Europe

The Hidden Kitchen of Paris

The dining location for your ten-course tasting meal is kept 'secret' until your reservation is confirmed

If there is one dinner to plan in advance on your trip to Paris, make it Hidden Kitchen. Located in the swanky Parisian flat of two talented American chefs, this secret restaurant is where food-loving strangers come to meet and eat.

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Controversy Tram Inn:
The Recycled Hotel

Spot Cool Stuff has seen our share of art made from found objects. One of our favorite Caribbean beach bars, Antigua’s Dune Preserve, was constructed largely with beach-scavenged goods. But the Controversy Tram Inn, located in the village of Hoogwoud, Holland, is the only hotel we know of with such a strong focus on recycled objects.

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The World’s Tallest Wooden Skyscraper

Towering over this termite's dream town is a 144-foot (44-meter) wooden sky scrapper.

Where else would the world’s highest wooden house be located other than “The Wooden City” (which, as the arboreally astute among you may know, is Archangelsk, Russia)?

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The London Restaurant with Interactive Tables

What’s on the menu at London’s Inamo restaurant? Literally, your plate, your drinks and your silverware. At Inamo, patrons order their food electronically at the high-tech, interactive table at which they sit!

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Tips For Finding Cool,
Yet Inexpensive, Cruises

Spot Cool Stuff’s single favorite piece of travel writing, the David Foster Wallace essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, is a humorous accounting of the absurd side of taking a cruise—that part of cruising in which overweight Hawaiian shirt-wearing passengers are herded between crowded shuffleboard tables, bad buffets and overpriced tourist-trap shore excursions.

Your next cruise needn’t be like that. Your cruise can (and should!) be a fun thing you’ll want to do again. And that fun, interesting cruise can also represent an excellent travel value. Our tips for finding cool, yet affordable, cruises:

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5 Cool Buildings Made of Shipping Containers

Shipping containers. You’ve seen them on trains, on the back of trucks, at ports and piled onto cargo ships. There more than 20 million of those steel 40 by 8 feet (12 by 2.4 meter) boxes scattered around the world. That’s more than were needed even before the current economic slowdown. Today, as many as one million shipping containers may be sitting around unused. The surplus is especially profound in the United States, northern Europe and China.

Given the planet’s excess of shipping containers and shortage of affordable housing it only makes sense that people would make the connection. “Container architecture” has become a specialty in itself. The benefits are obvious: Containers are relatively cheap (around US$1,200~1,500 each). They are, by definition, portable. And they are durable (made to survive rough treatment and resist salt corrosion). A container house can be built, on average, 40% faster than a comparably sized traditional house. And then there’s the environmental benefit of putting surplus containers to use instead of letting them slowly rust in a landfill.

Thousands buildings made of shipping containers are today being uses for offices, stores, restaurants and private residences. There are several excellent books documenting the most interesting among them. Here are five shipping container buildings we think are especially cool:

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The Icelandic Phallological Museum

Where would Freud go if he were alive and planning a vacation to Iceland? The Icelandic Phallological Museum.

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5 Cool, Luxurious (and Inexpensive) Hostels

Mention the word “hostel” and most people recoil in horror, perhaps haunted by memories of dirty dorms, queues for the bathroom and rowdy backpackers. But hostels have transformed in recent years into some of the best value accommodation around, offering the same comfortable rooms and range of facilities you’d expect in a hotel.

As the credit crunch bites and travelers cut back on their holidays, this couldn’t be a more timely transformation—why pay the high room rates of hotel chains when you can get the same standard in a hostel?

Forget the standard youth and backpacker hostel, the term now covers a huge range of lodgings, from guesthouses to beachside apartments (you can even find hostels in tree-houses and old castles these days!). Many hostels now boast private rooms with ensuite bathrooms, widescreen TVs and even a Jacuzzi if you’re lucky!

The rise of the ‘boutique’ or ‘design’ hostel in major cities, with cutting-edge design, stylish interiors and high-tech facilities, is perfect for those of us that want to be cheap and chic.

Here is a look to the five most luxurious hostels out there:

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