It's less than a month to go until the big Arctic Open Golf Championship so you'd better practice your swing and get used to playing at midnight.
Yep, up in Iceland they like to do things a little differently, and from June 26 to 28 you'll be able to take part in--or be a spectator for--the world's only golf tournament that takes place in the middle of the night, thanks to the almost endless daylight they get in northern Iceland in the summer.
The Akureyri Golf Club is the host for the unusual event, and we're thinking this might be the only time in our lives when we have half a chance to play well: Since the game's held at midnight, maybe our opponents will have trouble too.
There are all kinds of odd reasons to visit Sweden. We're quite keen on the nuclear power plant tours for a start. But come April, we have one more excellent reason to head there: April 19 brings us the annual Oyster Opening Championships, held in Grebbestad.
The aim of a champion oyster opener is simple:
To open 30 oysters in the shortest possible time, without bloodshed, and present them in an attractive way on a tray.
So obviously you've gotta be into oysters to get a kick out of this particular event. Locals recommend washing down an oyster meal with some of the local beer, Grebbestads Bryggeri. Sounds like the kind of beer whose name only gets easier to say when you've had quite a few.
We were on the way home from our geeky weekend in Philadelphia when we cell phone snapped this ad. It's touting the new Take Pity on Me! contest from the Scottsdale Convention and Visitors Bureau.
If you find yourself buried under snow, frozen and fatigued, Scottsdale can help. The CVB is giving away a four-day trip to Southern Arizona. All you have to do is submit a photo or video of you suffering from the winter blues.
Starting March 3, the top 10 photos and top 10 videos will go online and website visitors will pick the best of the best. Our advice? Go all out for this thing. No video has ever been a smash-hit on the web thanks to its being unoriginal and boring. Let us know if you enter, and we'll vote for you!
We love a good voting contest, and the nastier and more competitive it is the better. Which is why we were happy to find out about the upcoming edition of our favorite board game, Monopoly. The "Here and Now: World Edition" is coming soon. Picking just 22 cities for the game is gonna get ugly.
Before the factories can start churning out the new Monopoly board, it's up to the general public to decide which world cities go on the board and where. The top 20 cities as voted on the website will be allocated to spots on the board according to their ranking on February 28. The final favorite city will get the most expensive spot. (After that, there are two wild-card spots available.)
So if you have a niche kind of city that's your favorite, head to the website and do a write-in vote for it. From February 29, there'll be one more voting stage to see which two write-in cities will win the cheapest spots on the board. And then we'll be able to throw the dice and head to jail all while we're doing a round-the-world trip.
Any language that gives cute names to national tourist attractions--like Kiek in de Kök--is a language we're prepared to love, and the language we're talking about is Estonian. Strictly speaking we have a feeling that Kiek in de Kök isn't a correct part of the modern language, but there are still oodles of cool-looking words in Estonian.
So we're more than happy that the Estonian government has launched a Beauty Contest for Languages. The whole contest idea apparently came about like this:
The idea for the contest arose out of an Estonian story that the country's language was once crowned the second most beautiful language in the world after Italian. The winning phrase then was "soida tasa ule silla" which means "go slowly over the bridge".
The contest will involve kids from around the world recording a phrase in their language of seven words or less, and judges will decide which language sounds the prettiest. It's all timed to coincide with Estonia's 90th birthday as an independent state, so we can presume that some cute Estonian phrase will rank highly in the winners' list.
The annual New Zealand's Best Loo competition is on again. A loo is, of course, what all those colonial types call a toilet, so this is a New Zealand Tourism-sponsored hunt for the country's best public bathroom. Apparently bad restrooms are the most common thing tourists complain about, so the tourism board is trying to raise the standard across the country through this contest. Tourism chief Barry Lucinski reckons
The state of a town's public loo speaks loudly about the town itself and its level of public spirit.
Know a good loo in NZ? Entrants need to write 300 words about why their favorite public bathroom should win, and also send in photos. What exactly you're going to say for 300 words remains a bit of a mystery to us but presumably too much toilet humor won't actually be considered funny.
We still think it's kinda curious that Finland thinks all it has to offer in summer is weird events like cell phone throwing and wife carrying. But it seems to be enough to get the tourists in and the World Wife-Carrying Championships are coming round again, with the big hoist-up happening on July 7.
Now in case you've never considered carrying your wife around a 275-yard track as the ideal holiday activity (and don't worry if you don't have one--any woman over 17 will do) then you haven't read Stephen Bleach's blow-by-blow account of his own wife-carrying experience. From choosing the carrying style (fireman's lift, the Estonian, or the piggyback) through to navigating the water obstacle, there's a lot more to wife-carrying than meets the eye. And it's worth the training, because the winner receives ... wait for it ... his wife's weight in beer. For the record, Bleach and his wife came in 39th ... out of 40!
We've already covered Freddy's diorama nights here, but the popular Brooklyn dive bar's got us thinking again. There's no real reason to be intimidated about visiting a neighborhood place anywhere, but if you suffer from the occasional out-of-towner jitters, you can leave them at the door at Freddy's Bar & Backroom. We recently participated in one of their famous Monday night spelling bees (yeah, yeah) and were impressed by just how welcoming the competition was--perfect for out-of-towners, too, as the host will force you to awkwardly introduce yourself on your first turn. Spelling bees are $1 to enter, and the winner takes the pot home or, more likely, recycles it at the excellent bar. Check the bar's calendar for listings and consider dropping by next time you're in town.
0 Comments - Add Yours
by amandak
