Intelligent Travel

Día de los Muertos

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Meg Weaver, our senior researcher and resident expert on all things español, gives us the deets on the Day of the Dead.

As the macabre spectacle that is Halloween wraps itself up, it's time to celebrate El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) this November 1st and 2nd. One of Mexico's most important holidays, the Day of the Dead originates in pre-Hispanic indigenous traditions spanning at least 2,500 years.

Unlike Halloween's focus on the frightening and scary, Day of the Dead is almost like a Mexican Memorial Day during which families gather to remember their recently departed and assemble an ofrenda (offering) in the form of an altar, filled with the favorite foods and drinks of the deceased, wax candles to represent their soul, water to quench their thirst, and papel picado of various vibrant colors.

Many families head to the cemetery on the Day of the Dead on November 1st to welcome deceased children back from Mictlan (land of the dead) and on November 2nd to commune with deceased adults also returning, for one day, from Mictlan. During this time, the cemetery takes on an almost festive air.

Mysticism blends with mariachis playing and people dancing. Copal, a resinous sap, is burned. People place calaveras (skulls) made of sugar, often emblazoned with the deceased's name, on the ofrenda tables. A black humor pervades the space as yellow and orange cempasúchitl (marigold) petals are scattered about. (This video captures some of the icons of the Day of the Dead.)

Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz quipped that Mexicans don't mind getting up close and personal with death; in fact, the Mexican "...chases after it [death], mocks it, courts it, hugs it, sleeps with it; it is his favorite plaything and his most lasting love." Ironically, the Day of the Dead in Mexico is a celebration of life, an acknowledgement of death as a fact, and a culmination, of life.

Buenos Aires Up All Night

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Senior Researcher Meg Weaver advises you to mark your calendars for an art-filled night in Argentina.

If you happen to be in Buenos Aires on Saturday, November 15th, basking in the spring sunshine, don't miss the city's fifth annual Noche de los Museos (Night of the Museums).

On this special night, state and national museums, universities, and private galleries open their doors for free from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. A city-wide artistic block party ensues, with films and performances of jazz, tango, folk, techno, choral, and rock music throughout the city's many artistic venues. Last year 102 institutions participated and 414,000 people attended. Many train and minibus lines operate free of charge, too, carting culture lovers from venue to venue.

Expat Irish blogger, Paddy in BA, says he felt a bit like Ben Stiller's security guard character in the 2006 film Night at the Museum while strolling through the museums after dark (without T. Rex skeletons chasing him, of course). And the event reminded me of one of my favorite books as a kid, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which a brother and sister run away to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and explore it at night.

Paddy in BA adds that Noche de los Museos is not all high-brow fun, as it ends with a smashing party down near Puerto Madero and runs into the wee hours. Last year's closing party featured Argentine-American rocker Kevin Johansen & The Nada playing in front of 30,000 people from midnight 'til dawn.

Have you been to BA's Noche de los Museos? Are there similar city-wide cultural festivals in cities closer to home? Fill us in on this awesome idea. Wonder if we can get something similar started here in DC. . . 

Atlanta is for Louvre-ers

Le Musée du Louvre? Ici? Oui!

Thanks to a ongoing partnership between the Louvre and Atlanta's High Museum of Art, you can view a selection of the Louvre's masterpieces sans international airfares.

The exhibit, titled “The Louvre and the Masterpiece,” is the third and final installment in a series of year-long exhibits on loan from the Louvre. This exhibit opened in Atlanta on October 12 and will be on view at the High through Sept. 6, 2009.

As the title suggests, the exhibit will examine masterpieces. Not only will museum-goers have the opportunity to view 91 selections from the Louvre's eight curatorial departments, they will also learn about the concept of "the masterpiece" - how the term is defined, and how our perceptions evolve over time. Though most of the artwork will be on display throughout the exhibit's duration, some pieces, such Vermeer's The Astronomer (left), will be rotated in and out periodically.

High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E., Atlanta, Georgia; +1 404 733 4444. 

Saving Oklahoma's Prairie Cathedral

Driving along Highway 177 in north-central Oklahoma, your eyes wander across seemingly endless stretches of open prairie and sky. So it may come as a surprise when they fall upon an oversized barn made of rock. You can perceive the outline of this local landmark miles before you actually confront it; and when you finally do, you’re met with walls 55 feet high, expertly cut and mortised of local sandstone, with two of the stones cut in heart and diamond shapes—more the makings of a cathedral than a barn. The space inside the barn is lofty—capable of holding up to 60,000 bales of hay—with pine and hemlock-fir trusses that make up its intricate, arching skeleton.  It's the largest free-standing rock barn in the state, and possibly the world.

Deconstructed, the barn contains enough lumber to stretch for 9 miles, and enough stone to build some authentic looking mountain cabins. These facts did not go unnoticed by the barn’s owners, who saw more profit in knocking it down than letting it remain on the 66.8 acres of grassland it had stood on since 1941, when it was built by a banker named Richard Schultz. Unless, of course, there was a way they could make a profit by selling it.

Arkansas: Sweet Mountain Music

Friend of IT Gerard Matthews sends along a tip on the best place to find some bluegrass in the hills of Arkansas.

Tucked away in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, between clear mountain streams and canopy-covered hiking trails, lies a small town where people come together to sit a spell, eat down-home cooking and pick a little old-time music. A folk or country music festival isn’t such a rare thing in the South, but in Mountain View, Arkansas, you can hear sweet gospel music, or lightning-fast bluegrass licks almost any day of the week, so long as the weather’s nice. 

To say that Mountain View (population 3,000) is small might be a bit of an understatement, but from April to November the town square quite literally hums with excitement. The breeze up in the mountains smells like honeysuckle and feels good after a long, humid day. And in the center of town, as afternoon lulls into evening, the crowds begin to gather around the old courthouse, and local musicians—farmers, teachers, accountants, civil servants, shopkeepers, housewives, and their families—make their way to the surrounding town square, instruments in tow.       

“On a regular night, there’s at least 100 musicians out there on the square. It’s like a festival, but it’s a little different ‘cause it’s something that we’re all used to," says Dean Hinesley. "It’s really just a hunger and a craving that we have to take care of from time to time.”

Hinesley is a banjo picker who also plays the guitar, stand-up bass, mandolin, and fiddle (although never plays the fiddle in public, he says), is a fixture around the Stone County Courthouse on Friday and Saturday nights, and occasionally during the week, if he and his buddies get the itch. He’s 70 years old and has been playing music “for all but about ten of those.” 

As musicians sit in small groups of five, six, or seven, taking turns yelling out the names of songs everybody knows, music lovers can walk from group to group, enjoying a glass of lemonade or basket of fried green tomatoes from the local vendors. Old couples sit in lawn chairs and young children chase each other in circles or play in the grass. The music scene here has become a favorite for out-of-towners over the past few years, but the people of Stone County have been pickin’ and grinnin’ for decades.

Quirky Caravan of Life

If you happen to be in Brighton, England this weekend (Oct. 3-5) for the Photo Fringe Festival, you'll have a chance to pop into the tiny, traveling Caravan Gallery, which has been trundling around the UK since 2001 displaying photos that emphasize, according to their website, "the reality, and surreality, of contemporary Britain." The Caravan Gallery is an exhibition space, a caravan, and a visual arts project by British artists Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale, who describe themselves as "simultaneously seduced by and suspicious of the rose-tinted tones of tourist information brochures, and frustrated by their yawning omissions." Williams and Teasdale have set out to correct those omissions by photo-documenting curious juxtapositions they come across in their travels, and they display their photos in the 1969 car trailer that follows them around. Gallery visitors are welcome to suggest places for them to investigate next.

If you miss them in Brighton, you may be able to catch the show in the USA.  Chris Teasdale says

We are fundraising to bring The Carvaan Gallery to the USA next year and planning to exhibit images in the caravan of towns and cities in the UK to places with the same name in America.   We will be traveling between LA and New York stopping off at (among others) Portsmouth, Glasgow, Liverpool and Washington.  We have a film company involved o capture the reactions of the American public to the "real" Britain.

Check their calendar for updates.

Hat tip: Shedworking

Photo: the Caravan Gallery

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Babar the Globetrotting Elephant

Continuing our coverage of childhood nostalgia that has inspired us to travel, friend of IT Amelia Mularz sends us a dispatch from the wilds of New York City, where a venerable elephant has taken up residence for the next few months.

In a world inhabited by Bratz dolls, it’s nice to be reminded of an old childhood classic like Babar, the globetrotting elephant. There is a certain sophistication surrounding Babar and his simple green suit that more modern day children’s characters can’t touch (we’re going to ignore for the moment the fact that Babar married his cousin). Now until January 4th, The Morgan Library & Museum in New York hosts an exhibition in honor of the animal kingdom’s most famous world traveler. Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors takes visitors back to 1931, when the French painter Jean de Brunhoff first created Babar, then to 1946, when Laurent de Brunhoff took over several years after his father’s death.

The exhibit features the working drafts of each artist’s first Babar book, which makes for an interesting comparison in method between father and son. Not to mention, it’s fun to look back at Babar’s travels from the jungle to a Parisian-like city, on a family vacation around the world, and even into outer space. And after almost 80 years, Babar is still on the road. Just last month Laurent de Brunhoff published Babar’s USA. If only Babar could show those Bratz girls there’s a whole world outside the local mall. 

Read More: The New Yorker's Adam Gopnick recently reviewed the exhibit, and discussed the pro-colonialization interpretation of the books and the way it has fit into the canon of children's literature from the past century.

Has a storybook character from your childhood inspired you to travel? Let us know in the comments.

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Smithsonian Ocean Exhibit Grand Opening

Whether you made it to the beach or not this summer, you will definitely want to head over to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History this weekend to learn all about the unseen organisms lurking in the sand under your beach blanket…right??

Fine. Even if the fact that over half of all animal phyla are microscopic and live in sand doesn’t have you clamoring for more, a peek at the new Sant Ocean Hall will.

This Saturday, September 27th, the Ocean Hall will open to the public, but I got a look at the exhibits earlier this week. Spanning 23,000 square feet and boasting 54-foot ceilings, the Hall has a little something for everyone.

Big fan of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?

The exhibit features not one, but two giant squids – though the male looks downright small compared to the 24-foot-long female.   

Whale Lover?

The 45-foot model (above) of a North Atlantic right whale is an exact replica of Phoenix, an actual whale living in the wild. Phoenix, the model, has been dubbed the “ambassador” of the Hall – she holds a prominent position suspended from the ceiling.

National Geographic recently published a feature article on the friendly giants, (pictured, right), which are endangered in the North Atlantic but flourishing in the South  Pacific.  Brian Skerry's online photo gallery accompanying the article is stunning.

World's Greenest Museum

The "living roof" of the new California Academy of Sciences Museum, by Tim Griffith

The California Academy of Sciences will reopen this weekend as the greenest museum in the world. Located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the revamped, gargantuan CAS is an aquarium, digital planetarium, natural history museum, and four-story rain forest all rolled into one.

The U.S. Green Building Council is on course to award CAS its highest mark of sustainability, the LEED Platinum ranking. CAS is green on many levels: it’s insulated by nontoxic, second-hand blue jeans; it’s topped off with a 2.5-acre “living roof” stocked with 1.7 million native California species (which will absorb about 2 million gallons of rainwater annually); its pair of celebrity chef-led restaurants feature organic produce and local seafood; its glorious glass piazza uses an automated ventilation system to let in cool breezes from the park and refresh the building; it’s set to consume 30 percent less energy than required by federal codes; and its 60,000 photovoltaic cells will use solar power to produce between 5 and 10 percent of the museum's energy needs.

National Book Festival This Weekend

If you're in the D.C. area this weekend, make plans to stop by the annual National Book Festival on the Mall. Sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by First Lady Laura Bush, the festival features some 70 authors (from children's book authors, to poets, to novelists) who give talks and sign books.

This year's list of authors includes children's book icon R.L. Stein, novelists Philippa Gregory and Alexander McCall Smith, and historian Walter Isaacson.

But for travel enthusiasts like myself, the book festival is hosting Tony Horwitz (Blue Latitudes), Paul Theroux (author of The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: See the review by our own Don George), and Arthur Frommer (as well as his daughter, Pauline), founder of the famous guidebooks.

Also cool: The festival is free and has tons of activities for children. Each of the festival sponsors tend to have activities in their pavilion (kids can even take pictures with characters like Clifford the Big Red Dog and Curious George). While the authors speak all day, the festival freebies (posters, bags, etc.) go quickly, so try to get there in the morning. If you need a break, you can always pop into one of the Smithsonian museums that surrounds the Mall.

Photo: Book Festival poster designed by Jan Brett