walki-talki.com Travel Blog

This week Walki-Talki unveils its latest audio tour, a self-guided walk through the Swiss paradise of Geneva.  The city is a living postcard full of history and one of the most diverse in Europe.   The city is home to the United Nations. the International Red Cross and many other international bodies – a history of tolerance that dates back to the 17^thcentury when Geneva was a refuge for persecuted Protestants from throughout Europe.

This comprehensive tour encompasses fourteen major sites and follows the Geneva waterfront into the heart the Old Town.  Along the way, you’ll learn how the teachings of John Calvin and John Knox led to Geneva becoming known as the “Protestant Rome”;  find out how the city was once saved by a flying tea kettle; and learn just how the Swiss knife got to be so darn useful.  The tour is capped off with a visit to Geneva’s oldest Cathedral, and it ends in Geneva’s most beautiful park.  This tour is a beautiful walk with plenty of history, characters and interesting facts to keep you entertained from start to finish.

So head for the crossroads of Europe and head to Geneva, Pearl of Switzerland. You have a fabulous guided tour to get you started.

Footsteps: Milan Kundera’s Prague - Trumping the Unbearable Darkness of History | Travel | New York Times

The summer travel season is ushered in every year by a bevy of articles on the top travel destinations. The above cited article in the New York Times is no exception, but it is noteworthy for its style and its subject. It is a beautifully complex essay on one of the most complex cities in Europe. 

Nicholas Kulish uses perhaps the greatest contemporary novel on Prague to put the recently opened museum of communism in Prague in its proper perspective. This great Novel is Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and, according to Kulish, the diminutive size and status of the new Museum of Communism clearly demonstrate how the Czech spirit has triumphed thoroughly. 

Kundera’s brilliant novel paints a beautiful portrait of Bohemian spirits that bend under the crushing weight of the Soviet Union but fail to break. Kundera’s masterpiece imparts to the reader a remarkably deep appreciation of how free spirited people (literally Bohemians in this case) suffered and perished under the Soviet yoke and of how the Czech spirit survived, nevertheless.  

As Kulish recounts, the Czechs have triumphed thoroughly over communism, and they have elected to give communism its proper place in Czech history: a small chapter, an afterthought, an insignificant episode in the 1300-year history of Prague. While other cities like Berlin and Warsaw have erected more significant monuments to this ugly chapter in their histories, the residents of Prague have elected to dedicate a tiny space to their communist chapter to leave no doubt about how much they care about the communist era.

Prague has no shortage of attractions, but if you want to learn of Prague’s communist past, the Museum of Communism is located in the center of the city near the Mustek. The Mustek is stop number four on the walki-talki.com self guided mp3 audio walking tour of Prague. 

You should go to Prague!

Payam

At long last, we are proud to announce the release of the walki-talki.com self-guided, mp3 audio walking tour of historic Prague. This is one of best preserved medieval cities in Europe. It has survived the ravages of history and emerged as one of Europe’s premiere destinations and, indeed, one of her crowning jewels.

From Jan Hus to Dubcek and Havel, from Rabbi Pinkus to Kafka, and from wine to pilsner, Prague has it all. Neither Nazis nor communists managed to subdue this vibrant cultural capital, and just about any time of the year is the perfect time to visit Prague.The walki-talki.com tour will take you step by step through all of Prague’s major historical periods. You will encounter famous writers, musicians, composers, writers and astronomers. Seventeen breathtaking stops are guaranteed to make you fall in love with this most romantic of cities. So, pack your bags, get your walking shoes ready, and head to Prague. 

Payam 

That time of the year is drawing near. Yes, Carnival season. There are many choice places to enjoy it in Europe: Cologne, Duesseldorf, Aachen, Maastricht, Basel, and Venice, to name but a few. Wherever you go, you are assured to have a great time.  

By far the best and biggest celebrations are to be found in Cologne (Koeln), Germany, and in Venice, Italy. The Karneval in Koeln is quite an experience. I had the pleasure of attending this event in 2006. It consists of of an entire week of celebrations that culminates in a gargantuan parade on Rose Monday (Rosenmontag). During this parade, you will see over a million costumed Germans drinking, eating sausages and scrambling to catch carmele (candy) being thrown from the various trains in the endless parade. Upon catching a carmele, a man may present it to a women and demand a bütze (kiss in the Cologne dialect) in return.

The entire affair is totally friendly, the trains in the parade are invariably hilarious and edgy (and not for the prurient, see image), the beer (Kölsch, a pilsner) is good, the sausages aretasty, and the entire affair is difficult to forget. Of course, the giant parade on Rosenmontag is almost an afterthought for the informed traveler. It is best to arrive on the Thursday before (see link above) and enjoy the weekend. The entire city (Germany’s gayest city, by the way) is dressed in costumes and drunk for the entire four days. Every bar one enters will be full of costumed people singing traditional German music and dancing to disco. There will be Brazilian drum sections traveling the streets, and classical troupes spreading mirth everywhere in the city. So, arrive early, party early, and leave in one piece. 

The Carnevale in Venice is a decidedly more elegant affair, though equally hectic. The Venice Carnevale is a festival of masks. Elegantly dressed people will parade the city in the most beautiful and elaborate masks that one can imagine. The masks themselves have evolved into remarkable works of art and one of the many crafts for which the city is renowned. You can learn more about the Carnevale from the walki-talki.com mp3 walking tour of Venice. This tour will also get you acquainted with the major attractions should you find time before or after the party. As with Cologne, you are advised to arrive early to enjoy the festivities before the final parade. 

This year (2008) Karneval, Fasching, Mardis Gras, Carnevale (whatever you want to call it) happens on Monday, February 4.  

Payam

iPodLinux Installer 0.1 - MacUpdate

For those who are not particularly fond of the iPod’s operating system and who are rather technically inclined, there is now a solution. Get the software (linked above) and install your favorite flavor of Linux on the iPod.

“Why?” you may ask? There is no other motivation for the geek other than the fact that a challenge is there, but just as the geek curiosity to use the iPod to record internet broadcasts turned into the podcasting craze, this obsession with the iPod’s operating system may eventually lead to entirely new uses for the iPod. Should that happen, we here at walki-talki.com will be sure to be at the forefront.

Traveler IQ Challenge

I just heard about this fantastic geography quiz on the radio, and I immediately rushed to my computer and took it. I took the world quiz, and much to my disappointment, I only made it to level 10. I amassed a meager 372,662 points for a total travel IQ of 112. (I blame this on my outdated Mac and my bluetooth mouse. The combination makes for slow mouse movement). I imagine I will do better on the IQ tests that are limited to North America or Europe, but my lack of time has saved me the embarrassment of finding out otherwise.

In the mean time, you take the Traveler IQ Challenge and report back your results here for a comparison. Should your performance be less than you had anticipated, traveling to Europe and taking our self-guided mp3 audio walking tours is guaranteed to improve your score.

Walki-talki.com is proud to announce the release of our self-guided mp3 audio walking tour of historic Munich. See the city that was once the center of the European salt trade and the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. This is the city that took beer to new heights and gave us names like Diesel, Mann and BMW.

Jed Payne has written a beautiful introduction to this European–indeed, world–capital. Your guides Ben Silburn and Francesca bring this wonderful narrative to life in 15 splendid tracks that will guide you from Karlsplatz to Hofgarten. See where kings dwelled and drank beer. Take some time and drink! There is no better place to drink a refreshing wheat beer (or weizenbier, if you prefer).

So, load up your iPhone, iPod, or other mp3 player of choice, print the map, and get to learn the city made famous by monks: Munich.

Some time ago, I wrote about iTunes Agent, a free program that allows you to synchronize your iTunes library with any device.

Another fabulous and free program that can be used to manage your iTunes library and to synchronize your music with a large variety of music players and mobile phones is Floola. Floola is difficult to describe, but it promises to be the ultimate piece of software to read, to process, to manage and to synchronize your iTunes playlist with your iPod, certain mobile phones and mp3 players. Best of all, Floola is available for all platforms: Linux, Windows, and OS X.

So, bear in mind that you need not get trapped into the iTunes/iPod juggernaut. It’s not total freedom, but a definite break from the mainstream.

A while ago, I wrote about how the new iPhone and the iPod Touch may well be the perfect platform for our walking tours. It was awfully nice to read that the Telegraph of London agrees! The Telegraph recently reviewed mp3 walking tours, and in one article, The Telegraph placed walki-talki.com in its list of essential links for the iPhone.

Incidentally, in the other review, The Telegraph mentioned walki-talki.com as one of the best overall tours. So, if you’ve been looking for that perfect travel companion for your iPod or iPhone, look no further.

Happy Hotelier » Paris: Hotel Everland, The One Room (One Suite) Cube Hotel has arrived.

Happy Hotelier is a superb travel blog with a lot of fantastic tips on unusual places to stay in Paris. This particular article is about perhaps the most unusual hotel anywhere in the world, Hotel Everland. It consists of one room, it offers a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower, and it does not look particularly easy to reach. Read the article linked above to learn more.


Image from Happy Hotelier.

Hotel Everland is not cheap, however. So, you may want to invest in the superb walki-talki.com mp3 audio walking tour of Montmartre to make up the difference. Just take the subway across the river to the Blanch Metro stop, and press play.

• Jun 7 : Welcome to Geneva
• Apr 7 : Milan Kundera’s Prague
• Mar 20 : Walking the Medieval City of Prague
• Jan 20 : Carnival in Europe
• Dec 21 : Don’t Like the Operating System on iPod? Change It!