Welcome to the Carnival of Cities blog carnival, where we tour the world in a single post, via submissions from a variety of different blogs, all about any aspect of one, single city (or fair-sized town.)

This is the July 13 edition but published a day late, because the ol’ vacation beach condo did not quite have the web access I expected.  Oh, well, it was vacation!

The previous edition was hosted on June 29 by Sheila’s Guide and the July 27 edition will be over at Arrows Sent Forth.

If you would like to host a future Carnival edition on your blog please contact me at Sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com. The August and September editions are still open. Thanks!

Off we go….

Cities in Europe

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway Anne-Sophie Redisch presents Svalbard – polar bear country posted at Sophie’s World, saying, “Capital of the Svalbard Archipelago, at 78° north, Longyearbyen is probably the northernmost city in the world.”

Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic Quiet Wanderings presents The Good Tea Place: Cesky Krumlov posted at Quiet Wanderings, saying, “Thought this article on Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic might suit your Carnival.”

Cities in the Americas

Chicago, Illinois, USA Createlive presents We’re Going On An Adventure, Charlie! posted at CREATElive.

Bigfork, Montana, USA   Beth Blair presents Averill’s Flathead Lake Lodge: A Family-Friendly Montana Dude Ranch posted at The Vacation Gals, saying, “Averill’s Flathead Lake Lodge provides a terrific break from the everyday life; a dude ranch with activities fit for kids of all ages, it’s a respite that families return to again and again.”

Tofino, British Columbia, Canada Bonnie Way presents Explore: Tofino, BC posted at The Koala Bear Writer.

Indianapolis, Indiana, USA Nicole presents Slow Food Garden at White River State Park posted at Arrows Sent Forth, saying, “I loved this garden in the middle of a great urban park in downtown Indianapolis.”

Toronto, Ontario, Canada Matthew Hyde presents Toronto Superman Stories posted at Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, saying, “Toronto has a major but underappreciated connection to the character of Superman; here’s how I discovered how resonant that is…”

Big Sur, California, USA Byteful Travel presents Top 5 Memories of Big Sur’s Andrew Molera Park (How to Charge Seagulls & Live) posted at Byteful Travel, saying, “Big Sur, CA: There are some days when the very air you breathe seems to embrace you like a comforting hug. September 9th was *not* one of those days. It was better. On our way back north, my aunt and I spotted another captivating park within Big Sur, CA: The Andrew Molera State Park (or AMSP). As it turned out, this second stop in Big Sur had many stunning sights in store and would give me the opportunity to touch the waters of the Pacific for the first time in over four years.”

Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA Dominique King presents Visit the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan posted at Midwest Guest, saying, “Admirers of former First Lady Betty Ford flocked to the Gerald R. Ford museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to honor her life as the museum prepared for her final funeral ceremonies at the Fords’ grave site on the museum grounds.”

Rochester, New York, USA Traci Suppa presents World’s Largest Public Collection of Video Games, Rochester, NY posted at Go BIG or Go Home, saying, “I wouldn’t make a six hour drive for just any exhibit of electronic games. The International Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, NY, boasts the world’s largest public collection of video games. We played through the e-evolution, from Pong to Wii! My son found Nirvana.”

Tunica, Mississippi, USA Lisa Konupka presents Tunica is Open for Business! posted at Down the Road in Tunica MS Blog.

Cities in the Middle East

Dubai, United Arab Emirates Keith Kellett presents Across the Creek posted at Travelrat’s Travels, saying, “Dubai; a side you don’t often hear about.”

That concludes this Carnival edition, and thank you for visiting.

Please submit your (ONE, non-spammy) blog post 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.

By Jessica Lee

As the revolution unfolds in Egypt, a guidebook writer normally based in Cairo observes it from an emptied-out beach resort zone before she can return to see the aftermath firsthand.

Sunset while standing on 6th of October Bridge, I watched disco-lit pleasure boats cruise upon the darkening Nile while tinny Arabic pop music rose up from the river. I strolled down Talaat Harb Street. The smell of freshly fried taamiya and charcoaled meat floated over Orabi Square. I sat down at a table and watched the men on the corner lay out their mats to pray.

“Welcome to Egypt,” the waiter said as I sipped iced hibiscus juice and the Muezzin began the call to prayer.

“Welcome to Egypt.” a man with a battered suitcase of fake Rolexes said as he approached my table to try to make a sale.

“Welcome to Egypt!” a couple of kids running past me yelled. “Welcome to Egypt. Welcome to Egypt.”

As I walked home a thousand shisha pipes scented the air with apple-perfume. Five more passersby welcomed me to Egypt. I rolled my eyes and sighed.

***

I woke up. Dazed, I sat up in my hammock and stared out at the sea. Tiny rippling waves lapped on the shore. I walked over to my friend’s hut to watch his TV. We sat silently as the powder-pink puff of the Egyptian Museum came into view. Pitched battles of sticks and stones and camels from the Pyramids charged across the nightmare screen. The reporter was standing on 6th of October Bridge. A friend in Cairo rang us crying. I mooched across the beach, shoulders slouched. One of the staff was raking the sand, erasing the remaining footprints of the last tourists to leave.

Marooned upon a stretch of white sand at my friend’s remote beach camp on the Red Sea I watched as a bland square in Cairo’s downtown became headline news. Tahrir Square’s traffic—all belching and burping out diesel and din—was nowhere to be seen. Our internet disappeared. Phone calls to friends in Cairo wouldn’t work. The sun loungers on the beach emptied as the tourists fled. Soon it was just me left. I drank the camp dry of diet coke and finished the last of the muesli.

“Now you eat like an Egyptian,” my friend said and I swapped to lemon juice and fuul.

When the phone rang it was Radio New Zealand requesting an interview.

“What’s happening? What have you seen?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t think I can help you out,” I said. “I’m in the Sinai and there’s nothing happening here.”

“Nothing at all?”

I looked out at the beach. A fisherman’s boat bobbed lazily on the sea.

“Still no sniper-fire or tanks invading the beach yet,” I replied.

Bedouin women, cloaked in their embroidered niqabs, sacks of jewellery and scarves carried upon their heads, gave up their daily patrol along the beach. I tried to ration my cigarettes. We began to run out of fresh vegetables and my friend fretted about finishing the last of the generator’s diesel fuel. Banks had shut. ATMs had bled dry. Transport to and from Cairo had been cut off. The mural of Mubarak outside the newspaper building on Ramses Street invaded my dreams.

“You see that man in the aviator shades, the one that looks like a mafia boss? Well that’s our president.” My friend Muhammad would tell tourists.

Remember Cairo from an Empty Sinai

I thought of Cairo at midnight when the city streets shrugged off their blanket of heat and the hint of a cool breeze brought everyone outside. Crowds of girls with hijabs pinned and tied in mysteriously intricate ways, fabric floating after them like peacock tails, as they walked arms-linked down the street. Families gathering together on street corners, eating tubs of koshary. I would lie in bed and be rocked to sleep by Cairo’s lullaby; somebody yelling and somebody laughing; screeching tyres and smashing glass; the dull thud of a car crash; the sound of children kicking a football against a nearby wall; and then the horns, always the horns.

Moonlight stretched its fingers through the bamboo roof of my hut and threw shadows across the web of the mosquito net. The light from my alarm clock told me it was 2am. I got up, turned on my torch, and padded across the cold sand to the bathroom. Somewhere on the beach a dog was barking. A truck rumbled across the highway, headlights briefly flashing down the road. Beyond it, the craggy silhouettes of the Sinai Mountains rose up like mythical beasts preparing to attack. The sea shimmered as the waves rolled in. I sat on the beach and had a cigarette. In the morning I watched the blackened beaux-arts facades of downtown reduced to a backdrop on the television screen.

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“We never used to have all of these picky eaters with their food allergies.”

As a thrifty child of the Depression, my Mom has no patience with people who won’t just shut up and eat. I get that, and until recently I’ve been able to eat pretty much anything and so has my family, so I agreed with her.

Now, however, my teen daughter is tussling with some digestive issues and has become lactose-intolerant.

We spent a few weeks figuring out which fake milk tasted best and didn’t have a weird taupe color (winner: the H-E-B grocery chain’s Mootopia) and suddenly, I’m having to think about dietary restrictions in a way that I hadn’t before, including when traveling.

How Some Travelers Handle Food Restrictions

Here are some thoughts and resources….

From travel photographer Alison Cornford-Matheson:

“This is a hot topic for me right now as I just learned I may in fact have to go gluten-free. I’m experimenting with it now as I wait for a diagnosis. I live in Belgium and food and dining out is a big part of my life. It’s starting to be more recognised in Brussels at least but still not easy. Bread and pasta free Europe… not so fun.”

From writer Lanora Schoeny Mueller:

“France + Italy + LactAid = dairy-free tragedy averted.”

From entrepreneur Shennandoah Diaz:

“I was born on a dairy farm and have to take my own food with me to visit my parents. If I eat gluten or dairy it’s bad for me. Just suffered in Cancun – everything had gluten, dairy, sugars, etc. in it. Should have packed more food! I took gluten-free snacks, nuts, dried fruit, tea, Kashi instant oatmeal, snack bars and Splenda, but everything they made had dairy in it, even the vegetables. I wasn’t prepared.”

Shennandoah also told me that she wishes she’d checked luggage so that liquids restrictions wouldn’t have applied and she could have taken some almond or soy milk.

From traveler and author Aline Dobbie:

“India is [a good] country for gluten problems; they even have other breads made from chick pea or corn flour (but glorious rice is the answer.)”

Extended world traveler Jeanne Dee of SoulTravelers3 fame has been dealing with recent severe dietary restrictions lately (not sure why, she jokes that she, “Must have eaten the wrong Indian food while in Penang,”) but here’s how she’s handled it in remote areas:

“…had to carry a whole bag of herbs and medicines…but I managed quite well. I did miss out on some great food, but I enjoyed some special things too, since I could have bread and simple soups. Bhutan was harder because I cannot have any spice and the food tends to be very spicy. Jordan was fairly easy as I can have bread and hummus. I carried seaweed and miso in my bag too so that I could make a soup out of hot water if nothing was available that I could eat, but didn’t need to use it too much. I could only drink warm water, so that was a challenge, but I managed with a small thermos.”

Jeanne had all of this written down by a doctor to make airport security checkpoints do-able.

Some Resources for Travelers

**  Debbie Dubrow has a series of posts about food allergies on her Delicious Baby family travel blog.

**  Tripbase has a post telling you how to say “I’m Allergic to Peanuts” in 45 languages.

**  Celiac sufferers can get language cards on Celiac Travel that explain their situation.

**  Katie Aune launched a whole blog called Globally Gluten Free: A Resource for Gluten Free Travel.

Since this is all new to me, I’d love to hear more comments and feedback below about how you handle dietary restrictions while traveling. Thanks so much for your thoughts!

(If you like this post, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS feed or by email – the email signup link is at the top of the right sidebar near the Search box. Thanks!)

Pytheas was a Greek who lived almost four hundred years before the Christian era. Perhaps it was in part his interest the mathematics of navigation which led him to sail from his home in on the Mediterranean coast of what is now France, to leave behind the limits of the known world as he passed Cape Saint Vincent in what is now Portugal, and to sail on, looking for a sea route for the tin trade. He passed Caithness, in Scotland, and sailed on to Unst, in the Shetlands, which was then the most northerly place where people lived in those islands. He saw the northern lights.

In the first part of the fourteenth century AD, Ibn Battuta set out from his home in Morocco. Set out many times, in fact, in journeys that took him as far east as China, and south as far Mogadishu and Mombassa in Africa. He went west as far as Tangier, and traveled to the Caspian Sea, India, and Timbuktu, a scholar and a judge in search of knowledge, and a man of faith who made the pilgrimage to Mecca seven separate times.

Sebastian Cabot lived in the fifteenth century, setting out from his home in England to sail around Scandinavia seeking a northeast passage to Asia, exploring the Rio de la Plata in South America, seeking spice and gold, and heading out on a voyage to North America where he explored what is now Newfoundland. Henry Hudson sought that northeast passage too, also exploring the river in New York and the bay in Canada which bear his name. Vitus Bering left his name on maps as well, as he sought a land bridge between Russia and North America. Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humbodldt were as interested in science as they were geography. Francis Xavier and David Livingstone (yes, that one, of ‘Livingstone I presume’) were missionaries taking their faith to foreign lands. Columbus, Magellan, Cook, Sir Francis Drake, Vasco Da Gama, Freya Stark, Thor Heyerdahl, John Franklin, Jacques Cousteau, Neil Armstrong –dozens of people, whose stories are told in the book Explorers: Tales of Endurance and Exploration, a joint project of The Smithsonian Institution and the Royal Geographic Society, with Ellen Namey as project coordinator.

It is a thoughtful book, with stories told — and well told — as much through map and image and graphic as through narrative. A narrative of people reaching for the limits of what they know, and reaching beyond them, set in context and in time, reaching from the story of the ancient Egyptian Harkhuf who journeyed along the Nile to expand the knowledge of the then known world to the story of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who ventured into space to do the same. Then there is Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who said “The difficult is what takes a little time. The impossible is what takes a little longer.”

At first glance, you could think that this is a coffee table book, meant to flipped through casually. It’s not. It is a work meant to be explored and savored.

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Story and photos by Roger Housden

In an excerpt from the book Saved by Beauty, a writer looks at the draw and visual poetry of Iran, beyond the headlines, the current rulers, and the infamous legal system.

Who in their right mind would go to a place so maligned by much of the world, so apparently depraved in terms of man’s humanity to man, that even to utter the name Iran is liable to trigger images of mad mullahs, rogue nukes, ranting politicians who deny the Holocaust, and protesters shot down in broad daylight or dragged away to be raped and beaten somewhere in the sordid labyrinthine obscurities of Evin Prison?

But let me ask this: If you had nurtured images of another Iran, one which predates not only the current regime but even Islam itself, might you be willing to look beyond the prevailing headlines? Might you search for evidence of a culture that happens to have one of the longest and more venerable histories of enlightened humanism anywhere in the world?

I was one such dreamer.

Forty years ago I would listen to the plaintive, heart-rending melodies in minor key of Iranian music rather than spend time with the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd. I would read the work of Hafez and Rumi rather than the latest renderings of Alan Ginsberg. I would gaze in wonder at the blue domes of the mosques of Isfahan, all trapped in a book I found in the British Library in London. In my twenties, Iran was for me a place that seemed able somehow to marry heaven and earth. Its aesthetic sensibility, blue-drenched and sensuous, merged effortlessly with an awareness of invisible realms which nourished and infused this physical world.

Some forty years later, those images had long since retreated into the more anterior regions of my mind. But when George Bush labeled Iran as the center of an axis of evil, and the press was filled daily with story after story of abuse of power and the ravings of a fanatical President (both here and in Iran) those old images fluttered their wings and found their way again to the surface of my daily wonderings and thinking.

I wondered if the Iran I had imagined all that time ago was merely a figment of my imagination, or whether there was indeed some remnant of a culture, even today, that could justify my youthful ardor for a place I had never set foot in. Just weeks after the thought had first entered my mind, I was on a plane to Tehran to find out.

I wanted to see if the long cultural and artistic tradition of human dignity and values that was already in place in the 10th century when Ferdowsi wrote his great epic, the Shahnameh, The Epic of Kings, and that had woven its way down through the centuries in the work of poets like Omar Khayyam, Rumi and Hafez — I wanted to see if anything was left of such a tradition today. And there was more: if I could find the same thread alive today, I could give a human face to an ancient and sophisticated culture that was only portrayed to us in the West in the form of a caricature.

I found in modern Iran all that I was looking for and more. I discovered an intensely vibrant cultural scene in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan, with artists, filmmakers, writers and poets who, even though many had international reputations, chose to continue living in Iran despite all the restrictions on their freedom. Iran, they said, was the soul of their work. They had to live there to make their art. Then I met Sufis — the mystical brotherhoods of Islam — whose religion was nothing if not one of love and tolerance. Above all, I found a land whose people were the most gracious and welcoming I had ever encountered.

And yes, I did meet the other side of Iran. I was taken from the airport on leaving and interrogated for a couple of days by members of the Intelligence Services. They claimed I was a spy and threatened me with several years in Evin Prison. How I got out I will never know. But I was saved from cynicism, from blanketing an entire nation with the standard stereotype of a ruthless regime, by the beauty of a people, a culture, that still today bears the signature of lasting human dignity and creative achievement. If I could go back, I would. But I can’t.

That First Arrival in Tehran

There’s a cappuccino and some apple cake on my table, a hum of activity around me in the café at Frankfurt Airport; everything’s normal, my flight is on time, and I’m nervous. I’ve never been nervous traveling before. But I’m nervous now, sitting here waiting for my connection to Tehran. I feel like I am about to get on a plane to nowhere — to nowhere in my known world. The only other time I have felt anything close to this was when I was twenty years old and leaving the shores of Europe for the first time to enter the (then) exotic world of North Africa. Even at that time, I had felt less trepidation than sheer excitement. Now the balance has swung marginally the other way.

But why? What about the other Iran and the thrill of finally seeing a land I had dreamed of for years? And then surely I was used to landing in strange and even remote parts of the world? I was, but in these last few weeks of preparing to go there, Iran had already become in my mind a more shifting and complex world, one with rules and challenges that I had never encountered before. No other country I know of has kept my passport for its visa stamp until the day before my departure. Neither are visas granted automatically, and it was impossible to know beforehand whether or not I would get one. (The same is true for Iranians hoping to visit the United States, I was told later.) Yet I had to book my flights and give them my flight details, leaving it to fate that it would all work out and my tickets would not be wasted. Then they gave me fewer days in the country than there were between my arriving and departing flights; which now meant that I would have to apply for an extension once I got there. At least I am using my British, rather than my American, passport, but I’m not even sure that makes things any easier. Dutch or Irish, perhaps, but British, I don’t know. Salman Rushdie is British, and it wasn’t much help to him.

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