Each monkey is limited to working a maximum of two hours a day; the Monkey-Waiter Union is powerful like that.
Tweleve-year-old Yat-chan learned how to wait tables by spending time watching the staff at a sushi restaurant.
That would not be an especially noteworthy feat except for this: Yat-chan is a monkey, one of three who tend to customers at the Kayabukiya Tavern in Utsunomiya, Japan.
Spending the night in drainage pipe in a public park is a bad thing . . . usually
It’s almost like being homeless
All the charm and safety of a bomb shelter
Our rooms are no longer full of crap
We like to imagine that those were among the tag lines rejected by the Dasparkhotel, the accommodations in a suburb of Linz, Austria where guests spend the night in a recycled drainage pipe.
Brussels might be best known as the center of European Union bureaucracy and as the namesake for terrible tasting sprouts but it is also a Mecca for comic book lovers. Cartoons are arguably the Belgian national art form and world-renoun characters such as The Smurfs, Asterix, Blake and Mortimer— and, of course, the Farting Pig—have their origins in this tiny country.
The most influential, and perhaps the most famous, of the Belgium comic characters is Tintin, an inexplicably young journalist with an even more inexplicable of hair who, together with his dog Snowy, explores the world sans visa problems solving mysteries and engaging in swashbuckling adventures. He made his debut in the politically-tinged Tintin in the Land of the Soviets in 1929. From there Tintin’s globetrotting took him to such places as Tibet, the Congo and even the moon.
In the summer of 2009 a new museum opened dedicated to Tintin and his creator, Georges Rémi. The appeal of the museum to fans of comics is obvious. For lovers of travel and architecture there’s lots to like too.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! it’s . . . dinner?
For an experience that brings cuisine to new heights check out Dinner In The Sky. The Belgium-based company will hoist you and 21 guests up in a dinning platform for a gourmet meal. The hoisting is done by a giant crane!
Oregon’s natural beauty has been celebrated ever since Lewis and Clark first paved the way. With its epic coastlines, towering redwoods and undulating sand dunes, it’s no wonder manifest destiny brought Americans here.
But underneath Oregon’s beautiful exterior, lurks a completely different world. A world of bizarre, off-beat and downright odd roadside attractions that will challenge, disrupt and send askew any previous opinions you held about the state. Here are five of the best:
Want to reduce the environmental impact of your next trip? Bring your own water bottle. Particularly if you are traveling to a tropical destination where you’d otherwise buy (and then later throw out) plastic water bottles.
Thailand alone is littered with up to a billion (with a B!) plastic water bottles according to some estimates. And water bottles are also an issue in the developed world. In the Washington DC area 1 in 5 single-use plastic water bottles sold end up in a public waterway. In London single-use water bottles became such a problem that their sales were banned.
In the face of that you wouldn’t think that you could make much difference. But let’s say you and a partner go on a two week tropical trip and each drink three bottles of water per day. If you each bring your own reusable water bottles that alone will prevent 84 disposable ones from clogging land fills or being strewn across the landscape. That’s enough water bottles that, were they placed end to end, would be higher than an eight story building!
Spot Cool Stuff loves the nexus between travel and animals, whether it is traveling to see animals or traveling with animals or traveling to hop into a bath next to an animal. We are such fans that we’ve created an entire animal travel category for our posts.
So what were our favorite animal travel articles of 2009?
Two phrases sum up Harbin China’s Snow & Ice Festival: Wow and I can’t feel my toes.
Each year the far northeast of China the city of Harbin holds this famous winter festival. Artisans from all over the globe come to carve gargantuan works of art out of blocks of ice and mountains of snow. The theme of the festival changes yearly but, no matter the theme, the sculptures will have you ohhing and awwing.
