Suzanne Dean, the Creative Director of Random House in London, designed the new book jacket for Haruki Murakami’s new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which includes a sheet of stickers so readers can redesign their own book covers. Five Japanese illustrators were asked to create a set of stickers to reflect individual characters in the novel.
The English language version will be out in August.
When I’m on the road I like to dress casually and comfortably, but this dude has taken it to a new level. The anonymous guy, known only as “Mr. Bathrobe Crusader”, has been visiting the sights around Europe for the past month clad in a comfy blue bathrobe and slippers. He has invited us all to follow his wanderings on his Instagram page.
My friends and I were couchsurfing long before the term was coined—we just called it crashing. But it’s exciting to see how the internet has made it possible for people to people connections throughout the world. Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s wonderful photo series simply titled “Couchsurfing” captures his amazing adventure crashing with strangers in dozens of countries on five continents over a year of travel. Galimberti made his homestay connections through couchsurfing.org, which encompasses a vast community of 7 million folks in more than 100,000 cities and towns around the globe.
All images © Gabriele Galimberti
It just became a lot less expensive and much simpler for visitors to get around Dublin, Ireland. Tourists can purchase the new Leap Card for visitors that offers 72 hours of travel on the LUAS tram network, DART trains, short hop buses and the Dublin Bus system for just €19.50. At the moment, the Leap
Card can only be purchased at Dublin Airport, but it also includes round trip airport transportation on the AirLink Bus, which costs €10 if purchased separately. That leaves a cost of just €3 per day for unlimited travel.
New York psychologist, writer and animator Ilana Simons created this terrific short animated film called “About Haruki Murakami” to celebrate everyone’s favorite Japanese writer. Well, he’s my favorite, any way.
British street artist and designer INSA recently collaborated with American artist Madsteez (aka Mark Paul Deren) to create “The Largest GIF-ITI in the World” for the Pow! Street Art Festival in Taipei, Taiwan. The pair had to paint the eight story mural four times over five days to animate the GIF. Each painting was photographed in sequence to build the frames for the final image.
After spending a week in Barcelona not so long ago, I can sympathize with local residents who wish that their city was not quite so popular with tourists. With nearly 8 million annual visitors to the city, the streets are often jammed ass to elbow with tourists.
Barcelona filmmaker Eduardo Chibás has captured local sentiment about the flood of visitors in his documentary Bye Bye Barcelona.
There’s no denying the fact that American travelers in Europe benefit from the widespread European proficiency in English. But after visiting most countries in Europe, I can testify that the advantage of being a native speaker of the 21st century’s lingua franca is definitely not evenly distributed throughout the EU.
Czech linguist Jakub Marian has created this helpful map (see below) describing the levels of conversational English proficiency in most of the European Union nations. Marian based his map on data collected by the 2012 “Special Eurobarometer 386” report.
Having traveled in both Spain and Hungary recently, I can attest that being a monolingual English speaker continues to be problematic in both countries at times. Although having resided in areas of the U.S. with large Spanish speaking and Hungarian speaking populations, I seem to have learned a lot more Spanish than Magyar by some form of linguistic osmosis, because it’s always easier to communicate in Spain than in Hungary.
Image © Jakub Marian
Even infrequent visitors to TBTP know how I feel about the brilliant Spanish street art collective known as Luzinterruptus. So, it’s about time to catch-up with the anonymous crew of environmental pranksters. Last month they used thousands of discarded plastic bottle and bags to create a “labyrinth of plastic waste” for the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland.
The maze was built with plastic bags filled with bottles, illuminated by individual LEDs and suspended from metal racks. Once again dramatically demonstrating our growing consumer waste problem and the ever burgeoning bottled water business.
Images © Gustavo Sanabria
So many places to see and so little time. Now we can do our vicarious sightseeing via drone to just about every corner of the planet. All we need to do is visit TravelByDrone a very cool new website created by Swiss drone aficionado Jan Hiersemenzel. The site aggregates user submitted aerial drone videos from around the world. But beware, it’s easy to while away an hour or two on these amazing videos.
Travel Between The Pages 