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A trip back to your roots

Igor — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 23:30:23 +0000

Thousands of people flock to Salt Lake City each year, not for Utah’s skiing or national parks, but to search through endless records of births, deaths and marriages at one the world’s largest repositories of genealogy information on the planet.

There is a new breed of traveller focused on uncovering family narratives, as evidenced by the 1,500 visitors who visit the Family History Library every day. Run by the Mormon Church, it contains more than two billion names of the deceased, more than 2.2 million rolls of microfilm and 300,000 books.

Utah is not the only place focused on roots tourism. The newly opened £8.2 million Cumbria Archive Centre in England’s northwest, with records dating back to the 12th Century, is banking on the boom. The fact that Cumbria is home to relatives of three former US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson fuels interest among genealogy tourists there.

source: bbc.com

Sydney’s gourmet food safaris

Igor — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 23:28:57 +0000

Gourmet Safaris are off-the-beaten-path culinary tours that explore Sydney’s diverse cultures through its unique and authentic restaurants, cafes and shops — particularly those that are fairly unknown to the general public.

On the United Flavours of the World tour, I was chauffeured with a bus of about 25 food lovers, led by Maeve herself, to Sydney suburbs I had never heard of on a quest to find the best South American butchers and pastry shops, Portuguese delis, Vietnamese restaurants and desserts of Lebanese, American and English origin.

The eight-hour tour included visiting various establishments, tasting their goods and hearing their stories. We met Jose and Maria Pereira ofSunshine Meats in Milperra, who worked for years to make their wholesale small goods meat business the success it is today, and tasted one of their bestselling products — a chorizo that Jose perfected as a young man living in Portugal. Another shop owner, Margarita Garcia, talked about running her husband’s Chilean butchery after he passed away, now called Margarita’s Cecinas (205 Hamilton Road, Fairfield West; 029-726-0673).

United Flavours of the World is one of 10 bus tours around Sydney, all focusing on specific food cultures and the neighbourhoods in which they are found. For example, Italian Classics takes you to the inner-city suburb of Leichhardt, where Italian immigrants settled, or explore The Exotic Flavours of Lebanon in Punchbowl in southwest Sydney. A local from each neighbourhood accompanies each tour, as well as a specialist guide – or if you are really lucky, Maeve herself.

Seven Sydney walking tours, covering similar themes to the bus tours, are also available for those that prefer to burn a few of the calories acquired during the day’s eating activities.

source: bbc.com

The ultimate New York City food tour

Igor — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 23:27:35 +0000

For Famous Fat Dave, aka David Freedenberg, this is his job: providing a mobile buffet featuring the best food you’ll never find near Times Square. Dave leads fun food tours made on the fly from hundreds of hand-picked sandwich shops, pizzerias, bakeries and noodle houses. Many are old-school dives in the boroughs, where accents run deep. How does he pick them?

“‘I’m not a foodie,” he admitted. “I just like food for its pure taste.”

I also like food for its pure taste, and on a recent tour of seven stops in several hours, I ate memorable meals at places that I hadn’t previously noticed on long-familiar streets. In SoHo, we started with a 90-year-old Italian butcher’s, picking up pepper sausage to snack on while criss-crossing Brooklyn’s back streets. At Defonte’s in nearby Red Hook, I wolfed down a delicious beef, aubergine and mozzarella sandwich. In Sunset Park – Brooklyn’s Chinatown – we squeezed into Yun Nan Flavour Snack, a cubbyhole serving an unreal cold noodle bowl of pork, peanuts and spicy chilli sauce.

Since going full-time in 2006, Dave’s happily gained 30 pounds seeking out new stuff to eat. His to-eat list begins with locals’ tips from when he drove a cab. “This tour could only work in New York,” he claimed. “It’s been the coolest place in the world for 400 years. And it will be for the next 400.”

source: bbc.com