travel | NZ Muse

December 13, 2013

The best hostels in the world (according to me)

Out of the dozen or so hostels we stayed at during our journey, each will be remembered for its own quirks. The non-lockable doors, the faint stench of socks, the naked guy … But the two hostels that really stand out – in a good way – were:

Best rooms

Sunflower Hostel, Berlin

Hands down, the best room we stayed in was at the Sunflower Hostel in Berlin. This arty hostel is buzzing with life, with colourful murals on every flat surface, from the familiar – Bert and Ernie – to random (e.g. marine theme). Our six-bed dorm was the Tintin room, warm and bright with timber bunks and an outdoor balcony.

sunflower hostel east berlin tintin dorm room

Best common facilities

Belford Hostel, Edinburgh

The best hostel common facilities were definitely at Belford Hostel in Edinburgh. It’s housed in an ancient, drafty, gothic church. Atmosphere in spades. But more importantly, there’s a huge fully equipped kitchen, even a communal cupboard with some cooking basics and free fruit; beautiful bathrooms; a TV/game room; pool table; and bar.

Looking to book a hostel? Check out Booking.com.

What’s the best hostel you’ve ever stayed in? Please share!

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December 12, 2013

Wordless Wednesday: Lights, camera, Vegas…

December 10, 2013

How to get cheap Broadway tickets

By: Marcin Wichary

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about travel, it’s that travel is an intensely personal thing. I could have an entirely different experience of the same city than you do, and it could come down to factors as simple and arbitrary as the weather, where I stayed, what food I ate and the people I encountered.

Also, you should never feel bad for not doing the ‘must dos’ in any given city. If it’s not your thing, why waste the time/money?

Here’s the part where I tell you that we did not go up a tall building, visit MOMA, or see a Broadway show while in New York. And I have no regrets.

We did try, several times, to get tickets to the Book of Mormon. We did the lottery thing on Friday and Saturday, and even lined up for standing room only tickets one evening (unfortunately, there were just under 20 tickets and we were about 24th in line).

I’ve learned that you need to get in EARLY – people start queueing hours ahead for SRO.

See also: this guide to seating in various Broadway theatres, and this guide to rush, lottery and SRO policies for various shows.

Here’s what else I’ve learned about how to find cheap Broadway tickets in New York:

Playbill is a goldmine for advance ticket offers. You’re not going to find amazing deals for the hot new shows – not here or anywhere else – but if you aren’t too picky about specific musicals, then sign up to get their deals emailed to you.

TKTS is where it’s at for same-day discounted tickets, but again, you can’t expect to find deals for the top shows.

Resellers like Stubhub tack on so many fees that when you finally get to the checkout page, you’ll be seeing red. Try Tickpick, which isn’t as sneaky about that stuff. (Content marketing works. I found a Tickpick blog post while Googling for info about various seat locations in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, but their site doesn’t come up – at least not very high – when you simply search for tickets to a certain show.)

Now, my problem with Tickpick was that they apparently didn’t accept NZ credit cards, so I couldn’t buy the last two cheap tickets I spotted on the site. After much hemming and hawing, I decided just to select Australia as my country from the choices listed, and see what happened. The next page then informed me that the tickets had been sold to someone else already (isn’t it pretty standard to hold tickets temporarily if someone is looking at them online?!). But the REAL issue was that I checked my account balance the next day and saw that Tickpick had put a hold for the purchase amount on there. WTF.

In short: I could, potentially, have bought those tickets anyway?! Whatever; that didn’t work out, obviously, and I had to wait a week for that hold to lift.

Points to Tickpick, at least, for responding to my query about the credit card hold fairly promptly.

Click here to search for New York accommodation.

December 6, 2013

The tradeoffs we make for living in NZ

Here’s a truism if there ever was one: Travel widens your horizons.

You can know a lot of things intellectually, theoretically – but often you can’t really grasp them until you’ve experienced them firsthand. Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?

What would my ideal city be? I’m still stumped. Somewhere warm, but not punishingly hot. That poses a problem for T, though. We would prefer to live at opposite ends of the globe in that sense – I’d decamp to a sunny island, he to Antarctica. Other criteria:

Somewhere with advanced transport – a comprehensive metro system.
Somewhere with diverse, awesome and affordable food options, including a range of ethnic choices.
Somewhere with cheap/free entertainment options year round.
Somewhere with proximity to beaches, and maybe bush, mountains, etc.
Somewhere that doesn’t have a sky high cost of living, or at least a place where incomes and costs are in line, proportionally speaking.

I’ve yet to find this magical city, and I fear it does not exist.

While New York is now my absolute favourite destination in the world, it’s not my forever city. Sure, it seems like a fabulous place to live in your 20s, but long term… probably not so much.

Toronto was another city T and I found ourselves nodding at. Canada seems pretty close to perfect as a country goes; it has the good stuff you enjoy in the US (low prices, a range of ethnic cuisines, good customer service) and none of the bad (guns, healthcare, lack of employee rights, the imperial system, litigiousness – did anyone else adore that Don monologue to the lawyer in The Newsroom?). But the weather! I doubt I’d survive a single Canadian winter.

I thought I would return home either with a newfound fervent love for New Zealand, or the exact opposite. Turns out, it’s a grudging mix of both, tilted slightly in favour of the former.

My city has its faults. But I also need to appreciate what we do have.

Auckland has ridiculously unpredictable and rainy weather, but it’s milder than almost anywhere else in the world. A variance of about 15 degrees from hottest to coldest really isn’t very much at all. Many parts of the world have it so much worse; sure, they have lovely hot, dry summers, but by the same stroke, bitter, snowy winters.

We have the most pathetic excuse for public transport, but we aren’t under CCTV surveillance everywhere we go. Nor do we have armed police.

We have no squirrels, but also, we have no scary/poisonous creatures (or even plants) that are out to get you.

It’s hard to get ahead if you’re part of the squeezed middle class, but we do have a reasonably laid back and egalitarian culture.

We don’t have anywhere near the variety of cuisines that bigger international cities have to offer (though that’s sloooooowly improving), but at least we don’t put high fructose corn syrup in everything.

We have crappy uninsulated houses, but at least you don’t need to rent a plot of land if you want a garden – or abide by strict rules about what you can do with it.

Everything costs a lot. There’s no getting around that. But, erm, at least we don’t add sneaky taxes at the till?

I realise things in Auckland are unlikely to change. We are too small for mass transit; we don’t have the density and possibly never will. We like our houses, detached ones. (That goes for me, too.) It’s a city that’s desirable enough that prices keep steady or continue to increase; there’s still enough money around, both local and international, to feed this – even if the rest of us get left behind and priced out. We are too small for competition in consumer markets and far away from other countries – the tyranny of distance still exists for certain kinds of goods.

Living in New Zealand really is a lifestyle choice. Now, at least I’m a heck of a lot more aware of the sacrifices I’m making in exchange for what I get.

What tradeoffs do you make to live where you live? Have you found your forever city?

December 5, 2013

Wordless Wednesday: New Orleans’ French Quarter

November 29, 2013

Friday Five: Customer service highlights from North America

In which I pay tribute to a few instances where we got great service with minimal drama.

Burrito Boyz in Toronto

Mucked up our order, giving us a spicy instead of a mild. Made up a new burrito and let us have both (win!)

Uno Pizzeria, Chicago

I had a total ‘duh’ moment and realised I’d ordered the wrong size pizza. Turned out it was too late to change things in the kitchen, but our waitress only charged us for the smaller portion in the end.

Outback Restaurant, Irvine

Waitress forgot all about T’s beer, and brought it by after we’d finished our meals. (We still haven’t got the hang of making a fuss about that sort of thing.) Apologies flowed, and she didn’t charge us for it.

Earl of Sandwich, Disneyland

I brought some snacks along with us, but spending a whole day here necessitated the purchase of some food. It took a little psyching up, but I ballsed up and spoke up, as they messed up my order and gave me a horrible flavour combination I didn’t want any part of. I got the right sandwich in the end – and got to keep the other one (which I did also eat most of, and it was indeed revolting).

T-Mobile, somewhere in LA

Instead of charging us $10 to change our card (we needed to downsize ours from a micro to a nano sim), the sales guy gave it to us for free after hearing we would only be in the country for a few more days.

And while I’m on the topic, two thumbs up (and one thumbs down) to Slingshot, the NZ ISP. I gave up on their signup process as the system insisted my credit card details were invalid, went to eat dinner, and after that, decided to revive my existing account with Orcon instead. Saving roughly $50 over 12 months was not worth the headache with Slingshot. Alas, Slingshot called me right after I got off the phone with Orcon (and apparently tried calling a couple of times while I was on the phone) to see if they could help me finish the signup process. Sorry, guys, if you’d been 10 minutes earlier…! Not impressed, though, that Slingshot kept bugging me with multiple calls a couple of days later (last night). Enough is enough, and I hope that’s the end of that. I will definitely reconsider at the end of our contract, but for now I’m set.

Had any amazing/terrible customer service lately?

November 28, 2013

Wordless Wednesday: Chicago, from zoo to city to library

November 27, 2013

Embrace the lazy: The importance of rest days on the road

Out of an entire week in Paris, we managed one day under budget (and that’s one more than I expected, to be quite honest). We more or less stayed in our Airbnb apartment, watched movies, cooked at home and relaxed.

Confessing that feels strange; it feels like admitting to having wasted a perfectly good day in an amazing foreign city. But the thing is, you need ‘weekends’ while travelling, too. Being on the go all the time, while not ‘work’ in the typical sense of meetings + endless emails + squinting at a screen, does take it out of you.

(Let’s not get into the fast travel vs slow travel debate here. Rushing around trying to cram three days of sights into 12 hours isn’t for everyone, but neither is flying halfway across the world only to be stuck inside working and not getting to see anything at all, while proclaiming you’re a ‘real’ traveller because you’re living like a local. Yes, there’s something to be said for simply BEING in a new and exotic place … but that only goes so far.)

T and I are naturally slothful creatures. That quickly became apparent while we were away, too. Somehow, it worked out that we had a day off once a week, more or less (sometimes two). Whether we were in Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh, Edinburgh, Berlin, Bologna, Athens, Grindelwald, New York, New Orleans, or Flagstaff, we carved out time to sleep in, watch movies, and recharge just as we would in daily life.

Bonus: if you freelance, those are the perfect days to catch up on work.

November 26, 2013

Desert days: my favourite US landscapes

Much as I loved the coastal cities, when it comes to natural beauty, the Southwest blew my mind. I love a good desert landscape, and you guys did not disappoint. I can’t decide whether I love New Mexico’s white sands or Arizona’s red deserts more! Here’s some of my favourite shots from the region.

There’s the red rocks of Sedona…