When Israel entered the house, it entered as poetry?s guest.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
World Class Hotels That Tempt Tourists to take San Francisco Flights
San Francisco, a city and a county of California is a centre of culture, finance and transportation The metropolis is densely populated and tourism plays an important role in the economy To accommodate huge influx of travelers many world class hotels are constructed here The world class hotels that tempt tourists to take San Francisco flights include Nikko Hotel, The Mosser Hotel, Kabuki Hotel and The Edwardian Hotel
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Corkboard: our weekly travel news round-up
Our weekly look at what's new and fun in the world of travel, including tented camps in wild Kyrgyzstan and a cosy boutique hostel in SnowdoniaTweet us @guardiantravel or email us about your travelsEscapismA new series of tented fixed camps in the vast, little-explored, and utterly beautiful Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan have made independent treks here a realistic proposition for the first time. Walks Worldwide's (walksworldwide.com) 14-night, self-guided trip to Khan Tengri base camp costs from �1,775pp, including meals, helicopter flights, camping gear and route notes, but not international flights. Departs July and August.What's new?AccommodationBoutique hostels are not a new idea, but most of the ones we've come across are abroad. So hurrah for Plas Curig, a new, beautifully decorated independent hostel slap-bang in the heart of Snowdonia national park. The (unisex) dorm rooms have bunk beds, complete with Welsh blankets and curtains for privacy. Beds in here cost from �22.50, but a room for two is not much more, at �25pp, and a family room costs �27.50pp. This price does not include breakfast but there is a swish kitchen and a dining room, plus library, lounge, drying room and bike storage.? snowdoniahostel.co.uk TourHiddenCity is a simple but clever way of exploring a city. You put together a team of mates and then solve a trail of clues sent to you by text, each leading to a new location. There are 11 themed trails (art, food and drink, open spaces and more) available in London, Brighton, Newcastle and York; the most recent is aimed at a younger audience ? the Science Museum Discovery Trail. Perfect for text-savvy kids.? �16 per team, inthehiddencity.comDealAugill Castle, a family-friendly B&B in a 175-year-old castle on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, is celebrating its 15th birthday by offering double rooms at the 1997 rate of �80 B&B throughout March. Quote "15 years old" when booking.? stayinacastle.comTweet ur trip: insect horror? Getting to the bottom of my Christmas chicken curry in Malaysia to find a cockroach drowned in the sauce @Andyho73? Pulled back the sheets on my bed in a hostel in Flores, Guatemala to discover a sea of pulsating bug eggs @gemma_howe? Being laughed at in Laos for eating the entire cricket not realising the locals pick off wings, head, legs @EllaMullings? Bitten by spider in Belizean jungle, intense pain. Guide said try sleep, we've adrenaline if you stop breathing. Thanks @Recruitment2RioWe had some great tales from you about your horrific insect encounters ? see our pick of the best here on StorifyNext week: Bizarre transport. Tweet us @GuardianTravel #TravelCorkboardWalking holidaysHotelsBudget travelguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Why would someone pay for a coach trip around the M25? | Owen Hatherley
Take the tour, read the books, and find new ways of seeing. Motorway sightseeing shows the modern pull of mundanityWhy would someone pay to spend several hours on a coach on the M25? To admire the design of concrete bridges? To find collective solace in the loneliness of motorway service stations? As a new form of trainspotting? Or maybe because it's now, well, fashionable? It has been building for years. Books in which philosophers ponder airport concourses. Meditations on British roads. Psychogeographers trudging round the orbital network. Television documentaries on the history of the motorway. Glossy service station scrapbooks. The news that a coach tour operator has sold out a complete tour of the famously entropic ring around London just shows how mainstream all this has become.A possible ur-text for the contemporary obsession with modern mundanity is photographer Martin Parr's book Boring Postcards, published in the late 1990s. The point with the boring postcards is that they were not, in the context of the turn of the 21st century, boring. Rather they were bizarre, dreamlike, improbable images of things that we once must have treasured, that somehow became jokes and non-sequiturs.Parr's collection amassed practically every component of the Newly Interesting Boring. 1960s concrete infrastructure, such as the sublime sweep of Preston bus station; public art on postwar marketplaces in Stockport; nuclear power stations; airport departure lounges; suburban developments, holiday camps, modernist housing estates; and, of course, the motorway, from its futurist service stations to the long strips of clear concrete ploughed between green verges.For the past few years, the internet has abounded with material like this. Print publications range from David Lawrence's startlingly rich and comprehensive Food on the Move, a history of the motorway service station, to Anne Ward's travel guide to improbable Scottish holiday destinations Nothing to See Here.What Parr did was a simple act of defamiliarisation. If these were just contemporary photographs, we would be nearer to the linked, but in many ways dissimilar Crap Towns or Is Britain Great? books with their imagery of miserable Blighty. These, though, were postcards ? sent off by travellers, holidaymakers or the inhabitants of new estates with what must have been some pride, some sense that these "boring" places had real value, that they were worth looking at.During the Blair boom, with its bright, restless, neoliberal effacement of the clunky, provincial modernism of postwar social democracy, this started to mean something quite different. The implication was that once, these mundane things were considered rather special, by their designers, owners and users. Maybe they could be again? Parr may not have intended the postcards to mean anything of the sort, and it could just have been an elaborate joke on his part. Others, though, were deadly serious about this archaeology of the mundane.It's perhaps a way of reasserting something lost. In modern art and design from the 1910s to the 1930s, transport, production and urbanism were celebrated as a new technologised world; when Kraftwerk evoked the same in the 1970s, the assumption was that they were joking too. Instead, it's likely they were trying to recover a lost innocence ? a simple joy at the capabilities of man and machine. The approach they took to this also borrowed from the interwar avant-garde. As Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky put it, "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known". The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar", to create a "deautomatised perception" in which you suddenly see something you see every day in a completely new and revelatory way.This can be a very enjoyable game, and most of the books and projects mentioned above show generous, funny and warm ways of looking at what is all too easily dismissed as drab and nondescript. You could even create a radicalised definition of it, to encompass the seemingly "boring" work on containerisation and ports by photographer Allan Sekula, where seeing is radicalised by revealing the facts of production, distribution and exploitation behind the mundane everyday artefact. Yet it could just as easily be a wan, dilettantish and apolitical way of looking at the world of things ? staring at the sheer misery of a traffic jam and whispering "the world is beautiful".? Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfreeLondonOwen Hatherleyguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Chef's best breakfasts
From smoked salmon in Tasmania to a proper sausage sandwich in London, here's how and where Britain's top chefs and restaurateurs like to start their dayBar Italia, LondonChosen by Fergus Henderson, chef patron, St John In an ideal world, my favourite way to start the day would be a plate of devilled kidneys washed down with a black velvet (a cocktail made of Guinness and champagne). But that's just not the kind of thing you should do very often. Normally my morning "meal" is an espresso and a few cigarettes ? as a chef you're handling and tasting food all day, so breakfast often isn't a priority ? but at the weekend I make an effort for the kids and get crispy croissants from Maison Bertaux in Soho, or make bacon and scrambled eggs ? cooked slowly in lots of butter. I do love butter. I had some interesting breakfasts when I was last in India, including a deep-fried squash croissant, which was all kinds of sweet, buttery unctuousness. If I have a morning off in town, I'll nip into Bar Italia ? my favourite breakfast pit stop ? on Frith Street in Soho and get a sausage bap. I'm very partial to them. 22 Frith Street, London W1D 4RPTwenty Three Cafe, AucklandChosen by Anna Hansen, chef patron, The Modern PantryI'm a massive fan of Twenty Three Cafe. They do my favourite breakfast ? grilled sardines on sourdough toast with gremolata and smoked tomato salsa. If I really want to push the boat out I'll have their ginger marinated scallops on toast with black pudding. They also make a mean coffee and are super friendly ? both essential ingredients for a good breakfast experience. I try not to miss breakfast, although sometimes sleep takes priority. On a usual day, I'll have porridge with wheatgerm and manuka honey, or some of the granola we make at Modern Pantry. Breakfast was an important meal growing up, and one we enjoyed as a family. Porridge was a major fixture: mum would serve it either with butter and salt ? sounds odd now, but it was delicious ? or brown sugar and milk. In which case, in the days before homogenisation, my brother and I would pay tribute to our Danish genes and fight over who got the top cream. 23 Mount Eden Road, Eden Terrace, Auckland, NZMcDonald'sChosen by Will Beckett, co-owner, HawksmoorMy fondest breakfast memory is going to our local Little Chef with my grandparents and having the Olympic Breakfast. It felt like a huge mountain of food to conquer back then, and I'm pretty sure I always finished it. I think that kick-started my love for down-market breakfasts ? the king of all of them, for me, being the McDonald's sausage and egg McMuffin. There was a McDonald's by the bus stop on my way to school, and I used to go in with my best friend Huw (who I now own Hawksmoor with) a few times a week and get one. I'm not going to attempt an argument in their favour, they're just dirty and delicious and we loved them when we were 11. I don't get them that often now (although they're still a shameful pleasure), but we do a homage to it at Hawksmoor: the sausage and egg HkMuffin, made with a flat sausage and either Ogleshield or Colston Basset stilton and two fried eggs. There's a guy who comes in once a week for one like clockwork ? a man after my own heart.Berardo's, Noosa Heads, AustraliaChosen by Bruno Loubet, chef patron, Bistrot Bruno LoubetOne of my most special breakfast locations is Berardo's bistro on the beach in Noosa, Australia. It offers fantastic, inventive brekkie food and has stunning views of both Noosa's main beach and the magnificent Laguna Bay. Its Huon Tasmanian smoked salmon with warm brioche, goat's cheese mousse, slow-cooked egg, cucumber ribbons and dill is just perfect with a glass of champagne. I can't wait to go back. When it comes to breakfast on a weekday, I'll usually just have fresh fruit. But sometimes, for energy, I'll have porridge with sliced garlic, honey and olive oil. As a child my mother insisted we have food to start the day, but with seven children it was quite a task! We'd have grilled sourdough bread with butter and homemade jams, dipped into big bowls of cafe au lait. On very cold days we'd have grilled sourdough rubbed with raw garlic and spread with fat scraped off a large piece of salted back fat hanging in the cellar.Beachfront, Hastings Street, Noosa Heads, Queensland, Q4567The Modern Pantry, London Chosen by Angela Hartnett, chef patron, MuranoBreakfast during the week for me is usually little more than coffee. Sometimes I'll grab a piece of fruit, or a very quick bowl of cereal, but the constraints of a busy kitchen mean making time for breakfast can be hard. Come the weekend, though, I love to go to the Modern Pantry in Clerkenwell. Their vegetarian breakfast ? grilled sourdough, halloumi, eggs, tomatoes, mushroom and spinach ? is fantastic, each component done so well. That and a good coffee is Saturday heaven. Generally speaking, I do like a savoury meal in the morning ? that continental-style breakfast of bread, cheese and ham is much more appealing to me than anything sweet and sugary. Another wonderful breakfast can be had at Michel Bras's restaurant, Bras, in Laguiole in the Midi-Pyr�n�es. The breakfast buffet, full of homemade breads, local cheeses and salamis, is delicious. 48 St John's Square, Clerkenwell, London EC1V 4JJThe Fat Delicatessen, LondonChosen by Jason Atherton, chef patron, Pollen Street SocialDuring the week I'm up at 6.15am and breakfast is usually a cup of coffee, a bowl of cornflakes and an apple, then straight out of the door to work. At the weekends I like to go to a place down the road from where I live, in Balham, called the Fat Delicatessen. They do the best sausage sandwich I've ever had ? just really good bread, great sausages and a chunky brown sauce with apples and molasses that's more like a chutney. It's delicious. When I'm in the Philippines, where my wife is from, I enjoy a hot chocolate made from raw cacao with boiling water poured on top. You drink it with empanadas filled with soft purple yams ? the milky lilac colour is out of this world ? and margarine (you'll have to trust me on this) and cheese on top. They're phenomenal to eat, but not for your waistline. Neither is my other favourite breakfast ? my mum's full English. She can't cook anything else, but I've never had better. 7 Chestnut Grove, London SW12 8JAThe Wolseley, LondonChosen by Giorgio Locatelli, chef patron, Locanda LocatelliBreakfast when I was a boy would be a mug of hot milk and five or six little biscuits, given to me by my grandmother. Quite often, my grandmother would be sat at the other end of the table preparing that day's lunch or dinner, and I have an abiding memory of her butchering a rabbit. As a grown up, breakfast these days is little more than a couple of Marlboro and two espressos ? I'm never hungry first thing in the morning; if I have eggs too early it can really mess me up. Later in the morning I'm game for anything. My favourite place for brunch has to be the Wolseley ? it's just amazing. I was last there for a meeting with AA Gill and had what I always have: scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. It's so grand in there, such an experience. I want to take my mother and father ? they'd explode. 160 Piccadilly, London W1J 9EBHotel Sacher, ViennaChosen by Alexis Gauthier, chef patron, Gauthier SohoWhen I think about the breakfast in the Sacher Hotel in Vienna, I smile from ear to ear. I eat their amazing pastries with a little whipped cream. Whipped cream for breakfast is not for the faint-hearted, but it's expertly done here ? not over-whipped or over-sweet. I have a small hot chocolate with them ? you may as well go the whole hog. I do have to be careful with what I eat, though, since being diagnosed with a fatty liver in 2010. I moderate carefully, but if I have a chance to treat myself, pastries are my weakness. Especially pain au raisin. I start each morning at the table with my children ? it's the only meal I have with them during the week, so it's very important to me ? with some hot water and lemon, followed by muesli and toast with Nutella. I've had Nutella every day since I was a child. My sister and I probably had the equivalent of a mustard pot of the stuff every day. Some habits you just can't shake. Hotel Sacher Vienna, Philharmonikerstra�e 4 1010 ViennaBubby's, New YorkChosen by Russell Norman, Polpo, Polpetto, Spuntino, MishkinsI used to think breakfast during the week was for wimps. Until, that is, I joined a gym and the personal trainer refused to work with me unless I ate in the morning. Apparently I was "defeating science" or something. So I'm now in the habit of eating fruity, healthy things when I get up for work, and then five or six less-healthy espressos in the run-up to lunchtime. They're like jump leads ? I get withdrawal headaches without them. When I'm travelling the world to research ideas, breakfast is important because there are often very long days. I really get my breakfast mojo when I'm in New York, and always visit this 24-hour Tribeca brunch place, Bubby's. It's un-fancy, a tiny bit grotty and magnificent. I'll either have their eggs Benedict (done properly with English muffins and ham-like Canadian bacon) with hash browns or, my favourite, fried eggs, sausages and grits. I have a clandestine love for grits. 120 Hudson Street, NY 10013Allpress Espresso, LondonChosen by Skye Gyngell, head chef, Petersham NurseriesI generally don't put much in my mouth except for coffee before 11am. But by far my favourite place for a late breakfast in London is Allpress Espresso, just around the corner from Brick Lane, and for one major reason: the coffee. It's all I really want for breakfast and, in my opinion, no one in London makes it better. All the beans come from Costa Rica and are roasted on the premises. When I get to the front of the queue (there's always one) I get a takeaway piccolo latte, a tiny glass with two shots of espresso and twice the amount of piping hot milk, and one of their little cakes that are not too sweet. I have wonderful memories of breakfasts as a child, especially on Sundays. We'd go for an early morning swim on Bondi beach and when we got home my mother would have squeezed mangoes for us, and we'd eat fried eggs on Vegemite toast with slices of tomato, lemon juice and lots of black pepper. 58 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DPThe Towpath Cafe, LondonChosen by Mark Hix, chef patron, Hix restaurants The Towpath Caf� tucked away beside Regent's Canal in London does one of my favourite breakfasts ? masala-spiced scrambled eggs with chilli and spring onions. It's a great, powerful mix of flavours that the eggs carry so well, and watching the ducks swim by while you eat it is really lovely. Their cheese and onion toasties are a bit of a guilty pleasure, too. Breakfast is an important part of the day and I try not to miss it. Growing up, I used to wake up in the morning and look forward to the breakfasts my grandma would make me ? usually a little fry-up or a bacon sandwich, that we'd eat together at the table. When I'm travelling I love to eat the traditional breakfast of the country ? Japan has it sussed, I think, with big bowls of miso soup. I had a great one once with eel and bean curd in it which was more like a light lunch, but filled me up for hours and hours.Located between Whitmore and Kingsland Road bridges, London N1 5SB; 020 7254 7606The Seafood Restaurant, Padstow Chosen by Tom Kerridge, chef patron, Hand & FlowersReally good, strong coffee in the morning is a chef's best friend because often you don't have time for breakfast. Also, if you're tasting reductions and correcting seasoning from the get-go, the last thing you want to do is start the day on a full stomach. And then there's the need for sleep: if it's the choice between a bowl of cereal and an extra 15 minutes in bed, I know which one I'm choosing. When I was younger, my mum brought us up by herself, so I'd help out by cooking in the evenings. But she always made us have a bowl of cornflakes before we went to school. The only time I really savour breakfast is when I'm on holiday, and the best breakfast I've had in a long time was at the hotel that's behind Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant in Padstow in Cornwall. It was the full-on continental affair; really good breads, pains au chocolat, cheese. I go there two or three times a year, and I always look forward to coming down from our room to that bountyRiverside, Padstow, PL28 8BYBreakfastChefsRestaurantsFood & drinkRestaurantsEleanor Morganguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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