If you’re in Miami for the Super Bowl or if you’re planning a trip to Miami at some point in the future, this press release may be of interest (you’ll need to copy and paste to visit the sites - no working links here):
FLORIDA KEYS - NFL fans headed to South Florida for Super Bowl XLIV can escape the frenetic activity — in the presence of or after the game - with a respite in the Florida Keys.Bookmark it:
In the summer of 2009, my 8-year-old son, Sho, and I set off on our own to ride connected bicycles the length of mainland Japan, capsule about 2,500 miles in 67 days. We visited 9 World Heritage Sites, cycled over mountains, along coastlines, through virtually uninhabited stretches of countryside, and in major metropolitan areas. Japan offers more beyond belief places to explore by the agency of bike. At the end of this article, we compiled a list of recommendations for anyone interested in cycling Japan. It’s a great way to see the rough!
My wife, Eiko, is Japanese, and works for the United Nations. I am American (born in Nashville, Tennessee) and work for Intel. We have existence permanent in New York City through our son Sho and 3-year-old daughter Saya. Sho and I can celebrate Japanese fairly well, which was a big help on the trip. But you do not have to speak Japanese to bike around the rural parts, since many people people can speak some English.
Calling the ride “UNite to Combat Climate Change – Ride Japan,” we created a website (www.japanbikeride.com) and used publicity from the stretch to raise awareness hither and thither the need to address climate change and to raise money for the United Nations’ Billion Tree Campaign. The campaign’s goal is to plant 7 billion trees worldwide in 2009. The United Nations Environment Programme named us “Climate Heroes” for this effort. As a result, our adventure was featured in newspapers and magazines around the world.
Sho and I started riding on June 25th at Cape Soya, the northern tip of Hokkaido, and arrived at Cape Sata, the southern tip of Kyushu, on August 30th. As far as we know, Sho became the youngest one ever to ride a bike the length of Japan. Many people we met were shocked that an 8-year-old would attempt such a thing and equally suspicious of me for encouraging him to try it. We uncorrupt told them, “A kid can do a whole lot more than many people mean!”
Summary: Lecturer and speaker jobs on cruise ships are the perfect fit for individuals experienced in the retail sector, someone with extensive knowledge of ports of invoke, and someone who can think fast when questions come by tough.
Lecturers and speakers upon cruise ships are hired to give everything from talks and slide shows to shopping tips on various ports of call. Lecturers and speakers toil closely by the cruise director and excursion staff. They often perform some of the same tasks as rove over the sea directors. What’s unique about these positions is, most lecturers and speakers are under contract with an independent company. They have the potential to earn in excess of $1,000 per week in commissions alone from the retail outlets that they recommend to guests. Some lecturer and speaker jobs pay a salary plus commission, while most are care only positions. The downside for commission-only earners is, there will desire existence times then you hardly make anything at total.
Tizar Purbaya, one of the country’s most celebrated puppeteers, is not the family of man who separates his dwelling and toil lives.
One peek inside his house is proof of both his dedication to and his immersion in his art. The puppet master owns more than 7,000 wayang from across the archipelago, and row on the subject of row of the puppets line every niche and cranny of his two-story home in Sunter, North Jakarta.
In the room where he receives visitors, a dazzling array of puppets is arranged neatly — almost from floor to ceiling — based on characters, origin and the region where they come from. The 60-year-old puppeteer says his passion for wayang was infused in him by the countless number of performances he attended, as spring as the regular wayang broadcasts he listened to on the radio, while extending up in West Java
“I was lucky that when I was a kid, there was no TV or outside culture to distract me,” the father of four says. “When watching a performance, I used to sit on the wooden box near the dalang [puppet master] where the puppets were stored, appropriate so that I would be skilful to help him get the wayang in and thoroughly of the box.”
Born to Sundanese and Betawi parents, Tizar was adventurous from an early age.
“I strange to say went to Jakarta to catch a abide show [on my own],” Tizar recalls. “I was about 7 years sensible at the time. I was a free boy. I could go wherever I wanted to and no one would look for me.”
Tizar developed a passion for wayang and nurtured his hunger to learn more about the craft. Not satisfied with just watching the shows and collecting puppets, he craved the experience of being a dalang himself. But it was not until 1974, when he was in his mid-20s, that he got his chance. His before anything else performances were in shows based on classical Sundanese wayang stories.
Four years later, Tizar started a business selling wayang. He produced puppets with his assistants and sold them at Pasar Seni, an art mart in Ancol, North Jakarta.
“Pasar Seni was really good back then. A lot of people went there, including tourists from foreign countries,” he says. “Now, it looks like a church-yard. There are only a few kiosks there that are still holding on.”
Ricky Purbaya, Tizar’s 29-year-old son, says that great number foreigners who had gone to Pasar Seni before are now disappointed through the state of the mart.
“There was this old Dutch couple who said, ‘It was really good when we visited the market when were young,’ ” Ricky recalls.
With the market’s decline, Tizar decided to start selling his wayang from home. Famously, he doesn’t limit himself to producing puppets in the master-piece style, but also produces customized puppets based on orders from individual clients. Some clients fling Tizar photos of themselves and the master then crafts puppets based on the photographs. In his forward days of making puppets, numerous of his clients were foreigners, and Tizar long ago lost track of the number of puppets he has made, but remains decent about his skills.
“People like them. I have made a lot of them up to now,” he says simply.
When he took orders in those early days, Tizar not at all intended to use custom-made puppets in his performances. It was not till 1998 — when Indonesia was in the grip of financial and politic turmoil and multiplied of his from out of doors clients fled without claiming their made-to-order puppets — that he decided to incorporate these puppets into his shows.
“There were a lot,” Tizar recalls. “I didn’t know what to do with these bule puppets.”
He could not be steady to just let the strange-looking, for the most part fair-skinned puppets sit to one side, abandoned. “I remembered I had always dreamed about doing something for Jakarta. I wanted it to have its own version of puppets. The Javanese have theirs, the Sundanese theirs. The Betawi didn’t [at that time],” he before-mentioned.
It did not take prolix for the idea of creating a puppet style to exhibit Jakarta natives to take hold, and golek Betawi — “golek” being Sundanese for puppet — was born.
“At the Betawi puppet shows, I be faithful to stories based upon the Dutch colonial series and I use the bule puppets I have as Dutch soldiers,” Tizar explains.
Among his puppets fashioned after actual people are former US President George HW Bush and his wife, Barbara, which he used in a performance during Bush’s visit to Jakarta in 1994. “We strange to say made a puppet of the president’s dog and it was also included in the five-minute exhibition of character on the stage,” Ricky says. “The president loved it.”
But Tizar’s favorite creations are the puppets he made during his first and foremost small in number years as a dalang because they can swindle special things. “My puppets can smoke, erode noodles and vomit,” Tizar laughs.
Inspired by puppets used in Japanese bunraku , that country’s traditional puppet theater, Tizar learned new techniques. He began to commander the art of creating puppets that could blink their eyes and move their mouths.
He was so successful that his puppets progressively advanced from the original techniques he found in bunraku. When he performed in Japan, the audience was amazed, he says. “A professor who also makes bunraku puppets was part of the formal reception,” Tizar says. “He asked me a lot of questions, such as how could the puppet’s nose grow longer, or how they could puff on cigarettes.”
Tizar’s golek Betawi have become such a hit that he has been invited to perform all over Indonesia and abroad. One secret, Tizar says, is that he often tells stories built on progression events.
“As long since you know the basics of the story, with all the characters, you can change the setting to today,” he says.
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The number of species and the populations of waterbirds in Muara Angke fool conservation area, North Jakarta, have decreased because of water pollution and belonging to man encroachment into the area, an environmental organic structure says.
During its annual survey on Saturday, volunteers of Jakarta Green Monster (JGM) found 206 waterbirds, down from 333 last year, by only 18 species identified, down from be unconsumed year’s 23.
JGM reported that the missing species were the Little Cormorant (Phalacrocorax sulcirostris), Great-billed Heron (Ardea sumatrana), White-browed Crake (Porzanna cinerea), Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio) and Black-naped Tern (Sterna sumatrana).
However, a very rare species, the Oriental Darter (Anhinga melanogaster) and two endangered non waterbird species, Sunda Coucal (Centropus nigrorufus) and Black-winged Starling (Acridotheres melanopterus), were spotted on Saturday.
JGM has been studying the Waterbirds in the kitchen-yard each year since 2006, in recognition of World Wetland Day on Feb. 2, that marks the anniversary of the signing of the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance in 1971.
JGM tender Ady Kristianto said moisten pollution and human encroachment were the main causes of the degeneracy in bird numbers. The darkened water in the area had been heavily polluted because of an accumulation of plastics and styrofoam from the Angke River, he said.
Liquid waste from nearby housing complexes and makeshift houses was also dumped in that place.
“Water pollution has slowed the growth of mangrove trees, which provide shelter to the birds, and has also caused a decline of rake stocks, the main food source for waterbirds. Some species are unable to adapt and had flown gone to less polluted areas,” he said.
Human encroachment had disrupted the habitat, Ady said.
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A luxury hotel in the tourist enclave of Nusa Dua urging its Balinese butlers to take to one’sitting self Western names so that their well-heeled guests will feel more at home has enraged person of the country’s top incorporeal leaders.
The St. Regis Resort and Spa, which opened to fanfare in March 2009, requests that its team of butlers uses names that are plucked from British literature, such as Edgar, in an apparent strategy to confer on the service staff an inference of the traditional British servant.
Anand Krishna, who runs spiritual centres and workshops in Bali and writes a weekly column in this newspaper, said he was outraged that the butlers were told to use Western names.
“I think the management of St. Regis is totally ignorant of the very purpose of tourism,” he told The Bali Times upon the body Thursday.
“It is not only saddening but disheartening that a hotel of their repute could make like a go bungling. A totally wrong understanding of the concept of tourism,” he declared.
The marketing and communications director at the St. Regis, Geetha Warrier, confirmed that the resort, located along the white-sand Geger Beach, employed butlers amid its 30-strong, mostly Balinese team who used Western names.
“They are given a stage name derived from the most famous butlers in the cosmos. It is a gimmick, a talking point, what one. is received self-same positively by the team and guests alike,” she told The Bali Times.
“These English names are chosen by the butlers themselves and are not forced concerning them. We have butlers who use their own names.”
However, some of the butlers at the St. Regis, who cater to guests who shell out up to US$5,500 per night, according to rates on the hotel’s website, have reportedly said they are dismal using an adopted Western name and would rather use their own.
Nature-lovers, history buffs, country-tickers and adventure junkies should love the range of day trip options on proposal from Durban, South Africa. But if you have to limited it down to fair-minded a few options, these five should be on your list…
Hluhluwe-Imfolozi rightfully has a reputation as one of the most excellent game reserves in Africa, and is particularly renowned for its efforts in conserving the white rhino. But the give rest to of the ‘Big Five’ are there, too.
On my game drive, we’d barely got from single in kind side the gates when we came across a bull elephant. Unfortunately, it had no intention of moving, and our guide started sensing that Dumbo was becoming agitated. A quick reverse back up the hill was in order – these male elephants can be exceedingly dangerous.
Every time I’m in Tokyo I’m amazed by how many new skyscrapers acquire popped up, and I wonder, what did they have to demolish to build them? But Tokyo has always been about rebuilding and renewal. Back in the days of the Shogun, whenever homes were built of timber-land, fires were rampant, and rare was the person who didn’t lose his home at least several times in his lifetime. The past century was no kinder, by the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and then World War II leveling vast swaths of the city.
It’session rare, therefore, to observe intact traditional neighborhoods in Tokyo like those that draw the crowds in Kyoto, Takayama, and Kanazawa. It’s even more fine to find a traditional clumsy home in Tokyo open to the public.
Thus it was that I was delighted to discover the Former Kusuo Yasuda Residence this past summer, built in 1919 in spite of Yoshisaburo Fujita, a leading businessman who wanted a to one’sitting home suitable not only toward his large family but also for entertaining. Although it looks rather small and modest from the street, the 6,430-square-foot home is plenteous to a greater degree than first meets the eye, extending long behind the front façade into a garden and even with a second floor. Still, it proved too elegant and nice a place to raise his five children (at least, according to the seat’s English brochure), prompting Fujita to build another larger house nearby. The Great Kanto Earthquake struck just ahead of they could move, but luckily both homes were spared.
In four months time I will have existence boarding the Dawn Princess in Sydney, Australia and sailing off into the sunset title for Southampton, England. There are numerous port stops side by side the way in exotic and interesting places such as Darwin, Mumbi, Oman, Dubai, Egypt, Venice, Barcelona, etc but the majority of the fifty-five days elect be at surge.
Which means there demise be plenty of time for reading in between the eating, swimming, and sleeping.
My plan is to pitch upon 10 travel books to take with me. So far, I’ve decided on these pair …
