The Ultimate Sale

ATHENS — Athens provides a good study in how the New South coexists with the Old South. A lively music scene
(supported by students from the University of Georgia) flourishes in the bars, clubs and coffeehouses of the restored
downtown (it brought the world such bands as R.E.M. and the B52s). But you don’t have to look far to find the Old South: It’s apparent in the many Greek Revival homes and buildings that dot the city, the best example being the Taylor-Grady House. The University of Georgia, across the street from downtown, boasts a number of these Greek Revival buildings, including Demosthenian Hall and the president’s house. The university is where you’ll also find the Georgia Museum of Art (a collection heavy in 19th- and 20th-century American and Italian Renaissance paintings). Off campus you’ll find the Church-Waddel-Brumby House, the oldest surviving residence in the city, now serving as the visitors center. Athens is also home to the fragrant State Botanical Gardens of Georgia. Nature trails wind through the gardens of native flora — the rose garden is especially nice (it blooms May-November). Southeast of Athens in Washington is the Robert Toombs House, the restored home of a recalcitrant Southern politician who hated the North for political reasons and hated the Confederacy almost as much for not electing him president. One of the least mellow individuals the smooth-as-silk South has produced, Toombs never gave up his secessionist fervor or his cantankerous manner. 66 mi/106 km east of Atlanta.

The airport for Puerto La Cruz in northeast on the Caribbean. Isla de Margarita is off the coast.

Elegant is the word that will come to mind.

As you take in the Danish capital’s rich history and traditions. With castles and crown jewels, galleries and museums, cathedrals and canals, the sightseeing ranks among the best in Europe.

The Strøget is a series of pedestrian-only streets which make strolling and shopping a pleasure. And be sure to visit Tivoli, a unique combination of picture-perfect flower gardens, lakes, theaters and restaurants with more than 100,000 colored lights.

Dubai is the Arabian Peninsula’s most cosmopolitan city-and the second largest of the seven United Arab Emirates. Unlike other Gulf statess, Dubai’s thriving economy is fueled not by oil, but by trade, which may explain its laissez-faire attitude. And if you like to shop this is THE PLACE, especially if you’re in search of electronics, gold, antiques and carpets. The souks in Dubai and nearby Sharjah vary from tiny stalls to covered malls. Don’t forget to haggle-it’s expected. More pastimes in Dubai are a dhow excursion on the tidal creek which winds through the city, a game of golf on the only real grass links in the Emirates, a tour of Sharjah, an evening safari inot the desert for a barbeque and traditional dancing and a thrilling demonstration of theancient Arabic art of falconing.

Edinburgh, (èd´n-bûr´e) capital city (1991 pop. 421,213) of Scotland and royal burgh. The city is divided into two sections: the Old Town, on the slope of Castle Rock, dates from the 11th century; the New Town spread to the north in the late 18th cent. Edinburgh is a government, finance, and tourist center. Most industry, which includes brewing and distilling, publishing, and paper milling, is situated near the city’s port, Leith. Edinburgh grew up around its 11th-century castle and became Scotland’s capital in 1437. It blossomed as a cultural center in the 18th and 19th century, with such figures as David Hume, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott. It remains a cultural and educational hub and hosts an annual international arts festival.

Turkey is a great country to visit. The Turks are mostly overwhelmingly friendly to foreign visitors, the cuisine is frequently excellent, the cities are dotted with majestic old buildings and the countryside is often worth a good old-fashioned gasp. There’s an enormous variety of things to see and do ranging from water sports to mountain trekking, archaeology to night-clubbing and river rafting to raki drinking. Whether you leave Turkey with magnificent carpets, amulets to ward off evil, belly-dancing tips, an appreciation of its history, or just a tan, you’re likely to want to go back for more.

The famous city of Istanbul stands where Europe meets Asia and where East meets West, with all its magnificence, and signs from its far-reaching past. It has such a location that it constitutes not only a city of history, but also one of natural beauty beyond example. Extending on the two sides of the Bosphorus bordered by green groves, it also possesses beautiful shores along the internal Marmara Sea. Facing the city there exists small, pretty islands, adorning this big sea, Iying in the middle of the region. The sea features the land in that the climatic characteristics of the Black Sea influencing the north of it, is separated from the typical Mediterranean climate prevailing in its south. Rainfall is high enough to facilitate growing a variety of fruits, while snowfall enlivens the winter holidays. Indeed, it is Istanbul’s variety that fascinates its visitors. The museums, churches, palaces, great mosques, bazaars and sights of natural beauty seem inexhaustilbe.

Istanbul is also an international art and cultural center. In fact whatever intrigues your heart and mind can be discovered in this city where time lives on.

Portugal is for explorers. Its valiant seamen first charted the Azores, discovered Japan, and unlocked the major sea routes the world over. Now you can share the anticipation they must have felt as you explore this exciting city.

You’ll discover an 8th-century Moorish castle, quaint cafes and a palm-studded coastline. The Alfama district is a maze of narrow, twisting streets, whitewashed houses, flowered balconies, archways, terraces and courtyards that charm your socks off. (And if you can find your way out of this dizzying array, 20th-century Lisbon is just as intoxicating.)

Of course, if you’d rather play by the sea, the Portuguese Riviera lies just outside town, offering something for everyone, from sun, sand and surf to thrilling casinos. Lisbon is a vast garden abounding with flowers and tropical plants. The city’s appeal lies in the magnificent vistas from its many belvederes and in the tree-lined avenues and squares decorated with mosaic pavements.

Restless, enduring and wonderful, London is Europe’s largest city. And surely, if you have the choice to visit only two or three cities of the world in your lifetime, by all means make one of them London.

The Romans started it all. The city they developed was “the square mile,” – and Londoners still hunt for Roman relics in the Thames. History is everywhere you look in London, yet today the city is as modern and metropolitan as any city on earth.

By day, London is buzzing with the frenetic pace of commerce not even Dickens could have imagined. By night, the excitement and glitter of theatres, cinemas, pubs and restaurants beckons throngs of travellers from around the world. But there is another London, a peaceful London of cool museums, quiet tea rooms, immaculate gardens and hushed churches.

There is Royal London – ancient pageantry in a modern kingdom – with its palaces, pomp and precise manoeuvres at the Changing of the Guard. And there’s outrageous London, the urban gathering ground for Cockney pitchmen, “fringe” theatre and the city’s youth, with their own distinctive style.

There is also Greenwich, easily accessed from central London by public transport, or take a more scenic route and arrive by riverboat. Notable for both its maritime history and royal heritage, it is perhaps best known for giving its name to the Greenwich Meridian (0° longitude) and Greenwich Mean Time, based at the Royal Observatory.

London, this extraordinary city of contrasts, holds a stunning abundance of hidden-round-the-corner surprises. You owe it to yourself to explore them all. Here, then, is the London you’ll come to know and remember.

Ah, the French Riviera…is yours for the taking, for a few hours anyway, when you leave the town of Villefranche to tour Monaco, Monte Carlo,St.-Paul-de-Vence, Cannes, and the Grand Corniche.

Monaco is one of the smallest nation’s of the World and Monte Carlo is its city with the Palace place on top of a high rock overlooking the city, the quaint port and the Meditteranean Sea. The small town and Palace area are a must. Plan to spend at least half of a day exploring the many shops along the narrow streets and enjoy the views from the Palace grounds.

Monte-Carlo was founded in 1866 during the reign of Charles III,who gave it his name. This area includes the world famous Casino, great hotels and the recently completed recreational centers consisting of the Centenaire gardens, the Larvotto beach and the Monte-Carlo Sporting Club.

Each of its five boroughs is a county: Manhattan (New York county), an island; the Bronx (Bronx county), on the mainland, NE of Manhattan across the Harlem River; Queens (Queens county), on Long Island, E of Manhattan across the East River; Brooklyn (Kings county), also on Long Island, on the East River adjoining Queens and on New York Bay; and Staten Island (Richmond county), an island SW of Manhattan across the Upper Bay.

The nation’s largest city, New York is a major U.S. port, the country’s trade center and with its banks and stock exchanges, the financial center of the world.

Theaters, nightclubs, shops, and restaurants draw millions of visitors. With all the sights to see, New York is sure to be a fun filled getaway!

Situated at the head of a 60-mile fjord, Oslo, Norway, one of the oldest of the Scandinavian capitals, is beautifully framed by a vast expanse of woods, moors and lakeland. A blend of 19th- and 20th-century architectural styles, Norway’s capital is known for the wood carvings and colorful frescoes that decorate its buildings and public spaces.

Reykjavik, is the capital of Iceland. It is the country’s chief port and center of its cod fishing industry.

Founded in 874 A.D., it is the home of the Althing, or Icelandic parliament, the oldest in Europe. The city’s heating system uses nearby hot springs. Reykjavik was the site of 1986 disarmament talks between the U.S. and USSR.

Rome wasn’t built in a day…but you can tour it in just over 10 hours. A teeming anthill of humanity and antiquity intermingled with awful traffic jams, Rome grew up on the Tiber (“Fiume Tevere”) among seven low hills that rise from the river’s soggy eastern banks. It’s a city of many peeling layers of history, of which the bottom layer–that of the earliest Roman centuries–is the most interesting and still astonishingly whole. The hub of this layer is the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.

On the western bank is the Citta Vaticana, the independent papal city where the Pope blesses pilgrims from all over the world. Neighboring Trastevere (“Across the Tiber”) is a mix of Roman, Greek and Jewish subcultures, great for little restaurants and nightlife. Further north on the other bank is “vecchia Roma,” medieval Rome of the Pantheon and Piazza Navona; Renaissance Rome is centered south of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Commercial Rome is the city of the Via del Corso, the Piazza del Popolo, the controversial Victor Emmanuel monument and finally the Stazione Termini, the nexus for all trains and roads from Rome.

Built on hills between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, Seattle is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest. The city is close to scenic mountain and coastal recreational areas. It is also an educational and cultural center, with many museums, theaters, and musical groups.

Seattle’s distinctive skyline landmark is the 600-ft (183-m) Space Needle, built for the 1962 World’s Fair. Seattle prospered with the coming of the railroad in 1884 and became a boom town with the 1897 Alaska gold rush. Long a center of radical labor activity, it was the scene of a major general strike in 1919.

Founded as a fortress in the 13th century, Stockholm eventually grew to become the capital of Sweden. It is a city of remarkable beauty with numerous parks, tree-lined squares and boulevards, and pleasant water vistas. To grasp the full character of Stockholm, visitors must hop from island to island, each of which boasts its own personality. Sergels Torg, a central square located in Norrmalm, serves as the focal point for modern Stockholm. On Helgeans Holmen, the tiny island
immediately south of Norrmalm, sits the Riksdagshuset (Parliament Building), followed by the medieval Gamla Stan (Old Town) island and then the large Sodermalm, a bohemian enclave in a former blue-collar quarter.

Across the Strommen (the Current) lie the two scenic islands of Skeppsholmen and Kastell-Holmen. Farther east, Djurgarden Island houses a number of city museums and connects to the northern Ostermalm, a pricey residential neighborhood that adjoins Norrmalm sprawling across 14 islands, the Swedish capital has always enjoyed an ideal
commercial location at the confluence of Lake Malaren and the Baltic Sea. As a result, a forest of high-rise office buildings and condominiums has grown up beside the medieval castles that once guarded Sweden’s strategic waterways. Founded in the mid-13th century, this former outpost developed into a vibrant capital in the 17th century, when landscapers and architects began to build elegant parks and squares that rivaled those in the finest European cities.

Today, picturesque Stockholm boasts a stunning combination of man-made gardens in its center and natural scenery on its outskirts, where sun-lit lakes shimmer in the pine-clad countryside.

It’s a city of contrast. Where else do you find demure kimono-clad girls next to slick Elvis impersonators than good old Yoyogi Park? But only on Sundays.

Tokyo will amaze you with its dual personality; its serenity and its brashness. A city of about 20 million people, it is one of the few metropolises where every train is on time. But try to avoid rush hour. You might get pummeled by a sweet old lady on her way to the Sumo matches at the Budokan Hall!

Visit Roppongi for a taste of modern night life; you can even catch a reggae show. And if you’re still awake after that, hop a train to the Tsukiji fish market at 5 a.m. to see one of the most spectacular fish bazaars on earth. Some tuna comes all the way from Montauk, NY. Now that’s a global marketplace!

When you’re ready for a little peace and quiet, you may visit the brilliant Asakusa Shrine, a prime example of Edo-period architecture. Here you may cleanse your spirit, or, of course, shop to your heart’s delight at many of the little stalls lining the small streets leading to the shrine. Otanoshimi ni! Perhaps the greatest urban sprawl in the world, the Tokyo metropolitan. Tokyo began as a tiny fishing village called Edo, and for more than four centuries was ruled by a series of
chieftains and military warlords. A castle was constructed in Edo in 1457, the year officially noted as the founding of the city, and by 1680 it had grown to a population of over a million people. The city received its modern name in 1868 when the Emperor Meihi moved his court to Edo. It now sprawls 55 miles (88.4km) east to west and 15 miles (24km) north to south and covers an area of 2,031 sq. km.

This area is home to some 20 million people. Famous for its extremes; the word’s most crowded trains, the world’s cleanest streets, the world’s most expensive melons, Tokyo nevertheless seems to be characterized by an overlying blandness. Since the 17th century, Tokyo has been divided up between “yamanote” (south and west) and “shitamachi” (north and east). Simply put, uptown has more to do, downtown more to see. Uptown has the high-rises, the nightlife and the
armies of navy-suited salarymen of the Shibuya, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro business areas, while downtown has Tokyo’s oldest area, Asakusa, the city’s great museums and the imperial palace.

Located in southwestern Washington state, Vancouver is a port at the head of deepwater navigation on the Columbia River, opposite Portland, OR. Vancouver is a commercial, manufacturing and shipping center.

As you approach the city over the bridge from the Italian mainland, you leave behind terra firma and, with it, earthbound notions of how to see and experience a city. Venice is not solely the spill of churches and palazzi on either side of the Grand Canal, but rather a city of islands, 118 in all, some of which are little more than the weedy, humps you see in the Lagoon of Venice. And yet these mud flats provided haven for the people who fled here (without benefit of a bridge) from Huns, Visigoths, and other marauders in the fifth century. And those refugees gave birth to a culture that ripened into a thousand years of greatness.

As you near the end of the bridge, you see at first only the back side of the city itself. But in the time it takes to walk through the train station, you begin to hear sounds peculiarly Venetian–the low rumble of boat motors, a humid incubation of voices, water lapping insistently against wood and stone. And then Venice confers her greatest gift: No matter how many times you’ve been here, it always seems, in that first glimse, like the first time.

If you are smart, you will immediately start a tour down the Grand Canal by hopping on a vaporetto (water bus) or gondola or water taxi. If you are lucky, it will be during those few hours before sunset when the light shines most kindly on the venerable facades that line this liquid boulevard. If you are particularly observant, you might even notice that neither the light nor the colors are quite Italian, not like the tawny earth tones of Florence or Rome.

The canal is a murkey green, the palazzi a mix of faded, grimy sherbets–watermarked mint and sun-blanched apricot and deep overripe peach. Sunlight shatters into spangles on the water, gondolas knife bach and forth, the Rialto Bridge looms overhead, and then, beyond one final curve, the Palladian church of Santa Maria della Salute and the Campanile (bell tower) of San Marco come into view.

Piazza san Marco is Venice’s grand salon–expansive, familiar, picturesque, pigeonesque. It is anchored at its eastern extreme by the Basilica di San Marco, which is not only the spiritual seat of Venice’s patron saint but also one of the most glittering monuments of Christendom.