Hospitality Club

Traveller looks for free bed and friendly talk. The worldwide hospitality club gives him a hand.

A little trick in case you don’t know it yet.

Are you gonna travel to Armenia but your budget could really live with a free bed for a couple of nights? Do you already have a hotel booked for Belize but could live with a free walk tour for a day? Are you heading off to Japan and feel like going for a lil bit more of local culture? Do you wanna meet foreign people in your own city/country and share experiences?

Hospitality Club is a gentle answer to all of these questions. It brings travellers together to offer and receive free accomodation, tours around an area, a dinner and some beers or simply a friendly travellers talk. The banquet’s being served on the Internet: hospitalityclub.org gives you the chance of registering for free, creating a profile as limited as you want, counting with trustable security settings and offering only as much as you can/want, being able to contact thousands of travellers worldwide able to give you a hand in their home city.

Their motto is “Free accomodation worldwide” and Im gonna paste you here an extract of their ideals:
¨The club is supported by volunteers who believe in one idea: by bringing travelers in touch with people in the place they visit, and by giving “locals” a chance to meet people from other cultures we can increase intercultural understanding and strengthen the peace on our planet¨.

Don’t be shy. It’s convenient AND lots of fun.

EU and Middle East Top Peaceful Spots

Some people have a dog; I go for the LP bluelist pet. My top five peaceful spots around are…

The Wadi Rum Desert
A battered jeep and a young local guide able to speak no English will be your only companions when in the heart of the Wadi Rum. The vastness of the arid Jordanian desert, with its reddish tones, high rock constructions, and lack of dunes wrap you tight making you feel tiny and peacefully unprotected.

Dunes at Golden Beach
The remote, white dunes of Golden Beach (Nangomi Bay, the tip of the island, North Cyprus), huge and changeable, give you the splendid sight of two of the most isolated pieces of coast in the Greco-Turkish territory. Savage white, green, and blue. And not a soul around. It’s all for yourself. Dig in.

Cofete Beach
This distant, volcanic beach in Fuerteventura (Canary Islands) seems to be left to “God’s hand” as the Spaniards say. It’s absolutely desert, and bloody difficult to find. The violent waves beat the coast, the huge rocky mountains at your back block the sun; an abandoned cementery and yourself are the only things in between.

Ummayad Mosque courtyard
An authentic peaceful spot in the middle of Damascus’ hubbub. Even though the greatest mosque of the country’s always bustling with activity (local crowds join to play, take naps, pray, or just chill), its golden and green magnificent courtyard offers one of the most inspiring places to reflect about life.

Qobustan Muddy Volcanoes
The unknown natural reserve of Qobustan, in the oily country of Azerbaijan, hides a handful of little “volcanoes” made out of gray mud. Their constant gurgling, in the middle of a quite empty, deserted, almost lunar landscape, feels like a quiet, relaxing symphony

Get Insured First

All excited about your new travel adventure? Keep it safe and sound with a convenient insurance pack

First things first. Don’t underestimate insurance competencies. You’ll need it whenever you don’t have it, and it’t invaluable when things go wrong. Besides too many other things, proper insurance can reimburse your luggage, help you out if you get in trouble with the law, if you need medical assistance (help on the spot, get ambulanced to somewhere else, get your relatives brought to you if unable to fly…), translation services or legal assistance with diverse matters.

The procedure starts prior adventure, at home. Check your medical policy to see what the coverage you have now includes. Have a travel plan handy, and consider what kind of activities/risk sports you’re doing, plus the areas you’re heading off to. Obviously insurance price’s gonna go up the most dangerous places you go to or the riskiest activities you decide to go for. With all this data in front of you, compare policy prices and go for the most convenient one for you. Travel Insurance Center, SOS International or Rough Guides Insurance are just some of them. The first one’s specialized in terrorism/specially dangerous areas, the second one’s famous for its great evacuation services and alarm centers in the US, Europe and Asia, and the last one’s not bad for independent travellers.

Once you got your policy contract and all your gadgets packed, remember to leave a copy of the insurance papers to a relative/someone close back home.

Sound-proof Dreams

Hotels now have to pass noise tests with A grades. Which inns will master silence first?

Earplugs under the pillow as a hotel gift are not ‘in’ anymore. If you go for something a bit more expensive than a backpackers hostel now you’re within your rights to demand a sound-proof room (pretty much space ship style). The new ’silent sleep’ trend in American hotels/hotel chains is raising standards all over the country. AmericInn, Kimpton Hotels and Le Parker Meridien New York, to mention some examples, have started the race at a good pace indeed.

In most of the cases, to renovate windows, doors and their frames is not enough. Redesigning every single wall of the building and its components is needed. Every masonry block must be filled with sound-deadening foam (in AmericInn case named and branded SoundGuard), TVs must be placed in separate furniture pieces rather than being mounted on the wall, and electrical sockets should be staggered to prevent unwanted noise from seeping between rooms. Sound muffling strategies of all kind have definitely landed into the list of hotel director’s worries. The “Sound Transmission Class test” seems to be popping in every high-class hotel agenda. Will the grades of this test be the cover letter of a hotel in the near future?

Im still the old-fashioned way, faithful to the earplugs I always forget when packing on my way from pillow to pillow. But it’s certainly worth taking a look to these couple of links: Article “Blessed silence is the new amenity”, Hotel Soundproofing. The sound-proof trend’s gonna give lots to talk about…

Guaranteed: peaceful dreams without echos or surprises. You better think twice about going to bed with a snoring pig!

An Eden In a Tiny Island

Everyone calls her Isola Bella. Spoiled daughter, hypnotic brazen beauty…

Beautiful island. This is the name she was given when she was born, though she’s also been given the nickname of “Pearl of the Ionian Sea”. Honoring all her stiff princess credentials (if she was a lady instead of an island , she’d be gorgeous and babyish), spreads her charm out next to Sicily’s breakwater, being the last one her current mother and owner. She lives very close to Taormina, in a very cute bay to which thousands of paintings could be drawn. I really don’t know if such paintings exist, but the photography in my memory doesn’t forgive the long abscence or forget the panorama. Lovely, perfect doll of shady childhood from hero to hero.

“What moved Ferdinand I, your father, your owner -land terms apply, you see, unless I give you humanity- to sell you to Taormina, I don’t know. Maybe she was the powerful wife of the area’s noble sir -who knows how developed were the Sicilian mafias back then-, and got enchanted by your natural abilities to attract handsome gentlemen able to entertain her. At some point, maybe, got frustrated with your out of competition beauty and sold you for a couple of gold sacks to Mrs. Trevelyan. Your new eccentric mother built a house facing the ocean for you, and filled your arms with exotic, imported vegetation. You moved from hand to hand, parents and bosses, until the last one -whose name you can’t even remember- went bankrupt and sold you at auction in 1990. The buyer then was Sicily’s region, who now takes care of you and keeps you as a nature reserve.”

Little lady: few meters’ island. Your shore still looks so young and pretty.
So many paintings could be drawn…

A Spanish Custom you Can Miss

Bullfighting, against all nationalist odds, is a shame for Spain as a traditional spectacle

To walk around probably the most prestigious bullfighting square of Spain, Las Ventas (Madrid), might tangle your stomach and make you feel nervous before entering the “arena” to watch your first “bullfighting art show” -as they call it-. For or against it, at some point of your Spanish stay, you might fall for the idea of buying a pair of tickets for a “corrida”. “Hell, it’s the national spectacle, carries lots of the Spanish culture, and therefore it’s worth to see”, I’ve heard numerous times.

Decidedly against the whole thing, I have never given credit to these kind of arguments; until at some point, suffering from an empathy attack (provoked by friends visiting and the tourist spirit backup) decided to give it a try. “If it’s been running for so long, years and years, it has to be of some good”; “You really can’t judge something without proper knowledge of it”; “It’s worth to see, even if it’s under an anthropological point of view”. These were pretty much the main thoughts bumping the walls of my mind giving me the reason and the strength to go to the show.

I’ll keep it short. I made my way to the assigned seat on my ticket, blind by the intensity of the national colors -yellow and red- everywhere in the square. The “arena” in itself’s beautiful, just until…

First bull. Out of six. Oh my gosh…Am I going to handle it? Stay positive. Anthropological experiment. So many people shouting and clapping. Will they shut up? I wish i didn’t understand Spanish. They’re studs. So proud. So bloody hungry of action and suffering. Oh no…can’t keep looking. Stay still. Anthropological experiment. Banderillas. Triumph in their faces. Sword. Doesnt get in. General booing for the bullfighter. Such a puppet. Another attempt. Booing. Sword. Bull. Bullfighter. Sword.

First bull. Took him a couple of long minutes to die, in the opposite side of the “arena”. Walking slowly, spitting blood in gushes, blood coming out of its snout, convulsioning, spitting more blood, convulsioning, trembling, falling over its forelegs, trembling, spitting, convulsioning, wanting to fall, trembling, spitting, falling. Dying.

First bull. Im not gonna go over the other five. Couldn’t handle more than four, understanding and living why was I against bullfighting, and why is it such a barbarie and such a shame for a national culture.

The Las Ventas bullfighting square has a 22.000 seating capacity. The fact that 22.000 people (a bit less, excluding the Japanese and Koreans that don’t make it through the whole thing, and are just there to “experience Spain”) enjoy watching what it takes for a bull to die in a bullfighting square is unbelievable, not to say disheartening and a degradation of the Spanish (human) self. Experts say in order to appreciate the art of bullfighting, people unattach feelings and emotions. It happens, though, that the bull is real, and the game a murder (or six, even better). For the fun of it.

Walking besides bullfighter lovers, and listening to their comments, that day in the arena realized there is a very Spanish character behind bullfighting. People who happen to spend their Sundays in Las Ventas have a very “Spanish” look, and a very “españolista” way of seeing life and the national feast: why are we even gonna pay attention to the international community/national sectors who have been opposed to bullfighting forever? It is a cultural tradition (?) on the line of the sacrifices in the Greek theaters. Apparently we´ve not evolved that much since then.

Such a shame for a nation which calls itself occidental.

The Unexpensive London

The ¨Free Hugs¨campaign lands in Covent Garden, leaving a sound, non-cloudy scent…

Not everything´s expensive in London, as the tall stories go whispering around. Hugs are pretty cheap in Brit´s capital; free, actually.

The ¨Free Hugs¨campaign has checked in the cosy lovely area of Covent Garden to radiate random happiness and brim over hugs of all kind. When you step on Covent Garden, you might expect to find all sorts of street artists (it´s the only part of the city where their work is licensed, giving out a rate of amazing daily performers from around the globe), but probably not a bunch of random people (that seem to be ¨picked from very different gardens¨) wearing white t-shirts with these messages in red: FREE HUGS. Just smiling at passer-by shoppers or walkers offering free hugs. That´s what they were doing. Simple. Some chaps were reticent, as if thinking: ¨What the hell is the trick here? What´s going on?¨, while some others ran straight to the arms of the offerers. They had not met each other before, but they were sharing a minute-long hug able to stop the world.

The ¨Free Hugs¨campaign is a movement that started back in 2004 (spread widely in 2006), when ¨Juan Mann¨ (a pseudonym), going through a very bad patch of his life back in New Zealand, decided to jump to one of the most frequented streets holding a big sign with the now two famous words of the campaign over his head. The unselfish movement started back then, boosting impact after one of its videos got on YouTube in 2006. Now thousands of people around the Earth follow his initiative. I still wonder why the hell it took me so long to discover it…

With no failure, these guys at Covent Garden got a smile out of everyone walking by.
The unexpensive London´s not that bad after all: are you ready to make someone´s day?

NY astride your iPod

Tune yourself in to the MP3 tours of the Big Apple…sightseeing up your alley!

An official tour guide holding high a flimsy umbrella to gather his offspring; a book offering advice and miracle tips about the city you’re in fact missing while reading its pages; a fully-packed tourism information video you must see before departing, from which data you’ll remember nothing when in situ; an spontaneous guru showing you charming passageways only known by natives to take a not allowed look to your wallet afterwards. What a dilemma, what to choose having the departure around the corner!

The exageration sickness makes me send out of orbit the fatalistic consequences of the traditional touristic guide, in his/her most common poses and portraits. Or perhaps I’m just using this argument to string together my love for New York (a), and for the MP3 tours that show it with humor and convenience (b). As the NY Times Travel article The ear can be your guide states (See article), a mob of amateurs and professionals have joined the challenge of the production of fresh podcasts to provide the visitors with the lightest, and cheapest tours: the downloadable audiotours. Journeys up and down clandestine bazars in China Town, walking routes around the Big Apple, the Soho, Queens, and who knows if the Bronx, empowered by the sole energy of your thumb. They´re ear-catching narrator voices able to install the passion for this always captivating city.

You won’t really want to forget your iPod.
And I keep on tangling up my will to come back to NY. Tuning up.

The Viennese Madrid and The Game of Hidden Gardens

Of how the “Jardines del Moro” can be a halt in the stone and the sights

Fall’s morning lost to the sun and the way too many steps. Tris, tras, tris, tras, where the hell is the damn entrance to the park? I know you’re there, rotter, why do you hide? And at last…oh…ah…oh…the Jardines del Moro (moor’s gardens) with its morerias and remnants of lost city, right there, scattered in between the pieces of bread of the busy-town-sandwich (Principe Pio’s awful mall and the Real Palace’s magnificence, monument to which the gardens belong).

The grounds are not big, but they’re very green indeed, strangling the racket and the voice of the bustling metropolis. From the tip of their tongue, the royal palace and its green mantilla seem to me, as if by magic, siblings of the fairgrounds of the Schonbrunn palace, where Sisí -unaware and absent-minded- made a fairytale burg out of Vienna. Less delicate it´s its ancestry, though…the Jardines del Moro are named after the shelter they were, back in the XII and XIII centuries, for the muslim soldiers that had Madrid´s popular mood cloudy and unsettled. The greeneries have been trotted by hunters, royal whims, and bystanders on their way to the Casa de Campo…

So many ailments and the years passing by have confined the gardens to the role of public park rarely visited and retreat place, thanks to the occasional chance, as I would say. Its two fountains will set up the music for you; its entry, the poncho of Highness; novel, stone bench, ready, steady, GO!

My Pick at The “Noche en Blanco”

¨Basurama¨, in Conde Duque, definitely my contemporary art pick from the ¨Noche en Blanco¨ in Madrid

The set of European ¨Nights in white¨made its stop last night in Madrid, Spain. The unexpected heavy rain and the massive crowds made from this once-in-a-year cultural bargain a disillusionment for lots of people. In spite of the watered culture, some of the pieces of street art still kept their genuine being.

My pick? “Basurama”, def.

After the rarities of the shouting singer in Debod’s Temple or the excessive silence of the Japanese music concert in Oriente Square, “Basurama” shows up in my night and my world with its witty saying and its authentic oddness. Mock decrepit living rooms outdoors, baths and tights, piles and piles of clothes and textile eccentricities, orgies of unmatched pairs of shoes, t-shirts ordered by color happily hanging from scaffoldings with umbrellas on the top -ironic, so needed under the rain!-, chairs with no arms, abandoned art…and everything’s to take away!

Under the motto of “At nine p.m. you can take the clothes, at midnight the furniture” hanging from the scaffoldings I observe how a group of gritty guys and a hand full of shy ones dig in the mass of clothing and waste. I took a cuddly toy home. And I am sure that later in the night someone took the bath…