‘Politically courageous’: EU postpones Entry/Exit System once again - but what’s behind it?

It was only recently that Yatra Online CEO Dhruv Shringi could be heard talking about how Indian carrier IndiGo’s fierce pricing squeeze had led to a drop in revenue.

The European Commission has decided to delay the introduction of the Entry/Exit System (EES), the bloc's automated registry for short-stay travellers that was expected to come into force on 10 November.

The European Union's new Entry/Exit System or EES was set to go into effect for travelers entering as many as 29 participating countries across the bloc next month.

I pulled my suitcase through the elegant front doors of The Inn at St. John, weary from hours of travel from Connecticut to Portland, Maine.

Colombia has blossomed into a popular tourist destination — in 2023, the South American country welcomed 5.9 million international visitors, a 24.3% increase from the year prior.

Once our two daughters went off to college, it seemed my husband and I had different plans for enjoying our empty-nest years.

I had my first experience with Frontier this summer, flying from Miami to Salt Lake City, and it was quite a baptism by fire.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Christopher Willson, a 52-year-old retired engineer who spent more than 15 years renovating a cruise ship he named Aurora . The following has been edited for length and clarity.

A North Korean tourism advert with low production values, near-empty beaches and cloudy skies has caught the internet’s attention.

As a teenager who lived in a small town, I became obsessed with travel, collecting piles of books written by authors who'd traversed the globe under their own steam. I vowed to do the same and got a job at a bookshop to pay for it. There's nothing like working all hours to make you appreciate money, and I vowed not to waste a cent when I did get to see the world.

In October 2022, during a two-week trip through four European countries, I spent 11 hours bunking with three strangers in an overnight sleeper train from Vienna, Austria, to Venice, Italy.

A single panda can eat more than 70 pounds of bamboo a day, so before Mao Sun and Xing Er, two Chinese-born bears, moved to the Copenhagen Zoo in the spring of 2019, Danish zookeepers had to find a reliable source of the treelike grass. One supplier was the farmer Søren Ladefoged, whose crop has recently benefited another local attraction: the fine-dining destination Noma. The chef Mette Søberg, 34, who heads Noma’s test kitchen, was inspired to add tender young shoots to the menu after the restaurant’s 10-week pop-up at the Ace Hotel in Kyoto last year, where thinly sliced bamboo was served in squid broth. “In Japan, and in Kyoto specifically, they’re so excited about ingredients that are in season for a short time,” she says. From late March through May, “everyone knows, ‘Ah, it’s bamboo season!’” Back in Denmark, she started grilling the shoots over pine boughs for a slightly smoky tinge and serving them with a butter and sencha tea dipping sauce. “We want to make it really simple so people can actually taste the bamboo,” says Søberg, who describes the plant’s flavor as “nutty, vegetal and a little bit sweet.” She adds that many Noma diners are surprised to encounter bamboo in Denmark, where it’s cultivated but not typically consumed. Outside of Asian restaurants, the same is true in the United States, where, at Brooklyn’s Cafe Mado, the chef Nico Russell, 36, has been pickling the shoots and serving them with razor clams in a garlicky sauce. He gets his supply of the yellow groove variety from the New Jersey-based forager Tama Matsuoka Wong, 66, who described this year’s demand as “a frenzy.” Wong, who specializes in harvesting edible invasive plants, points out that yellow groove multiplies rapidly through horizontal roots and can quickly overtake a plot of land. She works with property owners to contain the plant, while getting it into the hands of chefs like Mads Refslund, 47, of the wood fire-centered restaurant Ilis, also in Brooklyn, who has ordered over 750 pounds from Wong so far this year. This past summer, he served vertically cut salt-cured shoots with buckwheat oil-brushed uni and caviar pooled in the divots of the stems. He also preserved the majority of his supply, he says, so that — despite bamboo’s short season — he can offer it for months to come. —