A vintage convertible -- the quintessential Cuban ride

For most Americans, whether to go to Cuba is a matter of legality. Does their trip qualify? The events of 50 years ago that led to the U.S. embargo are a distant history.

In Miami, where are I live, whether to visit Cuba is a moral and community question. Families remain torn apart, and the wounds of lost lives, homes, businesses still feel fresh to so many.

If you do go, my advice is to travel mindfully. Wander about; wave and smile. Take a cycle taxi or one of the motorized Coco taxis, and talk with your driver. Eat in private restaurants, called paladars. Stay in a casa particular — a local home, where you’ll see how Cubans live and put income directly in their pockets.

Yet even here, attitudes are shifting. With so much in flux in both the U.S. and Cuba, this spring was my time to go.

You can read about my trip and see photos and videos in my story for the Miami Herald.

You rarely see Philadelphia touted on the covers of glossy travel and food magazines. But it should be. The City of Brotherly Love may well be the most underrated destination for

Philadelphia City Hall

culinary and culture travel in the U.S., as my recent visit proved.
Let’s start with food. Philly is known first and foremost for its cheesesteak sandwiches; Italian and Pennsylvania Dutch comfort foods aren’t far behind. But what foodies forget is that the city lies near the sea and farm country – which translates into two remarkable food markets.

Every visit to Center City should begin (and maybe end) with breakfast or lunch at the Reading Terminal Market for spicy crab spread; a creamy tomme; mountains of shaved roasted chicken; a grilled sandwich stacked with roast turkey, chorizo and spicy goat horn peppers; fresh-baked Amish apple dumplings – even smoked pigs ears!

Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market

For visitors, getting to south Philly’s Italian Market  probably means a taxi, but the a strong through nine blocks of fish stalls, butcher shops, vege vendors and eateries from Vietnamese to Mexican – and of course, Italian —  is worth the fare.

Nature also serves up the raw ingredients for new American farm-to-plate menus dishes including short rib stir fry with mushrooms (Buddakan), pistachio pesto flatbread with housemade mozzarella (Garces Trading Co.), lollipop lamb chops with T, garlic, mint and mojito sauce (Indeblue), pan-seared scallops with roasted cauliflower and compressed apples in a curry vinegrette (Parc Bistroi), tea-brined chicken with cucumber radish salad (Square 1682)….you get the picture. The razor clams with ramps and seaweed salad at Petruce et al were delicately

Razor clams at Petruce et al in Philadelphia

charred to create a series of distinctive tastes within a single dish, while the roasted beets served with roasted duck breast had the beet-hating Husband sated and sighing.

Now that you’re waistband is popping, it’s time for a stroll. Most people think of this city as the birthplace of Independence, and that would be right. And while you should stop in to see the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center, you’ll soak up the past you wander through Center City, stroll around 19^thCentury City Hall with its mansard roof, or pop into the Post Office flanked by WPA-era sculptures.  As you

The Liberty Bell

wander downtown, don’t forget to look up; the historic architecture is stellar (and almost outweighs the boxy horror of some of the 1970s infill projects.)

Culture, not history, was the draw for this particular visit. But since it had been a while since the last Philly visit – and since our feet can always use a break – we signed up for the Philadelphia Sighting Tourshop-on hop-off bus as a transportation mode.  The surprise: the tour itself was actually informative and fun, delivered by live human beings (imagine!) who are Philly natives who clearly love their city, warts and all. (Because we used it as transport, we heard bits of the tour from three different guides.)

On the sightseeing bus

From them we learned that The Foodery sells  500 types of beer, that the city has at least two kaoroke sushi bars, the best and cheapest crabs are in South Philly at 9^th Street and Washington, that the city has the country’s largest brownstone structure (the Basilica) and America’s largest outdoor art collection (including the Mural Arts Project, with well over 100 murals citywide, but quite different in nature from Miami’s Wynwood Walls.)

Philadelphia's Rodin Museum

We had come to go to the Barnes, where former Perez Art Museum Miami director Thom Collins recently took the helm. We had figured we’d have time for visits to the Rodin Museum (home of to the most Rodin sculptures outside Paris) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well. But two days is not nearly enough time.

We did make it to the Penn Museum, a visual feast for anyone besotted with African tribal art, Egyptian pharaohs and Mesopotamian digs.

But the Barnes is, simply, staggering. By legal agreement, when the Foundation opened its new downtown campus in 2012, the salon-style arrangement of canvases and metalwork was preserved precisely.

While this decorative arrangement might have been somewhat suitable for a private home, it is definitely not the best arrangement for viewing the nearly 1,000 works by Renoir, Matisse, Gauguin, van Gogh, Cezanne, Soutine – plus a number of remarkable early Picassos. You long to see the 59 Matisses together in a single room, the Seurat juxtaposed with the Chicago Institute of Art’s Sunday in the Park, the 181 ethereal Renoirs in one heavenly space, the metal work together as a highlight rather than the afterthought it becomes.

Long before you make it to the Benin bronze on the second floor and the African figures nearby, your eyes will be glazed over, and you will need to head to restaurant for a Prosecco or take a break outside to admire the calming modernity of reflecting pools and angles designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Street vendor in Philadelphia

In Philly, culture can’t be contained in buildings (and we’re not just talking about the colorful but polite personalities you meet just about everywhere.) So for dinner, we head into South Philly for dinner at Victor Café..

Victor looks and feels like an archetypal Italian restaurant: wooden booths, red-and-white checked table cloths, multipuciano on the wine list,  vongole with fettucine on the menu and hundreds of photos of famous people on the walls. But don’t look for mobsters or movie stars in these pictures. Victor is all about opera.

Those who greatest fear in life if five hours of Wagner need not fear. Arias here come in short bursts – courtesy of the wait staff. Philly is home to three major operatic schools, and talent here is enough to convert hip-hop devotees and country western lovers. (After all, what are those musical genres but simply riffs on musical story telling?)

And forget the buxom Brunhilda image. Some of the biggest voices came from slight young women svelt enough for a movie screen.

Even if opera isn’t on your playlist, this may be the ultimate birthday place, if only to hear the tried-and-true ditty in its most glorious form.

Our own waiter, John (who was heading the next day for Europe to join his boyfriend, a recent winner on both Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune), knocked us off our chairs with a poignant rendition of the My Fair Lady hit, Here on the Street Where you Live. It was worth the visit alone.

 

 

View from the new Whitney Museum in New York.

VIDEO: View from the new Whitney Museum, New York

The queue lasted from dawn until way after dusk on the first day of public

Queue at the Whitney Museum, opening day

Queue at the Whitney Museum, opening day

operation for New York’s new #WhitneyMuseum, leaving art  lovers plenty of time to wander the High Line and check
out the street festival of performances.

From the outside, the Renzo Piano-designed building has a clunky feel, more

Renzo Piano's Whitney Museum, New York / WOOLDRIDGE

like a factory than a showcase for some of the national artistic timeline of passion, strife, concepts and yes, beauty.

Inside, it’s a different matter altogether. Some 18,000 square feet under soaring industrial ceilings allow provide plenty of space for works and the visual breathing space that saves your brain from overload.

This initial exhibition, America is Hard to See, showcases the Whitney’s vast collection in way that has rarely been seen, with realistic works from Alice Neel and Edward Hopper, abstraction from Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, the poetic commentary of Jean-Michel Basquiat and expressive gesture of Willem de Kooning. And, this being America, plenty of political opinion.

But the art outside is as powerful…and not just the sculptures installed on the 13,000 square feet of terraces. The views — over the High Line, through the Meat Packing District, up to the Empire State Building, along the Hudson and across a sea of roof gardens to the tip of Manhattan — are a different kind of testament to America’s history, ingenuity and strength.

On the royal lake in Udaipur

The modern world may be flat, but at this moment we’re in the India of a glorious past, of jeweled palaces and geometric gardens, tiger preserves and the exquisite white marble mausoleum that marks a timelessly obsessive romance. For two weeks we’ll be chauffeured through fabled Rajasthan on a private tour in a gleaming white Ambassador, the iconic conveyance of India post-Raj.

The tab: less than $2,000 for bed-and-breakfast, car and driver. And yes, that’s for two.

Pushkar, India. COPYRIGHT: Jane Wooldridge

With other meals, guides, museums, tips and the doctor — we’ll get to that — our vacation comes to less than $100 per person per day, plus airfare and shopping.

No, we didn’t languish in the five-star private enclaves that grace sleek magazine covers — though we did stay in several royal-owned boutique hotels that made us feel like pampered guests of a bygone time. And while our meals weren’t prepared by the stars of the Master Chef India TV series, we ate well enough on dal, chicken korma and the occasional plate of pasta.

Any English-speaker can easily catch the Metro from the airport to New Delhi and book arrangements from train tickets to tiger safaris online.

But The Husband has declared that he’s past his do-it-yourself-in-the-developing-world days. But we’re also not in for a group tour. And why should we deal with the hassles of luggage and public transportation when Namaste India Tours ( namasteindiatours.com)  — a small family-run company highly  recommended by a friend — can take care of the details for such a reasonable price?

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/travel/article19410840.html#storylink=cpy

People often complain that they can’t use their frequent flier miles. When it comes to finding free flights, I’m usually successful — but it

INDIA: Frequent flier tickets often come with hassles including time-consuming searches, oddball routings and overnight stays at airport hotels. But when the destination is a place like India, Africa or Europe involving an expensive air ticket, the hassles are worth it.

takes some serious work and creative approaches.

Just this week I snagged two tickets for travel in May to Asia. What I quickly found is that booking the legs separately — instead of as a round trip — secured a ticket that “didn’t exist” when I tried to book it as a single itinerary.

Airlines steer you to their websites for booking by imposing a whopping fee if you book frequent flier tickets with a live person. If I’m saving $5,000 — as in this case — it’s still a good deal to pay $40 per ticket to use an agent. But not every agent is patient and savvy, and so I look up the options online before I make the call.

In this case, I wasn’t able to find tickets from Miami to Darwin, Australia — but I was able to find them from L.A. to Darwin. The Miami-to-LA leg was also available, but not as a “through” ticket from Miami to Darwin.

My return, from the relatively obscure port of Kota Kinabalu on Borneo, took a bit more digging. I’m buying inexpensive tickets ($50 each) from KK to the nearest major airport, Kuala Lumpur. I’m buying another cheap ticket ($100 each) from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong, where I pick up my frequent flier tickets back to Miami.

True, getting free seats on the most convenient, direct flights is nigh impossible. Every other flier is competing for those same seats, and even trying to book them the minute an airline releases its first batch of free seats doesn’t necessarily work. (Airlines release seats at varying schedules, about a year out, but most add seats throughout the yearbased on the volume of paid bookings they get.)

But if the savings are significant enough — for an expensive ticket to Asia, Africa or Europe — the inconvenience of oddball routings and overnight hotel stays can be worth it.

The Hope Elephants are something of a marvel. Their name comes from their location — in the tiny village of Hope, Maine, population around 1,500, about 20 minutes west of the tony hamlet of Camden. But the meaning fits as well. Former circus residents, Rosie and Opal, two post-menopausal Asian elephants, were brought here two years ago by Dr. James Laurita.

Labor Day Weekend, I went to one of the thrice-daily presentations at the Hope Elephants barn. It sounds like a touristy thing to do; it was anything but. For 30 minutes, Laurita talked about his student days working with his brother at Carson a&Barnes Circus as an jugglers and elephant tenders; how the circus led him to become a vet; how he went back to visit Rosie over the years. In 2011 he and his brother raised the money to build Rosie and Opal a state-of-the-art barn, complete with radiant heat beneath the sand floor.

His passion spilled out as he talked about the elephants’ injuries — at the trunk and feet of other female elephants in a matriarchal battle for dominance — took them through simple exercises designed to strengthen Rosie’s damaged trunk and Opal’s stiff leg. Both leaned in for a spray of the hose, then the hose went straight into thirsty throats and mouths. Six more circus-retired elephants are on a waiting list to come to the Hope refuge, but the massive tech-savvy barns they need don’t come cheap.

So it was with surprising sadness that I learned last week that Laurita, 56, died just days after my visit. Tending to the elephants late one night, apparently he fell and was stepped on by one of his charges. No malice, just an accident.

One of the great gifts of traveling is the things you don’t expect…the gourmet shop plopped unexpectedly in the middle of the countryside, the general store selling both guns and wedding gowns. The passion of a man who battled the forces of economics and what would seem to be common sense to make his odd dream come true. That’s worth celebrating, even at such a cost.

Opaque websites are intentionally mysterious. Hotels, rental car companies and airlines often have “express inventory,” which means bookings aren’t going as quickly as they’d like. But they don’t want to put out a super-cheap price attached to their names to avoid denigrating their brand. This allows travelers to snag cheaper prices than they might otherwise find, but without knowing the supplier’s name until after they’ve made a non-refundable purchase. The best known of these are Hotwire and Priceline; Travelocity and Expedia also sell “secret” hotels. Autoeurope offers a similar service on cars, though unlike other “secret” deals, these are refundable.

For years I’ve used opaque sites for car rentals with superb results. Because I don’t rent that often, I’m not racking up loyalty points with one particular car company. And all of the opaque sites work with major suppliers, so there’s no danger of getting saddled into a car from a local no-name company with no road support.

Hotels and airlines are a different matter. Days off are precious, and when it comes to airlines, I care far more about the airline I’m flying (those FF points have taken me worldwide more times than I can count) and the exact times I’m flying than I care about saving a few dollars.  As for hotels, though I don’t adhere to a strict loyalty program, I’ve  never felt comfortable without knowing the name of the hotel, along with its exact location.

I’ve now changed my mind — at least where hotels come into the picture.

Recently we arranged a trip over a high-season weekend to Amsterdam. It’s one of the glaring holes in my travel resume, despite a number of previous efforts to get there (including one trip that was whited out by a London ‘snowstorm of the century’). In cities I know well — London, Hong Kong, New York — I have strong opinions about my precise location. But in the case of Amsterdam, I only know the neighborhoods I’d find convenient. What I do know is that my credit card screamed every time I looked at the hotel choices. Once I added in taxes, the cost of just about every hotel at any star level was heading close to $300 per night — meaning a tab of $900 for a three-night stay. Ouch.

Following the old adage that looking is still free, I went to Hotwire and found it has improved significantly since the last time I booked a hotel there. On the site, Amsterdam is segmented into tight areas, so you get a pretty decent idea of neighborhood. Information about each of the “secret” hotels offered includes a rating by previous Hotwire customers about whether they would recommend the hotel. Better yet, it also includes the 4-out-of-5 rating from Trip Advisor. (The two companies previously were held by the same ownership group.)

Still, all that might not have been enough to tempt me alone. The price was. Instead of paying $300 per night for a 2- or 3-star hotel, we found a price of $180 per night for a 4-star hotel in a good neighborhood. Even when we threw in a $40 cancellation insurance add-on, the price for our stay came down to just above $600 — a good 33 percent discount.

Click! Now that we had paid, the name was revealed. It turned out to be a chic brand hotel that I’d seen elsewhere online for $325 per night…more than we would even have considered booking out right.

It will be a couple of months before we actually travel; I’ll report back then on the experience. For today, I can say that we’ll be checking out the opaque sites next time we’re heading to a major city. It’s at least worth a look.