Travel Guides

Since a few weeks I visited Mexico City and collected a lot of stuff which you can find in my posts.

What I did not mention up to now is a very special trip: the illegal border crossing from Mexico to U.S. Many mexicans undertake this trip hoping in a new better life. A part of them die, as this trip is very demanding. If you wanna check your limits, and go far beyond them, I would advise you to try this trip. But do not forget, you must be in the best physical and psychical shape!

You will experience really hard and hot sensations. I am totally for this kind of tours, and if you made it once, the other conventional tours will appear to you very artificial.

If you plan to visit Barcelona, keep in mind the following dont’s. If you already visited Barcelona, maybe can you confirm all these things. And if you visited Barcelona, but were not aware of these things to avoid, keep them in mind for your next trip to Barca!

1.Dangerous places: avoid empty streets, and also the streets from the old city. Avoid particularly Barri Gotic and El Raval, where the thiefs operate in gangs. The peak hours for pocket thiefs are 21-24 when most of the locals eat, and the streets are crowded with tourists, and also at dawn(3-6) when the target are the drunked.

2.Boutiques for leather accesoires from La Rambla. The leather is not the best, and the prices are shameles.

3.Gambling in La Rambla. You might think, that your chances to win are high. But keep in mind that almost all surounding people are together. Avoid also the gitanes who try selling you flowers, while they research your pockets.

4.Expensive restaurants. The tourists terrace restaurants from La Rambla are inimaginable expensive. They give you paella or tapas at astronomic prices. Two blocks further you can find better cheaper food.

5. Crowded places. Avoid agitation and nonending queues from the main touristic attractions by visiting them at the first hour, when they open, or one hour before they close. Avoid overcrowded beaches, going there in the afternoon of working days.

6.Exchange offices from La Rambla, Placa de Catalunia and other major tourist attraction offer the worst rates.

7. Try not to look as a tourist . Do not wear at sight jeweleries, do not keep at sight cameras or big valuable baknotes!

8.Trafic jams. In order to avoid jams, drive in the late morning (10-13) or the late afternoon(17-19). The lunch time is usually between 14-16, which is basically to avoid.

9.August. During august, many locals do their vacations away from Barcelona. Many pubs are not opened, and there are unbearable many tourists. Inform you before go in august if your targets in Barcelona are opened to public.

10. Visiting museums on monday. Most of the important museums, inclusive Picasso Museum and MNAC, are closed on monday. Double check if you plan visiting something on monday.

You know what to avoid now, in order to have a nice smooth travel in Barcelona. I wish to enjoy it!

If you want to understand El Zocalo like an insider, then you should know some facts about it. Namely the followings, listed bellow.

First of all, travelling for the first time at Mexico City, probably by air to he Benito Juarez airport, you can see shortly from the plane the mexican flag. There is Zocalo, or Plaza de la Constitucion, also known before as Plaza de Armas.

The name Zocalo stays for the english plynth. Here should be builded a statue in the XIXth century, but only the plynth rose.

Zocalo is huge, it is one of the world’s biggest squares. It has been builded by the spaniards in the XVIth century, on the ruins of the demolished Templo Mayor, the heart of the aztec capital of Tenochitlan. There are plenty of archaeological sites in the neighborhood, and some of them unveil even earlier civilisations than aztecas.

On the east side of El Zocalo you can find the National palace(El Palacio Nacional). Here resides today the  City Hall of Mexico City, which I visited and noticed the paintings of Diego Rivera.

On the western side there are Monte de Piedad and the famous Portal de Mercaderes.

On the north side you can find The Metropolitan Cathedral (named also The Saint Nicholas Cathedral, built during three centuries) and the Sagrario.

Zocalo is the common destinations for any political and tradeunions demonstrations. It is also a place for concerts(Cafe Tacuba, Alejandro Sainz and Shakira held concerts here. Shakira concert attracted 210000 people!).

My tipps: avoid Zocalo when is crowded, avoid to change money in the neighborhood, you can get the worsest rate!(the best is in the airport).

Zocalo must stay at the top of your to do list while in Mexico City. I tried to present it to you precisely and briefly, and I hope you can learn from my experiences in Zocalo. Enjoy your trip!

If you plan a visit in Barcelona, Sagrada Familia shall be the first on things which must be seen!

Sagrada Familia is a church, “the church of the poor”, as Antonio Gaudi, its architect, used to say. Antonio Gaudi was a genial, brilliant ,succesfull architect, which dedicated his life mainly to Sagrada Familia. He joined the group of Modernista, active by the end of 19th century, was a fervent catholic and a catalan nationalist.

First design of Sagrada Familia and the first stones falled in 1883. Two years later, Gaudi had the genial idea of making the bell towers round, instead of square, as usually! In 1923 the Saint Joseph chapel, the crypt and the east facing were completed. In 1926 Gaudi died smashed by a tram near his church.

Antonio Gaudi wished to make from Sagrada Familia “the last sanctuary of the Christendon“, and he did. This church is honored as the world’s 8th wonder, attracting 2 millions of tourist every year. Entrance fee is 6 euro, and these money are used for the construction, as no government or church is supporting it. The construction of the church was based from its beginning exclusive on donations.

After Gaudi’s death the construction has been continued up today, and will be finished in 2026, on the centennary of Gaudi’s death. During spanish civil war the cathedral Sagrada Familia was partially destroyed by catalan anarchists, and then rebuild according master’s original drawings.

“My master is not in a hurry” said always Gaudi. Without modern CAD/CAM methods, the construction could last a few hundred years.

Gaudi is an example of dedication and strong believes, in my opinion. He lived almost monastic, and died poor. But Sagrada Familia remains for ever his creation, and it surely worths a visit. To be more specific, your visit.

Well if you think Uptake is yet another travel site, then you are wrong. Uptake is a search for travel sites. There are tons of travel sites out there like TripAdvisor, Farecast, Travelocity, Expedia etc. So a normal user searches most of these sites to find the best deal and ends up wasting lot of time. What Uptake does is it searches most of these sites so that you don’t have to and finds the best deal for you. Like the site says “it searches 1000 travel websites and 20 Million Reviews”, which is a lot of content for a user.
Uptake is a semantic search engine for travel which makes it easier for the user to get more relevant results. It generates tags by searching various travel sites and their reviews of hotels, destinations, theme parks. By doing this it does not have to wait for the users to tag. With the use of semantic search, the ranking in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo will be higher and lot of results from Uptake will be shown for travel queries. The technology behind Uptake is really great where millions of reviews are indexed and arranged in a proper way and the embracing of semantics has helped them a lot.
It has options like “just get away, family vacation, romantic getaway, pet friendly, girl getaway” which search sites based on this consideration. If a user is searching for family vacations, the site looks for tags which are relevant with family vacations like kids, pool, shopping and kitchen and shows the result based on that. It also has maps attached to its pages to know the exact location of the destination you have chosen or planning to choose. Uptake also has a feature called “Things to do” for most of the destinations so that you are not clueless when you are travelling.
Uptake currently indexes only US Destinations which is a bad thing for a travel search site but I am sure they will add International Destinations too as they go along. With the competition in Internet Travel Industry increasing day by day, they should add international destinations sooner than later. The other thing I am not very impressed with Uptake is their User Interface. Its User Interface is not very easy to use, Any website which is asking its users to scroll down to see the important content is doing a bad job. With the content this size they should arrange it better and should keep the main page clean, Instead of showing most of the destinations in the homepage. When Uptake adds International Destinations, the content would be way too much and they will have an uphill task of arranging it neatly and adding more languages to the website so that it becomes easier for International users. Travel is not bounded by boundaries and Uptake has taken the first step to improve it.

If you are a fan of Barcelona, as I am, or if you plan to visit this wonderful city, then you must read this article.

First of all, I can give 5 reasons to visit Barcelona:

1. The city architecture is a strange combination of old and modern, giving a special flair to this bimilennial city. Antonio Gaudi let many traces in his city, among them Sagrada Familia, Parc Guell, La Pedrera.

2.Shopping. Barcelona is a shopping paradise for everyone of you, no matter of higher standards you have. I bet! You can make shopping in big supermarkets, or in the narrow streets of the old city.

3.Football. Ever heard about C.F. Barcelona? About Eto’o, Cruyff, Deco and so many others big football players? About millions of socios from all over the world?

4. Dining in Barcelona is not expensive and very tasty. Try tapas, paella and other products of the famous spanish kitchen!

5. Museums and culture. There are 55 museums in this city, and everyone of them worths a few hours visit!

Barcelona is a spanish city, located on the Mediteranean Sea, on the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besos. It is Catalunya’s most populuos city, and one of the most dynamic european cities. It contains a rich cultural heritage, which made the city to be promoted as a UNESCO world heritage Site.

Barcelona is usually a destination for a city break or for a long week end. Because you will come again, I can assure you!

I was impressed in Barcelona by Sagrada Familia, the masterpiece of Antonio Gaudi, a genial architect of the XIXth century.  Its delicate , but strong lines, and long searched proportions are a pleasure for any eye!

Barcelona and the neighborhood means also sea, beaches, swimming. But you should observe, as I did, that beaches of Barcelona are not very stable and are very criticized by the environmental organizations.

Don’t waste time anymore, go and see Barcelona!

Burma is a nice land in South East Asia, bordering with China, India and the ocean. It was until 1949 a british colony.

Worse than that, it is ruled since 40 years by a military dictatorship. The neighboring India, the biggest world’s democracy, keeps the eyes shut on the human rights violation, as it it is very interested in controlling the Burma oil reserves.

The worst: a devastating cyclone, called Nagis, hit Burma and caused 100 000 human victims. Other 2 000 000 people lost their houses and live on the streets. There is a dramatic lack of drinking water and basic food, consisting the major risk of outbreaking epidemics as cholera, hepatitis and typhoydis. And the military government did not allow to the foreign aids to enter the country, which is not easy to understand.

In order to help Burma, I would have the following suggestions:

1. Stay away from Burma(Myanmar) for a few weeks, unless you are an international expert.

2.Speak about this disaster to your friends and relatives, and hold on the S.O.S.

3. Spend something for Burma through checked reliable channels.

Hello Sebastian, can you tell some information about you and the Tripwolf team?

I am originally from Vienna, Austria, but I have been living in New York for 2 years. I’m 30 years old and a passionate traveler: I have visited 70 countries. For the last few years I worked as a journalist and international correspondent for Austrian and German print magazines, covering stories like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the youth scene in Teheran, the hunt for war criminal General Mladic in Serbia or the working conditions in Brazil’s sugar industry.

I am running the company together with my best friend Alexander Trieb who is based in Manhattan. He has lots of start-up experience, both from the US and Europe and he worked in IT and management consulting before we started tripwolf.

At the moment the tripwolf team consists of 10 - 12 people, based in New York, Vienna, Budapest and San Francisco.

Can you tell us when did the Tripwolf project started?

The project was started in early summer last year - exactly one year ago.

If it’s not a secret, can you disclose the budget for the entire project?

I would prefer not to disclose the funding. We will announce one investor soon, and we are looking for a further round of investment.

Any story regarding the name of the site? Was it just a flash or did something else inspired you?

The wolf has a few associations that we like: wolves are social animals which reflects the community aspect. but there is also the association with individual travel -the “lonely wolf” that travels over long distances. (apart from that the name is easily understandable also for non-english speakers.)

What are your goals with Tripwolf?

Our vision is to become the leading European web 2.0 travel guide, both for tourist going INTO Europe as well as those going OUT OF Europe. We are focusing on German and English speaking markets first. We will also launch versions in Spanish and later in French and Italian (we have a lot of content in these languages already).

Can you tell more about the features that distinguish Tripwolf from the rest of travel social networks?

What makes tripwolf really unique is the integration with exisiting social networks - which makes it really easy for users to join and to get benefits like personal travel recommendations. You can import your Facebook profile and your Facebook friends, and after public launch you will also be able to log in with your Facebook account. The integration of other social networks will follow. The idea behind it: People won’t go to a travel website every day, but it should be easy for them to reach it through the sites they use a lot.

How do you see the travel industry in five years?

I think the dominant thing in five years will be time travel. no, just kidding…
Honestly, I think the trend to social networking is here to stay, especially in travel. People don’t have much holidays, and travel is expensive, so people want really good recommendations because they don’t want to be disappointed. And surveys show that more than. 70% of people get information from friends & family before they decide where they travel. that’s somehting that we reflect on tripwolf: you don’t get recommendations from a mass of users you don’t know (or from one travel guide book writer, for that matter), but from your own trusted sources.
I think online travel agents (from expedia downwards) will have a very tough time over the next few years. It’s hard for them to build up a credible and trusted community, and they can only compete over price. At the same time, customized, tailored offers for individual travelers will become more important.

What are your tastes for:

Travel destination
Wherever I haven’t been yet. Next stops on my wishlist: Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Laos

Hotels
Anything goes as long as it’s clean (no cockroaches!) and the mattresses aren’t too soft.

What’s the weirdest thing that happened to you on a trip?

wow, I could fill books with that. one particularly interesting experience was nearly getting killed by 20,000 rock fans at a concert in Mexico City. For some reason they didn’t like me - weird crowd dynamics.

This is the first interview on journeyetc and more are likely to appear soon, if you have any suggestions for persons I can take an interview from or questions I can ask, please use the email from the contact page.