The Mémorial Canadien de Vimy in France is a towering tribute--austere in height but ornamented at the base--to Canada's World War I dead on the Continent who never received a proper burial. And though we're hard pressed to find anything aphrodisiac about it, after two instances of public exhibitionism with the memorial as a backdrop, we're wondering what people are seeing in the stone.
Mere weeks after a couple was fined for taking erotic photographs in front of the landmark, set on the site of the 1917 Vimy Ridge battle, a French couple was convicted of making a porn movie at the memorial. They weren't caught in the act, but the 30-somethings (whose names have not been released) put the video on a pay site, which means they may have made money off their odd act of desecration.
Must we point it out? Spain's Valley of the Fallen is the sexiest memorial ever. Accept no substitutions.
Everyone has seen the Gateway Arch, at least in pictures, but few realize that it's part of the larger Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Designed by Saarinen, the structure raises 630 feet above the ground and is also 630 feet wide at its base. Besides being instantly recognizable, it's also the largest memorial in the United States.
Although Saarinen passed away four years before the arch was completed, it stands today as probably his most famous achievement. After his death, designer Richard Bowser incorporated a tram to take guests to the top of the arch, something that Saarinen felt was important to add. We're glad he did: Without the unique elevators, the only option to get to the top would be 1,000-plus stairs.
Can't afford a European vacation this summer? Do what our contributor Claire Duffett did: Explore Southeast Asia instead.
Are we talking about the same war? You don't know the history of the Vietnam War until you've learned about the "struggle against American aggression" from the tour guides at Ho Chi Minh City's Reunification Palace.
A brand-new visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park opens today. The building, designed to look like a 19th-century barn, brims with multimedia presentations, a feature film "experience" and hundreds of thousands of Civil War artifacts.
The new 22-minute film is narrated by Morgan Freeman and focuses on both the battle and its important aftermath. (While the fighting only lasted three days, it took four months for Abraham Lincoln to visit the site and deliver what came to be known as the Gettysburg Address.)
The visitor center will also house the Gettysburg Cyclorama. The 360-degree painting is currently being restored, but should be back on view by September. And of course walking the battlefield itself is still the main draw.
Interestingly, the new visitors center is LEED-certified as a green building, so you can count this as both a learning holiday and green travel.
On March 22, 1933, the first Nazi concentration camp opened in the German town of Dachau, just north of Munich. Today, 75 years later, the grounds of the camp are a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned there until its liberation in 1945.
Among the many people who have gone to see the historic site was James Shiels, who was a 19-year-old Army private when his division rolled into Dachau. He recently spoke with NPR about the decision to go back:
My son is really... He was the one that got me going... He asked me one day if I'd like to go back there, and the more I thought of it... I thought it was the greatest idea and we found a tour.
When we visited the Anne Frank House last year, we were upset to learn that the chestnut tree behind the house was "seriously diseased." An icon of the home, the city planned to remove it because:
Its leaves curl golden in summer because of the horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth that infests it; two fungi, tinder polypore and honey mushroom, are rotting its trunk.
Now, it seems, the tree will stand fast after lengthy bureaucratic proceedings have worn the pro-removal side into submission. (Gotta love Europe.)
Museum officials--who originally supported removal--now say even replacing the tree with a sapling cut from the original won't fly. Instead, they're working to keep the tree as it is--a connection to the past and a reminder that a little girl once looked to its branches for hope.
We don't have to tell you that it's 9-11. New York held a service near the former World Trade Center site, while construction on a memorial continued. Outside the Pentagon in Washington, DC families gathered. And the attacks were remembered near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
A formal memorial at the Pentagon should be finished by next year, and the National Park Service will run a memorial in Shanksville by 2011. New York City's progress is harder to discern, but that doesn't keep people away from the 16-acre hole in Lower Manhattan. For better or worse, all three sites has become tourist destinations, and with that in mind, we have some links to help you get there.
We're betting you haven't hit the Scottish town of Linlithgow yet on your treks around the world. They'll admit they have never been a tourist mecca, but that's all about to change with the establishment of a memorial honoring the (fictional) birthplace of Montgomery Scott, aka the guy who gets asked "Beam me up, Scotty."
With official confirmation from the original Star Trek author that Scotty will be born on June 28, 2222 in Linlithgow, the town's got the go ahead from its local (believe it or not) Enterprise Committee to establish the memorial. The display will include Scotty's original costume, some personal items donated by the late Scotty actor James Doohan's family, and even a scale model of the spaceship.
So if you need to be beamed up or just want to take the controls of the Starship Enterprise, Linlithgow is the place for you. The nice thing is they're not even ashamed to say that they're doing it all just to create some niche tourism. The other nice thing is we're not going to end this with some "beam me up" joke.
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by egw
