We were ready to get the hell out of Siam Paragon, as usual.
The cramped ground floor food hall was heaving with tourists and locals and young students and office workers on break. The roar of Thai-language conversation, and children screaming, and tourists blathering, and lunch trays clinking was fast reaching a suffocating pitch. There was nowhere to sit in the sprawling dining area, and navigating through these cattle-like herds at anything more than a sluggish shuffle was like playing a game of Twister while walking.
Patiently dealing with crowds like the ones typically found at Bangkok’s busiest megamall, particularly on weekend afternoons, is a skill one naturally develops over time while living here, but everybody has their limits. Having sufficiently accomplished what we came to Paragon to achieve–buy a new book, look for cheese bread, eat lunch–it was time to escape the feverish madness indoors and plunge back into the buzzsaw of whistles, buses, motorbikes, and candy-colored taxis that pump up the volume of the city’s orchestra of traffic rumble. That’s just how it is in Bangkok’s central commercial districts of Siam Square and Pratunam; I wouldn’t have it any other way (most of the time).
Something in the lower level just outside the entrance of Siam Ocean World drew our attention, though, as we rode the escalator up from the first to second floor. Something… odd. Something… not quite right. Something… inappropriate. Something… hilarious. We got to the second floor and turned right around to go back downstairs and further investigate.
Oh my.
My wife and I snapped photos through incredulous tears of juvenile laughter. We took turns posing with the bear, and snickered to ourselves when others posed with the bear. It was so revolting and egregious and amazing and, in a certain way, so perfectly Bangkok.
That poor, poor bear. She must have been so embarassed with nobody there to cover her up. I mean, really: no respectable bear would be caught dead in public wearing a red hankerchief around its neck.
I first heard someone talking about one during a tech conference …. a bunch of photography enthusiasts who were also conference attendees went out exploring as a group for an hour or two, usually in the morning or evening for best light.
The walk was at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, so the eye candy was all around.
In Los Angeles, the tourism office knows how important visuals are to the LA visitor experience, and their Los Angeles Photo of the Day blog is hugely popular. They also periodically host photowalks with local photographers.
One event used the standard hop-on, hop-off LA tourist bus tour – a great way to visit a lot of iconic, interesting places in a short period of time.
Enjoy the video below (direct link on YouTube) and see if your own local tourism office would like to host a photowalk.
They’ll probably want participants to sign over rights to the photos taken – so they can use them in marketing your town – but if you’re OK with that, it should be a fun experience.
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Congratulations to Tim Leffel and all the great PT writers.
Congratulations are also in order for the other two travel websites in the the ‘Best Travel Journalism Website’ – USA Today Travel (Veronica Stoddart) picked up the Gold and Travel with Lisa Online (Lisa Codianne Fowler) picked up the Bronze.
When I visited Palm Springs, California, I had no trouble remembering where I was. I had trouble placing when I was.
The city is well known for its impressive array of Mid-Century Modern buildings — many of which have been preserved, some of which have been tragically lost.
The sleek aesthetic of the middle 20th century has always struck me as incredibly futuristic, which is what creates that “wobbling in time” feeling — don’t ask me to tell you what year it is when I’m looking at fifty year old building that seems like it belongs to an era that won’t happen for another fifty years.
Adding to this time travel effect were my Palm Springs accommodations. I stayed at the Riviera, which takes its design mission very seriously — there were lots of “oh my” moments, from the lobby’s curved orange wall, lit up, with a floral metal lattice work dwarfing small check-in desks in the lobby, to the swank Rat Pack pool, to the never-ending collision of patterns in the hotel’s labyrinthine hallways – but not so many clues about what year tops the current calendar.
I will now confess that my estimate of fifty years of temporal flux in either direction was no rough estimate. I’m not too proud to say that my earliest impression of Mid Century Modern came from watching The Jetsons, and they “lived” in 2062. Exactly fifty years from 2012.
Anyway, the best way to get to know Palm Spring’s Mid-Century Modern architecture, also known as “desert modernism”, is to head there for Modernism Week, February 16th to the 26th, 2012. There are tours by foot and tours by bus, parties, lectures, films. Check out the full event schedule here. And if you’re heading to Palm Springs another time, be sure to get your mid-century bearings at the Palm Springs Visitors Center, pictured above left, which started its life as a fabulous gas station, constructed in 1965.
But those of us who live there already think it is.
Sure, the city might have the shakes and look a little worse for wear.
Despite this, Christchurch has maintained its character and grace and sense of humor.
Lonely Planet writer Brett Atkinson, in town for a couple of weeks to update the Christchurch chapter of Lonely Planet’s New Zealand guide, discovered that a lot had changed since his last visit to the city.
The bars, cafes, and restaurants that he had written about for the 2010 edition of Lonely Planet New Zealand were no longer open. The February earthquake had made sure of that, as well as destroying many of the hotels listed in that guide.
Instead, Atkinson found a city that was reinventing itself.
Bars and cafes were popping up in unexpected places.
A whole new social hub, dubbed SoMo (south of Moorhouse Ave), has risen from the ruins and is now home to Christchurch’s iconic Court Theater (usually housed in the Art Center) and numerous cafes and bars.
Highlighting innovative actions such as the ‘gap filler’ and the container mall projects, Atkinson has labeled Christchurch one of New Zealand’s most exciting cities (a statement that warms the hearts of die-hard Cantabrians who have always felt a little like the ‘poor cousin’ to capital city Wellington and super-city Auckland).
