Over the past 12 months, I have experienced six different international business class products thanks to my job as Insider's aviation reporter. And — among this particular bunch — I've found that none of them are like the other.
17.09.2023 - 13:49 / insider.com
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 31-year-old circus artist Kong Viban, a performer at Phare, the Cambodian Circus . The show performs regularly in Siem Reap and will be on tour in New York in December .
I never thought that I'd become a professional circus artist. But juggling and performing gravity-defying acts for Phare, the Cambodian Circus, has not only brought me joy and fulfillment, it has also helped me make a living. It has become my passport to the world.
It's been an unlikely journey. I was born in 1993 in Battambang, in the northwest of Cambodia. I was the second of four kids. My parents, siblings, and I lived with our grandparents, all of us in a small house on one plot of land.
Growing up, my family lived a hand-to-mouth existence. My grandparents were farmers, my mother sold fish in the market, and my father hawked ice cream around town. All of them had survived the Khmer Rouge but never talked about it. It's likely that they had spent time in refugee camps because most families in our village had come from the same camps.
Whatever my parents made for the day was only enough for that day.
I attended state school when I was eight. When classes were out, my friends and I would go around town collecting trash to make some money. We picked up empty glass bottles, used shampoo bottles, scraps of corrugated iron roofing, basically anything that could be sold for recycling. After we'd split the day's take, I'd end up with about 300 riel, or 7 cents by today's exchange. Back then, 500 riel could get you a serving of bai sach chrouk, or pork and rice, and 200 riel, could get you a bowl of hot porridge.
Some days after school I would help look after the cows. I didn't have a dream back then; all I cared about was my family's survival from day to day. The future wasn't something I really thought of.
When I was 13, my mom moved my older brother and me from the state school to Phare Ponleu Selpak, an arts school that had also begun to offer general subjects. The school opened in Battambang in 1994, but traces its roots back to the 1980s at a refugee camp on the Thai border after the Khmer Rouge regime had devastated Cambodia. In the camp, a French humanitarian, Veronique Decrop, taught children art as a form of therapy.
It was close to our home, it was free, and I could choose what art form to study. A friend of mine was enrolled in the circus arts program, and I really enjoyed jumping from a high point onto a soft mattress, so without telling my mom I enrolled as well.
During my second year of training, I started performing in front of an audience. I finally got picked to perform at the show regularly held in the school's big top. I was nervous at first, but then I
Over the past 12 months, I have experienced six different international business class products thanks to my job as Insider's aviation reporter. And — among this particular bunch — I've found that none of them are like the other.
Three life-changing words: New York City.
From thousands of drone, underwater and coastal images submitted by the world’s best ocean photographers, Ocean Photographer of the Year 2023 has announced the overall and the different category winners of its prestigious awards.
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Awe-inspiring backdrops, difficult yacht charter guests and cruise crew drama have fueled one of TV's most popular reality shows. Since "Below Deck" premiered on Bravo in 2013, it's spawned a number of spinoffs, beginning with the popular "Below Deck Mediterranean" series, which premiered in 2016.
In late May, I flew with my daughter from California to Kennedy International Airport in New York, where I rented a car from Avis and headed to Connecticut for a three-day family visit. On day two, I parked the car in Waveny Park in New Canaan and when I returned, it was gone. The local police told me they had impounded the rental because Avis had reported it stolen to the New York Police Department. I had planned to spend the last day of my trip with my 80-something mother, whom I had not seen for three years because of the pandemic, but had to waste precious hours on hold with Avis’s customer service department. They eventually offered me a new car but I was unable to coordinate picking it up, so we ended up relying on my sisters to get around. I was only able to spend a few hours with my mom and had to take a $100 Uber back to the airport. I asked Avis not to charge me for the rental, but they did, $653, and when I disputed the charge with Capital One, Avis fought me. I can’t believe Avis is renting out cars they have reported stolen, and then charging its clients. Can you help?
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The 37th America’s Cup sailing race will take place in the year 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. However, the first of three preliminary regattas before that event has kicked off in Vilanova i la Geltrú, a coastal city some 30 coastal miles [50 kilometers] south of Barcelona. Out of six racing teams from New Zealand, the U.S., U.K, Switzerland, Italy and France, the French Orient Express team cooly breezed into a win on the first competitive event on a hot 85 degree [29 Celsius] Saturday mid-afternoon.
San Francisco is undeniably having a moment.
Seen from Paris’s Pont de la Tournelle, the eight-story facade of the landmark restaurant La Tour d’Argent looks about the same as it did when its third-generation owner André Terrail grew up there in the 1980s, deploying toy parachutists into quayside traffic. But the interior is no longer indifferent to the 21st century: Late last month, La Tour d’Argent reopened its doors after a yearlong renovation led by the Paris-based architect Franklin Azzi. “It’s my Tour,” says Terrail, who took over following his father’s death in 2006. “The same, but more exacting, more thoughtful.” The new look draws on the outsize history of the classically French fine-dining institution, which has been serving diners since 1582, taking particular inspiration from the streamlined motifs of its Art Deco era. On the seventh floor, the redesigned restaurant — overseen since 2020 by executive chef Yannick Franques — functions more than ever as a theater. The airy dining room, in shades of indigo and silver, looks onto an open-plan kitchen and an elevated platform where the restaurant’s signature pressed-duck dish is prepared nightly. Upstairs and downstairs are new bars suited to less formal occasions: Le Bar des Maillets d’Argent, an all-day lounge with a fireplace, andLe Toit de la Tour, a rooftop terrace. Given that it has the welcoming air of a boutique hotel, it’s no wonder that the building can now host overnight visitors in a private apartment on the fifth floor, complete with a touch of Scandinavian-style minimalism attributable, in part, to Terrail’s Finnish mother.
Paris is always a good idea. And now travelers can escape to the French city and more European hotspots for less with a new Icelandair sale that has flights starting at just $349 round trip.