WHAT'S ON IN LONDON?
The British Museum The British Museum's major exciting exhibition opening in September, The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, will feature some of the world-famous terracotta warriors from Xi'an in China. Opening on 13 September 2007, the exhibition runs right through until 6 April 2008, taking in Chinese New Year and China in London 2008 along the way! Tickets are on sale NOW - both online and via our Box Office - Tel: +44 (0)20 7323 8181 or boxoffice@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk or visit www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/firstemperor
The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising New to London, over 12,000 everyday items tell the story of consumer culture from the Victorian times to the present days. The collection includes telephones, radios, televisions, posters, branded groceries, sweets and magazines. The Museum is located two minutes walk from Notting Hill’s famous Portobello Road. Groups of 10 or more receive a discount of 10% on entry fees: Adults £5.80, Concessions £3.50 (before discount). Entry fee includes all temporary exhibitions, currently showing: Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm, Sunday 11am to 5pm, closed Mondays except Bank Holidays. Telephone + 44 (0) 20 7908 0880 or email info@museumofbrands.com or visit www.museumofbrands.com
Tutankhamun Marking the first time the treasures of Tutankhamun have visited London in over 30 years, an extensive exhibition of more than 130 artifacts from the tomb of the cele- brated Pharaoh and other Valley of the Kings ancestors visits the O2 in London (formerly The Dome) on 15 November 2007. London is the only European city to host the treasures. Featured treasures in the exhibit, which are all between 3,300 and 3,500 years old, include Tutankhamun's royal diadem - the gold crown discovered encircling the head of the king's mummified body that he likely wore while living - and one of the gold and precious stone inlaid coffinettes that contained his mummified internal organs. Groups tickets available now by logging onto www.seetickets.com or by calling +44 (0) 870 899 3342. Presented by Credit Suisse.
To the top of the pageBRITAIN & IRELAND :
IRISH HABITS: Latest figures from global drinks giant Diageo, which owns Guinness, show local sales for the brand are down about 7 per cent in the six months to the end of December 2006. Wine now accounts for over a fifth of alcohol drunk in Ireland. Generally beer sales are declining while the amount of wine is on the rise, also drinkers who used to say they wanted a white wine, now will ask for a Chardonnay, However sales are rising in North America and parts of West Africa -- where the stronger, bottled local version of Guinness has a reputation, perhaps undeserved, for everything from helping prevent malaria to enhancing male sexual prowess.
THE CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL: In excess of 200,000 people came to Cheltenham for 4 days in mid March to watch 24 horse races. In 2006 £1 million was drawn from ATM’s around the course where over 170,000 pints of Guinness were downed. The event is very popular with the Irish and Ryanair put on 20 extra flights.
LIVERPOOL is to have a new canal, Britain’s first in over a century, linking the Leeds-Liverpool shipping canal to Albert docks allowing long boats access to the city’s World Heritage site. But more improvements are the way for the 2008 “City of Culture”: In the Liverpool Waters scheme 150 acres of derelict waterfront will be transformed at a budget of £5.5 billion, the 21m sq ft mixed-use project will include over 50 buildings, many over 50 storeys high including 23,000 new homes, 4 hotels, a new marina and a cruise liner terminal; plus a monorail for the city, with the potential to connect to John Lennon Airport. The whole works will take place over 30 years.
STRATFORD: The Royal Shakespeare Theatre closed on 30 th March for a 3 year renovation.
FLYING ABOUT: BAA (once called British Airports Authority, now owned by Ferrovial, a Spanish Construction company) that run Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted amongst their 7 airports and carried 9.9 million passengers in February, have announced that at last they are doing something about queues at security. BAA wants to cut queue waiting to five minutes, 95% of the time. but it said that the target could not be guaranteed by Easter or summer and did not rule out using marquees for waiting passengers outside terminals. BAA, which is also the operator of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Southampton, is to spend £40m recruiting 1,400 security staff and opening 22 security lanes at its UK airports. At Stansted - £40 million has been allocated on increasing the number of desks from 14 to at least 24 and baggage belts from 5 to 8. Construction starts in April and will disrupt the airport until mid to late 2008.
EASYBUS: Transfers linking Luton or Stansted to Gloucester Place/Baker Street can be purchased from as little as £2! Prebooking is cheapest but you can pay the driver (if there is room). Go to http://www.easybus.co.uk
LONDON: The Tour de France will start in London in 2007 with a round the city’s tourist spots race on Saturday 7th July and then from London to Canterbury on the 8th . One week before, on the 1st July, the “Cyclosportive” will allow 5,000 amateurs to ride the London – Kent route. After Canterbury the race restarts in Dunkirk. Look at www.tourdefrancelondon.com for details of closures on 6 th , 7 th and 8th July. Projected road works will severely disrupt central London over an expected 3 years as 64 kms of new water pipes are laid in the main roads of Westminster starting in March 2007. This is to save an estimated 5 million litres of leaked water every day. Traffic diversions will cause massive jams described by Westminster Council as the worst since the Blitz!
ALL RIGHT ON THE NIGHT: Price Waterhouse Coopers, one of the top business consultancy firms, predicts a room rate of £360 per night for luxury hotels in London by 2008, what chance does that give us for tour operators looking for decent city hotels at £60?
AROUND EUROPE :
VIKING GPRS: Over a thousand years ago the Vikings sailed from Scandinavia landing in Greenland and then on to Newfoundland, but in the absence of magnetic compasses they relied on the Sun, not a lot of use in cloud or fog. History records them using a “sunstone” which when held up shows the direction of the sun. Scientists believe it was a Cordierite crystal which is found on the Norwegian coast and changes colour in polarised light. When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, especially when moist, the rays are polarised in a direction at right angles to the line from the sun. If the sun is in the West, the sky overhead is polarised North-South so by holding the crystal up and rotating it the colour changes when it points at the sun.
THE OPERAS NOT OVER: Venice’s Fenice Opera House burnt down in 1996 and immediately rumours flew around concerning mafia involvement and speculation about the fact that the nearby canal had been drained thus stopping fire services reaching the site. Eventually 2 cousins who had contracted electrical services were arrested as they were behind in their work and faced a penalty payment of €10,000 which would have forced the small company into liquidation. Charged with setting the fire they were convicted and sentenced in 2001 to terms of 6 and 7 years. While on release pending appeal Enrico Carella disappeared after telling his mother he wanted a few days on the beach. Unfortunately he was homesick and had to call mama at home. Mexican police swooped on Cancun at the beginning of January, but he was gone, now he has been arrested at the Mexican-Belize border and awaits extradition. The Fenice however benefited as extensive works had to be done with rebuilding “as it was, where it was” but with state of the art technology at a cost of € 85 million, with the first concert in December 2003 and the first opera – la Traviata - in Novem ber 2004. * The book The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt, is a great read involving the reader with the personalities of not only the many aspects of the investigation of the Fire at the Fenice ( Phoenix in Italian), but also the lives of Peggy Guggenheim, Ezra Pound, Olga Rudge and various writers. You see another dimension of Venice through the eyes of people who have lived there or still live there; from Aristocrats, would be celebrities, minor politicians to street hawkers.
ROMAN LOVE: Young lovers in the eternal city have a new way of showing their fondness for each other - they clip a padlock onto columns on the Ponte Milvio then throw the keys in the Tiber. Unfortunately the craze has become too popular so the city is looking for an alternative site before the bridge is damaged.
SWISS HOLES: The Swiss are building a high-speed rail link between Zurich and Milan. It will include, at 57 kilometres (35 miles), the world's longest tunnel at a maximum depth of 2 km, and a key feature of the project, which is new to alpine transport, is the fact that the entire railway line will stay at the same altitude of 500 metres (1,650ft) above sea level. This will allow trains using the line to reach speeds of 240km/h (149mph), reducing the travel time between Zurich and Milan from today's four hours to just two-and-a-half. That would make the journey faster than flying. 2,000 people are working on the tunnel, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Traffic will move through two main railway tubes with access tunnels for people and equipment. One of the main purposes of the tunnel is to cut pollution from trucks passing over the Alps as the idea is that heavy vehicles will be loaded on the trains in Germany and drive off in Italy or vice verse. As part of the same clean air scheme, the Loetschberg Tunnel between Mitholz and Visp at 35km is due to open in Summer 2007 and will link with the Simplon tunnel. In 2006 a pilot tunnel was started under the Brenner to open up a Berlin-Naples high speed rail link. This one will be 56km long and has the same hoped for completion date of 2015. Trains over the Brenner are limited to 50kph because of gradients.
TGV EST: Will be officially started on 7th June, but there are tests running. Reaching 553 kph in February then on 3rd April a new speed record was set at 574.8 kph (375 mph) on the new track. A report noted “From about 380 kph, vibrations in the train became more and more noticeable, then at 490 kph passengers became slightly dizzy until at 540 kph it became difficult to remain standing despite the stability of the train.” Recent speed records have been an average 317 kph over a 1000 km stretch on the Marseilles line and a top speed of 515 kph in 1990. Normal running maximum speed is 320 kph which is often exceeded, but often a speed limit of 300 kph is imposed on older track.
THE LOUVRE GOES ABROAD: The French Government has signed a deal for the building of a “branch” of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. The gallery will be designed by the French architect Jean Novelli but paid for by the Abu Dhabi government in a scheme that allows the museum to lease works for up to 2 years from Louvre and other French museums. This will generate an estimated € 700 million for the museums over a period of 20 years, something that has caused a petition to say “our art is not for sale!”.
AIRBUS: The assembly plant where components brought from all over Europe are put together is on either side of Blagnac Airport near Toulouse. Three tour options are now available to the public – The A380 superjumbo hanger and test site, the A340 assembly line and the retired Concorde. Book well in advance through taxiway at +33 5 3439 4200 or www.taxiway.fr You must bring your passport and no cameras are allowed.
SILLY QUESTION? If Hitler was Austrian how did he become Chancellor of Germany? The State of Braunschweig (Brunswick) employed him as a civil servant which gave him German Nationality - the arranged post was “government counsellor in the Braunschweig Cultural and Land Surveying Office”. The Braunschweig State (later to become Lower Saxony) was a Nazi Party stronghold, but the City of Braunschweig was firmly in the hands of the Social Democrats and they resent any inference that they had anything to do with his position. There are moves afoot to rescind his German Nationality, something that will surely change the world!
BRUSSELS has its Jazz Marathon 25 – 27 th May when free concerts abound.
KEUKENHOF: 22 nd March to 20th May
REST OF THE WORLD :
BRICKDUST: Las Vegas’ Stardust Casino has been demolished, like the Norwegian Blue it is no more! It became famous when cut price rooms and food were offered to draw punters to the tables, but those days are gone as resorts now make more money from accommodation, restaurants and spectacular shows than from gambling. The Echelon Resort will be finished in 2010 with 5,000 rooms. There will always be the flow of bus trips from the West Coast but often they only spend the night on the tables before returning home, rather than the richer targeted trade for the world’s largest theme park that is Las Vegas today!
MOVING ELECTRICITY: A proposal for the world's biggest hydroelectric scheme, a project to harness the Congo River and power the African continent, is to be debated by multi- national energy companies and development banks. The Grand Inga power station would capture the intensity of water flowing through rapids at Inga Falls, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to generate twice the power of China's Three Gorges dam. Three electricity superhighways could deliver power south to Angola, Botswana and South Africa, west towards Nige- ria and north to Egypt and, ultimately, southern Europe. Power could be produced at a cost of just three cents per kilowatt hour, delivering a current to the Italian border that would cost less than the current market price of electricity in Italy today. The company behind the scheme is ESKOM, the South African power company that wants to co-ordinate the South Africa Power Pool Nations, putting Tanzania, the DRC, Angola and all countries south onto a grid. Despite Africa’s drought problems, the Congo River has such a large catchment that flow is pretty constant and advantages are a possible gain in living standards. However there is concern that the real rise will be in the corruption that plagues Africa, with little gain for the population. It is estimated that 500 million people live without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.
DRIVING BY: Sydney Harbour Bridge is 75 years old this year, and 79% of the steel came from Middlesbrough, the steel plant is at Redcar. It has 6 million rivets (1 million less than the Eiffel Tower) that were made in the Park Bridge Ironworks near Oldham in Lancashire, who also made the rivets for the Eiffel Tower and the Titanic.
LAOS: A collection of dramatic caves that provided shelter to 23,000 Laotians during nine years of aerial bombardment in the Indochina War have now been opened to the public. Between 1964 and 1973 Laos became caught up in a secret war that remains largely ignored in world history. Up to 480 caves in Viengxay district in Houaphanh province were transformed into a de facto cave city. The caves were used to house leaders and fighters of the Phathet Lao army. Many caves had specialist functions such as hospital, shop, school, printing house, government office, bakery and theatre. In the hospital cave, patients were treated by Cuban doctors
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