Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but the original St. Nicholas was very different from what we know today. His home was on the Mediterranean Sea, not the North Pole. More pious than jolly. Wearing a cleric’s miter hat, not a festive stocking cap. For much of the world, St. Nicholas magically and faithfully…
I went to Japan some 40 years ago to write travel articles but ended up staying a couple of years, first as editor of a travel magazine published in Tokyo and then to write the first of several guidebooks on Japan. My Frommer’s Japan guidebook alone ran more than 600 pages and covered about 65…
Perched at the edge of a precipitate drop, my first thought would NOT be, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to dive off here?’ But, in Queenstown, New Zealand thousands of tourists don’t agree. The logo of AJ Hackett, the first commercial bungee jumping facility in the world, is Live More, Fear Less, and visitors have taken…
Diversity Plaza, in Jackson Heights in the New York borough of Queens, is a landmark that celebrates the diversity of America. In 2011, the city created the Plaza by cordoning off traffic and furnishing it with tables and chairs to provide South Asians inhabiting the multilingual neighborhood a space for families to meet, eat, and…
By John Gottberg Anderson The tuk-tuk driver reclined on a padded seat in the back of his motorized transport, neither a surrey nor a golf cart but something in between. “Hey, bong, nice to see you today,” he said as I passed, using the catch-all greeting so frequently used in this Southeast Asian nation. “Where…
In Lhasa’s Barkhor Square, the weathered Tibetan woman softly intoning a Buddhist mantra fell to her knees, looked fervently skyward and then lunged face down on the pavement, oblivious to the commercial life surrounding her. After a few seconds of prayer, she rose stiffly, moved two steps forward and repeated the process. Shoppers flowed around her with scarcely a sideways glance because Lhasa residents are used to prostrate pilgrims
By David DeVoss For the better part of three years Macau slumbered, its public squares subdued, its major shopping streets shuttered. On two occasions the entire city locked down on orders from Beijing. For a city of 713,000 that makes all its money selling the luck of the draw, the consequences of reduced tourism were…
Drinking beer is woven into the social fabric of Vietnam. At family affairs and business lunches, impromptu meetings and private karaoke parties, beer flows like water. Cartons of beer — Saigon Special and Bia Hanoi, 333 and Larue, 24 cans to a box — balance in towering store displays and on the backs of motorbikes that careen through swarming traffic en route to their final destinations. A 2022 survey reported that Vietnam’s annual per capita beer consumption is 41.6 liters (over 11 gallons), or about 125 standard-sized cans per person.
By John Gottberg Anderson A colossal figure in alabaster rising majestically from a hilltop outside Danang stares regally across an armada of fishing boats into the vastness of the South China Sea. She is Quan Âm, whom the Vietnamese call “the Lady Buddha.” In the mother temple of the Cao Đài religion near Tây…
In April 1904, Chinese Prince Pu Lun, the 32-year-old heir apparent to the throne of the Manchu Empire, sailed to the United States, the first member of the Qing Dynasty ever to cross the Pacific. He was a “Kodak fiend” fascinated by everything he saw and Americans readily embraced him. En route to the St. Louis World’s Fair, where he would serve as China’s Imperial Commissioner, he attended a banquet where the host provided a dish he hoped would remind the young prince of home. Pu Lun looked at the platter curiously and asked his host what it was. “Why, that’s chop suey, Prince,” said the American. Eager to discover something new and foreign, Pu Lun smiled at this revelation, nodded his head slowly, and asked, “What is…chop suey?”