walki-talki.com Travel Blog

Scientists to exhume remains of Danish astronomer – USATODAY.com

Is it good to be a celebrity? It certainly seems that way when they’re alive. They have it all: good times, fame and fortune. Tycho Brahe was no exception to this rule. The brilliant Danish astronomer was man of considerable stature in his time, and he used his intellectual cachet to live an extraordinary life of privilege and accomplishment by making himself the most desired guest to the most power kings who ruled continental Europe.

And, that’s how he ended up in Prague. After falling into disfavor with the king of Denmark, Brahe accepted the invitation of Rudolf II, the king of Bohemia, to move his unrivaled research facilities to Prague. In Prague, Brahe continued to excel as the world’s best astronomer and trained the next great name in astronomy, Johannes Kepler, until his untimely death at the hands of a bladder infection, a demise documented thoroughly by Kepler. (The infection may have resulted from Brahe’s refusal to leave the royal dinner table to relieve himself, from his insistence on “holding it in”, as it were.) Now, some of Brahe’s compatriots from the University of Aarhus wish to verify that it was, in fact, a bladder infection that claimed the life of this most famous of Danes. They suspect that kidney disease or mercury poisoning might have been the culprit, and because Brahe is so famous and they are so curious, they have obtained permission to exhume Brahe’s 409 year-old remains from the Our Lady Before Tyne cathedral in the old city square in Prague in order to investigate this celebrity death.

So, is it good to be a celebrity? Are modern celebrities damned to this same fate? Will we exhume Marilyn Monroe’s body to reexamine her death? Is Elvis Aaron Presley’s corpse guaranteed any sort of restful, eternal sleep? Will Michael Jackson ever rest in peace?

The answer might depend on your perception of celebrity. Some might reduce it to the adage “there is no such thing as bad press”, not even exhumation.

But, what is definitely cool about this particular celebrity death is the location. Prague is an awesome city. The old city square is magnificent and magical, and the mystique that surrounds Tycho Brahe is but a small part–yes, really, a small part–of all the intrigue, mystique and history that are alive in Prague.

And, that’s why you should go to Prague. And, we have you covered. Our Lady Before Tyne cathedral is stop number 8 on the walki-talki tour of Prague. Get it now from our online store, or get it from The App Store for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

This much is for certain. Tycho Brahe’s grave is among the most exciting celebrity graves one could visit.

It’s a done deal. Our fabulous walking tour of the most dazzling, must-see destinations in Edinburgh is on sale on The App Store.

Learn about Braveheart, Castlehill, Sir Walter Scott and the nuances of Scottish cuisine that gave us deep fried Snickers bars, all from a totally self-contained and convenient app on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Follow the route to Grassmarket, visit the gravesite of the most loyal canine in the history of the world, find the best shopping in town and get acquainted with the rich Scottish intellectual history. Scotland’s contributions to economics, physics, chemistry, literature and philosophy are immeasurable, and this fantastic walking tour of the great city that cultivated all this culture will give you a full appreciation of these contributions.

And, if this sounds like an overstated aggrandizement of Scottland and Edinburgh, one only need to look to the last two British Prime Ministers to gain an appreciation of how influential Edinburgh remains as a vibrant world capital: Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh and Gordon Brown graduated from the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh also hosts one of the largest and most prestigious art festivals in the world every August: the Edinburgh International Art Festival and the attached Fringe Festival. And, if you have any doubts at all about the greatness of Scottland.

And, of course, Sean Connery is Scottish.

So, if you’re going to Edinburgh, August is the best time. Taking the walki-talki.com walking tour of Edinburgh can be done anytime. Buy it for iPhone OS  from The App Store, or for any device from our online store.

2010 is upon us, and with its arrival walki-talki.com enters its fourth year of business. We remain one of the surviving pioneers of digital audio walking tours, and we proceed as the company with the deepest device penetration: walki-talki.com is the only company to sell its tours as plain mp3 files for any device and as apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The generic mp3 packages can be purchased from our online store, and you can find our iPhone app collection on The App Store.

We also remain among the best reviewed digital tour companies on the web, and we have plans to expand our catalog to some of the less known but most desirable locales in Europe. And, if another mobile platform becomes as popular as the iPhone OS platform, we may expand our presence to it, as well. It is way too early to pick the next winner, however.

2010 may prove to be the year in which digital tourism finally breaks out of obscurity and becomes a travel mainstay, and the year in which walki-talki becomes one of its major players. Whatever happens, I would simply like to wish everyone a healthy and prosperous 2010, a year in which everyone will have the opportunity, the resources and the freedom to travel to far away places.

We have come one step closer to transporting our entire catalog of digital walking tours of European cities to The App Store with the release of the walking tour app of Geneva, the pearl of Switzerland.

Geneva is the capital of the Francophone region of Switzerland. It has played crucial roles in the protestant reformation, became a hub for Calvinism, contributed handsomely to the watch industry for which Switzerland is so famous, became a critical center for the writing and signing of international treaties, and, absurdly, was home to a bizarre casino fire that inspired a very famous Deep Purple song.

It sounds like too much history to come out of a small town nestled between the Alps and Lake Geneva, but it’s all true, and our audio walking tour of Geneva will convince you of the veracity of every single claim made in the above paragraph. A beautiful map, helpful pictures, a friendly, knowledgeable guide and a bevy of enhancements introduced in our 1.1 version of the app will assure you of a memorable walk through this fantastic Swiss city.

So, grab your iPhone or iPod Touch, buy the walki-talki.com walking tour of Geneva from The App Store, and enjoy a wonderful stroll through Geneva.

Don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch? Then grab the generic Geneva walking tour from our online store. It plays on any device.

We are very happy to announce that Rome: The Ancient City has been released for the iPhone and iPod touch. This fascinating walk takes you on a tour the heart of ancient Rome, as was seen 2000 years ago in Julius Ceasar’s time.

Rome: The Ancient City is available in the App Store now for just $9.99.

In addition to adding yet another city to our iPhone catalog, this is the first city to be released with version 1.1 of our player software. The rest of our published iPhone catalog has also been upgraded and submitted to Apple and is pending approval. Version 1.1 has several improvements:

• Addition of a volume slider especially for iPod touch users. Since most our staff are iPhone users, we overlooked the fact that the iPod touch has no volume controls other than what the app puts on the screen. (Sorry!) This oversight has been corrected.
• Zooming support. The map can now be zoomed in and out either by pinching or double tap/two finger double tap, just like the built in maps.
• Better resume support. Several bugs were fixed so that the app now does a far better job of remembering where tracks were if playback is paused for any reason.

Now that 1.1 is out the door, we are beginning to plan for the next release. We would love to hear any feedback or suggestions that people might have.

On a Munich Tour, Confronting a Dark Past  |  washingtonpost.com

The above cited Washington Post article describes the popularity of Nazi history tours in Munich. World War II, Nazi Germany and the Third Reich remain obsessions for too many Americans, in the view of Europeans. After all, Germany’s history is incredibly long, and its contributions to modern thought and culture are incalculable.

The obsession is perhaps understandable given that the persistent and constant celebration of the major WWII events (attack on Pearl Harbor, D-Day, VE-Day, VJ-Day, etc.) since 1945 have firmly established this global convulsion as the singular defining event of the modern American identity as global superpower. It is also understandable because anyone curious about human nature ought to study the singular greatest human catastrophe that arose out of, arguably, the most advanced intellectual culture in the world at the time in order to prevent its repetition. (Genocides in Africa have, unfortunately, proved us incompetent in that regard.)

All of which is the reason why the walki-talki.com walking tour of Munich is positively the ideal walking tour of Munich. We the major sites at which Hitler and the Nazi party rose to the establishment in Munich, but the rest of the history of Munich is also included. After all, Munich was major kingdom for nearly a thousand years before Nazi founder was even born. From its role as an independent kingdom that grew rich from trade, to its significant place in the Holy Roman Empire, and its rise to the center of modern thought and philosophy, you get it all in our tour. Naturally, we tell you why this is such an important place in the history of beer and brewing.

So, don’t limit yourself to the historical singularity. Get the whole picture when you visit Munich with the walki-talki.com audio walking tour of Munich, which is available for any mp3 player from our store, and for the iPhone and iPod Touch from The App Store.

36 Hours in Berlin  |  NYTimes.com

The New York Times recently published a fairly detailed itinerary for the hurried traveler in Berlin. Berlin is a rapidly changing city. Consequently, it’s hard for me to vouch for every one of the stops mentioned here, but based on the stops that I know, this is an excellent plan for you if you find yourself with fewer than 2 days to see Berlin.

Of course, an entire year is probably not enough to see everything that Berlin has to offer. Visiting the hundreds–yes, hundreds–of museums alone will take at least two years.

Fortunately, however, you have a nice list from the New York Times on all the current hip places to see, and you have the walki-talki.com walking tour of Berlin to blast through the city’s illustrious and unmatched history. The tour is available as an app for your iPhone or iPod Touch through The App Store, and as a combination of mp3 files and PDF map for any device.

If you’re in a hurry to see Berlin, this is your itinerary.

The Plan for Amsterdam

I came upon a fabulous post by Nick Zeleznack by following our web traffic data. Nick has a truly fabulous plan for those who want to get a good taste of Amsterdam, and I am quite flattered that he decided that our tour of the red light district is good enough to be part of his excellent tour of Amsterdam.

The tips he includes are excellent, and having lived in Amsterdam for five months myself, I can vouch for his choices of neighborhoods and shops to visit. They are all excellent.

So, grab our tour, read Nick’s plan, and have a blast in Amsterdam.

We did everything we could to get the iPhone app walking tour of Munich out in time for Oktoberfest (or Octoberfest, if you so prefer), and we succeeded. The walki-talki.com self guided audio walking tour of the historic center of Munich went on sale today as an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch (OS 3.1 tested) through The App Store.

Hofraeuhaus, stop number 11 on the walking tour of Munich.

Although this tour is not by any means an authoritative guide to the famed and fabled Oktoberfest, it will provide you with a nice background on the significance of beer in the city named for the monks who brewed the master brews that make Munich so famous. (München is the Bavarian dialect word for “monks”. For the record, the high German word for “monks” is “Mönchen”.)

Whether or not you are among the privileged few who managed to secure a seat in one of the VIP tents, get a copy of this tour and take a walk around town when you feel it is time to break from the merriment in order to avoid its toxic excesses. We are quite confident that this walking tour is every bit as entertaining when you are inebriated as it is when you are sober. And, if you harbor any doubts regarding this assertion, you can take the tour as many times as you want–drunk and sober–to find out for yourself because you are free to take the tour whenever you want and as many times as you so desire.

As always, if the iPhone and iPod Touch are not your devices of choice, the digital self-guided tour of Munich is still available through the walki-taki.com online store for any device capable of mp3 playback.

Eat, drink and be merry. That is the purpose behind Oktoberfest. A superb festival in a world class city.

The catalog of self guided walking tour apps for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) on The App Store improved dramatically yesterday with the introduction of walki-talki.com’s iPhone OS app walking  tour of Venice.

All of this tour’s fantastic narratives of the major tourist attractions in Venice–Basilica di San Marco (Saint Mark’s Basilica), Piazza San Marco, Ponte Rialto (Rialto Bridge), Palazzo Ducale and many other eye-popping historical treasures that make Venice a tourist attraction unlike any other are one click away on The App Store.

Basilica di San Marco, stop number eight on walki-talki.com's iPhone app tour of Venice.

Walk the steps that ancient Venetians laid upon the water a thousand years ago in this little corner of the Adriatic, see the places that Giacomo Casanova must have exploited in his countless seductions and learn why masks are such a big deal in Venice and why you should make an effort to return for the Carnevale.

The interactive map will guide you without an internet connection, the personable guides will tell you all of the most interesting stories about this dreamy land, and it will all be done on demand, whenever you want, from the convenience of your iPhone or iPod Touch. (We have tested the tours with the iPhone OS up to version 3.1.)

And if you have plans to catch the tail end of the Biennale, this tour is the companion you seek.

Of course, it bears reminding that the generic mp3 walking tour of Venice is always available for any mp3 capable device through the walki-talki.com store.

• Feb 24 : Digging Up History in Prague
• Feb 7 : Edinburgh on Foot with Your iPhone or iPod Touch
• Jan 5 : Happy New Year
• Dec 10 : A Stroll Through Geneva with Your iPhone
• Nov 12 : Rome tour released for iPhone – with new features!