Results tagged “foreignlands”

After looking across the pond for his congestion pricing scheme (London introduced congestion pricing in 2003 and extended it westward this February), Mayor Bloomberg is travelling south of the border to Mexico on a fact-finding trip to fight poverty. The subject of the mayor's journey is a program dubbed Conditional Cash in the U.S., but called Oportunidades in Mexico. Oportunidades pays poor Mexican women unrestricted cash bonuses for behaving in a manner that officials hope will break that country's persistent cycle of poverty. Goals that must be met include regular school attendance by a family's children, showing up for scheduled medical appointments, and following dietary guidelines that may include feeding children necessary dietary supplements. Compliant women must then travel once a month to a distribution center where they are paid an amount of money dependent on their circumstances, such as how many children they have. Oportunidades is not an employment program, but an effort to increase people's social capital by inculcating self-beneficial values and behavior.

When we feel the need to get away from the city without actually leaving the city, we head up to the Bronx. Places like City Island, Wave Hill, The New York Botanical Garden, and The Bronx Zoo are some of our favorite places to visit in all of New York, and we realize that's only the tip of the iceberg when considering the Bronx's appealing features.

If you're thinking about taking a little trip to cap off the summer, check out Farecast-- they just opened their beta to include New York and a bunch of other cities. The service predicts fares over the next few weeks, so you can time your purchase to minimize the expense. For instance, the graph above shows the NYC to LA fares for late October.

If you're looking to lose a few minutes thinking about how much amazing stuff Gotham manages to cram and sneak into itself we recommend you go check out the great set of black and white photos of Chinatown up on Rion.nu. They manage to capture a nice side of one of our favorite Manhattan neighborhoods.

Gothamist has a long list of things that fascinate us and one of the odder things on said list is the peek into the human psyche provided by security checkpoints (specifically the items they turn up). Luckily we're not the only ones. Sometimes it seems a week doesn't go by without a look at things turning up in airports or train stations showing up in one paper or another. But normally those stories focus on drugs or weapons, so it was with happy interest that we found this article in the Times today.

If Kim Jong Il's North Korean army is built of tiny prodigies, like the adorable three year old Mo Kin who can play the xylophone like nobody's business or mug and sing shamelessly in a creepy Shirley Templeish way, the U.S. is screwed.

An Agence France-Presse report about inept Finnish bank robbers was already funny itself: Drunken 50-something Finns (unmasked and easily identifiable) came into a bank intending to rob it, but were talked into a bank loan by the bank manager, left without a fuss, and ultimately were arrested at home. But then AFP paired it with a photograph of a Finn bringing his savings to a bank - plastic baggies of coins and hippo banks from the Hungry Hungry Hippos collection!

Slate's Seth Stevenson decides to look at Tokyo "One Cliché a Day." Yesterday's focus was comics and anime. His favorite is pop culture character is Sirotan (left), who Stevenson notes dresses up as other marine life. [Stevenson gives Sirotan a "Wackiness level" of "yellow, or 'elevated.'"] But the real prize is a crazy giant panda robot:

New York was bumped from number 3 to number 4, in UBS' poll of the most expensive cities in the world. Oslo is the new number 1, replacing Tokyo which is now 2; Hong Kong is number 3. But don't worry, that still means New York is the most expensive city in North America or Western Hemisphere. Some interesting Oslo facts from the Daily News:

Today is Bastille Day, but, considering the differing opinions of the US and France regarding Iraq, the festivities in NY seemed tame. The Times wondered where the French were and one middle-aged French woman said, "I think there's so many French people in New York that most of them are probably somewhere else. Maybe they're in Brooklyn."

The New York Post dispatches its own Post Potty Patrol to report on the best bathrooms at restaurants and clubs in the city. The bathrooms they choose? The ones at XL, bar 89, Tao (we were familiar with the pachinko machines in the ladies' room, apparently the men's room is the place to be), Jekyll & Hyde, Dusk, Noa, and Glass, plus the ones at Jay-Z's 40/40 . Gothamist is very familiar with various bathrooms in the city, we'd like to add that the bathrooms at Brasserie are cool, with that orange resin trough/sink. And at the shared trough sink (must be a brasserie thing) at Pastis, we washed hands next to Jean-Georges.

Mon dieu! Gothamist's favorite New York Times food writer, Amanda Hesser, and husband New Yorker writer Tad Friend, are riding Segways in Paris for Slate. Apparently, Tad Friend is heading up some sort of diplomatic-literary-technology type of delegation to bring cutting edge human transport devices to old-school Europe. About time.

Gothamist is already beginning to plan our summer holidays away from New York, and we want to help you plan your summer trip. Idea #1: Portmeirion in Wales. A zany place created by Clough Williams-Ellis early in the century as the embodiment of his ideas about architecture and beauty. Something is a little off though. Maybe it's because they filmed The Prisoner here in the 1960s. The show has been caricatured in many films and t.v. shows, most notably in the Mr. X episode of The Simpsons.

Gothamist is a big fan of Stencil art- the last time we were in Londres we think we saw some of Banksy's stencils around the city. Previous Gothamist posts about stencils and graffiti.

I love people who love subway maps as much as I do. This page at Reed.edu has about a million of these Subways / Transport maps. In my personal opinion, the nicest subway system in the world is in New York, followed closely by Madrid, Paris, and London. The coolest subway system is probably in Rome- there are only two lines and everything is covered in 1980s style graffiti. The worst subway system? My bet is still the gazillion dollar distaster in LA. "Hollywood to West Hollywood in only 15 minutes!" [via x990000]

The daily convergence of life and Seinfeld: In New Zealand, postal worker was fired for hoarding letter. You know where I'm going with this: the Andrea Doria episode of Seinfeld where it's revealed that Newman has been hoarding letters...Jerry helps Newman deliver the letters, in hopes that Newman will be transferred to Hawaii. Of course, Newman doesn't get the transferred because Jerry has a delivery rate of 80%, unthinkable for the USPS of the Seinfeldian world. "It's like the 4 minute mile!" Newman seethes.

My father took this picture of a special golden Buddha somewhere in Panyu or Zhaoqing. Apparently, people are not allowed to take pictures of the buddha, but Paul Chung, realizing his daughter needed content for the website, brushed convention aside and captured this. Thanks, Daddy!

Another picture from my parents' trip to Pangyu and Zhaoqing. These are koi fish in a pond. Koi fish are very popular in Asia, and there's a lot of koi porn here in the U.S. On Amazing Animal Videos had a segment about a golden retriever whose best friend was a koi fish; when the owners moved, they made another pond for the koi. The dog would lean over the pond and the fish would go to the surface of the water and kiss the dog.

My parents just got back from sightseeing in Zhaoqing, China. One of the things to see is the "Seven Star Crags," which are huge pieces of limestone in the same positions as the seven major stars of the Big Dipper.

The worry about the possibility of Iraq destroying artifacts because of war is upsetting when you think about how long those things lasted, and then to disappear because of this conflict...it just makes you wonder about all the destruction. People were upset when the Taliban damaged the Buddhas, but that seemed to be out of pure malice.

One of the movies I enjoyed last year was The Minority Report. Well, I enjoyed it up until the very end. If you haven't seen it, then this might be a spoiler, but I was disappointed by the "happy" ending and the way loose ends were tied up. I think movies, especially dramatic ones, are more interesting when things are left to the imagination. Anyway, apprently the Brits aren't found of TC in the Minority Report - at least not on their cell phones. ‘Menacing’ Cruise ad causes stir

I'd love to go back to Paris [via megnut/harrumph], but I'm still pretty uncomfortable with all the raging anti-Israel and anti-USA sentiment in France. I mean, it's not a deal breaker for me, but it's my money, and I'd rather go to a country that isn't quite so hostile to my beliefs.

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For some reason, Jake is very amused by the sight of middle-aged Chinese men wearing traditional British legislative garb.

I was reading this article on China in the Times, and I started thinking about how many cities there are in China. According to this list that I found at UCLA, there are over 99 cities in China with populations of more that a million people. Most of these cities I've never heard of- Tianjin, Qingdao, Shenyang, and Guangzhou all have more than three million people. According to this table at Travelgis, there are only 22 cities in the world with populations of more than five million people- surpringly the largest one is Seoul, with about 10.8 million residents.

Dateline, Hong Kong

Dateline, Hong Kong

Dateline, Hong Kong