2010 VANCOUVER OLYMPICS
Join our Vancouver stringer, Celeste Moure, for daily happenings from the host city.

Once known primarily for its dilapidated storefronts, sketchy Chinese restaurants, and convenience stores, Vancouver’s neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, located less than a 20-minute walk from the Olympic Village, has reinvented itself as hipster central. Walk around the stretch of Main Street between Broadway and 21st Avenue, now known as SoMa or the “fashion district,” and you’ll encounter a number of cool little boutiques, galleries, and vibrant sidewalk cafes. Start your adventure with a freshly brewed cup of Joe at JJ Bean, then meander over to The Regional Assembly of Text, a delightful little store featuring all sorts of stationary, notecards, and funky handmade rubber stamps. At Smoking Lily you can stock up on t-shirts, coin purses and silk scarves with whimsical prints of bugs, sea horses, and other creatures. Down the street at Hum you can score distressed denim with contrast stitching, eco-friendly (organic cotton and hemp) tops, and tote bags made with military surplus and vintage fabrics—all created by emerging Canadian designers. Come dinnertime, the Cascade Room is the place to go for delish thin crust pizzas, wild salmon burgers, and beetroot risotto paired with a glass of local BC wine or microbrew. But don’t leave Cascade without having mixologist Nick Devine pour you a classic cocktail. Negroni anyone?

For hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, and general trip-planning advice, check out our Vancouver Travel Guide and Whistler Travel Guide. Score cheap airfare and bargain hotel rates with our Vancouver travel deals.

2010 VANCOUVER OLYMPICS
Join our Vancouver stringer, Celeste Moure, for daily updates and happenings from the host city.

Designed by Arthur Erickson, one of Vancouver’s best-known architects, Robson Square is the place to be for some of downtown Vancouver’s best shopping, food, drink, and entertainment options. On Sunday, perched high above the Provincial Law Courts that make up part of the square, two brave souls were zipping some 550 feet across Robson Street as a jocular crowd cheered them on. This little bit of adventure is offered free during the Games by Ziptrek Ecotours, which also runs tours in Whistler. I fueled up on caffeine from Caffe Artigiano, whose staff often wins international barista competitions, and headed to the Vancouver Art Gallery to snap some photos in front of the vibrant floral patterned fabric that covers the Gallery’s entire northern exterior. Admission is (you guessed it) free during the Games and, from the looks of it, everyone who was not watching an Olympic event was lined up to get into the new Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man exhibition (open through May 2). Not one for hour-long queues, I decided to check out Robson Square’s new $2-million skating rink (yep, also free; skate rentals $3). I was probably 13 the last time I got my blade on but, in the spirits of the most popular Olympic event, I did a little figure skating of my own.

For hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, and general trip-planning advice, check out our Vancouver Travel Guide and Whistler Travel Guide. Score cheap airfare and bargain hotel rates with our Vancouver travel deals.

Theater buffs and foodies alike better hightail-it to New York City this month to take advantage of deep discounts on some of the Big Apple’s best shows and restaurants. Now through February 7 as part of the city’s bi-annual Restaurant Week fete, 260 of the fanciest eats in town are hocking three-course prixe-fixe menus starting at just $24.07 (for lunch) and $35.00 (for dinner). The roster of drool-worthy participants includes Gramercy’s Craftbar, Fig & Olive in the fashionable Meatpacking District, and Smith & Wollensky – Midtown’s prime steakhouse. After indulging your taste buds without breaking the bank, take your leftover cash to the theater. NYC & Co., the city’s marketing and tourism organization, is hocking two-for-one tickets to over 20 different Off-Broadway shows running from February 8-28. Read the rest of this post »

Now through the end of the year, West Coast art buffs can bed down beneath the works of modern masters at the St. Regis San Francisco. In honor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 75th anniversary on January 18th, the neighboring St. Regis has launched two limited edition SFMOMA suites featuring select prints from the museum’s own anniversary show.

On the 5th floor, the “Gems of the Museum” suite houses a reproduction of Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (pictured, 1905) – a painting “at the core of the controversy that led to the first modern art movement of the 20th century.” Jackson Pollack’s large-scale Guardians of the Secret (1943), one of the abstract-expressionist’s most famous works, graces an opposing wall. If your art-heart has a hankering for the City by the Bay, check into the 6th floor “Art of California” suite, featuring the works of native San Franciscoans Richard Diebenkorn (b. 1922), Anne Bremer (b. 1868), and Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) from hallway to headboard.  Read the rest of this post »

Hey movie buffs! We’ve got the scoop, hot from across the pond, that London’s celeb-favorite hotel The May Fair is launching an exciting new EatFilm club for guests early next year. Featuring “brunch and a movie,” “dinner and a movie” –type events, the club will showcase flicks from the British Film Institute’s exclusive archives (the largest in the world) in the hotel’s own high-tech private theater (built as part of the historic property’s $140 million revamp in 2006). Host of the London Film Festival and numerous press-only movie premieres (The Queen held its world premiere there in 2006, and rapper 50 Cent’s new movie Dead Man Running made its debut at the hotel last October), the posh screening room boasts 201 seats decked out in Ferrari-leather and is the only private theater in Europe with 3-D capability. The club will also employ nifty audience-interactive remote controls members of the press use to review movies at premieres, and The May Fair is in talks with the BFI to provide exclusive discussion forums with notable members of the Institute after screenings. Read the rest of this post »

The late Raymond Walter “Johnny” Apple, Jr. assumed many roles over his 40-plus-year career at The New York Times: bureau chief in Albany, Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London, and Washington D.C.; correspondent during 10 presidential races; Vietnam War reporter — and truly passionate eater. This last role gets top billing in a new collection of Apple’s artciles that is fiesty, painstakingly researched, and often simply mouthwatering. The more than 50 essays in Far Flung and Well Fed ($27; St. Martin’s Press) first appeared in Saveur, the Times, and Town & Country. Apple began compiling the book before his death in 2006; his stepdaughter Catherine Collins stepped in to finish it with the editors. Organized geographically, the book follows Apple’s travels throught the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The collection describes characters such as Oregon morel hunter Jack Czarneck; tidy history lessons, like how the popularity of San Marzano tomatoes led to the rise of the Italian canning industry in the 1800s; and regional cuisines, celebrating, for example, Philadelphia’s water ices, cheesesteaks, hoagies, scrapple, and soft pretzels.

Apple, well-versed in virtually all culinary styles and subjects, kept a small bag packed with Tabasco sauce and a tiny pepper mill in case of a sudden call abroad. As his friend Calvin Trillin once wrote: “Apple is someone who seems equally famished whether he’s sitting down to dinner at a three-star French restaurant or at a crab shack; he is what A.J. Liebling would have called, admiringly, a feeder.”

From the Fall 2009 issue of Sherman’s Travel magazine.

Despite China’s 21st century emergence as a major economic power, a lot of the country still remains hidden behind closed doors . . . but not for long. On September 23, Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific launched brand new China Experience tours designed by local experts to provide unparalleled VIP access to normally off-limits attractions. Starting at $3,000 a pop, these all-inclusive, ultra-exclusive expeditions offer behind-the-scenes peaks of protected heritage sites scattered throughout Beijing, Xian, and Shanghai – like The Forbidden City’s Imperial Palace tea room, Xian’s national treasure vault, and Pit #5 of the famous Terracotta Warrior Museum (normally only open to archeologists). In addition to dining with locals in a traditional courtyard (“hutong”) and taking private tai-chi lessons, visitors can explore the better-known Great Wall and Tiananmen Square (pictured). Read the rest of this post »

At least three new cultural spaces are turning heads this summer: 1) The new Jean Nouvel–designed Danmarks Radio Concert Hall of Copenhagen (pictured) wears an electric blue sheath. Inside, its four venues of various sizes include digs for the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. 2) In May, the massive Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago opened to the public. Renzo Piano designed the glass-and-limestone structure to house the museum’s modern and contemporary collections. 3) Winding describes both Zaha Hadid’s futuristic design of the MAXXI in Rome and its prolonged gestation. And now Italy has its first national museum of contemporary art and architecture at last.

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City is currently showing “On the Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker,” with around 80 original cartoons published from 1925 through the 1990s that square off with the subject of money and how it defines us (January 23 to May 24). In Boston, The Institute of Contemporary Art, in its new Diller Scofidio + Renfro building, is hosting a survey of work by Shepard Fairey, the street artist famous for his now-iconic Barack Obama poster (through August 16). The Guggenheim Berlin is presenting “Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s,” a look at paintings created from photographs, a movement that evolved from Pop Art by artists such as Charles Bell, Chuck Close, and Ralph Going, whose Airstream (1970) is pictured above (through May 10).

From the Feb/March 2009 issue of Sherman’s Travel magazine.