Explore Your Creativity with an Art Class at Pine Camp

January 26, 2010Our arts and crafts classes at Pine Camp allow adults and children plenty of opportunities to explore and develop their creativity. Our big, beautiful studios at Pine Camp provide an atmosphere that is relaxing and will inspire your creativity, while our our top-notch instructors are supportive and win praises from our students. The wide variety of classes range from fiber arts to

European Travel Commission

The European Travel Commission is a non-profit making organisation which has 39 National Tourism Organisations (NTOs) as its members. The role of these NTOs is to market and promote European tourism as well as domestic tourism within each of the member countries. The Reports & Studies section of the website is particularly useful for tourism research and includes a range of online reports, handbooks and market studies of countries worldwide. There are also archives of European Tourism Insights, the Research Highlights Newsletter and the Quarterly Reports. You will also find links to further online materials such as Tourism Trends and Market Insights, as well as to statistics, events, climate change and sustainable tourism. Some of the listed publications are for purchase only and will have 'saleable' next to the title.

Guided Walks on Richmond's Slave Trail

January 21, 2010Richmond's Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities will offer guided walks on Richmond's Slave Trail each Saturday during February in recognition of Black History Month. These emotional walks, led by James River Park Manager Ralph White, will take you from the stone docks at Ancarrow's Landing through the forest and across the river to the site of the old

City Dance Theatre to Perform

January 21, 2010The Department's national award-winning City Dance Theatre, composed of young dancers ranging in age from 9 to 17, will perform in the following upcoming programs.On Saturday, Jan. 23, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, Jan 24, at 3 p.m. they will perform in “Lights Up!,” a celebration of youth and the arts at Richmond CenterStage in the Carpenter Theatre. The concert will also feature

Have Fun and Help Save the Planet! - Plant Trees in Bryd Park

January 21, 2010If you enjoy using the Vita Course in Byrd Park, consider giving back by volunteering to help plant new trees around the course. Volunteers are wanted to gather at 9 a.m. on Jan. 23 to help plant 20 new trees around this popular exercise course in Byrd Park. The trees are being provided by the Friends of William Byrd Park, a citizen’s group that helps care for the park.
“Time has come for SportAccord to move a step forward, reorganise itself and develop a global strategy to leverage on sport unity and better face today’s sports challenges..." SportAccord President Hein VERBRUGGEN

Last March, GAISF was rebranded SportAccord
; the organisation brings together 87 International Federations and 17 Associated Members and works closely with the Olympic Movement; its aim is to 'unite, support and promote its members for the co-ordination and protection of their common aims and interests...while at the same time conserving and respecting their autonomy'. The website helps to carry this task forward by providing the latest news from across the sports sphere and the Sports Calendar highlights upcoming sporting events. SportAccord has two new projects in the pipeline - Multi-Sports Games and a Doping-Free Sport Unit which will provide support to its members.

The 13th World Sport for All Congress will take place in Jyväskylä, Finland, from 14 to 17 June 2010.

Marxist Leninism on the silver screen

During the communist period, the Albanian state produced a wide range of propaganda, for both internal and external consumption. The link below is to a clip on YouTube from an Italian documentary called 'Albania - il paese di fronte' ('Albania - the country opposite') which includes several examples, including a Radio Tirana broadcast, a particularly peculiar film about WW2 partisans (a variant on the 'Valkyrie' sequence from 'Apocalypse Now' involving a loudspeaker strapped to a bus and some dancing Italians), some 'racy' communist-era jazz and a ballet written for Enver Hoxha's atheism campaign. It's quite tricky to follow if you don't speak Italian but the images speak pretty much for themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-u5B2TSaDY&feature=related

Should this whet your appetite, the remaining ten parts of the documentary are also on YouTube and include footage of, amongst other things, King Zog and his wedding, the Italian invasion in 1939, Mayday parades, Khruschev planting a tree in Tirana, Enver Hoxha dancing with a Chinese delegation and, in the final instalment, the toppling of Hoxha's statue during the anti-communist revolution in 1991.

Two revised poems

The Air Display

Jetstream mirage and the taste of kerosene
is how it might start across the field,
or a Hawker Hunter hanging on a stall turn,
its chevron tailfin roundel against clouds.
Armed with bulbous candyfloss,
we’re walking between disputes,
provenance issues, these tanks
too often repaired, no longer ‘authentic’.
Redundant fighters’ afterburners sear
the early afternoon like rough nostalgia,
aerobatics over middle England.

And still it is easier to find a name
for Venom, Tempest, Fury
or how we might be expected to feel
about splintered tree-lines,
sand-bursts across that combat zone,
than for patterns of thought
in these actually occurring vapour trails
which backdrop one last fly-past:
impervious Spitfire, engine growling,
over woods and out of the sun.


Beginning with Palma

This is where a poem might start out,
here, on this terrace curtained with rain,
a Mediterranean afternoon
stifling with sweat and Ducados.
The cathedral’s too drab for a ticket
(history priced out of the market)
and you won’t find time to trace
intermittent carnival noise
to its roiling, gaudy source.

So never mind that you can’t recall
the word for it or put a name
to that face which insolently
stares from each window you look in.
Those booted boys – or others –
will be there the same tomorrow,
conveniently just out of focus,
details for your composition,
sketches for your Hemingway phase.

Is this boredom or fear? On the far side
of the rain, the Guardia Civil
patrol a cobbled, almost-empty street.
Keep your eyes peeled, they’d suggest.
You have, of course, and found them wanting.
The carnival’s moved on. Would you reach
for coins left lying on the ground?
You might do, if it didn’t mean
leaning over, wetting your hand.


Tom Phillips

Worldwide Hospitality & Tourism Themes

The WHATT journal has recently been relaunched; special issues have covered the topics of Casino Gaming, Caribbean travel and tourism industry and Sustainable economic growth in India. The journal is available online in Emerald (via Athens).

Warning: Park Lakes Currently Dangerous

January 12, 2010Richmond's Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities is asking the public to stay off its frozen lakes.The department has lakes at Byrd Park, Bryan Park and Forest Hill Park. “Although they may appear to be frozen, they are not safe,” said Department Director J. R. Pope.“When the temperatures fluctuate above and below freezing as they have recently in Richmond, it

Spotlight Gallery to Feature Local African-American Artists

January 6, 2010The City of Richmond’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities will present “From Africa and Beyond,” an exhibit representing more than 20 local African-American artists, in its Spotlight Gallery in celebration of African-American History Month. This annual group exhibit will trace the imprint of African Americans from the rich influence of Africa to current trends

Graphic Design from the 1920s-30s in Travel Ephemera

This website provides an online gallery of items the author, David Levine, has collected over the years. The collection includes travel brochures, ocean liner time-tables, road maps, luggage labels from the 1920s and 1930s, from many regions around the world.

Conferences

Etourism: Horizons - 10-12 February, Switzerland

City and national capital tourism research group meeting - 4-5 March, Belgium

INVTUR 2010 - Tourism Research: state of the art and future perspectives - 10-13 March , Portugal

7th International Conference for consumer behaviour, tourism and retailing research - 7-9 April, Portugal

Contested economies: global tourism and cultural heritage - 8-10 April, Florida

Journeys of Expression VIII: prospects and potentials for tourism, festivals and cultural events - 20-21 April, Denmark

International Conference on Monitoring and Management of Visitor Flows in Recreational and Protected Areas - 30 May-3 June, The Netherlands

Managing for the global and the local - 3-4 June, Canada

Poem: Catching the Drift

Catching the Drift

Collared by its spectral bridge, the bay’s incursion
narrows to a creek, these tongues of sand
where mist-wreathed skiff masts lie at odds
among the trees. “The well-to-do,” you say
and point at the far shore’s terraced villas.
What else to add? It wasn’t to be
that you’d put your name to such deeds
would allow you such possession.

Only here, on this shack’s uneven planks,
the morning’s steeped in diesel fumes,
or whatever else that smell might be,
and flies, perplexed by angling lures,
are seething on lopped fish-heads,
grounds for some complaint, perhaps,
were that your way. We push out
the boat instead, catching the drift

which squirls at fallen branches,
knots of weed, the sure-footed bridge’s
concrete stanchions, then thickens
to an estuary. If the jetstreams
unfurling north and east
register as promises, promises
made at one time to yourself,
there’s not a sign in your straight gaze.

Tom Philliips