Category: Miscellaneous

Les Deux Pierrots. I recall my night at Les Deux Pierrots as one of the best. I don’t think I’ve ever sung or danced so much in my life. I just couldn’t keep still, listening to the live band playing that night. I even sang songs typically Quebecois. This bar is so special and creates such a unique atmosphere that you feel like you’ve entered a universe of similar-minded amigos.

Café Campus. Until I hit Montreal I didn’t think it was possible to go out Tuesday nights, one after another. Café Campus is the sacred meeting ground for college students from all around the city. Eighties/nineties tunes accompanied by rat-killer beer kept us singing and dancing without reprieve. A few meters away, you can find Tokyo Bar and Ballroom, two other clubs to hit Thursdays after “4 a 7″.

Bili Kun / Gogo Lounge. If you’re looking to knock back a beer or down a cocktail, at the top of my suggestion list is Bily Kun. Few bars capture the essence of Mont Royal better. If you like this place and want to continue enjoying the Montreal nightlife, don’t forget to hit The GoGo Lounge located over in St. Laurent. Unquestionably, one of my favorites.

CodaClub. Montreal is a city where electronic music is omnipresent and CodaClub is the temple of reference. Acts like Crystal Castles have played here.

Club Opera. The two times I went to Club Opera I had a good time, but felt these weren’t exactly my kind of people. If you want to see and be seen, this is your place. With a little luck, maybe you’ll even see a Montreal Canadien hockey player lounging about. And If you want to beat the $20 cover charge, sdon’t forget to sign up for one of the club’s “guest lists” on the Internet.

Whenever we’re planning a trip and need to find a destination, we encounter tons of info which we don’t quite know how to process. Why? Mainly, because we don’t know whether to trust whoever wrote the stuff in the first place.

That’s why our aim at Trourist has been and continues to be to create a community of people with similar travel bugs – a community where quality prevails over quantity. In this community, friends play a key role since they are the ones we know most and who can best help us out.

This is my way of leading up to summarizing the advantages of using Trourist with 
Facebook Connect, so you can best use  your Facebook contacts:

- Easier Login Process. How often do we forget our passwords? With Facebook Connect, you can enter Trourist right off without having to stop top remember: What the hell was the password I came up with the other day? If you joined Trourist when we didn’t feature Facebook Connect or you decided to register the normal way, don’t worry. In the “Profile”  section, you can now  link up with your  Trourist acccount from your Facebook account.

- Easier to Add On Friends. When you login with Facebook Connect, you automatically add on your friends’ network from Facebook. Besides, by clicking on “Invite your friends to Trourist” (visible at various points on the web site), we can send an invitation to those Facebook friends of yours who most like to travel. The more friends we have, the more experiences we’ll be able to consult (apart from consulting those experiences of other trourists).

- Share on Facebook those experiences you create on Trourist. It’s a good way to show the rest of your friends (those who don’t belong to Trourist) those very special moments and places which you know. In order for your experiences to appear on your Facebook news-feed, you have to activate the button “Give Trourist extended permissions” and you’ll find it in “Profile”.

We’ve done all this so that you can connect to Trourist in the easiest way possible and for you to have a greater number of genuine experiences to consult and live.

Last week we talked to you about Lomography as a way of preserving a memory of your trips — or even — your day-to-day living.

Today, thanks to the cooperation of Lomography.es, it’s our pleasure to introduce a New Experiences Contest. To win one of the the dream prizes, all you have to do is share with us those special places that make any city special.

Photography is an important part of our trips. Far beyond the aesthetic value of our “work”, pictures immortalize our fun moments and discoveries forever, allowing us to process everything we’ve lived once we’re back home.

Technological advances in photography during the past decade have made available ultra-light and easy-to-use cameras, whose main function is their practicality.  I’d like to call your attention to other cameras that don’t adhere to this criteria however, operating instead on a more human and emotional level such as the experience of recording special moments in a special way with them. I’m talking about lomographic cameras.

Lomographic cameras are some of the best known analogical cameras, whose origin dates back to the early 1980s in the former Soviet Union.  These cameras were initially manufactured with a robust frame and defective lenses which produced surprising snapshots because of the focus deviation and color/light distortion they realized. This, of course, is what made them so special. Taking super-prepared photos is no longer a must; now, you expect a lomographic camera to astonish you with everyday images that stand out or to capture details which normally would go unnoticed.

At the start of the 1990s, a group of Viennese students discovered these cameras during a trip to Prague, and overnight an enormous community of lomographers was born. Their only aims are creative and spontaneous photography, as you will see in the “Ten Golden Rules”.

Nowadays, you can find reproductions of those original Soviet cameras in every color imaginable at their “Embassies” (yes, that’s what they are called) all over the world.

In 1977 at the behest of the New York City Tourist Bureau, Milton Glaser came up with a logo design that expressed with striking simplicity the admiration which the city inspired in him and all those who have allowed themselves to be infused by its essence.

The design, done pro bono incidentally (his altruistic donation to the city) has transcended to such a point that even today, thousands of persons everywhere –New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike — wear it daily, making it one of the most significant designs of the 20th century.

Since then, numerous messages have been transmitted via this unique creation produced by an American typewriter and a red heart. We, too, wished for Glaser’s legacy to be present in the design of our initial T-shirt. However, we elected to include our own personal touch.

With that in mind, we substituted Glaser’s heart with the silhouette of the mythical and romantic Route 66 sign. When we speak of route 66, we could care less that for decades it has served as the nexus between the eastern and western coasts of the United States. Instead, what we do like is that it is the symbolic representation of the non-conformist generation portrayed in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. For this reason and as a homage to that spirit of adventure and the numerous road trips it has engendered, we felt it should receive an honorary place on our inaugural T-shirt.

If you want to be one of the lucky few to own a T-shirt from our initial run of 100, we’ll make sure you receive yours anywhere on the planet for just 15 euros. Write us at: hello@trourist.com and include your name, postal code and the subject heading: ROUTE 66 TEE.

Don’t forget: Keep traveling real!

All of us who love travelling have at one time or another flirted with the notion of abandoning the hum-drum of our daily routines and embarking on that one voyage each of us safeguards within and considers “the perfect trip”. Even so, very few of us have taken a definitive step in that direction. Today, we’d like to share with you Iosu’s experience. Our hero is a twenty-nine-year-old adventurer who elected to leave his beloved Madrid behind in a north-to-south quest of the American continent. Ten months after setting off and just back from Ushuaya, Iosu reveals how he prepared for his perfect trip.

Q. Iosu, for those of us who’ve daily followed your blog, there hasn’t been a single day that we haven’t felt some kind of healthy envy. We imagine, however, that it was no picnic undertaking this enterprise.

A. Well, implementing a decision of this kind was a real headache. I had to sidestep fears, both internal and external; work endless hours to save up the money, and take a detour from everyday constructs which meant skirting whatever it is that our society calls “normal” — such as buying a house, having a mortgage, a car, starting a family… I decided to listen to the pulse of my heartbeat and assume whatever risks presented themselves. Would everything be the same when I got back from my trip? Would I return home or find somewhere else to set up camp? I was overwhelmed with queries and underwhelmed with answers.

Q. When you set out, did you have a clear notion of where you were headed or has improvisation been your second mate and made your destination decisions for you?

A. I began with the premise of crossing the continent from north to south, going against the usual migratory byways via the pan-American route from Prudhoe Bay (Alaska) to Bahía Lapataia (Argentina). Nowadays, it is a system of inter-connected roads that stretches over 30,000 kilometers, joining the whole continent from one end to the other. Ultimately, thanks to improvisation, I covered 45,000 kilometers of roads, from gravel to asphalted surfaces, aboard every kind of acquatic-terrestrial transport imaginable: busses, trains, bicycles, motorcycles, automobiles, canoes, boats, caravans, you name it. Planes were only permitted for crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Madrid to Alaska and, later, returning from Buenos Aires back to Spain.

Q. Usually, the main motivation for a trip of this kind is more about meeting people than seeing a lot of places. Am I right?

A. Absolutely. It’s all about the human landscape rather than tourist attractions. It centers on dialoguing with others, instead of being tourist-obsessed with accumulating snapshots. Observation takes primacy over furtive glances.

Q. What did you leave behind in Spain when you did this?

A. My job as a journalist. A girlfriend whom I loved, family and friends … To some, my idea sounded like the brainchild of a madman rather than something premeditated.

Now that Iosu’s back, he offers us evidence that there was not an inkling of madness to his decision. He’s made a documentary called “The seam of the Americas”. A trailer follows.

We got it! After an exciting voting process, we have qualified for the startup 2.0 final. A total of ten European startups have been selected within 157 projects. It means we’ll have the chance to present trourist to a panel of Venture capitals, angel investors, Web 2.0 specialists  and other entrepreneurs from all around Europe.

In April 24th, it will take place in Bilbao an important competition, Startup 2.0, whose objetives are to promote and reward the European Internet startups.

We are looking forward to taking part in this event, that’s why we would appreciate your votes in the following link. Three easy steps that will help us a lot.

Thanks in advance!

Third week of development: we have been defining together with La Personnalité the last details of the web’s design and Linking Paths has started programming.

The biggest efforts have been made to integrate trourist with Facebook through Facebook Connect API. Thanks to this, Facebook users will be able to log in with just a click, connect with their Facebook friends, and export their trourist activity to Facebook.

On another hand, we have been racking our brains about the best claim to include to the logo. In spite of having very clear what to say, it has been really difficult to determine how to say it. The important message is that trourist is going to help you to experience your destinations based on what your friends have experienced before (always having in mind that experiences make one place so different from the others). Our proposal is KEEP TRAVELING REAL. What do you think about?

Recently, Mashables’s blogger Ben Parr has published an article referring to how users use social media for travel research.

He provides an overview of tips an tools for using social as a travel research tool. He recommends the following steps:

1.- Utilize Wikis and Blogs for Travel Education.

2.- Scope out locales using user reviews.

3.- Connect with locals.

4.- Share your travel experience.

We share the same vision Ben Parr does and we are working to make the creation, enjoyment and remember of a trip more social.

What about you? Do you use social media for travel research?