If you’ve ever been confused by a foreign language idiomatic expression during your travels, you’ll enjoy “Idioms of the World”. Artist and illustrator Marcus Oakley incorporated some of his favorites for this infographic that he created for the HotelClub travel website.
This wonderful short film explains why literature matters and what books do for us. The animation is by Marcus Armitage and Ignatz Johnson Higham with voice over by Alain de Botton, who wrote the script.
Airbnb is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a short animated film inspired by a true story. “Wall and Chain” recounts the story of two former border guards, one from each side of divided Berlin, who met by chance in 2012 through Airbnb. You can learn more about the touching story here.
The Moscow Metro now is offering riders access to a virtual library of hundreds of classic novels. The free downloads are accessible via QR codes from station platforms without prior registration. The entire library is also available on buses and trams too. What a great idea for any transit system.
French artist and filmmaker Julien de Casablanca has created a brilliant interactive project for art lovers everywhere. Participants in Outings are encouraged to visit museums and use their phones to photograph “small, secondary and forgotten” paintings and to print out those images and paste them on walls in public spaces. Check out the Outings website and see how you can set some under-appreciated art free in the world.
I love a wacky tourism campaign and this new series created to entice Japanese tourists to Israel is just bizarre and quirky enough to get some attention.
“Israel, Like!” is an anime series that follows sisters Saki and Noriko as they travel around Israel for the first time. The initial installment of seven planned videos is now online. Be sure to turn on the closed-caption option; it’s good for a laugh.
Polish artists Sainer and Bezt, collectively known as Etam Cru, paint enormous humane, touching and sometimes a bit surreal large scale street art murals in urban locales around the world. The duo are currently in Rome for the launch of their first ever solo gallery show. To stave off the boredom while waiting for last weekend’s opening, they created this impressive 8 story painting. The Italian economy may be in the trash, but no one is giving up their morning coffee just yet.
photos: © Blind Eye Factory
By the way, if you’ll be in Rome soon, the show is at the Varsi Gallery at Piazza di San Salvatore in the Centro Storico. And if you go, be sure to swing around the corner to Gelateria Alberto Pica for some of the creamy stuff.
I’m a fanatical museum goer, and I’ve visited all of London’s important cultural institutions, but I’m a lazy slacker compared to Jo Hunt, Mary Rees and Linda Smither. These three Londoners share an obsession to visit every museum in London. With more than 250 museums in the UK capital, they’ve a long road ahead of them.
And speaking of roads, they already have a successful track record in their previous obsessive project to ride every one of London’s 549 bus routes end to end.
You can catch-up on their exploits at London Buses 1 Bus at a Time and then follow along on their museum odyssey on their blog. So far, they’ve hit about 40 museums, but it’s still early days.
I just saw that Penguin Modern Classics will be reissuing William S. Burroughs’ mind-bending cut-up trilogy with some appropriately sinister cover art by Julian House. You may not recognize his name, but House is responsible for some awesome album cover art for the likes of Oasis, Stereolab and The Prodigy.
