Tokyo’s Haneda Airport has managed to snag the top spot as world's most cleanest airport.
22.04.2024 - 06:58 / lonelyplanet.com
A cooking class booked in the first few days of your trip is the best way to get acquainted with a new destination.
You’ll whet your appetite and set yourself up for everything else you will see, taste and experience during your trip. You can get restaurant recommendations from an expert to avoid tourist traps and you may even be invited into a local home. If you’re traveling solo, you will meet like-minded travelers. It’s true what Julia Child said: “People who love to eat are always the best people.”
Get curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Is this dish eaten often or just for special occasions? Does your host have a special twist or substitution that they make to the classic recipe? What comfort foods did they eat growing up? Who was the best cook in their family? Where’s the best place to get coffee tomorrow morning?
I’ve made it a point to take cooking classes all over the world as a part of my travels, and I find that I usually come away with so much more than just the recipes. Here are a few of my favorites.
Before our cooking class with Cookistan, we walked through the neighborhood of Kurtuluş. Though it's off the beaten path for most visitors to Istanbul, it is a perfect introduction to shopping and eating like a local in the city.
Our guide, Aysin, weaved in details about the first occupants of the area – a Greek shipbuilding community – and the various multicultural inhabitants who still maintain shops there. We stopped in front of a butcher specializing in offal cuts, complete with sheep’s heads in the window, an illustration of how all parts of the animal are utilized – nothing here is wasted. She explained how people cook with the seasons in Türkiye as we stopped in to pick up artichokes from two men cleaning off a huge mountain of fresh ones in their shop. We salivated over counters of meze, pickles, jams and olive oils and I realized my stomach was growling.
The dishes prepared in the course give Aysin and her instructors a way to speak about various aspects of Turkish cuisine. Dolma (vegetables and grape leaves stuffed with rice and meat) are an example of Anatolian home cooking, for example. Zeytinyagli enginar (artichoke braised in olive oil) represents a popular style of braised olive oil dishes. Circassian chicken, one of my all-time favorite meze, allowed Aysin to explain Türkiye’s meyhane (tavern) culture and how drinks and food go together over a shared table.
Ready to explore Istanbul? Get to know the city one neighborhood at a time with our guide
One of my most memorable classes was in a suburb of Tokyo with Yukiko, who generously opens her home to guests for a taste of true Japanese culture. Leaving our shoes at the door, we entered the cozy living room, complete with
Tokyo’s Haneda Airport has managed to snag the top spot as world's most cleanest airport.
Launched in London more than 20 years ago, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards has become one of the most important ratings in the rarefied world of top tier fine dining (though not without some criticism and controversy). But regardless what people think of the process behind selection, there’s no doubt that some of the big winners over the years have in fact been some of the world’s very best, places like Spain’s El Bulli, England’s The Fate Duck, Italy’s Osteria Francescana, Denmark’s Noma and in the U.S. notables have included Napa Valley’s French Laundry and New York City’s Eleven Madison Park.
In April 2020, United MileagePlus removed its partner award chart. Partner awards continued pricing at the lowest Saver level from the last-published award charts for a while. But over time, United Airlines has slowly raised its unpublished partner award rates. Last month, United devalued first-class partner redemptions, increasing award prices up to 100%. Now, the loyalty program has struck again with another devaluation.
Ongoing conflict in the Red Sea has led Princess Cruises to revise its world cruise itineraries for the Island Princess and the Crown Princess, which were scheduled to sail there in 2025.
Before joining TPG in 2021, I was a newbie to the world of points and miles. Despite traveling frequently throughout the previous decade, I was oblivious to the benefits of loyalty programs or how straightforward it could be to earn points or miles for airfare and hotel stays.
An ancient city that looms large in history and legend, Athens has its main sights clustered in one area with tiny central neighborhoods.
It’s inevitable: Every spring when we pull together the Hot List, our annual collection of the world’s best new hotels, restaurants, and cruise ships, a staffer remarks that this latest iteration has got to be the best one ever. After a year’s worth of traveling the globe—to stay the night at a converted farmhouse in the middle of an olive grove outside Marrakech, or sail aboard a beloved cruise line’s inaugural Antarctic voyage—it’s easy to see why we get attached. But this year’s Hot List, our 28th edition, might really be the best one ever. It’s certainly our most diverse, featuring not only a hotel suite that was once Winston Churchill’s office, but also the world’s largest cruise ship and restaurants from Cape Town to Bali. We were surprised and inspired by this year’s honorees, and we know you will be too. These are the Hot List's restaurant winners for 2024.
On an otherwise unremarkable Saturday in Tucson last month, I visited the intersection of the Harlem Renaissance and romance lit with Netflix darling Tia Williams, brushed up on global security threats with MSNBC contributors Barbara McQuade and Frank Figliuzzi, got an easy Roman-Jewish cake recipe from cookbook wunderkind Leah Koenig, and caught a dramatic reading by National Humanities Medal winner Abraham Verghese. All before lunch. And tens of thousands of people around me were doing much the same thing: making the rounds at the famed Tucson Festival of Books, where I’d decided to spend a few hours on a trip to see my parents. As I began to realize the more people I met in line, many had come to town just for this.
Tripadvisor, the world's largest travel guidance platform, has unveiled the winners of its annual Travellers’ Choice Best of the Best Hotels Awards. It reveals this year’s highest-rated hotels in the world, according to its global travel community.
In its 25th year of judging airports based on passenger surveys, the aviation ranking website Stytrax revealed on Thursday the world's best airports for 2024.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) has once again been crowned the busiest airport in the world, serving a whopping 104.6 million travelers in 2023. The Airports Council International (ACI), the trade association of the world’s airports, published its annual rankings on Monday. Most notably, Atlanta’s international airport saw an 11.7% increase in traffic from the previous year when it also ranked as the busiest airport in the world. The demand for domestic flights remained robust, with ACI’s report indicating a recovery of 96.8% of the 2019 passenger traffic level. However, the most encouraging trend was the resurgence of international air travel, which experienced a robust 36.5% growth and welcomed 90.4% of passengers from pre-pandemic numbers in 2019.
Sicilian cuisine is an intriguing melange that developed over centuries, the result of an endless stream of conquerors—Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Normans, and Spanish—that shaped the island’s culture and cooking. Learning about a destination through its food is one of travel’s great delights, of course; a good way to do that (beyond all the restaurant “research”) is to take cooking lessons in situ. It can help you connect to a locale in deliciously simple yet profound ways.