This video of a local street musician was taken during First Night celebrations on New Year’s Eve in downtown Austin, Texas.

You are only subjected to my voice for a few bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In….”  :)

Happy New Year, everyone!

OK, so I really just wanted to type the last day of the year in the subject line, I confess.  Enjoy a round-up of travel tips and goodies in preparation for 2008!

**  Well, you could be ringing in the New Year at the Possum Drop in Clay’s Corner, Brasstown, North Carolina.  Keeping it small-town, there’s good eats even if it’s No Country for Cold Men, or explore the byways of Tennessee’s Appalachia. 

**  Even fewer currencies in your European wallet;  New Year’s brings the Euro to Malta and Cyprus.

**  On the hunt for new hotels to try? There’s Bangkok’s top 10 quirky hotels, the top 10 hostels in South America, even fabulous overwater bungalows.

**  In the Oldie-but-Goodie Department, the Baedeker Guides are back and Rolf Potts plays Jurassic Tennis in Paris.

**  Experiment with your transport;  Web 2.0 guru Jeremiah Owyang explores a Japanese bullet train on video, or slow down with winter kayaking in the Florida Everglades, or go rad at the Dubai X-Games.

**  Coffee drinkers can get hopped up in Chicago and pub fans can drink like Dickens in London.

**  When I posted about the tiny Middle Eastern country of Bahrain recently, I also mentioned Oman as an alternative to over-hyped Dubai.  Nice to see that a writer from the UK’s Times Online did go chasing shadows in Oman, following the footsteps of explorer Wilfred Thesiger.

**  Finally, a pause in New Orleans. The good news is that the Katrina diaspora helped to spread Cajun cooking across the U.S. (to be correct, it’s really Creole cooking since much of Cajun Country in Louisiana was spared, as my Twitter friend Shawn pointed out.)  As experienced and written by the San Antonio Express-News travel editor, there’s still a lot of work to be done but the rewards of helping are great.

May your stockings be filled with planes, trains and road trips this holiday season!

The city of Yokohoma, just south of Tokyo, has a special museum dedicated to warm, brothy ramen (or “raumen” as they spell it.)

It’s a long way from the dried noodles that you shove into a microwave — check out the real stuff at the unique Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum. 

Once you pay a small fee to enter, you are transported back to late-1950s era shitamachi Tokyo, right down to the advertising signs, street performers, a little toy shop and eight different actual ramen restaurants, each serving different styles of the iconic noodle bowl, at very reasonable prices (including perhaps a Kirin or Sapphoro beer to accompany your feast.)

In support of my time living in Sasebo, on Kyushu, I tried out the Hakata and Kumamoto restaurants; they specialize in Kyushu-style ramen, with lots of pork.

Some of the museum street performers tell Japanese adventure tales to children using special painted story-boards.

Watch their technique of building up to an exciting point in the story and then quickly showing a new picture: this is one of the cultural foundations of today’s anime and manga styles.

The gift shop has noodle-related knick-knacks including Naruto, who is a very popular manga character with his own action show on American TV.

His name comes from the traditional small decorative egg item with a swirl that is placed on top of bowls of ramen.

HOW TO GET THERE: Take the subway from Tokyo to the Sakuragi-cho subway station and walk out the Minato Mirai exit.

There is a tourist booth just outside the exit where you can get maps and directions to all of the attractions in Yokohama.

The Ramen Museum is a few minute’s walk from Exit 8 of the Shinyokohama subway station on the Yokohama City subway line.

Here’s a fun video of a Backstreet Boys-ish pop group called DBSK who visit the museum (hence the flashy intro but just wait; the museum comes on in a minute or so.)  There are English subtitles but they’re small and you have to read quickly.

In her recent PT Travel Linkfest 12.17.2007 PT blogger Sheila links to a post on Social Networks including Flickr.

Flickr is a photo sharing website, which allows people to post pictures and share them around the world. A laudable idea, and one that can be very useful for keeping in touch when you travel, but a number of people have had problems with other people - and even organisations - stealing images. This might not seem like a problem, but some of them have been used for commercial uses, without the subject’s permission. When Virgin Mobile used a picture by Damon Chang of his niece for a major advertising campaign, the company actually didn’t do anything wrong, as Damon put up the picture under a creative commons licence. This effectively allows anyone to use the picture for any purpose, so long as they credit the photographer. Unfortunately, the photographer claims not to have understood the licence, and the niece is certainly unimpressed by the advertisement.

The case of Lara Jade, who had a self-portrait of herself at the age of 14, used on the cover of a movie of a grown-up nature (sorry - have to be obscure to avoid google adsense ads for the same sort of product) is even more worrying. The picture taken by this keen photographer was stolen from the Flickr site, and used without permission, even though it was copyright flagged! When she complained she was basically abused by the people who stole her image, although it has subsequently been changed!

Looking around the web, there seem to be many cases where people have had images stolen and misused from being on photo sharing sites. Although it is nice to stay in touch - it is also pretty good to stay in control!