Eat, Sleep, Breathe, Travel

Google goes street-view on Great Barrier Reef

It’s definitely not as good as the real thing, but this is kind of cool. Google Street View now allows you to tour a section of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.

As I said, it’s kind of cool. In reality I think the idea of it is cooler than the actual interactivity. You get to poke around and wander a bit, but at the end of the day it seems a little ho-hum, in my humble opinion. Maybe that's because there are no streets in the Great Barrier Reef.

I would love to see it with my own eyes some day. I have never been to Australia, but I did just spend a bit of time on Wikipedia reading about the Great Barrier Reef. I learned some cool stuff:

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef in the world. It includes more than 2,900 individual reefs, which stretch for 1,600 miles, covering an area of 133,000 square miles. It can be seen from outer space. It is home to more than 1,500 fish species, and is at least a temporary stop for whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea turtles, saltwater crocodiles, sea snakes, and a gazillion other species (that’s not an official number). And it’s all made of coral, which is a living animal species in itself.

Anyway, you can now look at part of it (kind of) in Google Street View.

Alternatively, you could actually go see it for yourself on an EF College Break trip to Australia.

Photo: Paul via Flickr

A groundbreaking day for EF

A little bit of EF company news today. They held an official groundbreaking on an amazing brand new building in Cambridge, MA.

I like to look at cool architecture, especially when I travel, but I’m not usually particularly wowed by artists' renderings of future buildings. Today, however, I was wowed. Look at it (see below). It has a giant glass waterfall cascading down the front of it into the Charles River. That is very cool.

To celebrate the groundbreaking, EF hosted a big ceremony earlier today. I have seen pictures. It looked like fun. Food trucks, a speech by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, a live set by Passion Pit. Sounds like a nice way to spend a couple hours on a sunny September Tuesday.

This building will become the new home for EF’s main North American office (EF is the parent company of EF College Break). With a scheduled completion date in 2014, the building will be located just next to the current building, in a picturesque green park called NorthPoint Park. It will be ten stories tall, with tiered outdoor seating, and all sorts of other cool features.

But mostly I can’t stop looking at that glass waterfall. Very cool.

Exciting day for EF.

Photo. boston.com

Window-shopping for guys in Paris

This made me laugh out loud a bit. It’s a storefront in Paris with men standing in shop windows hoping to score dates with female passers-by.

The campaign is sponsored by a French dating site called Adopte Un Mec (“mec” is French slang for “guy”). They put men in the store window, and let them pose and preen inside gift boxes designed to make them look like dolls or action figures on a store shelf. Women walking by on the street can look and see if they want to date these men. It’s window-shopping taken to new and creative lengths.

As one woman in the video says, it’s a little like the red light district in Amsterdam, except it’s men in the windows instead of women, and it’s a whole lot more wholesome. And they're standing inside toy packages with labels like "le Rocker" and "Mr. Muscle".

Apparently, adopteunmec.com has been sweeping the nation in France, with 4.7 million people signed up. I like their logo, which is a stick figure of a man tumbling into a shopping cart pushed by a woman.

The Adopt Un Mec storefront event in Paris is only for a limited time—before it goes touring the rest of France and then Switzerland—so those of you traveling to Paris next year will not have the chance to shop for men posing in windows. Sorry.

Photo via huffingtonpost.co.uk

A billion tourists projected for 2012

This is pretty amazing. Stats from the first half of this year, brought to you by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, project that the world will see more than a billion international tourists in 2012. This would be the first time ever the total tourists surpassed a billion.

Between January and June of this year, 467 million tourists traveled the world. That’s a lot of tourists. Not surprisingly, the summer months of July and August are the busiest travel time, so they expect that by the year’s end there will have been more than a billion people traveling internationally.

Last year, there were 982 million total international tourists. That’s also a lot of tourists. The most visited country was France, with 79.5 million visitors. Europe, in general, was the most visited region.

Tourism is increasing across the board, all over the world. This is a great thing. I love to travel. Travel has been, and will continue to be, an important part of my life (I wouldn't write this blog otherwise). And beyond my own feelings about it, the fact that travel is increasing worldwide is a good thing for the world. The more people travel, the more they'll understand each other, and the more people understand each other, the better everyone will get along.

A billion people seems like a good start.

Photo: Thomas LePlus via Flickr

France losing the "vous" thanks to Twitter?

As a one-time French speaker, I thought this article was pretty interesting. It says that thanks to the informal communication on Twitter and other social media, the use of “tu” instead of “vous” may slowly take over in French society.

In French (like in Spanish and Italian), there are two ways to say “you”: there’s “tu” for informal use, like friends and family; and then there’s “vous” for formal situations or someone deserving of respect. I remember when I did a high school exchange and lived with a family in Paris, I was never sure which one to use with my host mother. (It ended up being “tu”.)

On social media like Twitter and Facebook, “tu” is the go-to form. Since communication online is generally informal and friendly, that has become the norm.

Not surprisingly, some older French people aren’t happy with this. One guy, Laurent Joffrin, director of a French news magazine, got upset last year when one of his Twitter followers addressed him with “tu”. In his mind, “tu” is an insult between strangers, something people yell at each other when they have road rage. But in today’s online world, it’s just the way people talk to each other. Twitter is by nature informal, and that’s just the way it is.

As the article says, Spain and Italy have the same thing going on (the informal “tu” taking over the formal "usted" or "Lei" through social media). Though, it sounds like there is less resistance to the shift in those countries. I think France, in general, tends to be more protective of its traditions and culture.

In any event, I always think it’s interesting to see how language and culture interplay. And in this case, it’s interesting to see how the culture of social media affects the language, and then back again to affect the culture. We’ll see how it all plays out in the coming years and decades. Someday, “vous” may become a thing of the past.

Photo: bbc.co.uk

Amazing kites hit the Sydney skies

I’m not a big kite person, so I wasn’t expecting to be wowed or anything when I clicked on a link about the Festival of the Winds in Sydney. But then I saw the enormous whale floating in the sky over Bondi Beach, and I was indeed wowed. These kites are pretty cool.

The Festival of the Winds is an annual kite festival that takes place around this time of year on Sydney’s most popular beach, Bondi Beach. As you can see, we’re not talking about little diamond-shaped kites with little ribbons fluttering from the tail. We’re talking about giant whales, manta rays, tigers, teddy bears and many more.

The event is organized by the Australian Kiteflyers Society, and, like many festivals, it is about more than just kites. There are international food stalls, dance workshops, puppet shows and, yes, kite-flying demonstrations. This was the 34^th Festival of the Winds event, and it drew about 50,000 spectators from all over the world.

Bondi Beach, meanwhile, is a great spot for this kind of event. It’s definitely the most famous Sydney beach, and it’s considered to be one of the world’s best overall. In a country full of legendary beaches, Bondi holds its own among the cream of the crop. Kite festival or no kite festival.

Photo: news.com.au

The college life in Galway and Heidelberg

It’s back-to-school time, and EF College Break is having a special sale for the occasion.

This has me thinking about two cities on EF College Break trips where the local university plays a central role in the city’s atmosphere. I'm talking about Galway and Heidelberg.

The University of Ireland, Galway, was founded in 1845 and is a major part of the city today. It has about 17,000 students, making up almost a quarter of the city’s population. The college is one of the things that gives Galway the artsy and bohemian atmosphere it’s known for. You can’t go anywhere without hearing some kind of live music, whether it’s out in the streets or in any number of pubs. Galway is also one of the festival capitals of the world. They have tons of them, everything from the famous Galway Oyster Festival (coming up soon actually) to the Galway Arts Festival (takes place each July).

The other collegiate city on a lot of EF College Break trips is Heidelberg, Germany. This medieval city is home to Heidelberg University, which is the oldest university in Germany and was the third university established in the Holy Roman Empire. It also happens to have been home to the inventor of the bicycle back in the early 19^th century. A lot of history here.

These days, a lot of the Heidelberg city life revolves around the university. You see it in the youthful atmosphere around town, and you also see it in the sprawling university campus itself, which can be worth a visit. There are about 27,000 students enrolled. Highlights include the Studentenkarzer (an old detainment pen where misbehaving students were thrown back in the day) and a nice botanical gardens.

Photo: doistrakh via Flickr

A long-lost Shakespeare theater found in London

This is pretty cool. At least for those who are into Shakespeare, or history, or theaters. A couple months ago they discovered the remains of Shakespeare's Curtain Theatre in east London. This was the theater where classics like Romeo and Juliet were performed for the first time.

The Curtain Theatre isn’t as famous as The Globe, which was where all the plays were performed in Shakespeare’s heyday. (These days they have a reconstruction of the original Globe, and you can go see performances there. I’ve never done it, but I'd like to some day.)

The Curtain was The Globe before there was The Globe. It was built in 1577, but by the end of the century, it had fallen out of use. It was dismantled at some point in the 17^th century, and over the centuries since, its location had become a mystery. Until now. They found the remains in a yard in a part of London called Shoreditch.

I like Shakespeare. I mean, I don’t sit around reading Shakespearean sonnets in my spare time, but I was an English major in college, and I took a Shakespeare class, and I give his plays two thumbs up. I also like history, so the idea of discovering the actual remains of the medieval theatre where London commoners went to see his plays is pretty cool.

Photo: guardian.co.uk