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Category / Off-Beat & Little Known

A French Youtuber went to Visit China’s Fake Paris for Himself

It’s been over a decade since we first blogged (yes, back when we called it blogging) about the European clone towns of China, including the city on the outskirts of Shanghai built around a fake Eiffel Tower with a replica Champs Elysées and rows of Haussmann-inspired Parisian townhouses. The gated community of Tianducheng, built in…

The Little-Known Los Angeles Cemetery Where LA’s Hidden History is Buried

There are plenty of dead people in Los Angeles. Some of them are even in the ground. Forest Lawn is very formal. Tidy. Hollywood Forever feels as much like a park as it does a boneyard, a chic place to commune with the dead. That’s not Valhalla. There are ghosts in the jet trails. It’s not just…

What happens in Pinecraft stays in Pinecraft: Where the Amish Vacation

The Amish, like everyone else (or perhaps more than everyone else) deserve to get away from it all and put their feet up every once in a while. So where is a devout Christian who maintains minimal interaction with the modern world to vacation? Florida of course! That is, Pinecraft, Florida, aka the “Amish Las…

The Enchanted Cities Hiding Inside Theatres

For some lucky theatregoers, a trip to see the latest B-Movie at their local picture house also means a trip across space and time. It’s all thanks to the atmospheric movie palaces and theatres of the early 20th century, whose construction brought veritable mini-cities, from old Spanish streets to lost temples of Ancient Egypt, into…

The Desert Town Built Around a Mirage, Come True

When I imagine a mirage, I think of epic tales of adventure and perilous journeys through the desert where our hero is dangerously lost, hallucinating in the barren landscape ahead. Rarely does the mirage turn out to be something real. Except this one did, and you don’t have to be a character in a storybook…

A Spiritual Revisiting of the Lost Beatles Ashram

‘Roll up! Roll up! for the mystery tour’… a mystery indeed, given the chaos that subsequently engulfed The Beatles on their return from India to the West in 1968. Following the ground breaking success of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Fab Four plus an entourage of no less than 60 people (including wives,…

Inside the Real Noah’s Ark buried on an Arctic Island

In the event of Armageddon, I think I know where I’ll be headed now. Buried 390 feet deep inside a sandstone mountain on an island between Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the doomsday vault, is home to the millions of seeds that could save a post-apocalyptic world. These are the…

Update from his Ghost Town: Time Capsules, Mine Exploration & Disaster

It’s been 7 months since our Zoom Date with the guy who bought a ghost town and 8 months since he started living there alone as the pandemic took hold of the United States. A lot has happened in the abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo since. We’ll start with the bad heartbreaking news. The…

I Went to Rome’s Last Surviving Adult Theatre So You Don’t Have To

The Romans are famous for a lot of things – building and conquering empires, trade, art, food – and don’t forget sex! Pompeii was excavated at the end of the 19th century and the archeologists who uncovered the city found themselves surrounded by erotic images at every turn. For more than a hundred years, there…

A Taste of Vintage Italia

Let’s not pretend that a summer in Italy doesn’t revolve around food, food … and food, discovering charming family-run restaurants and uncovering the secret pasta recipes of Italian grandmothers from Milan to the caves of Matera. But this is not your stereotypical Italian story of family and good food. At Osteria del Castello, housed inside an old court of a…

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