|
Information on the Travel Industry |
|
 Ticket packages for any Sporting, Theater or Concert event. For more information call 866-547-5362.
Hip Hop New York  From Times OnlineMarch 6, 2008
Hip Hop New York
Step beyond tourist Manhattan and take a rapping tour of hip hop in Harlem says Michael Moran
Ready to scratch at the Hip Hop Culture Centre in Harlem
Michael Moran
The New York most tourists see is confined to a narrow rectangle of Manhattan centred on Times Square and Central Park.
Beyond the Sex and the City world of Manhattan matrons shopping for shoes and Brits stocking up on iPods there are innumerable other pleasures waiting to be discovered uptown, if only you can find a suitable guide.
From the moment you step on the chartered Harlem Hip Hop Tours bus, which has been equipped with a DJ mixing station and a rump-shakingly loud sound system, you know that you’re in for a memorable experience.
Charismatic and personable tour guide MC PJ works hard to strip self-conscious tourists of their inhibitions and promote a party mood. It doesn’t take long before the cynical Britons onboard are sporting impossibly loud baseball caps and rapping along to even louder music.
There’s also a more conventional rolling talk about the history and culture New York’s most colourful district.
With a focus on the early pioneering days of Hip Hop music it’s slanted to please those 40-year old b-boys with substantial disposable income rather than devotees of more threatening contemporary rap styles.
There are digressions too into Hip Hop’s jazz and soul antecedents with brief stops at The Cotton Club and the Harlem Apollo, both of which are far smaller and more modest than their international reputations might suggest.
Definitely highlight of the tour was a visit to Harlem’s Hip Hop Culture Centre. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the DJing skills workshop resulted in anything but a raucous cacophony of inexpert scratching, but most participants were having too much fun dreaming up fanciful DJ stage names for themselves to notice.
Elder statesman (and arguably originator) of Hip Hop Kool Herc was on hand at the centre to say a few words and good naturedly pose for photographs with starstruck ageing Home Counties b-boys. Other rap luminaries are promised for future tours.
The tour ended with a lunch at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant. Few could finish the vast plates of delicious cornbread, fried chicken and ribs but it wasn’t for lack of desire.
Hip Hop tours offer a mix-and-match selection of authentic Harlem experiences, including club nights, Hip Hop dance lessons and even a recording studio visit. For those of us that grew up listening to the fat beats from across the Atlantic one of their tours really is an essential part of any New York visit.
For more information on Hip Hop Tours call 866-547-5362 | A hip-hop tour of New York's Harlem  From The Times
May 23, 2009
A hip-hop tour of New York's Harlem
Ginny Dougary and teenage sons take a guided tour of Harlem and the Bronx to find the roots of hip-hop
Ginny Dougary
So there I am with my solid crew, two teenage sons and me in Kangol berets, dripping in bling, on loan from our hosts Grandmaster Caz and Reggie Reg, the grandaddies of hip-hop, manoeuvring our way through Harlem and the Bronx in a tour bus rapping to “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under”.
What a great way to start a family holiday in New York. Caz (short for Casanova) is an A* teacher; no slacking permitted as he fires out questions, checks whether his pupils have been listening, points out places of interest — where such and such a gangsta rapper was shot dead (“We always pause here to pay a little love . . . a little respect”) — and lists the four cornerstones of hip-hop culture: the DJ, the MC, breakdancing and graffiti. And then there’s the clothes.
“What’s the difference between fashion and style?” Headmaster Caz asks. To my astonishment, son No 2 puts up his hand: “Style isn’t what you wear, it’s how you wear it.” “Excellent answer,” Caz replies.
Our first stop is the playground of an empty school in Harlem, walls ablaze with cartoon figures and slogans, which has been dubbed the Graffiti Wall of Fame. Caz, who does most of the talking, finds it amazing that what was once considered an “outlaw” activity has been transformed into Art — depending on who’s doing it and where it’s displayed.
Hip Hop New York
Step beyond tourist Manhattan and take a rapping tour of hip hop in Harlem says Michael Moran
New York's new cultural quarter
The High Line: New York's newest park
Central Park, your time is up - The High Line will be a thin strip of calm running through the city
10 best skyline views in New York
Background
The best places to eat in New York
The bloggers' travel guide to... New York
A New York hotel for under-21s
The underground bars of New York City
Staying in New York's Guggenheim Museum
Related Links
The High Line: New York's newest park
We learn how hip-hop started on August 11, 1973, when Kool Herc (whose father was a DJ in Jamaica and taught his son that James Brown was god) decided that his Party Must Go On.
After several nights of booming music that could be heard three blocks away, “it started getting out of hand”, Caz says, and the party moved from a tiny living room to nearby Cedar Park, which is where things became creative.
He leads us to what looks like a lamppost and says: “We needed electricity so you open this up and inside is a ‘thingummyjig’. You go to a hardware store and get a ‘thingummybob’ and you plug the thingummybob into the thingummyjig and you’re away. So the authoriteee of New York Citeee unwittingleee kickstarted hip-hop.”
Soon hip-hop parties were taking place all over the boroughs, from its birthplace in the Bronx to Brooklyn and Harlem — the boom box became known as “the Harlem briefcase” — while the Manhattanites remained in thrall to square old disco.
The first hip-hop single to enter the Top 40 was the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight in 1979, and the original words were written by none other than our tour leader who performs the number for us on the bus, urging us to sing along to his “signature” line: “I’m the C-A-S-A, the N-O-V-A, the rest is F-L-Y”. Grandmaster Caz fought successfully to get a writer’s credit but has never received a cent in royalties; all the more reason to book a ride on his illuminating, and massively fun, tour.
After we are deposited, now sadly bling and beret-less, the boys (boyz?) and I walk down the streets of Harlem, all the way to our serviced appartment near Times Square. This is something of a nostalgia-fest since the last time I spent any time in Harlem was back in 1981 when the boys’ father, Bruce, and I were in New York as part of an extended honeymoon.
He ended up working on 125th street, the main vein of Harlem, selling fruit and vegetables from a stall with Gillie who — a quarter of a century later — is the photographer for this trip.
Harlem, then, was considered something of a no-go area for many native New Yorkers. Bruce would always take the subway to work from our studio sublet in Greenwich Village, since most yellow cab drivers simply refused the fare.
Our Harlem circle of friends and acquaintances tended to be in a less respectable line of work than our downtown gang, and their recreational habits were more self-destructive. Manchu, the fruit-and-vege boss, was an engaging figure who lived on a diet of Thunderbird wine and various heavy-duty drugs which, sadly, did for him in the end.
The Apollo Theatre, Cotton Club and Lenox Lounge, whose heyday was in the 1930s, are still in operation and thrive under the new tourism, as does Sylvia’s famous soul food restaurant.
The Body Shop, The Gap and other international brands have long since moved in, along with Bill Clinton’s headquarters, and the magnificent brownstone terraced houses that were once derelict and used as shooting galleries for junkies (Manchu once offered me a look around, but I declined) are restored and selling for millions.
On Sunday we returned to Harlem on a gospel tour. On our way to church we stopped to admire a number of striking historical buildings which, rather shamefully, I wasn’t even aware of as a twentysomething. Sylvan Terrace is a double row of wooden two-storey houses, very quaint with their ivy-green shutters, built in 1882 across a cobblestoned street.
This was the carriage drive for a substantial Georgian mansion, Mount Morris, built in 1765 for Colonel Roger Morris, a Royalist, and his Dutch wife. George Washington used it as his headquarters during the Battle of Harlem Heights in 1776. In 1810 the wealthy French-Caribbean wine merchant Stephen Jumel and his wife, Eliza Bowen, restored it.
Jumel died in mysterious circumstances, according to our guide, and his widow — who had become the richest person in New York — went on to marry Aaron Burr, Vice-President to Thomas Jefferson, in the front parlour.
The church service, itself, was a bit of a letdown and too long for our unGodbothering tastes. I loved the way the congregation dressed up and the warm, sprawling family atmosphere. But the gospel singing was distinctly tame (its members, we were told, are recovering addicts) and not a patch on the choir I saw at a gospel brunch in Jimmy’s, a celebrity hangout in Harlem in the late Nineties. The singers were ultra-lively and rejoiced in such bonkers lyrics as “My Lord is a washing machine”.
The rest of our week was packed with all the enjoyable New York clichés: the free entertainment of opera-singing, rollerblading show-offs in Central Park; carb-filled breakfasts in the Empire Diner; oysters in Grand Central station; the Rockettes in Radio City Hall; jazz in the West Village; Polish food in the East Village; ice- skating at the Rockefeller Centre.
After a break in Philadelphia we returned for a last night at the Mandarin hotel in a suite of Madame Jumel-like luxury. The boys were thrilled with their eyrie views of Central Park. The staff, with the minimum of fuss, converted the sofas into beds while we were dining downstairs and both sons pronounced the hamburgers “excellent” and the female diners “fit”.
Earlier, I had a half-a-day in the company of a personal shopper, Deanna, who picked me up in a white stretch limo. We were, alas, a mismatch; she being a willowy Sex and the City girl, while I am more Rosemary and Thyme (not Felicity Kendal, the other one).
Deanna was frank: my look “definitely needed updating”. Thus I found myself, in slight panic mode, buying absurdly feminine shoes, a white coat and Prada boots, most of which have remained in the wardrobe. I should have listened more carefully to the hip-hop headmaster or, indeed, my son: “It’s not what you wear, it’s the way that you wear it.”
Bang that, shoppers, to the boogie, boogie beat.
For more information on Hip Hop tours call 866-547-5362 | Summer cruise prices 'ridiculously low' Summer cruise prices 'ridiculously low'
Like this story? Share it with Yahoo! Buzz
This item was written by Johanna Jainchill, who covers cruising for Travel Weekly. Jainchill is serving as Guest Editor of The Cruise Log this week while USA TODAY Cruise Editor Gene Sloan is on vacation.
How good are the cruise deals this summer?
Some people in the industry, like Norwegian Cruise Lines CEO Kevin Sheehan, say prices are “ridiculously low”.
We asked some travel agents to send us some examples of what they thought were the top summer deals this year.
And some of the prices they are advertising would seem too good to be true in any other economy. Especially in Alaska and Europe, where until this year, demand was so high cruise lines were able to get their best premiums.
Now, it’s where consumers can find some of the best deals.
CruiseOne is offering a seven-night Holland American Line cruise from Seward, Alaska starting at $349.
America's Vacation Center (AVC) is advertising seven-night Alaska cruises starting at $399 on both Holland and Princess Cruises, and a seven-night Celebrity cruise out of Seward on June 5 that starts at $449 - with a free coupon book for onboard spending.
Vicki Freed, Royal Caribbean’s senior vice president of sales, said Royal’s seven-night Alaska cruise on the Radiance of the Seas, starting at $499 in July, would cost “more than double” a year ago.
Also this summer, the airfare to Europe could set you back more than seven days at sea.
For $599, AVC has a seven-night cruise out of Barcelona on Norwegian Gem’s August 30th departure.
Brad Tolkin, president of CruiseOne and Cruises Inc., said that the deals get better the higher you go.
“The discounts on the premium and luxury lines is double on a percentage basis than what it is on the mega ships,” he said.
For example, CruiseOne is offering a twelve-night Scandinavia/Russia cruise from $1,499 on Azamara Cruises in July. | MLT Vacations Enhances Influenza Advisory Policy  Effective May 1, 2009, MLT Vacations has enhanced its Influenza Advisory Policy for the NWA WorldVacations and Continental Airlines Vacations® brands, to provide more flexibility for customers traveling to Mexico through May 31, 2009. The Worry-Free Vacations policy remains the same through June 15, 2009.
In addition, the rebooking option for all three brands has been adjusted to allow customers to rebook without penalty to another destination for departure within 21 days before or after the original departure date.
Please be advised that we have been receiving higher than normal call volume, and you may experience a longer wait time on the phone lines. | | |
|
|
This Weeks Hot Spots!
Presented by Continental Airlines Vacations
We’ve tracked down these hot deals to our top destinations to make it easy for you to save on your next vacation. | 
This Weeks Top Trips!
Presented by Delta Vacations
Our travel experts have been working hard to find these money saving deals to our most popular destinations. | 
2nd Aruba Veterans Tennis Invitational priced from $1050 per person!
La Cabana Beach & Racquet Club, 11/3-11/7/2010
The time is here to invite you to the 4th Aruba Veterans Tennis Invitational
We will again inaugurate this Special Tournament with our usual "Champagne Night" with Live entertainment. | 
GET UP & GO! Great Deals on last minute travel!
Limited Time Offer!
Updated every Wednesday with hot prices to hot destinations. Presented by USAIRWAYS VACATIONS.
Specials for week of 07/27/2010;
Air, & 2 nights to Las Vegas priced from $186. Air & 2 nights to Orlando, Fl. | 
Carnival's Best Deals!
So many Deals on so many Cruises to so many places!
Carnival features year-round sailings aboard 22 fabulous floating resorts (the newest and most innovative fleet at sea) to a wide selection of popular vacation destinations. |
|
