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A Rose Grows in Florence

The city that saw the birth of contemporary art continues to see new births every day. Florence is a place where the weight of the past seems to infuse the present with new energy and meaning, rather than overwhelm it. The locals seem quite capable of picking up the charge to make something new, and explore unknown territories in art, food, and many other things.

One would imagine that it would be something of a challenge to be born in the city that once houses Dante, Da Vinci, Donatello, and so many others who carved their names in greatness. For Rose McGowan , it just seems par for the course, and the actor has inherited an enormously cosmopolitan persona. In part this is surely from the city of her birth, as well as the influence of her parents, French and Irish, who had her living in communes with them from an early age.

In larger degrees, though, one can’t help but recognize it also comes from an immense life force, and an intellectual curiosity about the world. Having once been partnered with Marilyn Manson, and then Richard Rodriguez, also wouldn’t hurt for building a biography that adds up to an interesting life. Guests in Florence hotels may not catch a glimpse of her except on television and in the movies, but the air of sophistication here helped her to embrace the worlds she’s encountered.

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Leisure Time in Mazatlan

There are many fun things to do when visiting Mazatlan Mexico from exploring the historical lands near by to speeding across the coastal waters. Mazatlan is a very important and busy port along the pacific coast and it brings in many people each year to enjoy all of the activities it has to offer.

If you like golf you can head over to one of the many nice golf courses in the area. Most of them are right along the waters edge so you won’t miss any ocean time. They have incorporated the ocean right into the challenging golf courses. Just check with any of the five star mazatlan hotels for information on where to play.

You can also go on an adventure in the mountains near by with a wonderful rock climbing day trip. Creston’s peak has the second tallest lighthouse on its formation. You are guaranteed great views if you make it up to the top for a visit.

Connect with a company like Mazatlan Tours for vacation fun for everyone in the family. They have a line on everything from horseback riding to bass fishing. Even something as simple as a sunset cruise.

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The Charm of Bermuda

All the people who travel to Bermuda find a charm and grace not experienced on the other popular islands in the Caribbean. Their practicality, simple island lifestyle and integrity show up in all aspects of their daily living. Bermuda is technically a British territory , but the locals consider themselves very much an independent nation.

There is literally no unattractive place in Bermuda, which all the five star Bermuda hotels have taken full advantage of by utilizing the best views of the turquoise waters or of the multi-million dollar homes that are strung all along the pink sandy coastline. Bermuda is simply elegant, relaxing and full of activities that keep tourist busy.

Golfers will greatly enjoy Bermuda’s Golf at Tucker’s Point. Not only is it one of the best golf resorts, it also has one of the best restaurants in the entire Caribbean. The course offers professional and beginners golfers some of the most breathtaking views on the island. After playing the challenging 18-holes, the Clubhouse has one of the best ‘Dark and Stormy’ drinks on the island. There’s no drink a Bermudian loves more than a great Dark and Stormy . The drink is a mix of Black Seal rum and ginger beer. The Dark and Stormy is considered the national drink of the island.

St. George’s town was Bermuda’s first settlement and once its Capital, but now is a great place to see some fantastic historical architecture. As you’re walking around, you’ll see some reenactments of some of Bermuda’s high-points in history.

Once you’ve been to Bermuda, you’ll want to keep coming back year after year.

Tags: dark and stormy

Miami’s Improv

For all the appeal of the superb nightclubs that dot the urban landscapes of Miami, there are some moments when one needs a bit of a break. Even on a short vacation, where the time spent in Miami luxury hotels flies by and Monday’s coming again, too many late nights can get a little bit exhausting. There are other options in town for fun. And those who are never going to want to give up the clubs, at least until they turn 30, can usually do a few things in an evening.

A great warm-up, then, or a fine main event, is long-form improv. Going out for a laugh by paying someone to make you laugh is usually pretty rewarding. In big cities like Miami, the level of talent is usually pretty high, and stand-ups have been trying out their material for discerning audiences for awhile. And Just the Funny has been doing improv for over ten years.

The styles and deliveries are very polished, but the nature of the thing means that it’s entirely fresh every night. In long-form, the audience will make suggestions about what they want to see, in terms of setting, the characters, and often the plot, and the players take it from there. It’s a technique that’s been around for awhile, and it can make an evening out as splendid as any club, or as a great beginning.

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Playwrights in Boston

Boston has a pretty remarkable reputation for all of the arts. It’s the home to some of the country’s most prestigious universities, and that attracts some of the best artistic minds in the world. Professional and student artists have the opportunity to work together and learn from each other. Outside of the university, there are plenty of arts organizations that do regular performances of theatre, dance, music, and multiple combinations of any of these. That’s one of the reasons why people like to check the hotel rates Boston is offering at the moment, because it’s so exciting to visit here.

However, outside of the university, there are few forums where artists can continue to learn. Visual artists need viewers, and playwrights need audiences. Even for brand new work that’s not ready for a stage yet, the writer needs to hear their words read out loud so they can see where they are going. That’s part of the idea for the Playwrights Platform , an organization that’s entirely devoted to development for the writers.

They have an annual festival , and are active throughout the year in championing writers and their plays. This is a very necessary stage of a play’s birth and growth, and the organization is doing a favor for the writers, but also for the entire theatre-going community at large, by giving the works a breath of life.

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Denver Ski Vacation

Denver is a wonderful place to visit any time of the year. And while most people have their standard vacation time scheduled for the summer, many people also make a strong effort to visit Denver during the winter. This is due not only to all of the great cultural attractions that exist in and around the city, but also because there are excellent opportunities for fantastic skiing adventures just outside of Denver. Regardless of the time of year or season in which you choose to visit this mile high city , the best Denver hotels will have a room for you.

Skiing is not the only great winter sport and outdoor recreational event that occurs around Denver and throughout the state of Colorado. Snowboarding , and even just enjoying the beautiful white ground covering while sipping hot chocolate is great fun for many people However, a large number of winter tourists are there specifically for the slopes and there are plenty of great ones. And if you don’t know how to ski there are some extremely qualified and professional instructors that will not only show you the ropes and a few tricks but will help to ensure your safety and overall satisfaction. There’s a variety of slope angles, lengths and terrain difficulty levels that will fit the interests and abilities of skiers of all ages and levels of experience.

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Marisa in Brooklyn

Lots of people learned a little bit about the neighborhoods in Brooklyn, when Marisa Tomei came out in “My Cousin Vinnie.” She’s already been having a fine and dandy career, doing the work that she wanted to do, but the way she played the role of the girlfriend who knew so much about cars, it captured everyone’s heart for awhile. Then, when the “Wrestler” came out, she reminded everyone that she still had it, and never let it go, and never would.

People always scramble after a movie of hers is released, to find out exactly where in the city she was born and raised, and maybe even consider booking Brooklyn cheap hotels and think about star-gazing in the city. She’s from Midwood, and of course has come a long way since. But Brooklyn has also come a long way since she lived here. It’s been through a number of changes, and no one likes to hear the “gentrification” word around here, but there is some of that going on. As people start to get away from the other borough, looking for cheaper rents here, it became very obvious to a large number of people that Brooklyn really was as cool as everyone said it was.

Old neighborhoods, of the kind that made New York famous everywhere, were still intact, and there were areas where grandfather-looking men played chess and smoked cigars on the sidewalk, and any block could boast its own history of famous gangsters, dancers, and obviously, actresses. This is the kind of environment that Tomei grew up in, and it was one that sharpened her senses so that she could see the bigger picture in all things. It’s one of the things that makes her so stunningly compelling. She really doesn’t seem to care about the things most folks do, and likes the work because she likes the work. It’s an unusual thing for Hollywood, not so much for Brooklyn.

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The Spanish Monastery in Miami

David Byrne of the Talking Heads once asked the question, “How Did I Get Here?” which might be a fair question for the cloisters of an ancient Spanish monastery that now lies in North Miami Beach. At the St. Bernard de Clairvaux Episcopal Church, you’ll discover the medieval building, first built somewhere between 1133 to 1144 in the 12th Century. How did the oldest building in the western hemisphere, a building over 800 years old, find its way to Florida?

The Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux first found a home in Sacramenia, located in the province of Segovia, Spain. Canonized by a Cistercian monk named Bernard of Clairvaux, the monastery was named after him, and remained the home to Cistercian monks for almost seven hundred years. Then, in the mid-1830s, the cloisters were seized and converted into a granary and stable. Almost a hundred years later, William Randolph Hearst bought the cloisters and the monastery’s out-buildings. These buildings were then taken apart, piece by piece, placed in cushioning hay, packed into about 11,000 crates, and shipped to America. Then hoof and mouth disease broke out in Segovia.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture quarantined the shipment, broke open the crates, and burned the hay as a precaution against the disease, but failed to replace the stones back into the right, numbered boxes. Soon after, Hearst suffered financial problems and the stones sat in a warehouse for over 25 years. The year after Hearst’s death in 1952, the stones were purchased with the intention to use them as a tourist attraction. They were reassembled over a period of 19 months and 1.5 million dollars (in 1950s dollar value), and soon became first a savings and loan building, and then “The Mission of St. John the Divine,” from 1963 to 1964. Soon after, the mission became the Church of St. Bernard de Clairvaux.

One of the last pieces of this long, strange journey, occurred in 1964, when the church was purchased for the Diocese of South Florida, but financial troubles caused them to sell it to a multimillionaire banker and philanthropist who then gave it to the Episcopalian parish of St. Bernard de Clairvaux.

Southern Florida is filled with unique attractions and places to stay, such as the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, or a boutique Miami hotel in the Art Deco district — but few places have had such a long history as St. Bernard’s Spanish monastery. The cloisters are available for weddings and other special events, or just a general tour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays, and noon to 4 p.m., on Sundays.

Tags: boutique miami hotel

Seeing Amsterdam Through the Water Ways

Water is the way to travel or enjoy Amsterdam, because water and Amsterdam are inextricably linked. Amsterdam was founded on water and still plays an important part not only for the city’s commerce, but for tourism as well, with the canals and beaches respectively.

The Canal Bus is an ideal mode of transportation through the canals of Amsterdam, highlighting the best parts of the city. The bus is a comfortable boat that offers three routes with a fixed timetable. All the stops are at major attractions, like museums, shopping and are conveniently located near most major hotels in Amsterdam . While traveling on board, tourists will get to listen to interesting information about the places they are cruising by. The best part about this particular mode of transportation is that anyone can get on and off at anytime, and as often as they want; the Canal Bus ticket is good for 24 hours, is valid on all 3 lines, and is easily purchased at any Canal Company kiosk , at the Rijks museum, the Leidseplein, the Wester Church and many hotels. The ticket costs 20 Euros, but that price also gives the purchaser more than 133 Euros worth of discounts on a majority of tourist attractions and restaurants. Children under 4 may get on for free and children 5 to 12 only have to pay 10 Euros per ticket.

Also, in Amsterdam, while traveling up and down the canals, the Velsen-IJmuiden beach is located along the North Sea canal, which flows into the sea through huge sluices. The beach area affords a peaceful landscape of dunes and wide sandy areas for the locals and tourist a like who want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city of Amsterdam. Velsen beach, no matter what time of the year, besides relaxing in the sun, offers something for everyone, like outdoor music concerts to trampoline parks to educational farms.

Tags: amsterdam, amsterdam waterways, canal company kiosk, hotels in amsterdam

Berlin in New York

New York City is considered by many people to be the best city in the world. Most of the people who think this are from New York City, but it’s still an idea worth chewing over. It is one of the major intersections for culture in the world, and a place where all cities find some kind of familiarity. Nearly everyone here is from somewhere else, and there are a vast number of languages spoken, and the languages are sometimes a bridge back to a different city at a different time. Memory is found in the speech patterns, and in this respect, New York is never very far from Dublin, Rome, or Berlin.

Berliners may not find themselves perfectly at home here, but they never find themselves at home anywhere. The peculiar feeling of not being at home is peculiar to that city. It also has perfect resonances here, and for this, the new exhibition, Mooring finds a fantastic temporary home.

Terrell James is showing her new works at Jason McCoy, and it’s a wonderful way to get to see what the Houston-based painter is up to. The abstracts are magnificent windows into her version of Berlin, which necessarily becomes her new version of herself. Artists typically have a hard time finding a home in the world, and their paintings often contemplate that as much as anything. Great artists allow us to see these same things in ourselves, and that’s exactly what James’ work is up to.

For the visitor in the city, the temporary convenience that’s so valuable here in the city can be found in a perfectly lovely hotel . Convenience in thought is rarely found in a gallery, where there is more of an escape into something that’s ironically close to home. That’s one of the things that makes her show so striking, where the idea of Berlin, in all of its beauty, and all of its destruction, and all of its terrible history, overlap constantly, and the effect is impossible to put into words, but can be found in the brilliant minds of some of the artists who find themselves lost there.

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