Bless You! Bless You! Bless You! How wonderful you are!
In late December, ITN mailed out a survey to 1,000 subscribers selected at random. It was a many-questioned survey asking about your travels in the year 2008, and the results will be presented to potential advertisers. We received 869 replies!
Almost 87%! In survey circles, that is considered better than outstanding.
Travel can make you a poet. Travel can be spiritual. You meet people on the road you’d never meet otherwise. Traveling rearranges your cultural furniture, challenging truths you assumed were self-evident and God-given. By traveling, you learn not only about the people and places you visit, you learn about yourself.
One of the things that charms me about traveling through Europe is its ethnic variety. Hop on a train and two hours later you step into a different culture, different language and different heritage.
Travelers get a wonderful chance to witness European history in the making. Years ago when I got my history degree, I said to myself, ‘I’d better get a business degree, too, so I have something useful.’ But I’ve learned over the years that if more people knew more about history, our world would be better off.
When people ask me about the scariest situation I’ve ever been in, I think back to a taxi ride I took to the Moscow airport in the early ’90s. A no-neck guy who looked like a classic Russian mafia thug picked me up in a beat-up old car and drove for an hour down puddle-filled alleys and past derelict apartment buildings. All I could think about were those movie scenes where the good guy is taken down to the riverbank to be shot. Instead, the no-neck pulled up to the airport, shook my hand and said, “Have a good fly.”
Many travelers tramp through Europe like they’re visiting the cultural zoo. “Ooh, that guy in lederhosen yodeled! Excuse me, could you do that again so I can take a picture?”
One reason why Italy is so much fun is that it just keeps changing. Here are a few new developments that will be handy for you to know if you’ll be visiting the land of “la dolce vita.”
Shopping in Europe can be fun, but not if you let it overwhelm your trip. I like to shop smart, spending my time — and money — efficiently. Based on three decades of travel, here are my top tips for shopping in Europe.
Shop in countries where your dollar goes further. Shop in Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Eastern Europe, where the dollar is relatively strong. For the price of a doily in Britain, you can get a lace tablecloth in Spain.
