We think short skirts and large bags could be the next items banned from Venice after Tuesday's shocking arrest of an alleged Italian voyeur with an affinity for bums.
Police say the 38-year-old married businessman had 2 kids but still found ample time to capture up-skirt images of 3,000 women in Saint Mark's Square. Apparently he rigged a rather sophisticated camera inside a bag with a little hole cut in the side. How MacGyver!
An investigation revealed that the guy has been perving around Venice for years, but it took officials until now to realized he was only following girls who were showing some leg. As if having the images for private use wasn't gross enough, DVDs with the material he filmed were also found in his bag.
One might assume that Venice's boys in blue were too busy controlling topless sunbathers and pigeon feeders to notice a creep on the loose--until we present this photo, taken in Venice this Sunday. Italian police: As efficient as you'd expect!
You thought Nicolas Sarkozy was the only womanizer in Paris? S'il vous plaît. One of his aides, Pierre-Louis Colin, has written up a guide to spotting sexy ladies in the arrondissements.
Colin says you'll have luck just about anywhere in Paris, equating France's women with its cuisine:
Just as every region has its gastronomy, every quartier has its feminine speciality.
Top spots for babe-spotting include the Madeleine neighborhood and the Café Louis-Philippe, where strategically placed seats let pervy tourists glance up women's skirts as the ascend a spiral staircase. But the top spot on Colin's list is the Menilmontant district in the 20th, where you'll find:
Perfectly shameless cleavages, radiant breasts often uncluttered by a bra.
Move over Sports Illustrated! Cosmopolitan magazine's pulling together the ultimate bathing suit spread. The pub's announced that it plans to assemble 1,200 bathing suit clad beauties at Miami's Nikki Beach April 18 for a major photo shoot.
The ladies will spell out "Cosmo" on the sand with their bodies while photogs stage an aerial shoot to catch it all. They'll look cute too, as Old Navy is donating all the bathing suits for the massive pic and Nivea's got any semblance of cellulite covered with its new cream. They don't joke around with four-page spreads. Want to go? Nivea is also sponsoring a sweepstakes for a winning trip to Miami for the shoot and hosting Webisodes of the event on its site shortly.
If you really have to be there, plan ahead for a weekend getaway and check into the Tides, a stunning SB hotspot, where we're sure there'll be some Cosmo chicks hanging out in their off hours...
Pretty young women need to be banned from flying, it seems, to prevent them from starting drunken brawls that lead to planes being turned around half-way to their destination. Last Friday, passengers trying to get from St. Petersburg, Russia to Turkey were all delayed when exactly this situation occurred.
Apparently, three young Russian men had already hit the vodka when they boarded, and one of the men took a quick liking to a female passenger. When she rejected his advances, he slapped her face several times, sparking a multi-passenger brawl that prompted the crew to turn back and land in St Petes. Six hours after the original departure time, the plane took off for Turkey, without the three drunks and without the women who ended up at the doctor. Next time she'll wear an ugly disguise.
Dreaming of a round the world trip and a year off from your normal life? Plenty of us think it's just not affordable, but let the Lost Girls convince you otherwise.
Their blog follows the round-the-world journey of three twenty-something American gals who decided a year spent bungee-jumping in New Zealand, volunteering in Kenya and learning yoga in India was better than sitting around at home. Journey nearly over, one of the girls (with a spreadsheet addiction) has calculated the budget of their trip. All expenses included, their year away came up to $18,000 per person: about the same as the rent they would've paid if they'd stayed home in NYC.
The Lost Girls also have a bunch of how-to posts, explaining how they chose their route, how they stay in touch and (the all important) how they gave notice to their bosses. Basically everything you need to know when you want to throw it all in and hit the road.
Who would've thought that China would be the place to create the ideal village for women travelers? The central Chinese municipality of Chongqing is converting the Shuangqiao district into "Woman Town," where women will make all the decisions and men who don't follow the rules will be punished (by having to kneel on an uneven board or wash the dishes).
The local tourism board says the 1.5 mile square Woman Town area will be especially attractive to female tourists:
In any tour group entering this town, female members would play the deciding role, concerning shopping and other items of the itinerary.
Great! No more boring war museums or staring at valuable cars. We can just shop, eat and let the men wash the dishes. Now that's what traveling should be about.
We already knew about parking places for women only in Germany, but now you'll be pleased to know (half of you, anyway) that there are also these extra-safe spots in Swiss carparks. Unfortunately there's a problem: too many Swiss men are parking in these spots, so the whole plan of women having a shorter and safer distance to walk to their car at night just hasn't worked out.
But if you're hoping to drive and park safely around Switzerland soon, things might be OK. The city of Bern has decided to decorate these women-only spots with flowers and paint them pink, hoping that men will then be too embarrassed to park there. Well, maybe some men...
For all women who love to travel, and for all men who want to understand women, a book just out by Stephanie Elizondo Griest could be interesting: 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. While on the one hand we're getting just about saturated with these books of lists of all the must-sees--come on, who in the world has the money and time to follow all those tips--this one does seem like kinda nice reading. And at least it's a one-woman list, without the controversy of something like the New 7 Wonders.
You can learn about a really wide range of destinations and activities, from riding a yak in Mongolia to bathing in volcano mud in Colombia. The homes of some very important substances like chocolate and champagne also get a place on the top 100. Tips for women travelers, including the great concept of "male repellent" (for those times when you just want a guy to GO AWAY), are probably useful even when we're at home. If you can read such a book without feeling disappointed at not being able to visit every must-see place, you might get a kick out of it. Or learn when it's appropriate to kick a male.
