Ivy Esquero

Whether you are the type who loves pre-trip research, or the type who prefers to just wing it upon arrival, the issue of how long to stay in each place is a major one. We all want to maximize our time in the better places when on multi-stop trips, but figuring out which those are isn’t quite so obvious on your first visit to any part of the world.

Some of the best and most famous tourist cities on the planet are actually best visited in one well-planned day, while many others require 3 or 4 days to even feel like you are scratching the surface. Having been around the world a couple of times while studying these places as I go, I’ve sorted out some “best practices” on itinerary planning.

And lately I’ve been answering dozens of questions for readers in both the Europe itinerary planning and Eurorail Pass articles, so hopefully this will be of use for those going through the process soon.

How to figure out how long to stay in each city

If you are forming an itinerary for a multi-stop trip, the tips below should help you confidently make a plan you’ll enjoy.

Move as slowly as you can allow yourself to

For the longest time I was tired of hearing seasoned travelers preach about slow travel and its virtues. I even wrote a response about the benefits of fast travel, which I still stand by. But while helping people sort through their proposed itineraries lately I can’t deny that the most common mistake continues to be trying to see too much in too little time.

Many of the specific reasons are outlined below, but to sum it up, you’ll have a better time if you remember that it’s supposed to be a vacation and not a race. If you try to visit a major city in only a day or two you’ll mainly be left with the knowledge that you ended up skipping a long list of worthwhile things. Most likely you’ll have future trips to see the next set of cities, so it’s unwise to plan as if this is your only chance.

For major cities, 3 nights is a minimum, and 4 or 5 is better

So with the above in mind, you should already be crossing stops off of your itinerary, but when you get down to adding up days the first rule is to allow at least 3 nights in major cities, and especially the spread-out ones. In Europe, the major cities include London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Rome, Florence, Madrid, Barcelona, and Istanbul.

Most other cities deserve a minimum of 2 nights (although 3 is often better). As we’ll discuss below, your travel days will almost never be fruitful sightseeing days, and traveling every other day gets tiring in general.

For compact cities, 2 nights can be long enough

Again, discussing the minimum duration to make a visit even worthwhile, quite a few of the world’s best tourist cities have one central core that can be walked across in an hour or less. In these cases, you can actually see a lot in just two days, especially if you choose a central hotel or hostel as well.

European examples of this include Dublin, Edinburgh, Cologne, Munich, Nice, Copenhagen, Krakow, Budapest, Bratislava, Belgrade, Naples, and most cities in France and Spain except for the largest ones. There are dozens if not hundreds more just within Europe, and you can often tell which they are when you look at a map of hotels or hostels and discover that most of them are clustered within a couple square miles or so in the center.

A few famous cities can be done in 1 night, but only if you plan well

Another popular rule of itineraries is that you should never travel on consecutive days, meaning trying to see a city in one day or less. While this is a good rule, there are a few interesting exceptions to it, but only if you’ve planned it in advance. My favorite example of this is Venice, but it also works for Rothenburg, Germany, or any of the other compact medieval cities.

Cities like these tend to be insanely crowded from about 10am until 6pm because they are filled with day-trippers on bus tours. Some of them, most notably Venice, are also very expensive, so most budget tourists stay outside of the city if they stay in the area at all.

So the one-night strategy is this:

Arrive early, hopefully by noon, and check into a hotel or hostel in as central a location as you can afford. Then see the sights for a few hours until you tire of the extreme crowds, and go back to your place for a rest. About 6pm, head out again to discover you will soon have the city almost to yourself, and walk around enjoying the scenery before dinner and maybe a couple drinks into the late evening.

The following morning, wake up early and see whatever leftover checklist sights you missed the first day, and come back to check out of your hotel when it gets too crowded again. By noon or so, you are off to the next place, where you can catch your breath and slow down again.

Day trips to small and/or expensive places are good strategy

Continuing to focus on Europe because it’s both popular and compact, there are many interesting and worthwhile towns that are 90 minutes or less by train or bus from larger cities. Depending on the specifics, it’s usually better to stay in the larger city and see the others as day trips rather than spending a night or two there. It’s wise to take train or bus fares into account, and if a round-trip seems to expensive and you are moving in that direction anyway then it might be better to change cities.

Famous examples of this are seeing Monaco and Cannes (both expensive) while staying in relatively inexpensive Nice on France’s southern coast. You can visit Pisa (which is only worth a couple hours) while staying in Florence, and you can visit many interesting places while staying in Paris. The point is, when places look close together on a map, investigate the day-trip strategy.

Mix shorter stays with longer ones every week

As long as your whole trip is at least two weeks (and I hope it is), you’ll also want to take general pacing into account. If you line up a bunch of cities that look like they can be visited in one or two days each, it’s still not wise to move so quickly. A general rule could be to limit your travel days to no more than 3 per week, or 5 in two weeks.

One time I had a Eurail Pass and I did 11 cities in 17 days (including stopping in Munich for 6 hours during Oktoberfest on my way to Innsbruck), and it was ridiculous. As relaxing as trains can be while they are moving, being on them several times per week gets exhausting, and flying is even worse.

Research flight or train durations before adding too much

Another of the more common mistakes people make in Europe in particular is not realizing how long it can take between some cities. While most of the major cities are 5 or fewer hours apart by train, there are many that take 12 or more hours and might require a change along the way. A night train could be a good strategy for those, or flying, of course, but however you do it you’ll need to factor that into your trip.

So whether it’s a 12-hour train ride or even a 1-hour flight where you have to get to the airport two hours early and then take another 2 hours getting into town after you land, days like these can be pretty much written off for sightseeing. By the time you arrive you’ll be disoriented and exhausted, so having dinner near your hotel or hostel might be all you’ll be capable of. The point is, on flight or long train ride days, add another night in order to see the new city properly.

If money is an issue, check our price indexes and plan accordingly

It seems like most of us are trying to keep expenses low while we travel, and this is one major reason I created Price of Travel in the first place. Not only should it be helpful to know about how much each city costs (at least relative to the others), but it should help you sort out an itinerary where you maximize time in the cheap-great cities while hustling through the expensive-great cities.

Hopefully you are already aware of the Backpacker Index, which calculates typical expenses for budget travelers and backpackers. The Europe Backpacker Index ranks 47 cities by price, with the cheapest only costing a quarter as much as the most expensive. There is also the Europe 3-star traveler Index, which does the same thing for mid-range travelers. The Asia Backpacker Index ranks the most popular destinations on that continent, which are also the cheapest in the world.

Don’t plan itinerary stops just because you’ve heard of a place

Another mistake that seems common is that people plan stops in cities just because they’ve heard of them or maybe they are the next major city on the map. Now, a travel purist might argue that every city has its own charms to be discovered, which is true (sort of), but remember our goal here is to maximize time in the great places and minimize time in the duds.

You might even ask yourself, with each city on my list, can I form at least a sentence or two on exactly why I am going there? Do you know of specific attractions you don’t want to miss, or is there a certain local food you’ve been intending on trying? If you can’t come up with something concrete about each place, it’s time to research and consider cutting it. Good examples of cities like this are Frankfurt, Brussels, Rotterdam, Dresden, Bratislava, Belgrade, Zagreb, and even Milan. I’ve stayed in all of those, but I wouldn’t recommend any of them for a first visit to Europe unless you have particular reasons.

If you plan to move quickly, better to wing it than lock it all in

So, you are still planning on visiting 10 cities in 21 days. You might actually pull it off exactly as planned and you might love it, but I’d be willing to bet that along the way you’ll realize you are spending too much time moving and too little time appreciating what you’ve come to see.

The best favor you can do for yourself if you want to try something like this is to lock in the first 2 or even 3 destinations with hotel reservations and transportation, and then evaluate the rest of it as you go. In other words, please don’t buy airline or train tickets all in advance for such a wild itinerary. If by Day 11 you’re really enjoying your 3rd or 4th city, you don’t want to have to keep racing to the next ones just because it seemed like a good idea when you were at home a few months before.

The post How long to stay in each city? Itinerary tips and tricks appeared first on Price of Travel.

Beneath this rose glaze lies some pretty genius pastry engineering.

Starting tomorrow, this round, glazed thing you see before you will be added to the permanent collection at Dominique Ansel Bakery. Being part croissant and part doughtnut, the pastry chef is, appropriately, calling it a cronut. (Go ahead, say cwaahh-nut, you know, French style.) Each one of these puppies is made from pastry dough that's been sheeted, laminated, proofed, then fried like a doughnut and rolled in flavored sugar. But that's not all: Cronuts-to-be are also filled with a not-so-sweet Tahitian vanilla cream, given a fresh coat of rose glaze, and bedazzled with rose sugar. Got it? Good. Let's briefly examine the sheer implausibility and engineering genius that goes into each one of these things.

First off, call your friendly neighborhood pastry chef and ask him or her what happens when you try to fry croissant dough. It's not pretty. Even if the laminated layers don't separate instantly and part ways in the hot oil six ways to Sunday, chances are that yeast-leavened dough will have a lumpy, sad, and uneven ascent before it ever gets to the golden brown stage. Ansel says it took around ten recipes and adjustments to multiple variables of time and temperature before he found a special trick to sheeting the dough, then learning to fry it in grapeseed oil at one specific (and somewhat secret) temperature.

The fried cronut looks like this on the inside:

To finish, it's filled with cream, another feat that's also a bit difficult to pull off in a pastry that has a punched-out center hole. The finished cronut tastes a lot like a classic glazed doughnut, but pretty much more awesome, and its layers peel apart like those in a mille crepe cake.*

Ansel's ongoing work with religieuses and his reinvention of the fraisier already had us convinced that the pastry chef routinely dares to dream at his Soho shop and is never content to rest on his macarons (though those are also very good), but this is just sort of nuts. It's a bold step forward for pastry.

Cronuts are $5.00 apiece and go on sale tomorrow at the bakery, just in time for Mother's Day. Flavors will change: Next month's cronut will have lemon maple glaze, maple syrup cream, and slightly salted sugar on the sides.

Dominique Ansel Bakery, 189 Spring St., nr. Thompson St.; 212-219-2773

Earlier: Anatomy of a Cake: Will Cotton and Dominique Ansel’s Fraisier Debuts in Soho

*: It should be noted that cronuts do not share any pastry DNA with members of the endangered cupcake family.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: engines of innovation, cronut, dominique ansel, dominique ansel bakery, the cronut

Cronutz-4-Life.

The bakery opened at 8 a.m. this morning, and its inaugural batch of cronuts — the pastry chef's croissant and doughnut hybrid — sold out within 35 minutes, Fork in the Road reports. Someone even made a sort of food-porny, cronut-themed Vine.

Fear not, cronut seekers: Ansel and his staff are working on a new batch right now.

Earlier: Introducing the Cronut, a Doughnut-Croissant Hybrid That May Very Well Change Your Life

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: cronut watch, cronuts, dominque ansel, dominque ansel bakery

Siri for Food Critics most definitely still in Beta.

“There are other factors that make Albert’s emerging empire different, as well. The scope of the food being served falls well beyond the Spanish food he built his name on. He is now putting his stamp on high-end Mexican food, on kaiseki-style Japanese cuisine, on spice-charged Peruvian food…To top it off, he’s making this push in one of the worst economies in Europe, if not the entire developed world. Unemployment in Spain stands at an all-time high of 25 percent (a staggering 40 percent for youth) and GDP is shrinking now at its fastest pace since the recession began. Walk the streets of Barcelona at 2:30 and 9:00 pm, the peak eating hours of the day, and you will find a city full of empty restaurants.”

- This is all from Matt Goulding’s epic profile on Albert Adria, the man who’s just as responsible for having made El Bulli what it is as his more famous brother, Albert. 

Actual, literal, for real, unironic Bloomberg News headline.

A new flight-search website has launched to the general public only a couple weeks ago and it feels like the future. There are at least 10 major players for those looking to buy airline tickets and most of them have more similarities than differences. Routehappy.com looks like the others at first glance, but it is actually loaded with very useful information that none of the others have yet.

A couple years ago a new site called Hipmunk got a lot of well-deserved traction and buzz by changing the main fare-display screen to show flight and layover times rather than just a list with the cheapest on top. It proved that in today’s airfare market, where often dozens of flights are clustered closely in price, that there are more important factors than price alone.

Routehappy takes it several steps further

The killer feature of Routehappy is that every flight listed not only includes airline, price, depature time, and duration, but it also includes the following for every flight:

• Plane model
• Seat pitch (distance between seat backs) and roominess
• Entertainment system
• In-seat electricity availability
• Wi-fi availability
• General airline/route review

At least as of now it doesn’t mention whether there are free or paid snacks or meals or drinks, which could be another useful feature since it still does vary in many markets. But still, they provide so much useful information that no one else does (yet) that I’m already hooked. As a taller person, the seat pitch is a major factor for me, so instantly knowing which flights only offer 29″ (cramped) or 33″ (roomy) is fabulous. In the past I’ve tried to research that on SeatGuru, but that site is still missing most of the airlines (in Asia) that I seem to fly.

Critical information for so many similar airfares

Working on PriceofTravel.com I spend many hours each week researching airfares, and on competitive routes around the world (international and domestic) you’ll typically see the cheapest airfares bunched closely together. In other words, there might be 5 airlines offering fares within US$10 or US$20 of each other on a US$400 flight.

Hipmunk generally lists the shortest and nonstop flights on top and pushes cheap flights with long layovers down the list. That’s helpful but I can do that in my head in 20 or 30 seconds. Routehappy, on the other hand, provides information that is difficult to get at all. Who wouldn’t pay US$10 more for a flight where every seat has good legroom and there’s a personal entertainment system compared to a cramped flight with no entertainment at all?

So far Routehappy is missing some airlines and flights

When I check airfares for research or my own purchases I typically start with Kayak and then I use Momondo and Dohop to make sure Kayak didn’t miss the best option. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, at this point Routehappy still seems to be missing some of the cheaper airlines and flights. Hopefully this situation will improve soon because if some of the cheapest options aren’t listed then knowing the seat pitch and wifi options on more expensive flights doesn’t help me much.

So for now I’ll be using Routehappy but I won’t really start my decision making process until I’ve checked the other websites for cheaper options. Only if Routehappy includes the best choices is it really helpful.

Will other flight-search sites copy it? I assume so

It’s probably best for the consumer that flight-search sites aren’t able to patent these sorts of innovations. Kayak caused an absolute revolution when it became popular, but another site called Sidestep was basically identical to it before the two brands merged. So it would seem that when one site comes up with something that people like, others are sure to add that feature too.

I’m routing for Routehappy as it seems that they have moved the industry ahead by a couple of years all at once, but I sort of expect Kayak and other sites to add in some of this same information in the coming months. So Routehappy might only have a short window where they are alone with this approach, and hopefully they’ll improve their inventory soon enough to get a foothold.

The post Routehappy is new and instantly my favorite flight-search tool appeared first on Price of Travel.

Slate and whey.

It's long been our collective suspicion that the incessantly festive glut of fake national holidays (It's Navy Bean Week!) is really entirely derived from sweatshop labor taking place at some anonymous press release factory in Hillside, so Grub Street generally refuses to acknowledge such days. (Also: Just send us some kind of signal, you workers forced to make up fake, food-themed national holidays, and we'll come get you.) Anyway, this Saturday from noon to 4 p.m., visitors to the newly opened Brooklyn Slate Factory in Red Hook will be rewarded with a free grilled cheese sandwich, in part because it's — you guessed it — National Grilled Cheese Day. We'll get behind this one. Just this once. You reserve your cheese on Facebook. [Brooklyn Slate Company via Matt Lewis/Twitter]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: freebies, brooklyn slate company, grilled cheese, red hook

“My mom died when I was eighteen. I acted like it didn’t bother me cause I was a punk rock kid. But I think it came back to me later in weird ways.”

---

This photo is part of a month-long collaboration I’m doing with Vogue.com. Vogue’s Met Gala has a punk rock theme this year, so they asked me to assemble a collection of punk-themed photos from the HONY archives. I’ve thrown in a few exclusives, also. Besides requesting “no cigarettes” and nixing a couple of portraits with egregious middle fingers, they were open to all sorts of personalities and let me have free reign with the selections. They were great to work with. We’re going to be adding a photo per day until May 6th, so be sure to check back. 

It’s a cool collection: http://bit.ly/ZxixH5

Across the course of history, French discoveries have proved invaluable to the field of science. Children still learn the stories of Louis Pasteur, who discovered that invisibly small bacteria spoil food and cause disease, and Marie Curie, who found and named the unseen power of radioactivity. Now there's one more name to add to the list of geniuses upending the world's assumptions : Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, who has declared that bras make women's boobs saggy. More »

National Grilled Cheese Day is this Friday, but there should be an entire holiday for this one grilled cheese alone. What you are looking at is a Salted Caramel Lobster Grilled Cheese, and it features all of those things in one hand-held food item. We haven't tried it yet, but even though it doesn't feature ramp pesto it seems rather life-changing. Rather like it might make you believe in God. And love. And everything good in the world. And unicorns. And a metabolism that never slows. [ more › ]

We passed our goal last night! We’re at $77,000 with 17 hours left. You think we can raise the full $100,000? I think that’d make a beautiful statement about the openhandedness of individual citizens— not to mention bringing some much needed levity to the lives of hundreds of deserving kids.

Every Bit Helps:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/346367/

A NYC-based company has a new fashion offering that meshes the straphanging masses with Massimo Vignelli: subway tights. They come in white and gray (though the gray looks definitively brown on the website), and features the 4/5 lines. From ankle to upper thigh on your right leg you'll get from Bowling Green to 42nd Street (depending on how tall you are and how short a skirt you rock); and on the left you'll get the Brooklyn stops. Each pair costs $44... but will anyone with a MetroCard actually wear these (besides Jake Dobkin, obviously)? [ more › ]

Because we seem to be on a bit of black kick today (who knows why? We’re in a good mood, we swear! Black is just soooo chic!) we thought we’d continue today’s trend and feature a post with five all black houses. Black’s not normally a color to choose for an exterior paint, but darn if it don’t look sleek, modern, ominous and welcoming, all at the same time.

Atelier Kastelic Buffey Ski Chalet

Agudela House

The Black House

Little black dress

House Tumle

Would you ever paint your house black?!

Images: As credited above

A recent episode of This American Life explored the theme of Doppelgangers, and by far the most sensational segment hinged on a report that pig rectum was being sold as imitation calamari. A reporter for the show, Ben Calhoun, got a tip about a farmer "with some standing in the pork industry" who is in charge of "a pork producing operation that spans several states." One fine day this farmer was visiting a pork processing plant in Oklahoma, and noticed boxes stacked on the floor labeled "artificial calamari." Asked what that meant, the plant's manager, his friend, replied, "Bung. It's hog rectum." For clarity, Calhoun adds, "Rectum that would be sliced into rings, deep fried, and boom, there you have it." [ more › ]

The CDC says we're having a flu epidemic, Gov. Cuomo has declared a state of emergency, and your local Duane Reade is shooting people on sight (...with vaccines)—it's safe to say that you either have the flu, or know somebody who has it. And if you haven't picked it up yet, there are still things you can do to avoid succumbing to their fate: get a vaccination shot, load up on cold medicines, push the fluids, or try natural remedies. You can also try to avoid infected areas as much as you can—and to aid you in that quest, you can consult the Germ Tracker app. [ more › ]

[Update Below] Let's get ready to faaaaaarrrreeeeee hiiiikkkkkeeeee! Today is the day you've all been waiting for with bated breath—the MTA board is all set to vote this morning on plans to raise the price of a MetroCard. $2.50 base fares! $30 7-day and $112 30-day Metrocards! More expensive tolls! And you can watch all the excitement live from the comfort of your own desk! [ more › ]

“I went to the store the other day, and accidentally bought some anti-aging lotion. At first I was upset, but my right hand and my dick have never looked younger.”

The origin of this modern tree house starts out in quite the unique way, well, actually, we’ll let the builder, Joel Allen, say it in his own words: “I’m just going to come out and say it. I tried to retire at the age of 26 and failed. What does this have to do with the tree house? Well, my attempt at retirement seems to be the critical link between my former career as a software developer, and my new career as a carpenter.”

Who would have thought that such a stunning piece of architecture would come from such an unlikely turn of events? Just goes to show you, when one door closes, another one that leads to a tree house might open.

You can find more photos and all the information on how this unlikely piece of architecture was made on Joel Allen’s website.

Spurred by the mass shooting in Newtown, a councilman from Spring City, Utah, has drafted a proposal recommending that each of the town's 956 residents get their hands on a gun. More »

          After learning about meggings, the male leggings that are the hot new trend in menswear, Gothamist publisher and stunt journalist Jake Dobkin immediately ordered a pair from Amazon. This is his story. [ more › ]

Now that he's been benched for Greg McElroy and received death threats from devoted fans, it's safe to say that Mark Sanchez's days in NYC are numbered—whether or not the team will bite the bullet on his big contract next season remains to be seen. But it's not like they're just going to drop Sanchez for some big name, jersey-selling, has-been quarterback like they did in 2008 with Brett Favre. Oh wait, this is the Jets we're talking about—which is why we should all be very nervous now that Michael Vick has reportedly shown interest in coming here. [ more › ]

Time Magazine just unveiled its Person of the Year for 2012—and it's President Obama. Managing editor Rick Stengel explained, "We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America." [ more › ]

Photo via The Daily What

Well, this MUNKGE business was predictable: humor blog The Daily What has found an Ikea instructions manual spoofing this week's monkey incident—in which an attired rhesus named Darwin was found wandering around the parking lot of the furnishings retailer's Toronto store. Much like the faux car-assembly Ikea manual that was released last year, this is a pretty good iteration of the real thing, so good, in fact, that one can only hope the video assembly guide is soon to follow. Hey, when Ikea and animals are involved, stranger things have happened.

· This Looks Shopped [The Daily What via Laughing Squid]
· All Ikea coverage [Curbed National]

The American baby-naming crisis was already getting out of hand prior to this week, with names like Jaydien being thrown around by white trash parents who are actively trying to damage America's reputation. But now the problem is worsening. Yesterday, the people at BabyCenter—the site you go to when your child has glued his own nipples together and you need advice from parents who have experienced similar issues—unveiled their list of unusual baby names for 2012, names that were given to at least TWO children during the course of the year. The list is terrifying. More »

Your waiter for tonight will be very old and cranky.

Now through January 6, Amali on the Upper East Side is doing something both festive and unexpected: The restaurant has transformed the second floor of the brownstone it occupies at 115 East 60th Street into a dining room inspired by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and is offering guests a meal inspired by passages from the story. This isn't dinner theater, though; there are no reenactors in funny hats seated across the table and, hopefully, no feeble English children tugging at your trousers. Instead, guests are greeted at the door with a mug of "Cratchit" hot gin punch.

Amali's menu, like the novella's ghosts, represents the "past" (oysters with fennel gelee, for example), "present" (chicken with foie gras and truffles; goose leg salad), and "future" (almond crumble and other delights). Most of the menu's dozen items have been devised to pair with a Christmas Carol passage. The dinner is available for $90 per person, or $40 for the "Tiny Tims" in your life.

That's not the only well-read supper going on: The newly opened Louro in the West Village is hosting a five-course tasting menu inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road (and, of course, the new film of the same name) tomorrow night. For $95 per person, David Santos will cook crab with cioppino vinaigrette, catfish stew, and grit fritters inspired by Kerouac's time in New Orleans, and ricotta beignets with coffee ice cream to match the "absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves." After-dinner benzedrine shooters are not included.

A Culinary Tribute to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” [EventBrite]
Charles Dickens Dinner [Amali]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: cakes and ale, amali, david santos, dickens, kerouac, louro

 

Looking for a great way to spend $2.25 on some holiday fun this Sunday? The MTA has set up a vintage subway train that runs every Sunday through December 30th .  You can catch a ride on these classic R1/9 subway cars at stations along the weekday M line between Queens Plaza and 2 Av.

Catch it here in Long Island City at the Court Sq-23rd St. station.

Departures from 2nd Avenue are at
10:01 AM, 11:30 AM, 1:01 PM, 2:30 PM, and 4:01 PM.

Departures from Queens Plaza are at
10:44 AM, 12:14 PM, 1:43 PM, 3:14 PM, and 4:44 PM.

 

More info at the MTA’s website.

               Wearing a cable knit sweater and skating in orderly circles under a giant murdered Norway Spruce in midtown is for squares. If you want to experience the authentic, anti-corporate artisanal holiday spirit you've got to take the L train to Grand Street and simply walk two blocks to the House of Yes, where the real meaning of Christmas awaits... wearing pasties and sequined spandex: [ more › ]

"Gangnam Style" is the year's biggest viral dance sensation. Now it's also its most deadly — and not because it drove someone insane from overexposure. A 46-year-old man attempting the dance — created and popularized by Korean rapper Psy — at his office party collapsed with chest pains and died over the weekend, prompting a warning from a cardiologist: More »