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Creative Writing Workshop
at the Paris American Academy
July 1st through the 29th, 2011
For the seventh year running, I’ll be teaching an intensive, month-long creative writing workshop at the Paris American Academy. This hands-on English-language writing program includes courses in:
In addition to taking classes and amassing writing portfolios, students will participate in one-on-one critiques with professional writers (including myself), give readings in Parisian bookshops, and receive "survival" French lessons. Other instructors include O. Henry Award-winning author and playwright John Biguenet, and novelist Lauren Grodstein.
Between classes and tutorials, there will be ample time to experience the city, attend cultural events, visit museums, learn history, take day-trips to the countryside, read books, hang out in cafes, dance by the Seine, and make friends from around the world. It’s not cheap by vagabonding standards, but students who’ve taken the course in the past will attest that it’s a great value!
For more information, including costs, course descriptions and testimonials from past students, click my Paris American Academy page here.
To receive an application, email an inquiry to info@pariswritingworkshop.com.
The Paris American Academy is located in the heart of the Latin Quarter, on the rue Saint Jacques, a block from the Luxembourg Gardens, and less than a mile from the Seine and Notre Dame cathedral.
Above: The Paris American Academy, in the heart of the Latin Quarter
Collection of passport stamps. Photo: Ho John Lee / Flickr Creative Commons
What if you could:
–travel around the world for free?
–get experience as a travel writer?
–express your creativity through videos, photos, blogs, and tweets?
You can! STA Travel is holding the 2011 World Traveler Internship. The two winners will hit 16 countries and serve as travel correspondents. The runners-up will get to spend a summer in Europe. A pretty sweet consolation prize. The homepage has a slideshow of all the destinations where the winners will be sent on assignment.
Now that we live in an age of social media, applicants will get instant feedback. Aspiring travel writers will have to create a profile and submit a 1-minute video application. As more people view their profiles, the applicants will gather fans and comments. This makes things a lot more transparent, compared to most contests where you don’t know who’s gaining the most momentum.
You can check out the competitors on the applicants page. A common theme is emerging. Many of the videos have trip photos set to music as a slideshow. Might be good to switch things up for your application, to boost your chances. Do it soon, the contest goes from Jan. 25 to Feb. 25, 2011.
For more information go to www.worldtravelerinternship.com. Good luck!
When I was a kid, I used to carry an agate arrowhead with me when I traveled with my family. I found it in an Idaho river, and my dad’s uncle offered me $20 for it. That was a lot of money for me then. I turned him down, thinking that if he was willing to offer me that much, it was surely special. As a talisman on my travels, it served as a reminder that any moment could be lucky.
The arrowhead sits on my desk now, accompanied by other travel mementos: a jade carving from Honduras, salt crystals from Peru and a Zulu coconut from New Orleans. In fact, the special items that go along on my travels are all practical. I miss having some small item packed in with the rest—something that’s just along for the ride and snaps my attention back to the moment. It’s time to take the arrowhead back on the road.
One friend travels with a charm on her bracelet that was blessed by the Dalai Lama. Another friend carries a turquoise-colored piece of beach glass. Many folks bring along photos of their kids or sweetheart. One adventure-minded pal will always wear a Maori greenstone necklace when he travels over water.
Do you have a travel talisman? What is it and where did you get it?
If you’re in Korea, or traveling through the region, one thing you should be sure to experience is the Korean jjimjilbang. A jjimjilbang is a Korean sauna, though referring to them as such is perhaps a little lacking, as they offer so much more. For around 5,00won, about US$4, travelers can take advantage of many of the great features the spas offer.
Most jjimjilbangs work the same. You enter, place your shoes in one of the tiny lockers at the entrance and take the key with you. You pay the entrance fee, pick up a towel, and proceed to your gender specific changing room. Here you will find a locker with the same corresponding number as your shoe locker key. Strip down completely and proceed to the sauna area. Many people like to bring a towel to dry themselves, or dra over their faces in the sauna rooms. You can also bring an artillery of products needed for grooming, though they all can be purchased in the changing room.
In nearly every jjimjilbang you will find a row of showers and several rows of seated washing and showering areas. Grab one of the tiny plastic stools and scoot up to the mirror. Before proceeding to the baths it is essential to take at least a quick shower.
Next, leave you things perched around the shower area, and you may proceed to the pools. The number and variety of pools depends on the scale of the jjimjilbang. Most will have a few pools of varying temperature, one pool with timed jets for the whole body, and a few saunas for a good sweat. However, large-scale spas like Seoul’s 7 floor Dragon Hill Spa, will have almost a dozen pools. Some will have cedar pools, rose but baths, sea salt pools, and multiple bubbling pools of different temperature. The larger spas will boast of a large variety of saunas, a steam room, an ice room for a good cool down, and an endless list of beauty services. Most jjimjilbangs offer a basic massage, but the larger ones will offer hair and nail care, a variety of facials and skin treatments, hair removal and styling, and every massage treatment under the sun.
After a good scrub and soak, change into the shirt and shorts set that you were given at the entrance. Sometimes you have to specify that you would like a set of these, though they are usual folded there on the counter and pointing and smiling goes a long way if you are not up on the local language. Nearly all Jjimjilbangs have a common area where men and woman can lounge together on the great heated floors. You can pull up a mat and sleep comfortably here until dawn. This is also where you can purchase refreshments, beer, mokoli, snacks, kimbop, and sometimes complete Korean style meals.
Jjimjilbangs are a great place to soak out your weekly stresses, but they are also great for travelers who have exhausted their muscles from traipsing all over sightseeing for days. If you’ve fallen upon a bit of traveler’s exhaustion, the jjimjilbang is a great place to recharge your energy for the road.
Jjimjilbangs are also a wish come true for the shoestring traveler. Hostels are harder to come by in Korea than in some places, and most travelers end up spending a few extra won to stay in a love motel. While these accommodations can be a very cosy treat, you may not want to shell out the 35,000won each night. Jjimjilbangs are open 24 hours, and at roughly US$4-8, travelers can sleep, shower, relax in the pools, and recline in front of the big screen TVs in some of the fancier spas.
Going to the jjimjilbangs is as common a practice as eating kimchi in Korea. It is a social custom, and you might just find yourself making friends in the common rooms as locals inquire about your visit to Korea.
Age: 25
Hometown: Phoenix, Arizona
Quote: “Don’t sell yourself short – try with all your might to communicate to people in their language.”
(more…)
One of the most common objections to traveling the world is the supposed danger involved. After all, the world is full of nasty stuff — war, crime, murder, kidnappings, beheadings and so on — why needlessly expose yourself to all that? While it’s easy for those who’ve actually traveled to world to laugh at such questions, most of us still draw a few lines.
Despite a handful of slightly insane people, like say war correspondent Robert Young Pelton, who wrote and updates The World’s Most Dangerous Places, most of us do not want to deliberately place ourselves in harm’s way. Yet if you listen to the U.S. State Department you’d never leave your couch.
So how do you really know if a place is dangerous or not? Well, the answer is you really don’t until you go. I’ve been to numerous places considered dangerous and found them far safer than the shady neighborhoods in my own hometown. That said I do have one rule: don’t go to active combat zones.
Popular travel blogger Gary Arndt is currently in Acapulco Mexico, a country that many people consider quite dangerous (home to drug gangs, kidnappings and even the occasional beheading). Before he left, Arndt wrote a long post on traveling to dangerous places and has some great tips for those who want to get out of their comfort zone without taking Pelton-style risks. Here are a few of Arndt’s suggestions, as well as a couple tips for what to do if you find yourself in over your head:
- Are tourists being targeted? In many places, like what is happening in Tunisia currently, it has nothing to do with Americans, westerners or even foreigners. If the problems are internal, you probably don’t have too much to worry about. If, like in Yemen, tourists are specifically targeted because they are tourists, you might want to think twice. Likewise if they are targeting groups you might belong to or foreigners in general.
- Do problems exist in the city or region you’ll be visiting? As I explained above, many countries are quite large and lumping everything together makes no sense. Make sure you get specifics on where you will be, don’t just get news at the country level, unless the country is really small.
- Could you get caught in the middle of things? Even if you aren’t a target, that doesn’t mean you can’t
- Be inconspicuous. Don’t stay in the most expensive, well know hotel in a city. Don’t look like a tourist if you can avoid it.
- Have an escape plan. During the Bangkok protests, I had a plan for getting out of the city if thing blew up. (Taxi to Pattaya.) When I was photographing the protesters, I had an escape plan for getting off the street I was on. (Run up a parking ramp and into an office building with embassies). Just giving a few minutes of thought to what you would do if things went bad could save you if it does.
Be sure to read the whole post for some background and more tips, and if you’ve got your personal “dangerous places” criteria or suggestion on how to stay safe, be sure to post them in the comments.
Riot Squad on Yonge Street photo by Christos Tsirbas/Flickr/CC
Photo from Venere.com
There are some really interesting travel statistics about women.
For example, MaryBeth Bond, the “Gutsy Traveler” and so-called #1 expert on women’s travel in the USA, noted on her website that 80% of travel decisions are made by women, regardless of who’s traveling, where they’re going, and who’s paying.
“Hard” adventure travelers (of whom there are 6.1 million) — those thrill-seekers looking for sky-diving, hang-gliding, and parasailing — are usually young college-aged men, while “soft” adventure travelers (all 67 million of them) — interested in horseback-riding, camping, hiking, and off-roading — are overwhelmingly senior women.
Women travel more often for leisure than for business or work, and if they do travel for work, they’ll do it earlier in their lives.
Women’s-specific products earned $875 million for their producers in 2004, and the products are constantly increasing in number and becoming more available.
The older the women, the more likely they are to plan their souvenir purchases while traveling — younger female travelers tend to buy more spontaneously, potentially regretting it later.
And finally, for any female travelers who’d like to make some statistics of their own, GoGirl (a company that makes female urination devices — talk about women’s-specific marketing) and Women Travel Blog are having a travel writing competition; you could win your own personal urination funnel, or a $30 cheque as a guest writer for the blog. It’s not much, but it might be fun! At the very least, it’ll be easier to pee standing up.
“Eighty years ago, the British traveled the world and found it almost entirely a source of satire and contempt. Now many a traveler (from Seattle, let’s say) is hungry to go to the Amazon, to Tibet, or the darkest parts of Africa, and find it a source of veneration. Here is life unspoiled; here are the ‘dirt and darkness’ that Greene had been so eager to deplore. The sojourner, now as likely to be a woman as a man, knows she should pass no judgment on the people. She comes as a student, not as a ruler. And yet, of course, she passes judgment in the scrupulous way she notices that indigenous ways are good, that the materially dispossessed are the spiritually advanced, that Africa or Tibet has a soul that’s lost in the developed world. This is a good-hearted and a humble way of approaching things, as befits self-questioning, eternally unsettled America — compared with regally self-assured imperial Britain — but it is a form of coercion nonetheless.”
–Pico Iyer, “Travel Writing: Nowhere Need Be Foreign,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2009
Budget questions are among the most frequently asked when it comes to planning just about any trip, but especially long-term trips. When you feel ready to hit the road, the time spent waiting until you’ve saved enough money to travel can be agonizing – so what about taking out a loan and traveling now?
BootsnAll member Ben2Africa says he doesn’t plan on doing this, but he knows someone who is:
I have a friend who is planning on taking out a $10,000 loan to spend a few months traveling the world. I also have the urge to do the same because it seems so easy and would make my RTW happen so much sooner. But, I remember reading “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts and a section where he wrote about how working to fund your travels is all part of the experience. Because of the saving, and sacrifice the traveling is more rewarding. Just curious what your opinions are and if any of you have done this in the past?
Ben2Africa notes that while he’s sticking to his plan of saving for his RTW trip slowly, the idea of having the money right now and just going are even more tempting when he’s in his cubicle at work.
So what do you think? Would you take out a loan to travel? Have you done that in the past? Click over to this thread on the BootsnAll boards and leave your two cents’ worth – and sign up for BootsnAll’s RTW travel newsletter. This month’s topic is (conveniently!) budgeting.
A $1 bill. Photo: rychlepozicky.com/Flickr Creative Commons
One of the central tenets of vagabonding is that travel doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, going abroad can be far cheaper than your monthly housing and car costs at home.
Lonely Planet called on its readers to send in their tips on what $1 buys around the world. Replies poured in from nomads from all points of the globe. The value of a dollar can really vary across different countries. In some places, a dollar can buy you a feast; in others, that will barely pay for a cup of coffee.
Thailand, a perennial favorite, made an expected appearance in this comment: “The question is, what can’t you get in Chiang Mai for US$1? – Sheila”
In other places, the higher cost of living was reflected: “Paris: about 40% of an espresso at Starbucks. – Michael”
An interesting trend is that many of the replies revolved around food. When you only have $1 to spend, you’re going to buy things that:
A) You can afford
B) You really need
Food fulfills both categories. What’s the best thing you’ve spent $1 or a small amount on? Please share your stories in the comments.
