Travel Writer Wanted

One of the largest publishers of In Your Pocket guides is currently looking for a new writer.

If you think you have what it takes to write witty, informative and fresh content under great pressure, send an email with your CV to editor@inyourpocket.com.

While experience is good, it is not always necessary. Indeed, some of our best writers had little experience before joining us.

What you will need is: a commitment to relocate to, and a knowledge of, Central and Eastern Europe; a love of cigarette smoke and railway stations smelling of stale onions; a disdain for anyone who carbon offsets their flights and generally worries about climate change; a desire to spend long nights trying out every grotty student bar in town.

You also need to be a native English speaker.

How Does an In Your Pocket (IYP) Come About?

Easy.

Someone who likes our products gets in touch with us at the email address publisher@inyourpocket.com, and after a brief exchange of mails and a phone call or two, we send out a full information pack that gives people an idea of what it takes to publish an IYP guide.

Interest in publishing a guide usually collapses at this stage, when the realisation of what it takes to publish a city guide becomes apparent. However, those who have been completely bitten by the Pocket bug and who are committed to publishing a guide bite the bullet and go ahead and produce business plans. If the In Your Pocket Council (known as the Pocketburo) is impressed with what it sees, we give the nod and the applicant signs up with us as a licensee for five years.

So what kind of people sign up with us?

First and foremost a publisher of IYP guides has to have a genuine love for their city, and a desire to share both its best and its worst with a wider audience. IYP guides are respected for their insider knowledge and their accuracy. Fierce standards - as laid down in the Editorial Style Book, whose rules and regulations are strictly enforced - have to be maintained. Fact checking and researching can be tiresome, but they are jobs that have to be done. Publishing an IYP is not all about writing witty restaurant reviews (though that is a big part of it...).

If you have a desire to tell the world more about your city, and have the commitment to help us spread our brand worldwide - we ultimately want a guide in every city - then maybe you could be the publisher of the next In Your Pocket. You will need dedication, entrepreneurial spirit, some start-up capital, supportive friends and family, and to realise that publishing of any kind is no get rich quick scheme. As somebody once said, "if you want to make a small fortune in publishing, start with a large fortune."

For more information, contact us at publisher@inyourpocket.com. It could be the beginning of something big.

Father Ted-a-like

We mean My Lovely Horse, of course. Dustin now has the thumbs up from Geldof, despite rumours the Eurovision luvvies want the turkey out. VOTE DUSTIN!

Dustin the Turkey

Dustin the Turkey - Ireland's most famous fake fowl - has won the public vote to represent his nation in this year's Eurovision Song Contestant. Famously, the country's string of wins in the 80s and 90s brought RTE - the national broadcaster - to its financial knees, and many have suggested this Father Ted My Lucky Horse-style scenario is yet another attempt to lose the competition. Judge for yourself here. Irlande Douze Pointes.

Sounds like a winner to us.

Meanwhile, in Turkmenistan

For the viewers of Turkmenistan's popular nightly news programme, Vatan, it was another routine bulletin. But as the newsreader began the 9pm broadcast, viewers across the central Asian country spotted something unusual crawling across the studio table: a large brown cockroach.

The cockroach managed to complete a whole lap of the desk, apparently undetected, before disappearing. The programme, complete with cockroach, was repeated at 11pm that night.

It was only at 9am the following day that horrified officials from Turkmenistan's ministry of culture discovered the cockroach's guest appearance. And that, perhaps, should have been the end of the matter, the mildly entertaining footage being consigned to the occasional airing by the Turkmenistan equivalent of Denis Norden on a telly bloopers show.

But the consequences of this particular cockroach's impromptu five minutes of fame were immediate and severe.

The country's president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, took news of the insect so badly that he responded by firing no fewer than 30 workers from the main state TV channel, the news website Kronika Turkmenistan reported yesterday.

Before the cockroach debacle, Berdymukhamedov had instructed Turkmenistan's minister of culture, Gulmurat Muradov, to revamp the country's Soviet-era TV channel. However, a new ministerial supervisory committee founded to carry out this task only worked 9am to 6pm - allowing the cockroach to make its audacious run undetected.

Berdymukhamedov became leader of the oil-rich former Soviet republic in December 2006, following the sudden death of Turkmenistan's longstanding and flamboyantly authoritarian ruler Saparmurat Niyazov, who also had run-ins with state TV executives. Several executives were sacked after drunken technicians failed to screen the new year's address to the nation by Niyazov.

They eventually managed to get the bulletin on air at 3am.

Those sacked in the cockroach debacle included journalists, directors, camera operators, and technical staff, the website reported. Yesterday nobody from the Turkmen embassy in Moscow was available for comment.

Berdymukhamedov has been credited with improving relations with the west, and embarking at home on a series of mild liberal reforms.

He has announced the opening of internet cafes in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan's capital, and reintroduced foreign languages to the school curriculum.

Last March the president restored pensions to more than 100,000 elderly citizens and in January he reversed another of his predecessor's more bizarre bans - on opera and ballet performances.

"Our flourishing nation should not stand separate from the world," Berdymukhamedov told state-run television. He added: "It absolutely should have a worthy operatic theatre and a worthy state theatre." The first opera would be performed in six or seven months, he suggested.

Berdymukhamedov has moved to end Turkmenistan's isolation from the rest of the world in other ways too. He has overseen attempts to attract larger numbers of foreign tourists to Turkmenistan, including the building of a multibillion pound tourist resort on the Caspian Sea. The president has also dropped in on Washington.

Berdymukhamedov's apparent dislike of cockroaches may have something to do with his previous career as a dentist. He graduated from Turkmenistan's state medical institute in 1979, completing a PhD in medical sciences in Moscow, and working as a dentist from 1980 to 1995. In December 1997 he was appointed minister for health.

(The Guardian)

We've had some abuse in our time but...

Writing a city guide often means annoying the hell out of restaurant owners. We've faced down libel threats, won two libel cases and remain as committed to being as impartial today as we were when we began back in 1992.

In all our days though we have never come across abuse like this...

Though we will be checking our bills a bit more thoroughly from now on.

Bucharest to Close its Airports for Three Days

No, you really couldn't make this one up.

During the three days of this year's Nato Summit - being held in Bucharest from April 2-4 - the city's two airports will be forced to close by government decree, get this, "for the benefit of passengers."

All air traffic on those days will be redirected to Constanta or Timisoara or - in all likeliness - canceled.

What a country.

Read the story (in Romanian) here.

Don't Spare Romania's Horses

'End of a way of life' says the reporter. Damn right, a poverty-stricken one.

It is astonishing that all those who bemoan the disappearance of this 'way of life' don't actually live that life.

I think you will find most people, given the choice, would take car over horse and cart any day.

The Love Train

First children's play areas, then this.

What are the Germans going to put on their trains next?

The Belfast Media Frenzy Goes On...

Lithuanian beavers breach Belarusian border

Officials in Belarus have fingered Lithuanian beavers for breaching the EU border between Lithuania and Belarus. The beavers are accused of engineering a dam across a river that forms part of the border. Apparently, some Belarusian beavers may have been involved, but according to Belarusian officials, the Lithuanian beavers are the masterminds of the whole dam operation. The dam will be destroyed to maintain border integrity and the beavers will be relocated.

Details: Interfax.

Beaver
Originally uploaded by Tancread.

Let Them Build Mud Huts!

Claudia Ciobanu doesn't live in a mud hut. I mean, I do not know that for a fact, as aside from the fact that she writes for Inter Press Service (IPS), a mouthpiece for various environmental groups and their supporters, I know nothing about Miss Ciobanu. I would imagine, however, that like most Romanians she does not live in a mud hut, despite her latest article which puts forward the case for mud huts as a solution to Romania's housing crisis and to climate change. I would also guess that she doesn't want to ever actually live in a mud hut either.

So quite why she feels able to suggest that Romanian peasants start building mud huts en bloc is beyond me. I mean, if a mud hut is not good enough for her, why should it be good enough for anyone else?

I visit the Romanian countryside a lot. And yet in all my travels I have yet to come across a single peasant who actually wants to give up his or her wooden/brick house and exchange it for a mud hut. In fact, even those who do are pretty keen on moving into something a bit more modern, with heating, air conditioning, running water and reliable electricity.

As Rob Harris put it so well late last year on Spiked, let's ditch this nostalgia for mud.