So I haven’t been the best at updating Helen’s Travel Corner recently. Life has somewhat gotten in the way I suppose and blogging has been put on the back burner. Not that I haven’t wanted to blog, but more because time seems to have played a trick on me and disappeared before my eyes. I’ve also started a company – got the official paperwork in March  - so that has been taking up a lot of my energy and focus. That being said, here’s the quick and dirty highlights from April and May and now that we’re into June, I’ll try to better about writing more. Summer is into full swing and all the adventures that come with it.

Back in April I took the Bolt Bus to Boston for two nights for a Beijing reunion then flew JetBlue to San Diego for one night on business before hopping on a United flight to San Francisco. I was in the bay area for the Facebook f8 conference and stayed the weekend. During that trip, I crashed with Lily, my old roommate from Boston, and it was great to catch up with her. On Saturday we went sailing for free with Jenna, a Boston-turned SF cs-er friend, and her boyfriend David. Jenna, David and I hiked to the Tourist Club on Sunday. The Tourist Club is a German beer garden over a 100 years old hidden in the woods. A journalist from Brooklyn who I met at SXSW in Austin tipped me off about the spot and it is indeed a great discovery! It’s the perfect combination of hiking and beer consumption that one could ask for! Monday I worked from a startup in Silicon Valley which my inner geek loved. That night I took a Virgin flight back to NYC concluding the week. While I’m not a big fan of red eye flights, I was impressed with Virgin a lot. It was the epitome of sleek and sexy travel.

Other highlights include my first Yankees game, an overnight trip to Connecticut during Memorial Day weekend, the Queens beer garden, speak easy bars and discovering amazing brunch places in Manhattan. (Hmmm…a food and drinking theme seems to always emerge with me…)

Since last Thursday I was working on a project in San Diego. I’m sad to report that I didn’t see much more than my hotel room and the office I was working out of. We were in Del Mar and I was able to at least eat some good food of which a Pho place quickly became my favorite spot! It’s also becoming a tradition when I’m in California to at least hit up In-N-Out once. I’m now in Philly for just a night to spend some quality time with Mike and Sarah before they head to Canada for the summer…and then they’ll be back in the fall and will be getting married in October which I can’t be more excited about! Surprisingly it’s also much warmer here than in San Diego – I got to experience ‘June gloom’ first-hand and have to say that being back on the East coast is nice and warmer. Even though I’m sure I’ll be complaining about the humidity and heat before long! Tomorrow night I’ll be back in NYC.

This morning -ah hem 2:30pm – we did brunch and caught the USA-England game. Sarah’s taking a quick nap and Mike is picking up some beer before tonight’s festivities begin. This is their last hoorah and weekend in the states for the summer so tonight should be fun…you may or may not get more details on it .

Until next time, Go USA!

Happy Mother’s Day! I’ve got two special shout-outs today for two spectacular moms: Mama Lucy and my mom.

While I’ve only met Mama Lucy once on her first trip to the United States, she’s an inspiring woman. In her village in Tanzania she started a school with money raised from selling chickens. The school has grown and the students are among the top performing in the country. Today there’s a special project honoring moms all around the world while also helping Mama Lucy’s dream to build a home for 50 children become a reality. The project is To Mama with Love.

One of Mama Lucy’s biggest advocates is Epic Change, a non-profit that’s cutting edge in using social media to connect with people all over the world. This time is no different. For To Mama with Love people are asked to create a heartspace for a mom they’d like to honor and place it on the map as part of a collaborative art project. For each heart, a donation is made towards building the home. It’s the perfect mother’s day present to honor your mother and also help a wondeful cause at the same time.

The second shout-out goes to one mom that I owe everything to: my own mom! One of the biggest things I’m thankful for and that has shaped me the most is my mom’s continuous encouragement for me to pursue whatever it is that I want, regardless of what it is or where I want to travel. This support comes knowing that sometimes my ideas make the distant between us that much farther and they can be terrifying (there’s always a distinct tone of worry as extra security advice is shared with me before a trip). Thank you doesn’t quite seem like enough.

Of course you can find the heartspace I made her somewhere approximately over Tennessee. There’s still time to make a heartspace for a mother you want to honor too. Click here to get started.

This past week I was in charge of suggesting a place for drinks for a colleague and I to meet up at after work. Upon consulting my good friend Yelp, I found a place called Ducks Eatery. The location seemed central and a picture of sliders was showcased. I’m always a sucker for sliders so Ducks Eatery was selected and little did either one of us know exactly what I’d discovered.

It’s apparent that  I didn’t see anything beyond the mini hamburger picture and it’s also not surprising that I was a little confused to see a front desk after walking down a flight of stairs. This was a bar right? After turning a slight right I was dumbfounded to see that the bar was in fact a ping-pong hall with drinks and food to compliment the sport- 9,000 square feet of prime ping-pong space to be exact!

I do recommend the sliders but you can’t leave without playing at least one game of ping-pong. During off-hours it’s $10 for thirty minutes for a table and during peak hours, the price jumps to$20 for thirty minutes. There are even memberships for $650 per year! One of the best parts about playing is that you don’t have to go chasing missed ping-pong balls around. There’s a basket of balls at your disposal and staff scooping up the ones flying to the floor, which I contributed to a lot.

I definitely wasn’t expecting to be playing ping-pong that night and I really wasn’t expecting to see a ping-pong tournament either! Prior to the DJ setting up shop, we were a little suspicious of the die-hard players showing off at some of the tables. We’re talking athletic shorts, headbands and goggles. Among the amateur night-goers, there was clearly some people who were there for more than leisure activity and their calf muscles suggested that they’d played a fair share of table tennis. With money at stake and a tournament bracket on the wall, the pro players migrated to one area of the room. Among the introductions was a former ping-pong Olympian and a current North-East champ who has to be in high school given his voice was breaking! Needless to say, we were fascinated watching the tournament for a couple of rounds. Each player had their own serving style and theatrical moments whether throwing down or biting a paddle! The announcer threatened to eject a couple of players who were caught up in the moment a little too much. As you can imagine, it was entertaining to say the least.

Turns out that the place was created by quote ” food visionary and table tennis extraordinaire” Will Horowitz. For everyone not up on their table tennis athletes, I’ll save you the google or wikipedia search. Will was a professional junior table tennis player in his high school-aged years.

Who would have guessed? Just another reason to love New York and who knows, I may have even seen an upcoming athlete for the London Olympics!

Intrigued? Ducks Eatery can be found at 48 East 23rd St, between Park and Madison or you can visit its website here. Have you stumbled upon any interesting places you weren’t expecting to find? Share here!

Remember Amtrekker? He’s a friend who set out with a goal to cross off a list of 50 things he wanted to do before he died and wasn’t going home until they were crossed off. After 15 months he achieved his mission and now he’s got something else up his sleeve! I had the chance to hear about this project in person at SXSW in Austin last week and think it’s great and while it’s not exactly travel per say, it’s definitely an interesting adventure you may want to check out! Here’s the email and what to expect from Brett, soon to be synonymous with the “Greatest Employee in the World”! Read on…

Hey Team,

It’s been awhile since I’ve sent out an update but there is BIG news this time around! Bigger than Amtrekker? Who knows…maybe!

So what’s the new adventure? After some serious pondering I figured:

1) I think I nailed unemployment pretty well. Pretty tough to do homeless vagrant better than I did…if you don’t mind me saying. Something I haven’t tried in awhile? Employment.

and

2) I learned an awful lot about the Internet, New Media and the social web while wandering around the country like a technologically advanced hobo.

So it only seemed natural that I unilaterally decree myself the “Greatest Employee in the World,” start a new website and hold a WORLD WIDE employment contest where companies can compete over who “gets” to employ yours truly! As shamefully egotistical as that sounds I think this is actually going to be a REALLY fun adventure. Check out the website at: http://www.greatestemployeeintheworld.com or…if you’re prone to carpal tunnel the acronym redirects too. http://www.GEitW.com

The idea is that companies will enter the contest by making a job offer and posting a short video about their company. (That way even the companies that don’t win get plenty of free exposure.) Then visitors to the site will get to vote the job offers up and down and after two months the top 7 offers and 3 wildcard picks will be interviewed on video and those videos will be placed online for one more week of voting to bring the top 10 down to the final four. After that I’ll make the final decision!

The winner gets me taking the job offer in their company and working for them for six months WHILE I produce a short form documentary every week about the job, the company, the experience…think Amtrekker meets Dirty Jobs! Basically they will get two employees for the price of one (me doing said job and me being the social media community building, blog writing, documentary making guy that you all know and love) PLUS a mountain of buzz to start things off right.

Here’s why I’m so freaking excited about this: A mid-sized company without a huge marketing budget could get a GREAT deal (or I could see a larger company just using a tiny chunk of their marketing budget to do something new and original in this space)! AND, I get to move somewhere and do something I’ve never done before while producing entertaining videos and blogs to share with all of you guys! To paraphrase Michael Scott, “That’s a win-win…win.”

So if you have a twitter, facebook, blog, podcast, website or even something bigger I’d be forever grateful if you’d help me spread the  word! Also, if you own your own business that could use some attention (or if you know someone who does) here’s the link to enter the contest! (http://greatestemployeeintheworld.com/submit-3/)

Thank you all SO much for paying attention to Amtrekker and I have a feeling this could be even more fun! (More importantly, thanks for taking the time to read this absurdly long-winded email. )

Thank you!

Brett Rounsaville

Follow Brett on Twitter @GEitW

I came across my journal from when I was in Beijing and found a sketch that made me realize that the CCTV Tower is still my favorite building. It never failed to fascinate me regardless of the number of times I saw it. While I miss seeing the building on a regular basis in person, I’m reminded of it with pictures, my journal and my old blog post In Awe of the CCTV Tower, even though my pictures never seem to do it full justice. It’s funny to me how much of an impression a building has made on me but I guess that’s just another discovery made while globe trotting and I’m happy to have the memories recorded in one form or another.

This was taken summer of 2008.

Do you have a favorite building? What art, architecture or something similar has made an impression on you while traveling? Share here!