Culture shock. I’ve always been fascinated with this term. Before I experienced it, the phrase always struck me as seriously clichéd. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I spent some time in La Mosquitia in Honduras a few years ago. It’s remote, and requires major effort to explore. Before this trip, I had traveled a lot, but never in [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Blog posts by Betty'
Culture Shock: A Reality or a Fabrication?
April 21st, 2010 · 3 Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Wary of the advice of others
Travel Movies We Love: Wide Ties and Rotary Phones
April 7th, 2010 · No Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Travel Movies We Love
#2. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976) Whenever I’m in Washington D.C., I walk through the National Mall. It’s expansive and intense, and I always feel something that falls somewhere between nostalgia, pride, and extreme power. It’s the backdrop for so many of America’s stories, both good and bad. And it’s one of the settings in [...]
Tags:Washington D.C.
Travel Movies We Love: Madness in La Mosquitia
April 7th, 2010 · No Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Travel Movies We Love
#3 THE MOSQUITO COAST (1986) Clearly, Lia and I have a thing for Harrison Ford. Based on the book by Paul Theroux, “The Mosquito Coast” tells the story of an eccentric patriarch who drags his family to Central America in hopes of creating a Utopian society away from America’s capitalistic grip. Ford plays Allie [...]
Travel Movies We Love: Che, Chaps, and Chile. Yes, Please.
April 1st, 2010 · 1 Comment · Blog posts by Betty, Novelty, Travel Movies We Love
#7. “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004) “The Motorcycle Diaries” is the film adaptation of Ernesto “Fuser” (Better known as Che) Guevara’s journals that recount his amazing motorcycle South America road trip right before college graduation. Beginning in Buenos Aires, Che and his buddy Alberto Granado spend months making their way up the continent on their beloved [...]
Tags:Buenos Aires·Che·Chile·motorcycles·Peru·South America·Venezuela
Travel Movies We Love: Marie Antoinette’s Equivalent of Martha Stewart’s Turkey Hill
March 31st, 2010 · 2 Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Travel Movies We Love
#8. “Marie Antoinette” (2006) If I could find the modern-day travel-writer equivalent of Sofia Coppola, I’d be ecstatic. She basically took the tried-and-true formula of period pieces and turned it upside down. And not without a serious fight. We need the same for travel. “Marie Antoinette” garnered more headlines for being booed during the Cannes film [...]
Travel Movies We Love: The Africa Movie without Meryl Streep
March 30th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Travel Movies We Love
#10. Nowhere in Africa (2001) I was immediately transported the first time I saw Out of Africa. Meryl Streep, vast swaths of the Serengeti. Robert Redford. What’s not to love? It immediately made me want to go to the continent. The problem, unfortunately, is that because it came out in 1985, it now feels very [...]
Quiet, Massages, and Butterflies
March 25th, 2010 · No Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Novelty, Transportation bliss
While I don’t totally agree with the winners of this year’s World Airport Awards, I was thrilled to see that Singapore’s Changi Airport was on the list. When I was recently there, three things stood out for me: 1. It’s pretty much carpeted throughout, making it quiet and pleasant. One of my pet peeves about [...]
Fail ‘o’ the Day: “A Trip of a Lifetime”
March 25th, 2010 · No Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Fail 'o' the Day, The point of travel
A few years ago, I was on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala in a kayak with a friend. Surrounded by Mayan villages, the lake is one of the deepest in Central America and thought to have mystical properties. Lush, green hillsides consisting of coffee plantations surround its clear waters. I let the boat glide for a [...]
Golf Courses Are Dead, and the LA Times Keeps Puttering Along
March 17th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Fail 'o' the Day
Sigh. WHY? The LA Times recently ran a story in their travel section entitled, “Playing golf courses the pros play.” Again, this is why travel sections are increasingly becoming irrelevant. Let’s look at data. New hospitality developments are forgoing golf courses as part of their schemes for other revenue producing vehicles (such as spas) because [...]
Tags:hackery
Fail ‘o’ the Day: Time for the Gold Watch Edition
March 5th, 2010 · No Comments · Blog posts by Betty, Fail 'o' the Day, Wary of the advice of others
Growing up, my dream was to be a foreign correspondent. I didn’t really have any idea of what that meant, except it sounded sophisticated and extremely exotic. The notion of traveling overseas to report the truth consisted of wearing khaki, dodging bullets, and sleeping underneath mosquito netting. Now my travel for work has little, if [...]
