Currently house-sitting for Rob and Yvonne.
Cabo San Lucas – Wikipedia
Next week they fly to Vegas to meet up with my Mom and Dad.
Category: travel
review – Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar is the most recent Paul Theroux book.
He retraces his rail journey from Europe through Asia of 30-years earlier.
Theroux has mellowed with age. Now in his mid-60s, he’s less disagreeable than ever before in this, another travel classic.
I’ve read all his travel books. He’s one of my favourite authors. Always entertaining and informative. This one is as good as any of the others. Read it.
Still, critics call Theroux: arrogant, dishonest, a narcissist, a misanthropist.
Certainly he’s envious of greater writers than himself, especially Nobel Prize in Literature winner V. S. Naipaul. Theroux thinks much about the great authors, obviously because he thinks himself just as skilled a wordsmith, unrecognized. Unawarded.
Theroux’s the son of a French-Canadian father and an Italian mother, I learned.
Amazon – Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
This book has rekindled my interest in travel. I’m ruminating future prospects right now.
Aging too, I liked the moments on this long journey where Paul Theroux found himself “content”. Even happy.
Everything I Know About Barbecue, I Learned From Rockin’
Now he’s carrying coal to Newcastle. Barbecue to Texas.
In his day job, Ron Shewchuk is a business consultant who helps organizations communicate better with their employees. In his spare time, he’s built a second career as his alter-ego, Rockin’ Ronnie, international barbecue champion and bestselling cookbook author.
A few years ago Shewchuk had a crazy idea to combine his lifelong passions for outdoor cooking and indoor business communications. The result: a combination multi-course meal and keynote address called “Everything I Know About Communication, I Learned From Barbecue.”
Shewchuk is bringing his smoke-infused business wisdom to Houston’s famed Armadillo Palace on February 26, where he’ll deliver his talk to the local chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators. His visit is timed to coincide with The World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, the first big event of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. …
… read the whole article – Market Watch – Canadian Barbecue Guru Mixes Business with Brisket
Otalo – vacation rental search engine
A new service is getting good press.
Otalo is a vacation rental search engine. Save time and search all the vacation home rental sites at once (kind of like Google, but for vacation rentals).
Just enter what you need once, and let Otalo search all the different rental sites for you. It’s easy to use and you can specify everything you want in a vacation home rental. You can save your favorite rental homes from all the different sites in one central place and share your list with friends and folks with whom you’re planning your vacation. Even if you’re not actively planning a vacation, you can just browse the world, looking at all the cool homes in exciting places. …
I have a lot of friends looking for vacation rentals through one service or another. Otalo wants to list EVERYTHING available in one place.
the future at airports
Remember the movie Total Recall? Commuters were x-rayed to reveal concealed weapons.
It’s coming to airports soon. But will look like this:
AirportTechnology
… you wake on time and make your way to the airport in your battery powered car. At the UnitedDeltaContinental airlines desk you wave your phone in front of the check-in kiosk and a green light indicates that you are cleared to proceed to the security checkpoint.
At the checkpoint, an agent waves his rfid reader tag in front of the wallet in your pocket, and you stick your hand in a biometric ID reader. The agent stares at a hidden display for a few seconds and allows you to walk through the full body scanner. As you pass through the device, you think back to the days when you had to place your bags on that stupid conveyor belt, and how it always delayed getting to the gate on time.
At the gate, you connect your iPhone 5G with the gate information system, and you instantly receive a message about your upgrade request, sadly you’ll be stuck in coach again for this flight.
Boarding is delayed 20 minutes, once it begins, your phone begins to vibrate that your boarding group is allowed to get on the plane. At the gate, you stare into the airline iris scanner, and the gate attendant allows you to board. …
Gadling – The future at the airport involves your phone, fingers and eyes
Get Your Baht To Thailand
We deserve the worldwide recession, in my opinion.
The developed world was living far beyond its means.
The most interesting aspect of the downturn to me are the opportunities that are opening up as economies restructure.
For example, this promotion by Air Asia and the government of Thailand:
AirAsia is offering 100,000 free tickets to Thailand under a regional marketing campaign, ‘Get Your Baht To Thailand’ (a play on Thai currency) to support its tourism industry which was battered by the recent political unrest. The sale of these free tickets commenced yesterday and will be on till tomorrow. These tickets are for travel between January 6, 2009 and March 31, 2009 and can only be purchased online at AirAsia’s website. The airline is giving tickets to Bangkok from Vietnam, Cambodia, Myammar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and China, as well as for flights within Thailand. Passengers will only have to pay airport taxes and administration fee. Also AirAsia last month abolished fuel surcharges on all its flights. …
AirAsia offers 1, 00,000 free tickets to Thailand to boost battered tourism industry
larger version – flickr
Grant Assenheimer in Africa
Grant Assenheimer has his new blog up-and-running on the Doctors Without Borders website.
This post documents his arrival in a small village by plane.
… Before the engine had stopped, they started to sing. Kate, my Project Coordinator and new boss, was also returning to the project after a week in our headquarters for meetings and exclaimed “Look…they are singing! They are singing for you Grant!”
…and they were. Something like “Welcome, welcome, welcome, Mr. Grant…welcome to Shamwana…welcome to logistics…”. The singers were about 25 of my new staff members, a couple of fellow Expats and at least as many kids who had gathered to see just who this new Mazungo was. Incredible. The singing continued as I got out of the plane and headed towards them. Everyone, including myself, had huge smiles on our faces. Handshakes and introductions followed as I met, for the first time, a large part of my new African family. It is really something special to feel so welcome by total strangers. …
DRC – not just the Kivus! – The DRC welcomes another Mazungo
best picture – Slumdog Millionaire
Of all movie recommendations for 2008, the first I downloaded was Slumdog Millionaire.
From Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting …, comes the story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”
Click PLAY or watch the trailer on YouTube.
Actually, I don’t think the trailer does the film justice.
The movie does remind me of Trainspotting, Boyle using “edgy, upfront” music.
The cinematography is mostly fantastic capturing the chaos, horror, laughter and vibrancy of modern Bombay effectively. In many ways it reminds me of my favourite book, Shantaram. (The film adaptation starring Johnny Depp has been delayed, by the way.)
Bottom line, you should rent Slumdog Millionaire.
It’s an entertaining and heartwarming love story on one level. And a complex film aficionado’s triumph on another.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
My buddy Grant Assenheimer, on assignment for Doctors without Borders, writes …
… Right now I’m typing from a small-whitewashed office in Shamwana, a tiny village in the middle of Katanga, the southern province of the massive DRC. Its Sunday afternoon and my day off. A generator is buzzing in the background, the Tragically Hip are playing on my IPOD and the storm clouds of the rainy season are building after a hot and sunny afternoon.
Dinner should be good. We bought some pork ribs at the “market” this morning…there was only 1 guy with meat and, after shoeing away the flies, he used an axe to literally hack off our selection. As with pretty much EVERYTHING else around here, we had avocado flown in from Lubumbashi so I’m making guacamole as a starter. Finally, we have local maize for a version of corn on the cob and will probably add some potatoes for starch. Our cook has Sunday’s off so we have to cook ourselves. No restaurants in town, charcoal for fuel, kerosene refrigerators and definitely no corner store when you run out of milk! Its not only getting used to a new kitchen but a totally new way of cooking! …
There are no landlines in the southern DRC and we are definitely not in mobile phone territory. Shamwana is a 2 hour flight from Lubumbashi and is really is in the middle of the bush. We do have a decent HF radio network and use satellite phones at a about $1.50 a minute as backup.
Internet?
Amazing enough, we have satellite Internet so I have pretty decent access to email and the Internet. I’ll be checking my Yahoo account … regularly and won’t have problems opening attachments or looking at pictures…so email away! The connection is also fast enough for Skype …
Good on ya, Grant.
Merry Christmas.
Rick McCharles 