|
Have I forgotten something? Undoubtedly! Please email me your suggestion(s) of what you think should also be included on this website. Thanks!
The International Men's Day is an international holiday since 1999 and is celebrated worldwide on the first Saturday of November worldwide!
"For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guide book will be the one which he himself has written. All others are an exasperation. They mark with asterisks the works of art which he finds dull, and they pass over in solence those which he admires. They make him travel long miles to see a mound of rubbish; they go into ecstasies over mere antiquity. Their practical information is invariably out-of-date. They recommend bad hotels and qualify good ones as 'modest'. In a word, they are intolerable. The days of Philias Fogg and the Grand Tour are long gone, but even today - where travelling in style has been replaced by package tourism en masse - select few have retained the savoir-voyager." They are the ones for whom my website has been created!
"Some people travel on business, some in search of health, but it is neither the sickly nor the men of affairs who fill the Grand Hotels. It is those who travel 'for pleasure', as the phrase goes. What Epicurus, who never travelled, except when he was banished, sought in his own garden, tourists seek abroad.
And do they find their happiness? Those who frequent the places where they resort must often find this question, with a tentative answer in the negative, fairly forced upon them. For tourists are, in the main, a very glommy-looking tribe. One usually sees much brighter faces at a funeral than in the Piazza San Marco. One wonders why they go abroad.
The fact is that very few travellers like travelling. If they go to the trouble and expense of travelling, it is not so much from curiosity, for fun, or because they like to see things beautiful and strange, as out of a kind of snobbery. People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it. To have been to certain spots on the earth's surface is socially correct; and having been there, one is superior to those who have not.
To justify this snobbery, a series of myths has gradually been elaborated. The places which it is socially smart to have visited are aureoled with glamour, till they are made to appear, for those who have not been there, like so many fabled Babylons and Bagdads.
The genuine Traveller, on the other hand, is so much interested in real things that he does not find it necessary to believe in fables. He is insatiably curious, he loves what is unfamiliar for the sake of its unfamiliarity, he takes pleasure in every manifistation of beauty."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)