Weak dollar drawing international tourists

ORLANDO, Florida -- Nicola Ross held up a gray and black sneaker for her husband, Ian, to examine in a Puma store aisle piled high with boxes of tennis shoes. She arched her eyebrows when she saw the price tag.


"They're $40!" said Ross, a tourist from Liverpool, England. "Do you like them? Try them on."

Although Ross, 37, is no slouch of a shopper -- it is one of her favorite activities back home -- she was stunned at her purchasing power recently on an excursion to an outlet mall in Orlando. The power came in no small part from a currency exchange rate that had the British pound approaching twice the value of the U.S. dollar.

"The exchange rate is fabulous," said Ian Ross, who sells household appliances in Liverpool. "We couldn't have timed it better to come over on holiday."

U.S. tourism officials expect more European and Canadian visitors will follow the Ross' example this year, in part because of the weak U.S. dollar. They hope the exchange rate helps reverse a three-year decline in the number of international visitors to the United States.

"It couldn't happen at a better time," said Cathy Keefe, a spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association of America in Washington. "We'll see the results of tourists spending more money. They'll stay longer, stay at nicer hotels, take more tours, eat out at more restaurants."

Keefe said she does not believe last week's terrorist bombings in Madrid will affect international visits to the United States. "It may be a different matter if something happened on U.S. soil again," she said.

Record lows
The dollar recently reached a record low against the euro and an 11-year low against the pound.

This week, the euro was worth about $1.22, compared with $1.07 at the same time last year; a British pound was worth about $1.80, versus $1.58 at the same time last year; and a Canadian dollar was worth about 75 cents, up from about 67 cents.

Because of the exchange rate, 14-year-old Emma Price of South Yorkshire, England, bought five heavy-metal T-shirts during a recent visit to Orlando, and her parents, Martin and Sandra, decided they could afford a road trip to Miami.

The family used more cash instead of credit cards, and booked hotel reservations and bought theme park tickets in the United States rather than in Britain. By buying the tickets in dollars instead of pounds, they saved about $21 each day they went to the parks.

"Our money is going a lot further," said Martin Price, an electrical engineer who was visiting the Downtown Disney shopping and restaurant complex with his family.

The exchange rate also led the British travel company Virgin Holidays to renegotiate prices with the U.S. hotels and car rental companies that it uses. The new prices allowed the company earlier this year to offer a package of airfare to Orlando, seven nights' accommodations and a rental car for 399 pounds, or 130 pounds less than what it previously offered, said spokeswoman Naomi Lewis.

At the current exchange rate, the discounted price would be equal to about $718, for about $234 in savings.

Signs of improvement
The number of international visitors coming to the United States slipped from a high of 51 million in 2000 to 40.4 million visitors in 2003, according to the U.S. Office of Travel & Tourism Industries. Expectations for a strong year in 2003 were dashed by the sluggish world economy, the war in Iraq and the SARS scare.

But there were signs of improvement toward the end of last year. In November, arrivals from Western Europe were up 7 percent from the same month in 2002. Canadian arrivals jumped 11 percent.

The U.S. tourism office is predicting a 5 percent increase in international visitors in 2004, or 42.1 million tourists.

Some U.S. tourism leaders attribute the upturn to the exchange rate, as well as a greater feeling of security in traveling and an improving world economy.

"We're hearing more languages spoken along Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue," said Cristyne Nicholas, president of NYC & Company, New York City's tourism marketing agency.

International tourists are prized visitors because they spend more money than domestic tourists. In New York City, for instance, they make up 17 percent of visitors but account for 40 percent of tourism spending.

Mike Palma, general manager of the trendy Clevelander Hotel in Miami Beach, estimated the number of Europeans visiting South Beach right now is 20 percent higher than last year. The Europeans are booking their plans on U.S. Web sites so they can pay in dollars, he said.

"You're getting German modeling companies that haven't come out in years because it was too expensive," Palm said. "They're coming in droves."

Walt Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland in Anaheim, California, are experiencing a 12 percent increase in international visitors for the second quarter, according to Prudential Equity Group. The theme parks suffered a dramatic drop-off after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

A British family of four who booked in U.S. dollars a $1,550 package at Walt Disney World that includes theme park tickets and four nights' lodging would pay about 858 pounds at the current exchange rate. They would have paid 967 pounds a year ago.
- posted by Rachel @ 1:22 AM

 
Coffee, tea, or take a hike

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota -- Do you have raspberry-kiwi iced tea?


Has anyone ever said you look like Monica Lewinsky?
Who's flying the plane?
Do you have a place where I can put my cheesecake?

Passengers have asked these and many other questions of Rene Foss as she scurried to fetch their drinks, hand out their pretzels and pick up their garbage.

Foss, a second-generation flight attendant, has taken her 19 years of experience and turned it into a hilarious one-woman play and book, "Around the World in a Bad Mood!" (subtitled "Confessions of a Flight Attendant"). She performs at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage through March 28.

Foss still works at Northwest Airlines, where she started flying in 1985. She's quick to say that the airline of her play and book, WAFTI ("We Apologize for This Inconvenience Airlines") is not based on any specific carrier. She wears nondescript uniforms while performing and does not mention Northwest in the book or play.

"It's really a commentary on air travel in general," she says.

Flying these days isn't the same as it was when Foss' mother, Maxyne, worked as a stewardess for Northwest Orient Airlines in the 1950s. Flying then was considered a luxury; Rene Foss calls it the golden age of air travel.

"Instead of wearing white gloves, we're wearing rubber gloves. Instead of serving lobster thermidor, we're learning to put handcuffs on people. And instead of practicing the art of polite conversation, we're practicing the art of self-defense and disease control," Foss says.

Barf bags and 'Macbeth'

On stage, Foss is a dynamic performer, throwing herself from a frenzied "safety demo" pantomime that opens the show to different skits that feature her as a flight attendant training supervisor with an accent straight out of "Fargo" or as a gun-toting pilot with a Southern drawl. Theatergoers get a bag of pretzels and a once-over with a mock metal detector before they enter the 1 1/2-hour show.

In one sketch, Foss uses puppets made of barf bags to re-enact "Macbeth" as a comic duel between two passengers warring for the same first-class seat.

Foss, who stands 5 feet and 4 inches, hasn't had to cuff any unruly passengers in her career. But she understands how crowded airports, long lines and increased security can try passengers' patience.

"So you kind of get on the plane and you are hungry and you are tired," she says. "And now we don't even really serve food anymore."

That's when passengers end up in a bad mood, she says. "And then the flight's full and there's no room to put your bag on because you're the last passenger, and then we're going to take away your bag and check it. And then the only seats left are center seats. And, well, 'Welcome aboard!' "

After Foss graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1984, her dad encouraged her to get a job with benefits. But Foss, who grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, had acting ambitions and set her sights on Broadway or Hollywood. The solution: a flight attendant's job that allowed her to live in New York.

She thought she could quit in six months. "Of course, 19 years later I'm still picking up garbage on the airplane," she says.

'I would be an expert'

Foss says she was so down and out that she was ready to give up and move back home to Minnesota. But she decided to write a play and star in it, and chose flight attendants as her subject.

"I would be an expert, and I would know how to play that role because I've been doing it," she says. Foss got her actor friends to come over, and with piano player Michael McFrederick writing the music, came up with a five-actor revue. "Around the World in a Bad Mood!" -- featuring songs about the safety demo and greeting passengers -- debuted at a New York cabaret in 1998.

A New York Times article about the play caught the attention of Hyperion Books, which approached Foss about writing a book, which was published in 2002.

Meanwhile, Richard Frankel Productions, a producer of such Broadway hits as "Hairspray" and "The Producers," suggested Foss trim her five-actor play to a one-woman show. She premiered that version at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August 2002, then performed it in Melbourne, Florida, and last August at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in Minneapolis. (The Minnesota Fringe Festival is co-producing her current Minneapolis show with SRO Productions.)

Foss is planning to take her show to Los Angeles. She hopes it becomes a franchised theater piece such as "Late Night Catechism" or "Defending the Caveman," and dreams of a TV sitcom. She also would like to do a sequel to the book, and has a "Bad Mood Hot Line" at 212-712-8702 where passengers can tell Foss about their terrible flight experiences.

"Instead of 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding,' maybe it'll be 'My Big Fat Airline Career,' " she says.
- posted by Rachel @ 12:20 AM

 
The soul of Queens

NEW YORK (AP) -- When artists Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer decided to explore immigrant life in their hometown of Queens, they didn't have to travel far.


Behind the drab storefronts and nondescript homes that define the borough, Sloan and Lehrer discovered a soulful place teeming with immigrants from Mexico to Australia whose stories unfolded in a kaleidoscope of color.

Their discoveries, captured in interviews, audio recordings and large-format photographs, are on view at the Queens Museum of Art in the exhibit "Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America." "Through the people, we found the beauty and soul of the borough," Lehrer said during a recent tour of the show, named for Queens Boulevard, the New York borough's main thoroughfare.

The exhibit features people such as Bovic Antosi, who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo after refusing to join rebel leader Laurent Kabila. Antosi escaped on a cargo flight and landed at Kennedy Airport. After two years in the airport's grim Wackenhut Detention Center, he was granted asylum.

Like the other 70 portraits in the exhibit, the striking photograph of Antosi is shot against a white backdrop. Next to each picture is a short, first-person narrative about the subject's experience, while a set of earphones allows visitors to listen to the immigrants and refugees recount their stories in their own words.

"Their pictures are not taken against backdrops of squalid living, but against white backgrounds with objects," Lehrer said. "We are portraying the largely invisible lives, images, sounds and stories of new immigrants and refugees."

Camilo Perdomo and Juan Carlos Veloza, a gay couple, were repeatedly threatened in their native Colombia and feared for their lives. After hours of interrogation, Perdomo and Veloza finally succeeded in convincing American immigration officials that they were really homosexual and were granted asylum.

Lehrer's photographic composition of the couple features the two men embracing. Next to them are the religious statuettes they brought from Colombia, giving the viewer a sense of the disparate worlds the men straddle.

Singer and dancer Malika Kalontarova and her husband, drummer Iskhak Gulkarov, left Tajikistan in 1993 at the height of their careers. Like tens of thousands of Bukharan Jews, they resettled in the Rego Park section of Queens, where they have struggled to rebuild their careers. The photographs of Kalontrarova and Gulkarov and their son, Arthur Gulkarov, who has had success as a member of Cirque du Soleil, show the three family members performing.

The audio accompaniment features Kalnotarova singing as her son describes the difficulties of adjusting to life in a new country.

"Queens is this little dot on the map but it encapsulates the world," Sloan said.

'Choreography of chaotic coexistence'

First person accounts of 79 people, photographs and a compact disc that combines interviews and music inspired by the subjects are also available in a book published by W.W. Norton. It has the same title as the exhibit and sells for $35.

Lehrer, 48, who grew up in Queens, says the borough has changed dramatically since his childhood. Back then, Queens also had large pockets of immigrants, but they were predominantly Jewish, Italian and Irish. The demographics shifted after passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed more immigrants from southern and eastern continents.

"Today, Queens is a choreography of chaotic coexistence," said Lehrer, noting that an estimated 138 languages are spoken in what is considered one of the most ethnically diverse locales in the United States. "It gets really interesting when it starts to break down and people start to mix and marry and work together."

Low rents attracted Lehrer, a writer and photographer, and Sloan, 47, an oral historian and actress born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Queens in 1990. But they never appreciated the borough until they began exploring its nuances.

In the late 1990s, the couple hopped in their car and started traveling around Queens. They visited a Nigerian Pentecostal church in Far Rockaway, Egyptian cafes brimming with the scents of mint tea and apple tobacco in Astoria and the Champion Ping Pong Center in Jackson Heights, where masters from China to Guyana play.

One of the many things they learned along their travels was that immigrants today tend to retain more of their culture than immigrants of the past, due in large part to inexpensive phone service and the Internet, which allow them to stay connected to their culture.

"Immigrants 80 years ago or 50 years ago were anxious to assimilate immediately and to disassociate from their culture," Sloan said. "Now ... instead of melting, people bring their customs and create something altogether new."

The exhibit closes March 14. Part of "Crossing the BLVD" will then travel to New York University.
- posted by Rachel @ 4:27 AM

 
Kentucky: Mammoth Cave long on history

MAMMOTH CAVE, Kentucky (AP) -- Mammoth Cave doesn't have the colorful stalagmites and stalactites that make some caves famous. Lighting is minimal; signs are nonexistent, and there's no pipe organ playing "Shenandoah," like the one at Luray Caverns in Virginia.


Yet Mammoth's claims to fame are many. It's the longest cave in the world, with more than 360 miles (580 kilometers) of connected tunnels. It's also the second-oldest tourist attraction in America, after Niagara Falls, with guided tours offered since 1816. Huts used by an 1840s tuberculosis colony still stand, as do mining pits from 1812. Most amazing of all is how far back Mammoth's human connections stretch: Mummies have been found in the cave, and you can still see petroglyphs (cave drawings) that are thousands of years old.

Mammoth entered recorded history around 1798 when John Houchins, a Kentucky homesteader, shot and wounded a bear, then followed the critter into a natural cave entrance that is still used today.

Other early 19th century visitors found the cave's tunnels littered with discarded moccasins, reed torches and several mummified bodies. Eventually archaeologists determined these artifacts were up to 4,000 years old; the cool, dry cave air had preserved them.

The mummies became traveling shows. "Mammoth Cave was world-famous because of the mummies," said tour guide David Sholar, a National Parks Service ranger. "Wealthy people in Europe and in the East wanted to see Mammoth Cave, and the owners of Mammoth got a wild idea -- that people would pay money to see a hole in the ground."

To sophisticated 19th century Easterners and Europeans, a cave tour in Kentucky -- billed as "The American Interior" -- was as appealing and exotic as a trip to the Amazon rain forest sounds now. Porters -- who in antebellum times were often slaves of the cave-owners -- brought food and musical instruments to entertain their guests on 12-hour excursions. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind were among the Who's Who of visitors in the 1800s.

Violet City tour

Modern guests can get a taste of those trips on the Violet City Lantern Tour, a three-hour, 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) hike without electric lights. Instead, hikers use kerosene lamps to illuminate the cave's steep, dark paths, just as visitors did 150 years ago.

Mammoth is a relatively dry cave, which is why it has few of the icicle-like formations associated with caves; those are made when moisture drips through minerals in cave walls. Instead, what makes the Violet City tour so interesting are the artifacts. Guides often wrote their names on the walls using candle smoke, and encouraged their guests to do the same. Today's tourists will find "Wad Wallace 1868" written on one wall, and on another, "E. Bishop," left by the son of cave guide Steve Bishop, a slave renowned for his knowledge of the tunnels.

Ranger Sholar also pointed out remnants of stick torches lodged in the cave's rocky ceiling, which he said had been left some 4,000 years ago. "Wood is durable, as long as it is dry," he said. When lit, the pole torches -- made of cane reed from the nearby Green River -- would give light for 30 to 60 minutes.

The Violet City tour also includes a look at the petroglyphs. These charcoal drawings were left on an immense, flat stone slab called Devil's Looking Glass, which appears to have been placed at a prominent angle on a tunnel path, as if the ancient artists wanted maximum visibility for their work. One drawing looks like a snake, or a lightning bolt; another resembles a human form, with two arms and two legs, but it might also have been a crude map of four nearby passages leading to a natural rotunda.

You won't see any mummies on the tour, but you will pass the spot where one was found in 1935. Nicknamed "Lost John," the 5-foot-3-inch (1.6-meter) man wearing a shell necklace was considered a major archaeological find and was exhibited until 1976, when federal law prohibited the display of Indian remains. Lost John was buried near where he was found.

Other artifacts include the pits where 70 slaves and indentured servants worked hand-mining thousands of pounds (kilograms) of nitrate, or saltpeter, during the War of 1812. The nitrate was used to make gunpowder, which had skyrocketed in price during the war after Britain blockaded Eastern U.S. ports. It was shipped for processing to a Delaware chemist named E.I. DuPont, whose family's firm still bears his name.

World Heritage Site

Later the cave was purchased by Dr. John Croghan, who in 1842 set up a colony for tubercular patients. Croghan thought the cave air would be restorative, but his patients actually grew worse, due to smoke from torches and cooking fires in the cave. They died within a year, and Croghan, who'd lived with them, later died of the disease himself. The Violet City tour passes by their huts.

Biologists have documented 130 different species of animals -- including rats, bats, mice, crickets, salamanders, snakes and, in the cave's river, eyeless crayfish and shrimp.

Also worth a stop is the graveyard of a picturesque church near the visitor center. "Greatest cave explorer ever known" reads the epitaph for William Floyd Collins, whose death spurred the movement to make Mammoth Cave a national park.

Born in 1887, Collins began exploring caves -- which abound in this part of Kentucky -- at age 6. Money could be made by charging tourists fees to enter the caves, so poor families in this hardscrabble rural area were always looking for a way to cash in. Collins was searching for a tunnel between Mammoth and nearby Sand Cave when he became trapped on January 30, 1925. He died 17 days later amid misguided rescue efforts and swarms of gawkers and reporters.

In an editorial soon after, The Courier-Journal of Louisville urged federal officials to make Mammoth a national park and bring some order to the frenzied efforts to exploit local caves. "Floyd Collins ... will not have died in vain if you open the cave country... to the people of the United States," the paper said. The Eastern United States had no national parks when Congress, in 1926, authorized the creation of Mammoth Park.

The cave's importance continues to be recognized. In 1981, the United Nations designated it a World Heritage Site, on the same list with the Egyptian Pyramids and the Grand Canyon, and in 1990 UNESCO classified it as an International Biosphere Reserve.

Admirers of Collins, meanwhile, still leave flowers and food on his grave.
- posted by Rachel @ 12:20 AM