tourism
For all the official rhetoric about the need for Kansai’s prefectures to set themselves apart from each other, let alone from the rest of the country, the local bureaucracies too often have a herd mentality when it comes to planning and promoting tourism campaigns.
As Chinese tourists spill from their tour bus into the Beverly Center, Charlie Gu hands each one a sleek black envelope. Inside: a Chinese-language map of the mall and a special discount card. Gu, the center's Mandarin-speaking Chinese specialist, asks shoppers about what they're looking for and circles relevant stores on the map.
More than a century ago, Theodor Herzl wrote a book in which he described Israel as an old new land. For the public, with its archeological digs and religious sites, Israel definitely conjures images of the old. The new, not so much.
Organizers of the Rio 2016 Olympics on Thursday revealed plans to provide language training for more than a million people ahead of the event. Brazil ranks behind many of its counterparts in the language learning stakes, comparative international studies show, and few people speak English outside major cities.
I have traveled to dozens of countries, but my trip to North Korea this past February was the most unforgettable experience of my life. My plan of going to a country with a “totalitarian” regime, known for its chronic famine and political oppression, intrigued many of my peers in China.
When you grow up in England, breakfast is an event. Not in the, “Let’s do breakfast!” way that I imagine West Coast movie types emptily holler at one another across busy studio lots, but as a deep-rooted part of our cultural makeup. Take, for example, the ‘Full English,’ a centuries-old national obsession with a symbolic breakfast table heaving with bacon, sausage, and smoked fish.
I have traveled to dozens of countries, but my trip to North Korea this past February was the most unforgettable experience of my life. My plan of going to a country with a “totalitarian” regime, known for its chronic famine and political oppression, intrigued many of my peers in China. They were surprised by my “unusual interest,” asking “Why North Korea?” I replied, “Because it is a different world; because I see similarities between China and North Korea; because as a Chinese citizen, I have the privilege to travel to North Korea easily.”
The sidewalks are empty on Alvaro Obregon Avenue. Restaurants and souvenir shops lining the once popular thoroughfare are gutted and shuttered. The sign in front of an abandoned karaoke bar is now ripped and dilapidated, riddled underneath with three spray-painted tombstones. The thousands of spring breakers who flooded over each March from the nearby Texas resorts are gone. The drug war drove them off, leaving a void of tourism in a city that years ago gave up trying to cater to such crowds.