Posts made during June, 2009
Karaoke World Tour – England
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
We’re off to England for Part Five of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour and the most visited place in all of England – Blackpool. In fact, with 120 000 holiday beds, Blackpool has more tourist beds than the whole of Portugal. What is even more amazing (and frightening) is that Blackpool attracts 11 million visitors annually, which is more than twice the number of people that visit Australia every year. And as a draw for tourists, nothing comes close to Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach (an amusement park)… (read more)
Karaoke World Tour – Sweden
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
In Part Four of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour we’re off to Sweden. And Finland. Well, it’s actually in the middle of the two on the overnight Stockholm to Turku ferry (this was part of my ‘Ferry’ chapter for my book Planes, Trains & Elephants). I was leading a group of Hong Kong Chinese on a Russia/Scandinavia tour for tour company Top Deck and my passengers were very, very excited because there was an all-you-can-eat buffet followed by karaoke. I both love and loathe buffets. I love them because you have so much food to choose from, and I loathe them because you have so much food to choose from… (read more)
Karaoke World Tour – Kyrgyzstan
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Not much to talk about this week, so due to popular demand, here is Part Three of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour. I was in Kyrgyzstan as part of the research for my book Where’s Wallis?and on my final night I hit the streets of the capital Bishkek in search of karaoke (as any good travel writer would!). It was there that I found most of the young cool set of Bishkek loitering on the footpaths of the main drag Chuy Prospektisi. Kids loiter on city streets at night in every city in the world, but these kids had a better reason to hang about than most. Every twenty metres or so… (read more)
Karaoke World Tour – Vietnam
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Part Two of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour takes you to Vietnam – although it does seem to have much the same storyline as Part One (ie: lots of drinking and singing). I promise that not ALL my Karaoke World Tour stories involve me getting drunk.
I was in Hue in January 2003 as part of the research for the Tet celebrations (Vietnamese New Year) for my book The Naked Man Festival. I was on one my usual aimless wanders down side streets looking for the ‘real’ Hue where I found Tet celebrations in full swing as I peeped into people’s houses and saw lots of card games going on and plenty of drinking. I was… (read more)
The Couch Surfing tidal wave.
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
In August last year I posted a blog about couchsurfing.com reaching an amazing 700,000 members, but while I was away on my last trip the website hit the MILLION mark! And since then they have snuck up to 1,167,005 members with close to 15,000 joining EVERY week. Now, I’m not very good at maths, but at this growth rate I figure that the entire world will have their couch registered by 2025. There are now 232 countries represented and 59,599 cities. I found this info on the stats page on the couchsurfing website. I love stats. I hope you do too because I’m just about to share a whole bunch of them with you… (read more)
Karaoke World Tour – USA
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
My name is Brian Thacker and I am a karaoke addict. I do love my Karaoke and in my travels I’m always on the look out for a karaoke bar so I can add another country to my World Karaoke Tour. I’m now up to 29 countries that I’ve sung karaoke in (yes, and I know it’s sad). So, as a special treat to you dear readers I’m going to do a semi-regular blog (and mostly when I’ve got nothing else to talk about) about some of my karaoke experiences.
I first discovered karaoke back in 1989 at a bar in Waikiki. Actually it was the large sign… (read more)