Jaunted

Tags: Beijing Field Trip / Tiananmen Square / Communist Travel / Mao Tse Tung / → All Tags

Mao Groupies Flock to Tiananmen Square

With the 60th anniversary of China becoming a communist republic approaching October 1, Claire Duffett took a jaunt around the country for the month of September, starting with Beijing. Nowhere does old and new China collide than in its Capital, and for the next five days, we'll share with you the most up-to-date tidbits on what to see and do, and how many yuan it will set you back.

Tiananmen Square. For most in the West, it evokes images of a peace-loving student offering a daisy to oncoming tanks. For Chinese, at least outwardly, it’s a combo of Trafalgar Square and the Lincoln Memorial.

Every morning, thousands of pilgrims line up, white carnations in hand, to see the body of Chairman Mao Tse Tung, which lies in preservation in a mausoleum in the center of the cement-tile square, the largest of its kind in the world. The atmosphere is austere though a bit frantic, with armed police monitoring the seemingly-endless line and kicking out cutters.

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Tags: North Korea Travel / Pyongyang Travel / Communist Travel / Travel News / South Korea Travel / Seoul Travel / → All Tags

North Korea Inviting South Korea Over For The Weekend

Who's game for a nice little package trip to North Korea? Anyone? Bueller?

It was announced yesterday that Kim Jong-il is feeling a little neighborly lately and less bomby, and wants to restart family reunion trips from South Korea. Although South Korea hasn't yet said yes to allowing their people to venture over the border, North Korea is re-opening an enclave for reunions at Mount Kumgang, which was once a major money generator for the poor country.

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Tags: Worlds-Coolest-Pools / Moscow / Russia Travel / Communist Travel / → All Tags

No Need to Russian This Moscow Pool

Last one in's a rotten egg! We're finding the best places in the world to stick our toes in this summer (or next winter) for our World's Coolest Pools map. Know of any pools we must check out? Let us know.

Ah, life is short and time is fleeting! We didn't get to Moscow in time to use one of the world's largest public pools—it closed in 1990—but its traces are still readily apparent on the site. Besides, we don't know of any other pools which later became houses of worship.

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Tags: Berlin Field Trip / Berlin / Communist Travel / Tourist Traps / → All Tags

Berlin's Wurst Tourist Traps: Alexanderplatz

Jaunted's assistant editor Cynthia is currently kicking it in Berlin and all this week she'll be telling us what to do and not do in town. Any suggestions or questions? Let us know.

When we were living in Rome, we used to frequent a miniscule, cave-like jazz club named "Alexanderplatz." Knowing that it was named thus because of the historical cabaret district around the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, we suffered from a romanticized idea of the square.

It's been seventy or so years since the cabarets left, fifty-plus years since the Soviet architectural aesthetic converted it into a massive concrete platz anchored by the Fernsehturm (TV tower) and office blocks, and fifteen years since the giant Kaufhof department store emerged as king of the place. And yet, the tourists flood in for more than just access to the transportation hub; the draw being that finally, one is standing in Alexanderplatz.

Aside from the graffiti-covered Friendship fountain, whose proper name is the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft, the biggest attraction is perhaps the straight-up view of the Fernsehturm and the ubiquitousness of cheap wurst vendors in the square—both are pictured above.

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Tags: Berlin Field Trip / Berlin / Communist Travel / Tourist Traps / → All Tags

Berlin's Wurst Tourist Traps: The Reichstag

Jaunted's assistant editor Cynthia is currently kicking it in Berlin and all this week she'll be telling us what to do and not do in town. Any suggestions or questions? Let us know.

What is with the touristic impulse to ascend every tall, open-to-the-public building in a city? Like New York City's Empire State or London's St. Paul's Cathedral, Berlin boasts of some similarly sky-high sights. The city may be pretty flat, but draws like the Fernsehturm (TV tower), Berliner Dom, and of course the Reichstag keeps the busloads lining up for a glimpse of each landmark from the viewing platform of another.

While the Fernsehturm is the tallest option, the line is longer and the history weightier at the Reichstag, the home of German parliament which burned in 1933 and remained in ruins for decades. When architect Lord Norman Foster's new glass dome crowned the recontruction in 1999, the gawking masses descended on it due to its free and open admission policy.

This is both a blessing and a burden for visitors to the building, as nothing is better than free views of the city and an up-close experience of an architectural triumph, but free means queues long enough to bring about sunstroke.

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Tags: Berlin Field Trip / Berlin / Communist Travel / Tourist Traps / → All Tags

Berlin's Wurst Tourist Traps: Brandenburg Gate and The Wall

Jaunted's assistant editor Cynthia is currently kicking it in Berlin and all this week she'll be telling us what to do and not do in town. Any suggestions or questions? Let us know.

Dash across the street, in between the double decker tour buses and the school groups more interested in their souvenir purchases than what they are about to see, and you arrive at the Berlin Wall. Rather, you're standing in front of four sections of it, placed just so in Potsdamer Platz where the tourists can best photograph it surrounded by the glass buildings of a modern European capital.

The Berlin Wall, which once divided this city between the allied section and the Soviet quarter for thirty years, remains a huge tourist draw. In fact, it seems as though everyone and their moms can boast of owning a piece of the thing.

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Tags: Berlin Field Trip / Berlin Travel / Communist Travel / Tourist Traps / → All Tags

Berlin's Wurst Tourist Traps: Checkpoint Charlie

Jaunted's assistant editor Cynthia is currently kicking it in Berlin and all this week she'll be telling us what to do and not do in town. Any suggestions or questions? Let us know.

Taking a picture in front of a section of der Mauer (the wall) is a touristic rite of passage for visitors to Berlin, usually accompanied by a stop to the former location of the US Army's Checkpoint Charlie. We however chose to bike instead of walk around Berlin during the city's perfect early summer weather, and therefore literally breezed by most of the jammed tourist traps that dominate the areas where the Berlin Wall once stood.

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Tags: Design Travel / Serbia Travel / Belgrade / Communist Travel / → All Tags

Belgrade Opens a Communist Supermarket Redux

Oh, goodie! Someone has resurrected the sparse and depressing concept of a Communist-era supermarket in Belgrade. Everyone, off to Serbia! Inside of what was the first discount supermarket in Communist Yugoslavia, a Belgrade design firm has arranged various relics of cold war life and reopened the space as a concept shop.

With repurposed refrigerators, a VW bus, whole hospital examination rooms, and even bathroom doors ripped from a derelict freight elevator, the ReMiks Supermarket reinterprets the ascetic aesthetics of the "Golden Years of Communism" in order to show off spectacularly designed consumer products for modern living. Cracked cement floors and white warehouse lights dominate the space, in order to serve as an "imperfect background for the educated consumers' perfect fetishes." Sounds naughty!

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Tags: Cuba Travel / Communist Travel / → All Tags

Más Mojitos! Cuba Tourism Chugging Along Despite Hurricanes, Global Economic Collapse

As we've mentioned before, most Americans can't legally visit Cuba, but it looks like the rest of the world is having a hell of a holiday down there without us. The communist Caribbean island recently welcomed its two millionth visitor for 2008, marking the fastest it has reached that annual milestone in four years. As the AP reports, Fidel and Raúl didn't single out one passenger in particular for the honor of being number two million. Instead, the Cubans threw parties for passengers arriving at international airports in Havana, Santiago, and Varadero on Friday, November 14, plying them with boozy mojitos and salsa music. We don't dig the Castro regime's heavy-handed treatment of its political adversaries, but who doesn't love a good rum cocktail! The 10.7 percent surge in international visitors is especially impressive considering that the island got rocked by three hurricanes this year and the global economy absconded with everybody's money. To the rest of the world, all I can say is enjoy your Cuban vacations, and maybe we'll be joining you some time in the no so distant future.

[Photo: usacubatravel.com]

Related Stories:
· Cuba Throws Party For 2 Millionth Visitor [msnbc.com]
· Cuba Travel Coverage [Jaunted]

Tags: Communist Travel / Cambodia Travel / History / Southeast Asia Travel / → All Tags

Stepping Behind The Iron Curtain Of The East

The countries of Indochina love themselves some communism. Laos and Vietnam are openly People's Republics, with red hammer-and-sickle flags lining the streets, while Cambodia fronts like a democracy. (Mao Zedong Boulevard and Josip Broz Tito Street in Phnom Penh hint at the country’s political ideology.)

In Laos and Vietnam, it seems every central square, statue and museum pays homage to the worker’s struggle in some form. Here’s a quick run-down of the reddest sites in the region:

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Tags: Travel Referendums / Cuba Travel / Communist Travel / Barack Obama / John McCain / Chris Dodd / Mike Enzi / → All Tags

Travel Referendums: Considering Cuba

This November 4 is about more than just deciding between McCain and Obama. Other issues that directly affect travelers are up for decision, and this week we're taking a closer look at some of them.

Early in the Democratic primaries, Sen. Christopher Dodd, a returned Peace Corps volunteer, talked up the fact that all the American embargo on Cuba seems to accomplish is getting presidential candidates those 27 electoral votes in the swing state of Florida. We haven't heard much about Cuba policy ever since everyone's money evaporated, but there remain differences between the two possible presidents on whether or not the US should ease its embargo.

Barack Obama brought up the "pander to Cubans in Florida" aspect of campaigning when he spoke in Miami back in May. Before that, he stated that his administration would hold a "series of meetings with low-level diplomats" in Cuba. On the travel tip, though, Obama's policy isn't encouraging to would-be tourists from the US who want to obey the law. His stance on Cuba:

In the case of Cuba, [he and Biden] will empower our best ambassadors of freedom by allowing unlimited Cuban-American family travel and remittances to the island. Using aggressive and principled bilateral diplomacy he will also send an important message: If a post-Fidel government takes significant steps toward democracy, beginning with freeing all political prisoners, the US is prepared to take steps to normalize relations and ease the embargo that has governed relations between our countries for the last five decades.

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Tags: Communist Travel / North Korea Travel / Restaurants / → All Tags

Dictatorship Travel: Eating Like Kim Jong Il

After North Korea agreed to turn off its biggest nuclear reactor last week, it officially fell off the United States' list of countries that sponsor terrorism. So we figured, why not indulge in some Communist cuisine to celebrate?

In Cambodia, along with about 200 other countries, state sanctioned and supported North Korean restaurants serve as unofficial embassies of the country's creepy culture.

Turns out Pyongyang Restaurant in Phnom Penh is a microcosm of North Korea's Arirang Festival, in which tens of thousands of children create moving mosaics at Pyongyang's May Day Stadium.

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