Authors: NGUYEN T-H.; KING B.; TURNER L.

Source: Tourism Culture & Communication, Volume 4, Number 2, 2003 , pp. 95-107(13)

Publisher: Cognizant Communication Corporation

Abstract: This article examines the influence of cultural factors on the travel behavior of Vietnamese migrants (Viet kieu) resident in Australia, with particular reference to return visits to Vietnam. A conceptual framework of cultural influence on migrant travel behavior is proposed to explain the relationships between migrant adapted culture and travel behavior. The findings suggest that the Viet kieu maintain certain traditional Vietnamese cultural values and Confucian ideals, while actively adopting behavioral characteristics from mainstream culture during their gradual integration into the adopted society. Significant differences in cultural and travel behavioral characteristics are evident between the Viet kieu, their relatives in Vietnam, and mainstream Australians. Such differences appear to have some connection with the individualism of the West and the collectivism of the East. Issues of identity, rootlessness, belonging, and the relationship between past and present are associated with the decision to travel and subsequent experience of travel to the homeland. The article concludes by discussing implications for future studies.

Cite as:Rowley G, Wilson S, 1975, "The analysis of housing and travel preferences: a gaming approach" Environment and Planning A 7(2) 171 - 177

The analysis of housing and travel preferences: a gaming approach

G Rowley, Susan Wilson

Received 20 November 1974

Abstract. This paper represents a report on the study of housing and travel preferences both of coloured immigrants and of native British within the city of Sheffield, England. The investigation uses gaming procedures to facilitate the recording of raw data which reflects the preference patterns of the respondents. Certain hypotheses are proposed and the statistical analysis of the gaming procedures is developed. Simple chi2 goodness-of-fit tests are used to assess the allocation of preferences over the various elements for the two populations considered. The general approach can be quite readily extended to more complex situations. With hindsight, improvements to the initial game format are suggested.

MICHAEL CRONIN's job as a college admissions officer took him to India two or three times a year, so he had already seen the usual sites - temples, monuments, markets - when one day he happened across a flier advertising "slum tours."

"It just resonated with me immediately," said Mr. Cronin, who was staying at a posh Taj Hotel in Mumbai where, he noted, a bottle of Champagne cost the equivalent of two years' salary for many Indians. "But I didn't know what to expect."

Soon, Mr. Cronin, 41, found himself skirting open sewers and ducking to avoid exposed electrical wires as he toured the sprawling Dharavi slum, home to more than a million. He joined a cricket game and saw the small-scale industry, from embroidery to tannery, that quietly thrives in the slum. "Nothing is considered garbage there," he said. "Everything is used again."

Mr. Cronin was briefly shaken when a man, "obviously drunk," rifled through his pockets, but the two-and-a-half-hour tour changed his image of India. "Everybody in the slum wants to work, and everybody wants to make themselves better," he said.

Slum tourism, or "poorism," as some call it, is catching on. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty - and in many ways surprising - slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he's running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.

From the website:

WeFi makes WiFi easy. Our software makes it easy for you to find and connect to WiFi networks. With WeFi, each user contributes to the rest of the community by using the client and discovering more networks around. All this is reported to a centralized server and shared seamlessly among all users, resulting in easy connection. With our software you can also map your favorite hotspots, find your friends, share your WiFi with other WeFi members and do many other cool things.

Nice package of portable applications.  The whole magilla will fit comfortably on a 512Mb USB key.  It has things like openoffice, firefox & thunderbird, Sage, Filezilla, and several others.  But get this, it also has XAMPP, a portable package of Apache httpd, PERL & MySQL - all configured and ready to go...

Tell me this isn't cool. 

June 11, 2006
Footsteps
Alice Munro's Vancouver
By DAVID LASKIN

IN Alice Munro's Vancouver nobody eats sushi. Nobody jogs along the seawall or browses Granville Street galleries or shops for organic herbs at the Granville Island market. Ms. Munro, the 74-year-old Canadian whom the novelist Jonathan Franzen dubbed "the best fiction writer now working in North America," set a handful of her marvelous short stories in the damp British Columbian metropolis, and the urban geography is so exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable. Young but hopelessly uncool, lustful without being sexy, dowdy, white, blind to its own staggering beauty, Ms. Munro's Vancouver is an outpost where new wives blink through the rain and wonder when their real lives are going to begin.

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