walki-talki.com Travel Blog

La Biennale di Venezia: Cinema. August 29 - September 8, 2007 Director: Marco Müller

The most preeminent film festivals in the world are the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy (linked above). How do you decide which to attend?

Cannes is a beautiful beach town, but the festival has associated with it a media feeding frenzy that is perhaps unbearable to most. Park City offers a spectacular natural setting for a festival, and Robert Redford has transformed the movie industry by creating the Sundance Film Festival as a showcase for independent filmmakers. However, many claim that the festival has lost its “independent edge”, and that, for example, the Toronto Film Festival offers a better variety and quality of films in North America.

This leaves, of course, the Venice Film Festival as the festival of choice because, frankly, few complain about it. And, if the lack of complaints is not incentive enough to visit the Venice Film Festival, consider the following. The Venice Film Festival is part of La Biennale, the biennial (the namesake) art festival in Venice. La Biennale is the biggest art festival in the world. It takes place over several months, and it covers every aspect of art: fine arts, design, architecture, dance, music, and film. Although each genre is fested at a different time, you are assured some overlap (art exhibit is from June 10 through November 21, 2007) and a dreamy setting to cleanse your palate between movies.

And, this year, there is a tribute to The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci. You can decide if you like him better for edgy films like The Conformist, the sex-laden movies like The Dreamers or Last Tango in Paris, or sentimental movies like The Last Emperor. It may be fun just contemplating.

And, if all of this is still not enough, then grab the walki-talki.com mp3 walking tour of Venice, and see Venice this year. It is a good time to visit.

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The new Globe Theatre is stop number 8 on the walki-talki.com mp3 walking tour of London. The original Globe was, of course, host to the master works of the best known playwright in the world, William Shakespeare. From the stage of this theater, the Bard transformed British theater so completely that he came to define it. From this stage, he mocked the royalty, the Church and the laity alike with zest and eloquence unseen heretofore or hence. On this day, June 30, in 1613, the Globe burned down to the ground.

It took nearly 400 years, but a replica of the Bard’s stage has now been built, and it is open to the public. Even if you are not a Shakespeare fan, you will find the many activities offered in this venue to be a most welcome break from the mind-numbing array of temptations that London offers. So, if you’re not quite in the mood for anything else, the new Globe is a worthwhile visit.

La Biennale di Venezia: Dance. June 14-30, 2007

La Biennale is perhaps the greatest art exhibit on the planet. It is now well under way in Venice, and you have until the 30th of June to partake in the dance portion of La Biennale. You really should partake in this event because there are no bonehead judges of the sort in the “reality” television series. It is the highest form of the art, performed on stage for your enjoyment and intellectual enrichment, should you choose to take a break from your vacation.

So, grab a copy of the walki-talki.com mp3 walking tour of Venice, and enjoy La Biennale.

Many more events remain in La Biennale, which officially lasts through November. We will bring you updates as they draw closer.

Berlin Hotel Recreates East Germany | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

The above Guardian article mentions perhaps the greatest treat for the cost-conscious traveler in Berlin: nostalgia, history and cheap prices. The Ostel in Berlin is a budget hotel that recreates the East German way of life. At nightly rates that are quite low compared to standard hotel rates in Berlin, guests stay in rooms decorated like the standard issue apartments of the communist era. (The beds and sheets, we are assured, are new.) For as little as $20 a night, you can bunk with other travelers in multi-occupancy rooms that harken to the Free German Youth summer camps of the former DDR.

Naturally, you will want to take the walki-talki.com mp3 walking tour of Berlin with you to get a better idea of why the Ostel hostel is so special.

The Ostel’s official web is www.ostel.eu.

You can find complete photo galleries here.

When we started walki-talki.com, we certainly hoped that the business would have an international appeal and an international reach. I don’t recall having the expectation to achieve both objectives immediately from the start. To get an idea of how international we are, click on the thumbnail to the right and see how geographically widespread our visitors are.

As it happens, our customers (those who bought tours) are similary distributed all over the planet. Naturally, our primary sources of sales are the US and the UK, but we have sold tours to customers from Poland, Lithuania, South Africa, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, and Brazil. I am certain that additional countries are represented, but I cannot remember them all at this particular moment.

So, if you have any doubts regarding walki-talki.com, lay them to rest. We are a company with a far, international reach. And, if you want to find out how we can help you do business on the international scale, visit our corporate services page to learn of the options that we offer. If you have any questions, our contact form is always at the ready. Self-guided mp3 audio walking tours are what walki-talki.com does. If you think your business could use our tours, we will integrate them into your business seamlessly and flawlessly, anywhere in the world.

Of course, you are free to enjoy our tours, too. That’s the primary reason we make them.

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Blackfriars bridge is stop number 5 on the walki-talki.com tour of London. In 1982, it was the site of a ghastly death. This week, five men accused of the murder were cleared of the crime in Rome. The court found insufficient evidence to convict the accused. Surprisingly, the first inquest in the UK concluded that Mr. Roberto Calvi, a troubled Banker living in Canada, had decided to commit suicide by hanging himself from Blackfriars Bridge one early morning.

Well, whatever the truth may be, as you wander about Blackfriars Bridge, feel free to wonder whether this was a suicide or a murder. Or whether the Mafia is reality or entirely the figment of the active imagination of people like Mario Puzzo and Francis Ford Copola.

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Photo by Bruno Girin.

In case you did not know, walki-talki.com has opted not to use any digital rights management (DRM) scheme in our walking tours. You may surmise that this is purely a consequence of either our lack of resources or of our laziness. Well, you would be wrong on both counts. walki-talki.com is but one of many internet sellers of digital media (music, photos, etc.) who are the avant-garde of digital distribution. We know that we can trust our clients, and we will prove that respect and trust are reliable commodities in the business of digital distribution.

Before you poo-poo this notion, bear in mind that just last week, Apple, Inc., (Yes, their official new name) started selling DRM-free music. Of course, Apple is very clever about it. They are using it as a marketing ploy to charge an extra 30 cents per song–the “theft premium”, if you will. That’s probably what they mean by iTunes Plus. (In the interest of full disclosure: I am an Apple stockholder.) So, this is a very real trend, and we are pleased to be at its frontier.

And, unlike Apple, we do not embed any personal information into the audio files that we deliver to you.

So, if you want DRM-free media to become the norm, put your money where your mouth is. Buy your walking tours from walki-talki.com, and buy your music from DRM-free outlets like www.audiolunchbox.com, ww.pastemusic.com, www.bleep.com, and www.betterpropaganda.com among many, many other outlets of DRM-free music. Of course, it’s now fair to count the iTunes Music Store as one of these outlets.
You will be shocked to learn how little it costs to start a revolution. To be precise, it costs roughly $0.99 a track. Substantially less at walki-talki.com.
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Yes, here at walki-talki.com, we emphasize how easy our tours are to use with iPods, but we are committed to making tours that work with any music player. That’s why we record and distribute our tours in standard mp3 format so that they are playable just about everywhere. One thing is for certain, however: iTunes sure does make the process of transferring files to the iPod very easy.

Then, the question that may come up is this one: can I use my generic mp3 player with iTunes? The answer is “yes”! Enter iTunes Agent. This is but one of the many wonderful free, open source software titles we will mention in this blog. iTunes Agent is a completely free program that synchronizes your iTunes library with any mp3 player. As you can see in the graphic, you can synchronize your iTunes library with mobile phones, too.

So, if you like the simplicity of iTunes, but you are not impressed by the hype around the iPod, get iTunes Agent, and take your music with you. Better yet, take our self-guided mp3 audio walking tours of your favorite European cities with you.

iTunes agent is for Windows only, so we Apple users will have to wait.

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The self guided mp3 audio walking tours at walki-talki.com could have been the first travel application for the iPod, but William Bright beat us to it by creating iSubwayMaps. “Little Bill” created this site as soon as the photo-capable iPods were introduced. He surmised, quite correctly, that it would be useful to have subway maps on the iPod. So, he painstakingly adapted high resolution photos of various subway systems around the world to be used on the iPod.

Why painstakingly? Because the documents had to be broken up into pieces so that you could zoom in on a particular part of the system when you need to do so. The result is quite nice, and by now, the selection of maps is large enough that you are almost guaranteed to find the map you want.

But, just in case you can’t find the map you want, go to amadeus.net There you will almost certainly find the map you need. amadeus.net provides maps in pdf and Micro$oft Word formats, only. Therefore, you will have either to figure out how to view pdfs with your iPod or other media player or to take a printout with you.

In due time, I hope to cite enough resources to allow you to take everything you need on your iPod. For now, you have walking tours and subway maps, and that may suffice.

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PS If you read the posts on the isubwaymaps.com home page, you will learn that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority prohibited Bill from using the MTA’s official map. So, he had to create one from scratch in order to avoid their alleged copyright violation. Bill also had to change the name of the site because Apple objected to the word “iPod” in the site’s original name. It is always interesting how progress is achieved despite the best efforts of large business and big government. PNM