Marilyn Terrell: December 2008 Archives

Looking for a unique holiday gift? The Royal Oak Foundation, the American affiliate of Britain's National Trust, has a deal for you. For a $55 membership fee, you can give someone free admission to all the castles, manors, parks, and gardens administered by the National Trust of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland for an entire year. And if you'd like to stay in a historic property as well visit one, the Royal Oak Foundation also offers 25% off three historic hotels that are members of the Trust: Hartwell House and Spa in Buckinghamshire, England; Middlethorpe Hall and Spa in York, England; and Bodysgallen Hotel and Spa in North Wales, now through October 31, 2009. Each of the properties is at least 300 years old, and each has been meticulously restored to historically accurate standards. 

Bodygsallen Hotel, for example, has a 13th-century tower with a view of the mountains of Snowdonia National Park, and sits on a hillside amid 200 acres of its own parkland, two miles from the Victorian seaside resort of Llandudno. You can stay in the elegant Main Hall, or in one of the cottages on the estate: Pineapple Lodge, Castle View, or Gingerbread House (pictured above). To get to the spa, walk through the formal gardens, which include a walled rose garden and a parterre herb garden bordered with 17th-century boxwood hedges. And lest you feel guilty from the pampering, it's nice to know that all profits go to benefit the house and the National Trust. 

As Henry James said: "Of all the great things that the English have invented and made a part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the one they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has become a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country-house."
 
Thanks to Susan Derby at the L.A. Times Daily Travel & Deal blog for the tip!

Photo courtesy of Bodysgallen Hotel, The National Trust

On the blog 3QuarksDaily, which always provides delicious food for thought, I came across an essay by Jennifer Cody Epstein, who asks "Has globalization really changed the experience of travel? And is it always and necessarily for the worse?"

She was visiting Barcelona recently for a symposium entitled "Reading to Travel, Traveling to Read," sponsored by the Libraries of Barcelona, and was struck by how familiar the city seemed, with its Circuit City, Starbucks and Chanel, in contrast to her experience in Kyoto some twenty years ago, where she was constantly reminded by everyday experiences how far she was from home:

"From food to fashion to the crisp cadence of the language; to the very posture and pace of the pedestrians, nothing--quite simply, nothing--felt familiar. For the first time in my life I felt fully an outsider, completely other; almost entirely without cultural or linguistic foothold. The simplest tasks--withdrawing money, finding the bathroom; using the bathroom (all those appliances! All those chirping automations!), making a phone call--seemed vast challenges."

But as her week progressed in Barcelona, she wondered if globalization, as much as it is widely condemned, doesn't so much eliminate cultural differences as provide tools to understand, even transcend, those differences. 

It's an interesting question and we wonder, what do you think?  Has globalization helped you transcend cultural differences when you travel?  Or do you crave the shock of the unfamiliar? Or both?

Photo of an apprentice geisha in Kyoto, by Melissa Rose Chasse via Intelligent Travel Flickr pool