You know the drill; it’s lunchtime and you want something reasonably filling that doesn’t cost a fortune. Fresh, imaginative and tasty would be a major bonus.

On a recent trip to New York City, I stopped in Bryant Park at the ‘wichcraft sandwiches kiosk, and was impressed with my yummy, well-priced (for Manhattan) lunch. The menu was full of appealing options and the staff was super-friendly.

The pretty day in a peaceful park setting didn’t hurt, either.  You can take an audio tour of Bryant Park with actor Matthew Broderick; don’t miss the outdoor Reading Room.

For those reading via RSS feed, or anyone who can’t see the video box below, click here for the ‘wichcraft sandwiches video direct URL.

Related posts:

• Good eats on New York’s Lower East Side
• The American story is alive at this New York museum
• A New York City sanctuary: the Public Library

Welcome to the February 18, 2009 edition of the Carnival of Cities, where we tour the world in one blog post.

We’re taking a little time away from our “home” blog, the Family Travel Logue, to host the Carnival here on the Perceptive Travel Blog this week. Next week (February 25) please join us on the UpTake Attractions blog.

If you’d like to host this Carnival on your blog any Wednesday in March, please contact me at sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com.

Off we go….

Cities in the Americas

Chicago, Illinois, USA Byteful Travel presents Find Nemo at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium posted at Byteful Blog, saying, “On a Tuesday in August, I visited the most popular cultural attraction in Chicago: John G. Shedd Aquarium, which contains over 25,000 fish and 2,100 species of fish, mammals, birds, snakes, amphibians, and insects. From the dolphin show to the incredible Wild Reef exhibit, the Shedd Aquarium is an experience you won’t forget.”

Tijuana, Mexico Catherine Bardrick presents Tablet Tourism around Tijuana posted at Small Fish in the Big Taco, saying, “Border areas can so often be painful areas to visit because of the collision of two very different systems. Tijuana and its tablet tourism is no exception….”

San Francisco, California, USA CatSynth presents Museum of Broken Relationships posted at CatSynth, saying, “This Valentine’s Day, we at CatSynth visited The Museum of Broken Relationships, which is currently on tour in San Francisco.”

Las Vegas, Nevada, USA Jennifer Miner presents Free or Cheap Things to Do in Las Vegas, Nevada posted at Traveling Mamas.

Tikal, Guatemala Go Green Travel Green presents Hidden Ruins at Tikal National Park, Guatemala posted at Go Green Travel Green.

New York, New York, USA Liz Wright presents A Taste of NYC’s Upper West Side With the Food Poet posted at Travelogged.

San Francisco, California, USA matthew bamberg presents Painted Ladies posted at Digital Traveler.

Cities in the Middle East

Marrakech, Morocco Liz Wright presents Just Back From… Marrakech posted at Travelogged.

Cities in Europe

Berlin, Germany Amanda Kendle presents City tips: Berlin could be my favourite European city posted at Not A Ballerina, saying, “Thanks for the opportunity!”

Paris, France WritingTravel presents Navigo like the natives through the Paris Métro: Navigo Découverte pass a must for bargain-seeking travelers posted at WritingTravel.com.

Cities in Asia

Mathoor, India AdmirableIndia.com presents Trip to Kanyakumari: Chapter 13: Mathoor Hanging Bridge: Part 1 posted at AdmirableIndia.com.

That concludes this edition.

Please submit your (one, recent, non-spammy) blog post about any aspect of ONE city to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form.  Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Whether you’re tripping through London, Tokyo, or Boston, no visit to a city is complete without traveling the metropolis’s subway system. An underground acts as a city’s circulatory system, shuttling its residents through rushing days of commerce, social interaction, and meditation (I’m sure I’m not the only person who can spend hours on the subway to escape the real world above ground).

This is especially true of Moscow, where the metro doubles as a living art museum. Triples as a massive network of air raid shelters, an obsolete purpose, but it explains why it can take several minutes to descend from street level to the unseen platform below. The metro is famous for its designs, architecture, and mosaics, and no tourist should be allowed to rush through the city without taking a tour at least of the circle line, where many of the city’s most famous stations are planted.

Komsomolskaya Station, pictured above, is wedding cake-like, covered in stucco and massive chandeliers, with gold-gilted mosaics depicting famous Russian war heroes.

By contrast, Mayakovskaya station is all shiny marble and stainless steel. I find it a bit soulless, but the station is an emblem of its time: its design won Mayakovskaya the Grand Prize at the 1938 World’s Fair in New York. While the overall impression is of a cold white hall, craning your neck ceilingwards will expose 24 softly colored murals. Their theme was “24 Hours of Soviet Sky.” As the Wikipedia entry says, “A passenger has but to look up and see the bright Soviet future in the heavens above him.” With Soviet military power depicted against a gentle blue sky, the future certainly does look bright here — or must have done then.

Novoslobodksaya Station, on the other hand, is covered with these stained glass panels, set off at one end of the station by a mosaic entitled “Peace Throughout the World,” which was probably not meant as irony at the time. Like most stations, Novoslobodskaya was built during the heydays of the Soviet era, and many of the panels glorifies the Soviet State — its workers and its ideals. Those themes are continued throughout most of the stations, where the Soviet member cultures and its citizens are all drawn in images of happy unity: athletes, scientists, factory workers, engineers, folk dancers, war heroes, and farmers were all meant to be the cheery, hearty backbone of the Soviet state.

The dream didn’t turn out quite as the creators of this mosaic, in Park Kulturi Station, planned. But the history is still there, providing a sometimes glittery, sometimes sad backdrop to the rushing, humming hustle of modern Russian life. These photos show only a few of the bizarre variety of elegance and absurdity contained not in one of of Moscow’s incredible museums, but in its workaday subway.

(All photos copyright 2005 Antonia Malchik)

Everyone seems to focus on airplanes when it comes tourism and carbon emissions, but Climate Care, a United Kingdom-based carbon-offsetting company, says cruise ships are emiiting almost twice the amount of carbon dioxide as airplanes. Find out why and what should be done about it in this NYT’s article Cruise Lines Urged to Shrink Their Footprints.

Kyoto,the ancient capital of Japan, is taking a slow road towards eco-tourism.

There’s a new Satnav gadget out that uses GPS to supply fuel-saving driving advice. Called Econav, it not only guides you from point A to point B, but will tell you off, through visual and audio warnings, when your foot’s too heavy on the accelerator and brake pedals.

Meanwhile, Sir David Attenborough explains why the Galapagos Islands need tourism to survive.

The European Union is setting up an Airline Carbon Credit Scheme.

Those with iPhones might be interested in these Top 10 Green iPhone Apps.

Find out about how you can Bid Your Way to an ecoDestination.

This week’s green cities include Warsaw, Cardiff, and Bangkok.

Today’s the anniversary of the death of Captain Cook, the 18th British explorer and navigator who charted and named more places in the world than any other explorer in history.

But this man, who explored more of the earth’s surface than any other explorer, remains a relatively obscure figure. He was not rewarded with a strait, sea, or river named after him like the explorers Magellan, Bering, and Hudson. No cities used his name, unlike Christopher Columbus who is the namesake of 10 American cities. And his achievements are not celebrated with a national holiday.

Anyone interested in why this is so should have a read of Tony Horwitz’s excellent book Blue Latitudes (Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before). Part travelogue, part history book, Blue Latitudes relieves on Captain Cook’s journals and those of naturalist Joseph Banks to re-traces Cook’s path around the world. Along the way, he has opportunity to analyse the man and his values and determine Cook’s influence in today’s world.

Horwitz discovers that for all of Captain Cook’s feats, he remains a man mostly misunderstood or, worse, simply unknown. For example, when Horwitz asks a vendor in Tahiti “Connaissez-vous Capitaine Cook?”, he receives on a blank stare (and a Coke). In New Zealand, a discussion with some Maori, the indigenous population, revealed that Cook is not seen as an explorer but as a murderer.

Obviously, the ‘romantic’, unspoiled South Pacific islands of Cook’s day no longer exists. There have been too many changes over the past two hundred years, driven by colonialization and commercialisation, to allow for things to stay the same. But Horwitz, aided by his friend, an Aussie free spirit dedicated to wine, women, and fun, does his best to find traces of Cook. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be many traces of Captain Cook left.