Going to Europe - How About a First Class Travel Guide?

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Are you thinking of traveling to Europe? Perhaps you might want to go now before they institute the cap and trade tax for airliners, which could increase the price of your airfare. Or, maybe you wish to wait until the Euro drops in price against the US Dollar, as the slow-motion train wreck of the European economy will finally make a trip to Europe affordable again. Still, whenever you do go, there is a great book and travel guide that I highly recommend. This is a book I own myself and have used; it's the best one I've found so far. The name of the book is;

"Travel Book Europe - The Guide to Premier Destinations," (Twelfth Edition) by a Contractor for the American Automobile Club, 2011, 576 pages, ISBN: 978-159508-400-2.

This book is totally comprehensive, and relatively small and compact. Just about everything you need to know including what you need before you go and it covers the following countries; Austria, Belgium, Britain, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. There are maps of each country, all the best and safest places to go, all the museums, downtown areas, train stations, and information about history, and historical landmarks.

Best of all there are pictures, tourist information, and average climate temperatures, so you know what type of clothing to wear, and the temperatures are both in Fahrenheit and Celsius listed by season and month. This book will prevent you from getting lost, and it's small enough to throw in your backpack, if you are taking a walk or excursion down any European downtown shopping district. If you are going on a trip to Europe by way of cruise ship, this travel book has all the information outside of every port you might stop at.

The pictures are beautiful, and so is the architecture, it almost gives you a sense of being there, with plenty of trivia, history, and all the incidentals that you might need. If you get lost, need to contact the police, or perhaps even find a Hospital, everything is listed in this book. There are even phone numbers for information such as Rent-A-Cars, hotels, and some of the finest and/or most popular restaurants. There are detailed maps of airports, train stations, and just about everything you need to know. If you are traveling to Europe, you need to go pick one of these books up, and use it to help you prepare your itinerary.

Yes, I also have other books on this topic, but I would submit to you this is the best one I've found so far, because it is a practical travel guide that you can take with you, and it barely takes up any space. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Traveling and Vacations. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/

Top 7 Books to Read Before Traveling to Turkey

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I like to read several books before each trip to have a better understanding of the culture and the local life of my next destination. Of course there are the travel guides I read before leaving or even before choosing my next destination, but my favourites are fiction novels. I like to read stories that take place in that country or whose authors are from that country.

Below is a great list of non-travel books about Turkey, some from Turkish authors. If you are considering travelling to Turkey soon, create time to read at least few of them, perhaps they will make you realize your dream trip sooner than expected.

1) Yasar Kemal, The Birds Have Also Gone

A short novel from one of Turkey's internationally recognised and widely read authors who has also been a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this book, author tells the story of three boys who are struggling to survive in the constantly changing environment of the big city: Istanbul.

2) John David Tumpane, Scotch and Holy Water

Entertaining book on Turkish people and life in Turkey written by American author who lived in Turkey for 10 years. From the view of a Turkish person you may find the author arrogant and the observations exaggerated but it will surely be helpful to Americans in understanding Turkish thinking. "We arrived in Istanbul via Pan Am after midnight. On the way into the city, all the neon signs looked so strange to me: Tuzcuoglu, Haci Bekir Lokumlari, Koc. I thought, I'll never be able to learn this language. Then I saw a sign reading Is Bankasi and I was sure the word "bank" was lurking somewhere in there. Since I knew one word of Turkish already, I decided to stay"

3) Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul Memories and the City

The Nobel Prize winner recalls the Istanbul of his youth. Istanbul's melancholy enriched his childhood and continues to inspire him. "... the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernise and modernise may have been, the more desperate wish, it seemed, was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire: rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved's clothes, possessions and photographs"

4) Mustafa Ziyalan and Amy Spangler (editors), Istanbul Noir

Comprised of by 16 stories, all original, some of Turkey's most exciting authors; the result is an underground portrait of the city and of Turkey, told in evocative, often poetic, and powerful language.

5) Louis de Berni?res, Birds Without Wings

Birds Without Wings is a novel by Louis de Berni?res, telling the tragic love story of Philothei, a Christian girl and Ibrahim her childhood friend and Muslim. The story is set in Eskibah?e, a small fictional village; although fiction, the setting of Eskibah?e is based upon Kayak?y village near Fethiye, the ruins of which still exist today; a beautiful historic romantic novel.

6) Elif Safak, The Flea Palace

Safak is a young Turkish novelist, writer of best-sellers in Turkey, France and Bulgaria. The Flea Palace is a novel about daily routines of the inhabitants of an apartment building in Istanbul named BonBon Palace, miniature representation of the city itself, the city of contrasts and contradictions, the city where East meets West. Here is an extract from The Flea Palace: "Istanbul was under a heavy fog that morning, and as all Istanbulites knew too well, during foggy days even the city herself could not tell what her colour was. However, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had always been pampered with great care since birth and had been subsequently led to presume that others were to blame whenever she could not obtain anything she desired..."

7) Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey

A nonfiction anthology created and edited by Anastasia M. Ashman & Jennifer Eaton Gokmen. The collection includes the life experiences of 32 expatriate women from seven nations and five continents, whose collective experience spans over the past four decades. These diverse women describe religion, culture, conflicts, traditions and customs with the perspective of foreign women living and working in Turkey. They will take you to Istanbul's narrow streets, to warm homes, and to steamy Hamams. If you are planning to visit Turkey soon this book is a great read to warm your heart to Turkish people.

Nil Aykut is the Marketing Manager of Anatolia Travels. Anatolia Travels offer private and escorted tours to Turkey, Greece, Italy Egypt, Jordan & Morocco. More information about travelling to Turkey at http://www.anatoliatravels.com/Turkey-Tours.htm

Original article available at: http://www.anatoliatravels.com/travelblog1/

How To Secure Your Luggage

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It is funny the subjects one can become interested in. I've found myself over the past couple of months more interested in luggage and while I've written other information on how to choose different types of luggage - today I'm going to talk about a part of luggage we don't like to think about - which is how to secure your luggage.

If you're like me and travel frequently - you will eventually end up in a situation where you lose your luggage. The silliest time I lost my luggage was when I was flying on a regional airline and as we pulled out from the gate we could see our luggage left on the tarmac. The airplane was too heavy to carry the luggage! You might also find out luggage is broken because of accident or damaged during airline transfer.

However, there are tips that you can use when choosing your luggage as well as when you are traveling with your luggage. These are probably better to actually help you on your trip than determining whether to pick a bag with stripes or not.

The most basic knowledge to have is to not to overpack your luggage in the first place. By only packing what your baggage can hold you will reduce the chances of the bags breaking. This is because the number one reason why bags break is because people overpack their luggage. There are smarter ways to travel such as not carrying toiletries that you can buy cheaply at your destination, proper packing technique and leveraging clothing that has extra pockets instead of over-stuffing your bag. You can further strengthen the bag and make it easier to find in the baggage pickup by using a strap around the bag.

The other cause of losing luggage is when they are actually stolen. In most cases this is because people packed valuables such as jewelry or cash in their checked luggage. While you can use locks to protect your luggage these are not a very strong protection - in particular not post 9/11 where the locks must be designed to be unlocked by the TSA. While we like to think that criminals don't have access to the master keys, I think that's being naive. Plus the locks don't prevent someone from using a knife or saw or drill to go through the luggage to rip it open. Instead of carrying valuable jewelry in the luggage - carry it with you in as plain of package as possible. Nobody suspects a plain brown envelope contains valuables - which is why gemstones are often transported that way between stores. So you can use the same trick with your own valuables.

Of course if your luggage has been lost or you want a stronger bag you might want to check out modern pink luggage.

Books Set in China - Five Novels to Read Before You Travel

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With its huge land mass and population China is a country with millions of stories to be told. Luckily for us, some of those stories have been captured in novels. From its colonial past and its decades of communism to the economic power-house it is today, China's many faces are reflected in the pages of hundreds, if not thousands of novels available for us to read. Here are five much-loved titles which will give you an insight into a country which was for so long closed to those from the outside. Before setting off to explore this fascinating country, discover some of what makes it tick with this selection.

'Snow Flower and the Secret Fan' by Lisa See

This is a fast-paced tale of adventure and mystery in 1920's Shanghai as Spanish painter Elvira De Poulain tries to sort out her murdered husband's messy affairs. To survive and pay off her husband's massive debts, she and her teenage niece Fernanda need to decipher the clues in an antique chest to find some lost treasure - before the killers get their hands on it! An entertaining and action-packed way to delve into Chinese culture.

'The Painter from Shanghai' by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Staying with Shanghai, this novel is based on the true life-story of painter Pan Yuliang, the first Chinese woman to paint in the Western style. Born in 1895 and orphaned as a teenager, Yuliang follows her passion to become a renowned and controversial painter. The novel follows Yuliang's life and career as China goes through enormous political upheaval, world wars and invasion by Japan. It is the story of a passionate and determined woman battling to create rebellious art in a country in which it is not accepted.

'Brothers' by Yu Hua

Bring China's social revolution to life with this funny and touching novel of two step-brothers from a small town. Spanning the years from the Cultural Revolution to the country's capitalist reform, it is a cynical look at modern China. As the years progress one brother finds himself lost in the new world, while the other embraces its entrepreneurial spirit, reflecting some of the breadth of response to the country's changes. But while this novel does attempt to tell the story of modern China, it is its memorable, much-loved characters and sharply observed humor that really delights its readers.

'The Vagrants' by Yiyun Li

A brutal and melancholy story which explores the impact of a 1979 execution on the residents of the fictional provincial town of Muddy River. Young female counter-revolutionary Gu Shan's horrific death comes after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and while there is a local protest to clear her name, the government clamps down on this expression of liberalisation. The after effects of the execution travel far and wide on an ensemble cast of characters, and is a reminder of the shadow the Cultural Revolution casts over the country. This is a bleak but powerful read that will remain with you for a long time to come.

'The Concubine's Daughter' by Pai Kit Fai

Spanning three generations and forty years, this novel reveals the stories of an educated woman turned concubine, her daughter and grand-daughter. The book explores the status and role of women in China in the first half of the 20th century, as the characters eventually challenge their fate and seek to forge their own destinies.

It would be a lifelong task to read all of the many novels set in China which are in print today, but hopefully this selection has given you a taste for the rich and rewarding stories that are available for you to explore. Why not allow fiction to carry you further through this wonderful country and its people, even as you explore it in person - from Beijing to Hong Kong, from Shanghai to areas deep in the countryside, from the past into the exciting world of the present.

Suzi Butcher is the editor of http://www.packabook.com/ which makes it easy to find novels set in particular locations. This is a just a taste of the novels she recommends -- visit books set in China for many more. With Packabook's constantly updated selection of travel novels from countries all around the world, you will always be able to choose something exceptional to read.

A Wildly Distorted Account - 30 Days In Sydney by Peter Carey

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Peter Carey's 30 Days In Sydney claims to present a wildly distorted account of a writer's return to a city he knows well. After ten years in New York, the author spends a month in the city he left behind and he records the experience. It's not at all distorted, except interestingly via an essential personal perspective. It's more than a travelogue, less than a memoir, certainly not a guidebook. The form is intriguing. It could pass as a commonplace book, the merely fleshed out notes of an individual's visit to his own past. And the form works well.

The idea, it seems, is to communicate a feel for a place. The result is a collected experience where the personal rubs shoulders with the historical, where memory meets geography, where the past is partly lived again through recollection and the lives of others who themselves have moved on. And all of this takes place in less than sixty thousand words.

Peter Carey's aim of using the ancient elements, fire, air, earth and water, as a thread to bind his impressions, however, simply does not work. The idea appears and then seems to be forgotten for some time. The earth is surely special in Australia, quite unlike anywhere else. And water is everywhere in Sydney, whose harbour is surely one of the world's most beautiful places. Fire certainly formed - and continues to form - this landscape: no Australian needs to be reminded of this. Air, however, did not seem to have its own angle, apart form the author having arrived by plane. Looking back now, perhaps the thread was there, despite the fact that at the time it seemed something of a complication.

Themes apart, 30 Days In Sydney is a delightful read because of the characters that Peter Carey meets, depicts and describes, both the living and the dead, the contemporary and the historical. The mix is unique. The rawness is abrasive, but the sophistication alongside is always breathtaking.

Sydney is the kind of city where multiple cultures coexist. In that it is not unique. But it is also the largest city of a nation that has recently rediscovered an aboriginal identity that is being apologetically sanctified. It's a city where the bar at the opera probably has a poker machine. In Manly, the multi-class seaside suburb, a beautiful person with headphones and roller blades can flash past the open door of an amusement arcade while the police swing band, live in the open air, all in uniform and wearing shades, plays a Glen Miller selection. It's a place where you can be pushed off the sidewalk by a redneck right outside the most utterly twee of art galleries. Such contrasts are all there in Peter Carey's book.

I am semi-retired, living in Spain. I spend most of my time nowadays gardening, cooking, reading, reviewing and writing. I have four books available, two African novels set in Kenya, Mission and A Fool?s Knot, a set of travel stories, Voyagers, and a rugby league book, 50 Of The Best, which I wrote with Martin Offiah. I review almost every book I read in an attempt to clarify what I think about it. It?s these reviews that I post on my blog. Please visit http://www.philipspires.co.uk/

Fun to look at on the road and living in Asia could

Tom's new book, Doncaster Borneo Tom, could be your guide through the Asian trip, but it is also much more than that. Get an inside look at what it has to travel through the entire Borneo, Malaysia and Asia could not live "and to develop a meaningful relationship, all the orangutans.

Borneo Tom drafts help tells you how the dealer, retired teacher decided to take and blaze new and never before tried on the experience of the tale. After maintaining his parents before their service life is the end of the year, Tom impulsiivisesti, decided to move to Borneo and can travel through Asia. What happens next to conquer you.

His daring may affect a little radical to some, but Tom is a part of his personality and adventurous spirit. After the people of the Islamic faith in Asia, could also be, it may be decided to write to try to educate the people of Doncaster and the Borneo Tom and reduce bigotry and without prejudice to the provisions against them. Tom writes about his experiences with the people of the Islamic faith, and portrays the mainstream media in a different light.

Borneo Orangutan's plight also featured Tom. These magnificent beings despite the efforts mentioned in the book, and has even appointed a useful reason for this worthy of a portion of the proceeds from Doncaster. Pictures of the Borneo orangutans, and how they interact with the Antigen to tell Tom classic "-humans-in such a way that they wish to endear readers of the group, and for more information.

Make the images "and the Borneo Tom French readers smile, and create their own group the right picture about life as lived in Doncaster during his time travels to Asia. A man who is called the Niki created water and drafts. Niki's life and that are located near Sarawak River, Borneo and the road "he sketches of all the Nations, and throughout the territory of the tourists in the form of images from Chris Gore of his.

Borneo has anyone every time Tom United States to escape the usual and try something new-a new culture, new landscapes, .bak, and the life of the relationship. It took the courage and the determination to take life, works, and to prove that the Tom Tom Borneo succeeded his quest for Doncaster.

Doncaster found love with a local girl in Asia and could also be a miracle happened when she became pregnant, Tom had received some years before the Vasectomy. Recently found the love story and the changes to the Borneo permeates Tom travel guide/love a tale of life and story.

Lauren Smith is a virtual book review-reviews of books, known as the bestselling books by authors and soon-to-be identified by names. For more information, visit: http://virtualbookreviewnetwork.com/. This review covers the "Borneo", Tom Tom, Doncaster.

Review of Berlitz German Phrase Book and Audio CD

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AppId is over the quota

Berlitz German Phase Book and Dictionary was one of the first resources I bought to learn German. I knew that it wouldn't help me with colloquial language, and that it would mostly consist of handy phrases for travelers, but I figured it would help me decide whether or not German was the language for me.

For the price of $14.95 at Borders (back when Borders was the major book store chain), I purchased this phrase book, which also included a pocket dictionary and an audio CD. The main phrase book was packed with many useful requests and conversations which, as I anticipated, were geared primarily towards travelers. As a beginner, I found a lot of useful vocabulary in the phrase book. Most textbooks and courses don't go very in depth into travel vocabulary, so this phrase book could be a very useful supplement.

Now, having studied German, I know that the formal language used in this travel guide is overly-polite and I would likely not use a good deal of it, if I were to travel to Germany today. Still though, it was a helpful resource. I also enjoyed the audio CD, although it was a little hard to follow before I had a sound basis in German basics.

I would recommend this traveler's guide anyone who needs to learn/brush up on their German before a trip purchase this book. It is certainly one of the best travel guides out there for the German language. The audio CD will help to perfect your pronunciation, and the book covers just about everything you would have to say. For serious language learners, this book could teach you some of the more formal/polite ways of making requests in German, as well as a great deal of travel vocabulary.

What I do not recommend, however, is starting out your German experience with this or any travel guide. That is how I started and I found myself very confused by the different grammatical cases, adjective agreements, and all the other fine points of the language. For that reason, I recommend learning the basics of the German language from a more informative course/class/program and then, at a later time, using this or any travel guide as a supplement for vocabulary.

Whilst this set is only useful for vocabulary when learning the German language, it is certainly one of the best travel guides that I have seen. I have quite a few pocket travel guides, for several languages, and this one has the most features and words. Most travelers, when armed with this book, should do just fine in Germany, especially considering how many people speak in English there.

Wilhelm Schulz is the owner of Schulz Languages, where he endeavors to provide affordable language learning solutions to the average person. To find out more about Schulz Languages, visit http://schulzlanguages.com/.

Schulz also blogs at http://wilhelmschulz.blogspot.com/. Visit his blog for more information!