Taking off Travel blog

Here’s 9 more utterly fascinating gestures and behaviors from around the world to tickle your fancy: Read more »

Quick: which sounds like a better vacation to you:

* Plan out infinite details, take a tour bus, rush from site to site, have a tour guide tell you where to go, stay in an American-style hotel, eat in regular restaurants

* Rent a local house, hang out with locals, buy local groceries, have lazy unplanned days of randomness

If you liked the second option, you’ll fit right in with the “slow travel” movement. Read more »

When you travel, you may think that if you don’t know the language, you can just communicate using gestures. BZZT! Knowing what gestures and body language mean in foreign countries can mean the difference between making friends and getting beaten up and it’s all too easy to make mistakes.

Take the quiz to find out how much you know about body language, gestures and foreign customs: Read more »

If you’ve ever had to schedule a business trip you know you can be deluged by confirmation e-mails for every detail, including flights, hotels, and car rentals. God help you if you have multiple destinations! Tripit.com promises to relieve the headaches of travelers by aggregating all the details of your trip into master itineraries, available to be shared with friends, accessed by SMS text messages and supplemented with additional information like weather, google maps, and more!!

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Imagine a country in which the denizens are experts at il dolce far niente (sweet doing nothing). Italy is a country in which a great day is one spent sipping espresso (the national breakfast) and people- watching in a piazza. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Eat Pray Love says she learned from her time in Italy that “the more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.”As a recovering Silicon-Valley workaholic, the idea of living this sort of existence both titillates and terrifies me. But I wanted to know more about it…This is the first in a series of blogs that will introduce you to cool people blogging about their lives in venerable Italy.Most Italian blogs I found carry the same observations from the authors: no matter how long they lived there they would always be outsiders, they miss clothes dryers, that the continual juxtaposition of the pope and naked bottoms in the media is amusing.zoomata: Nicole Martinelli, based in Milan, writes in a smart and sometimes snarky style on politics and current events in Italy. Her “daily life” articles are a hoot – read about the recently found Mafia 10 Commandments and official love parking lots. Nicole also writes for Spot-on. Read more »