Travel as a Rabbit

Here's the latest and greatest happenins in the travel section!

Come scope our Destination of the Month display before it turns to October: SEATTLE

I am studying the Finnish language and just learned the sweetest idiom: "Matkustaa jäniksenä," or "to travel as a rabbit," meaning travelling for free, as a stowaway (like a bunny sneaking on a boat!). I prefer the first image the phrase brought to mind, a bunny too short to reach the Charlie Card machine so he just snuck under the turnstile and didn't pay his fare.

Anyway, everyone knows the best way to travel as a rabbit is to pack like and move fast, so do I have a grip of petite pocket guides for you! These adorable, fun-size guide books are full of off-the-beaten path trivia, must-sees and gorgeous design:

First up are the WildSam guides. Currently available for Nashville, Austin, San Francisco and Detroit, they have awesome almanacs full of local trivia, interviews with local movers and shakers, places to check out that are more funky and local haunts than tourist spots, and even a grip of pretty graph paper in the back for notetaking and scrapbooking on the fly! $18 each.

Citi x 60 guides are brand new, and available for all kinds of big-city locales: New York, Paris, Tokyo, Barcelona, Berlin and more. The idea here is that 60 local artists, business owners, writers, creatives and other influential and design-oriented share their favorite haunts, so you get a bunch of ideas for discovering a city from the people who love it the most, and seek out the most unique and vibrant offerings! Super inexpensive and pretty as well at $9.95 each.

The Hunt guides, representing cities from Austin to Singapore are beautifully designed with must-sees and local faves as well, an emphasis on shopping and amazing food make these guides a must for the urban adventurer. $16 each.

Happy travels! 

Of tiny soaps and books

Let's be honest: whether you're chilling on a cruise ship, lying pool side in a tropical oasis, or hoofing it in the big city, whatever kind of vacation you prefer, your hotel room is your sanctuary. It's the place that anchors you even though it can be as foreign as your environs, where your feet rest, your domination plans take shape, and you can start to remember who you are before you head back out to character-shaping adventures. 

And for those of us who tourist around to bookstores, CNN has a great lil mashup of literary hotels the world over. Though CNN sadly missed Boston's own Omni Parker House, where Emerson and Longfellow had their literary salons and Charles Dickens read from A Christmas Carol in 1867. This week a grip of new guidebooks are swelling our shelves, from the rebooted Frommers EasyGuides, to the new Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2014 (ranking the places to go next year) and, perhaps the most lush and exciting of all, and pertaining directly to places to lay thine traveler's head, the new crop of Mr. and Mrs. Smith guides to the chicest hotels in tout-le-monde.

For the uninitiated, Mr. and Mrs. Smith guidebooks feature lush photographs of lavish hotels--the creme-de-le-creme boutiques--as well as what to do beyond the bedroom. We just received the France and Italy guides, so come snatch them and book your dream room before anyone else. 

You, Too, Can Be On a Boat

According to the New York Times Sunday travel section, it's the time to strike if you're want to book a cruise. The deals are on now and what better way to see swaths of the world AND get away from it all at the same time? I've set up a small subsection at the beginning of our Europe section for cruise guidebooks. So come get LUXURIOU$ and load up on how to be on a boat!

Berlitz Cruising and Cruise Ships 2014  A big ol' guide for the Cruise newbie or afficianado. This is a great book to by right now as you start to plan your cruise. There are reviews of all the lines, itineraries, ideas for how to spend your time both on and off the boat, and while some details may need refreshing over the years, you could really hold on to this for future ideas for planning. This could be your Mediterranean cruise year, and next could be your Alaskan cruise year, and the same Berlitz book could guide you to all your coming adventures.

Rick Steves Northern European Cruise Ports and Mediterranean Cruise Ports  Rick Steves guides are great in general, but particularly on a cruise, if you're a do-it-yourselfer, a little budget conscious and a really excited, open-minded sort of person his guidebooks are AMAZING. Enough information that you can go through even the most overwhelming museums on your own, useful phrases in the back to make a friendly impression on the locals, and exhaustive, frank and practical reviews on everything from where to eat, when it's worth booking an on-shore excursion through the ship, and what is missable and unmissable both on the ship and off. Great for those travelling with or without families, and if you prefer investing your money in lifetime memories over fancy digs.

Fodor's European Cruise Ports of Call  If you're maybe cruising without the kids, if you enjoy the finer things in life, if you have a membership to the MFA AND the Gardner, and would spend a premium for hotels with high-thread-count sheets, Fodor's guides might be speaking your language. Exhaustive guides to the major ports of all the major cruise lines, tips for the sort of food you would eat to have a culinary experience, NOT to run home and tell horror stories about, tips for maximizing your museum and shopping trips in your quick city jaunts at each port. We have them in for Europe and new editions for Alaska and the Carribbean are on the way!

Destination: Preparation. For TOKYO!

Not that I'm counting or anything but in just 40 short days I am lifting off and traversing half the globe to TOKYO! I've never been before and this is about as different as could be for me and I'm suuuper excited. I'm getting all kinds of help here at the Booksmith to get ready for the trip, too. My stack of guidebooks as I plan to cram thousands of years of history and city building into a few short days is indispensable. So far, I have:

Lonely Planet Tokyo. Lonely Planet guides are great. The writers are folks who have lived in the city for a long time, and they always give it to you straight. They manage to make you feel like conquering a sprawling megalopolis in a few days is doable with simple itineraries and affordable restaurant suggestions. SUPOIB.

DK Eyewitness Guide Tokyo. I don't want to carry a bunch of redundant books while ostensibly will be walking a good deal of my trip in humid weather. HOWEVER, DK Eyewitness travel guides, especially in regards to cultures that have different alphabets, numerical systems and food predilections are indispensable! Their motto is "we show you what other guides only tell you," and boy and howdy is that pretty much true. A full spread that shows all the coins and bills for their currency, lush photographs of food and the name for it to help decode menus, and crosscuts of important shrines, temples and museums to show you what you may see. SO helpful in a land where signs and such may be indecipherable to this gaijin.

Streetwise Map Tokyo. Streetwise maps cut straight to the chase. They show you blown up pieces of neighborhoods--the most important parts of the city--and add helpful landmarks, 3D buildings to help orient you, and are helpfully laminated and still foldable for megaplanning. I've used these on just about every trip I've ever gone on and I keep them around for forever because they're indestructible.

Crumpled City Map Tokyo. These ones are new to me. The store recently started carrying them and they're really cool looking. Well-designed, small and lightweight enough to stuff in a bag or pocket, and they're made of Tyvek so therefore tear- and water-resistant. They don't seem to be super detailed on street names but they give a good overview of the city and have metro stops clearly marked, in addition to major landmarks so I'll report back from the field but I'm hopeful it will help keep me oriented.

...and to bone up on my Japanese (it's now been 10 years since Sensei Miller taught me and my high school cronies how to say what color a bear is. I hope I don't need that sentence come August) I have:

Lonely Planet Phrasebook. Lonely Planet phrasebooks are tiny, exhaustive, and have things spelled out in Romaji (the Roman alphabet for Japanese pronunciations) so I can just sound out the word and VOILA I'm speaking Japanese. There's even a helpful page or two on flirting, though since this trip is for my 10th wedding anniversary, maybe I'll just have to take notes on those pages. Another great feature of these books are these helpful little sidebars that offer "what to listen for," so if you as a question, they give you some stock phrases that you might hear in response and what they mean. SO GREAT!

DK's 15-Minute Japanese. This is another experiment. I won't be taking it on the trip but I've already gone through several of the lessons to brush up on conversation things, get used to food-words and bone up on asking directions. These sets come with CDs so I'm NAILING it on pronunciation, and the lessons are tidy, quick, and you get a refresher of the last one when you pick it back up so if a ... couple ... of days pass between practice sessions it's not all for naught. It even includes helpful etiquette tips!

Join me next week when I talk about all the rad books I'm reading to set the mood for my forthcoming trip!

Baedeker's Back

THEY'RE BACK. Find out more at Booksmith's other blog, http://globecornerbookstore.com/blogs/.