walki-talki.com Travel Blog

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

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.

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.

Audio Walking Tour of the East Village and Hell’s Kitchen (Manhattan) - New York Times

walki-talki.com brings you the premiere mp3 audio walking tours of the top European destinations. We have designs on the top American destinations, too. Until the top American cities are given the walki-talki.com treatment, you can get two terrific tours of two of New York City’s influential neighborhoods from the New York Times. Follow the link above to find the tours.

The tour of the East Village (the part of Greewich Village that resides on the east side of Manhattan Island) takes you on a tour of the places that influenced modern art, including Claes Oldenburg’s studio and CBGB’s. Neither exists anymore, alas, but you can still make pilgrimage to many sites that had a huge impact on modern art and culture.

The Clinton neighborhood is the erstwhile neighborhood of poor, working-class Irish immigrants, whose misery and ambitions fueled racial strife and thuggery in the form of organized crime, thus earning neighborhood the title “Hell’s Kitchen”. Like the rest of Manhattan, it is now largely gentrified and occupied by decidedly civilized and affluent people of all races. Nevertheless, you can visit the places that inspired countless stories, as well as a few destinations that are still noteworthy.

Of course, neither tour nor the combination of both is enough to see New York City, and that is probably why the are free, but they should be enough to whet your appetite for the rest of the city and the walki-talki.com mp3 walking tour of New York City.

Stay tuned…

Clint Bagwell Consulting: Subway for iPhone

We told you earlier about subway maps for your iPod. It is not surprising at all that a similar service is now available for the iPhone. Why should this iPhone service be better than the iPod service? The iPhone offers more visualization features than the iPod. (Although the new iPod Touch matches many of the iPhone’s features.) Along with the bigger screen, the new visualization features of the iPhone and iPod Touch make it possible for you to use the device to follow the pdf map for each tour, as well as examine the additional media that we supply with each track.

This is awfully convenient from walki-talki.com’s point of view, of course, because the iPhone and the iPod Touch can each serve as a single comprehensive solution for deploying our walking tours. You can play our tours, view the pdf map, and decide which subway route to take to your next stop.

King James Bible + Proverbs + Psalms for your iPod

In my own travels as of late, I have noticed that fewer and fewer hotels store a copy of the Bible in the desk drawer. This development never bothered me, but there were at times a sense of unease. Nothing bad ever happened, of course, but it felt as if I was being cared for perhaps a bit less than in times past. If you have ever had this feeling, or if you ever feel it is necessary to have a copy of the Bible with you on your travels, follow the link above to take a copy of the King James Bible with you on your iPod along with our mp3 walking tours of Europe.

For a slightly higher price, you can order the Old Testament, too.

None of this should be construed as endorsements of any kind. Rather, these are merely links to satisfy any curiosities you may have had.

Payam