- There’s no doubt it’s beautifully made, but this compilation guide to 150 weekend mini-vacations from The New York Times feels like one massive nostalgia trip
- We can only imagine its purpose is to remind the reader of places not yet visited, to which they can dash, mobile in hand, to snap those Instagrammable moments
The New York Times: 36 Hours World, 150 Cities from Abu Dhabi to Zurich, edited by Barbara Ireland, Taschen, 2.5/5 stars
The Codex Calixtinus is a 225-page medieval text in five volumes, with authorship attributed to 12th-century Pope Calixtus II and stored in the bowels of St James Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Volume five is a set of instructions and advice for pilgrims walking the legendary Camino de Santiago from the French side of the Pyrenees to the final resting place of Saint James in the north west of the Iberian Peninsula. It's what might be considered the first iteration of Lonely Planet: Europe on a Shoestring.
The codex included, in its own way, the now familiar formula: History, Getting There, What to See, What to Do, Where to Stay, even Where to Eat. And after the "Which churches make false claims to housing holy relics", there is as much of a Nightlife section as you could ask from a 12th century pilgrim's guide.
And for about 1,000 years, that was pretty much the format. Right up until the internet relegated travel guides to the same fate as video rental and record shops. Whispered recommendations in overnight train carriages became collated TripAdvisor star ratings, getting pleasantly lost in a new place was now metadata for Google Maps.
Woe betide having to navigate the Tokyo Metro using your own brain, having to ask a few locals for directions, which beckons that other sacred relic " the phrase book.
It's not good or bad, it's just what happened. So what is this big, dictionary-sized thing here, with these little finger divots in the pages for easy access to section A-C, D-K, etc, and what is The New York Times: 36 Hours World, 150 Cities from Abu Dhabi to Zurich but a 900-year nostalgia trip for those who can afford international long weekend mini trips?
So what are you supposed to do with this thing? It's the same old Lonely Planet prose listing, tailored to the Twitter-span generation set adrift now that Anthony Bourdain won't be doing any more Layovers, but originally published in The New York Times so you feel it's all highbrow.
The book is what it says it is: Abu Dhabi to Zurich with lots of Bangkok-Paris-Rome in between, with Milwaukee thrown in too, because, you know, this beautifully bound and embossed collection of newspaper columns isn't at all an elitist outing.
There's no city information here you can't get elsewhere, but this is all about the packaging, the target readers being those of us who want to count in our hands " to smell the pages on which are printed " the number of cities in the book we've already been to, and thus feel good about ourselves.
Once those endorphins dissipate, we assess the percentage of cities in the book not yet visited, and feel the mandatory guilt that propels us, as it propels all humankind " just that in our case it's to the nearest cheap-flight aggregate website. We take the cheapest ticket to somewhere we haven't been yet " hotel included? Bonus! " and think about all the Instagrammable moments we shall create and post (because beyond the essential animating force of guilt, it's the sweet effusion of vanity that will complete the cycle).
Pack quick, pack light, that flight was cheap because it leaves in two hours. Leave your 36 Hours World on the coffee table before you leave, turn it just so, fluff the edges a bit to make it look worn. It's OK, you can point out to your friends that you do in fact own it when you get back. Now get a move on, you modern pilgrim " lock the door, flag down a cab, and stare at your phone all the way to the airport.
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