Day: May 30, 2023

A stranger photobombed her vacation video. They’ve been together for almost a decade

Ginna



CNN
 — 

Anna Faustino was careering down the sand dunes of Mui Ne, Vietnam, on a sand sled when she first saw Tom Rogers. Out of nowhere, she spotted him in the corner of her eye, rolling down the sand dune next to her, head first.

Anna turned to look at Tom, wide-eyed. She had a GoPro strapped to her – she’d been filming herself sand sledding – and now her camera captured Tom as he tumbled down, inelegantly, before crashing into the sand at the bottom.

“When I get to the bottom, I kind of stand up, dizzy, brush off the sand. And then I walk over to her and I’m like, ‘Hey, how you doing?’” Tom, who is from Wales in the UK, tells CNN Travel.

Anna was baffled but charmed. She laughed at the sand-covered Tom’s faux-casual demeanor and right away, she thought he seemed fun and “game for anything.”

While other travelers at Mui Ne were sitting back and watching, Tom wanted a turn on Anna’s sand sled. The two walked back up the dunes together and then Anna cheered on Tom as he headed back down, this time sledding rather than hurtling head first.

It was 2014. Anna was 26 and at the tail end of a year-long travel sabbatical. She’d spent years working as a teacher in her home country of the Philippines to fund her adventures.

“All I wanted to do was travel,” Anna tells CNN Travel. “I had given up my job and packed everything, and everything I owned was in a backpack. So when I met Tom, I was just in a place in my life where I was just having fun. I wasn’t looking for anything serious.”

As for Tom, he was a bit younger – “I was 22 back then, so I was a little silly,” is how he puts it. He’d just finished university in the UK. When he reached Vietnam, he was midway through his own year of traveling.

Tom had spotted Anna earlier that day at Mui Ne. Her enthusiasm for the sand sledding was infectious

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SO/Paris hotel: the height of glamour

Ginna

This posting is portion of FT Globetrotter’s tutorial to Paris

SO/Paris, a new luxury lodge on the Rive Droite, is bringing an injection of glitz to a quiet stretch of the 4th arrondissement earlier acknowledged for remaining a ghost city between Bastille and the Marais. With possibly the best sights of the whole metropolis and rooms starting up at €500, it positions alone as becoming a “five-star resort, but not a Palace hotel” — an significantly common way of demarcating itself from much more trad luxury choices — and is making waves between a nicely-heeled intercontinental trend established, who block-booked it for the past two Paris style weeks. Followers of the strike Netflix collection Emily in Paris have flocked to reserve space 1201, which stars for a nanosecond in collection 3 (filmed prior to the lodge even opened) — an encouraged piece of marketing. 

But it hasn’t usually been these a glamorous locale. Together with neighbouring Île de la Cité and Île St Louis, the space was the moment an island alone, recognized as Île Louviers, which was employed in the 18th century as a type of large woodpile for Paris’s timber. In 1841, Louis Philippe ordered it to be attached to the Rive Droite and it has remained so at any time since. 

The resort is part of a advanced on the Seine referred to as La Félicité, a former administrative making that also contains housing, business office area and a food stuff outlet © Thibaut Voisin

Established back from the Seine by one particular highway, SO/Paris occupies 1 facet of a reimagined 1960s intricate of administrative offices, which was greenlit in 2014 as component of mayor Anne Hidalgo’s “Réinventer Paris” task to carry lifetime to dormant locations of the city. The complex is now recognised as La Félicité, a mini village that prides itself on its mixité, comprising housing — each social and private — a crèche, youth hostel, a number of floors of business room and a incredibly excellent boulangerie.

SO/Paris by itself has been created by RDAI architects to be timeless still à la

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