Wouldn’t it be nice to travel the world without worrying about hotel expenses (plus, a thriving creative community to greet you?) The Creators Inn in Gothenburg and now Stockholm, as The Moment explains, sets “aside a block of rooms in [a capsule hotel] for starving artists, designers, musicians, mimes, whoever applies and is deemed worthy of subsidizing.” (I wonder if they accept bloggers?) “The reason for coming to town is more important than the title on your business card,” explains the proprietor. “Meeting up with an old Swedish friend to go clubbing is … not a valid reason to be granted a free stay.” In Paris, at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, you can sleep in beds around the shelves so long as you sweep the floors (or work on that novel.)
Joanne travels: Book Expo in NYC on the 30th. Portland and Seattle June 11-14. And SF for a long layover on the 15th. Heading to London and Berlin mid-July. email me if you’d like to meet up! This month is going to be a busy one for me as I’m working on the book proposal. But I’ve got a few long posts in draft form I hope to finish up before the technology discussed becomes obsolete.
For some time I’ve thought about running away this autumn to Berlin to complete the book. As it turns out, enough people have acted on this fantasy to merit a NYT Styles piece (”ultracheap nooks for the aspiring authors who need room only for a laptop.”) Time for Plan B.
Is that a fake letter or is someone really complaining Iceland is cold in February? Another crazy person writes that “Paris is a Third World country masquerading as a civilized society.” Here’s what LA Times readers think of popular vacation destinations. Seattle: “boring.” Lima: “unhappy people.” Bali: “poverty everywhere and beggars.” Lake Tahoe: “second-rate scenery.” Greece: “stinky, crowded.” Istanbul: “filthy.” Don’t even think about going to Austin, you’re better off checking out “Honolulu or St. Augustine, Fla.” (WTF?) Even the Grand Canyon is “certainly a geological sight to behold” but “the campgrounds are atrocious, about as charming as pitching a tent in the alley behind your local big-box store.” (via Doree who adds, “Amazing. People will complain about anything!”)
From The Economist: “[The Texas Renaissance Festival] is the largest Renaissance festival in the country; it had more than 400,000 visitors over eight weekends this year. But more than 150 of these productions have popped up in America since 1963, when a “pleasure faire” was first held in southern California.”
“A good question to ask before you start a career in corporate business is, are you lonely in hotel rooms?” – gone to croatoan
“To Europeans, America represents creativity, inventiveness, openness, popular culture and at the same time, atrocious poverty and racism bubble to the surface during and after events like Hurricane Katrina of 2005 or the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. Meanwhile, Americans are slowly learning how Europe brushes its inter-ethnic and inter-religious problems with a broad veneer of secularism and the theory that everyone is all the same, or at least should be.” – Cyrus Farivar
5 Underwater Habitats. The flashiest, unsurprisingly, is in development in Dubai. Anyone want to run off to Maldives with me, and dine alongside the stingrays?
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