly interesting about everyday objects – something mundane and disposable yet incredibly meaningful depending on your personal context and experience with it.

I like to think that the more each of us travel, the less we acquire souvenirs so we can “brag” or give gifts to our friends and instead begin collecting youvenirs – items that have little monetary value but speak specifically to the unique emotions and experiences each of us attaches to travel.

What do you think about the concept of youvenirs? Do you have any memorable items you’ve acquired that would qualfiy? Click below to see our gallery of examples of “youvenirs” and leave some comments about your own favorite youvenirs below.

%Gallery-44944%

What’s Your Favourite Souvenir? (The Office Cleanout Continues…)

by Brett Atkinson on

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on what to do with the old guidebooks at my office. Part of the shift also involves bringing home a few favourite souvenirs from past travels. Here are some special keepsakes I’ve now got to find room for at home.

  1. A framed front page of La Epoca, the Buenos Aires newspaper, from the day after Eva Peron’s funeral.
  2. An 18th century map of Asia Minor I bought in Istanbul
  3. A screen print by an artist called “O” who hangs out at Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Basically it’s an American flag with the word “Democracy” spelt out with the logos of various American corporations. D for Disney, E for Enron, M for McDonalds…you get the picture.
  4. A faux gold plated microphone from when I played guitar (a shocking version of Wild Thing) at an advertising conference in Cannes, France.
  5. A copy of Kerouac’s Big Sur that I bought at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California

What are the poignant, heart rending or downright tacky travel mementos you hold dearest?

Thanks to kristenhillier on Flickr for the stunning pic of Venice Beach.

Send More Crap Back Home with Panda Poop Souvenirs

by Justin Glow on

A while back, Gadling covered a story about postcards in China made from recycled panda poop. The feces were gathered, presumably cleaned, and compressed into flat sheets of “paper” to be sold to tourists. The Chinese have stepped it up a bit and begun making souvenirs out of the cuddly bear’s dung. Fortunately, the pandas are herbivores, which keeps the little statues odor-free. Gosh, they’re awfully cute, I guess, but it’s still something that made its way through an animal’s digestive tract, and there’s something very wrong about that. Even so, it’s the perfect gift to give to someone who either has an unhealthy obsession with panda bears, or you don’t like very much.

One animals poop is another person’s Chinese keepsake. [via]