【推荐1】Come and see the Snowman

Experience the magic of The Snowman in a whole new way this Christmas. Carrot Performers are the world’s most experienced performers of The Snowman film. They are delighted to be touring with their Christmas show again this December. The show will feature a live orchestra.

The concert will open with a Christmas Medley (集锦) followed by a fun introduction to the orchestra. All the instruments are presented in a fun way, offering young audience members the valuable experience of seeing – and hearing – the instruments individually.

Following this there will be one of two exclusive (独家的) films:

A Donkey’s Tale

The world premiere ( 首 映 ) of a brand new work created especially for us by Daniel Whibley. Set amidst the wild landscape (景色) of Connemara in the west of Ireland, it tells the heartwarming story of Dillon, an ordinary donkey with an extraordinary dream that takes him on a journey that will change his life.

The Bear and the Piano

This beautiful tale of music, friendship and adventure was first brought to the big screen in 2017. With music by Daniel Whibley played live by a professional orchestra, and a narration ( 旁 白 ) recorded by superstar Joanna Lumley this creation looks set to become a family favorite for the next generation.

● For CHESTER performances, please telephone: 01244 500959 (open 9-5 Mon-Sat)

● For WINCHESTER performances, please telephone: 01962 857275 (open 10-4 Mon-Fri, 11-4 Sat, closed Sunday and public holidays)

● For all other performances, please telephone: 0344 8000 410 (open 9-9 Mon- Sat & 10-5 Sundays and Bank Holidays. Calls will be charged at your local rate)

Tour dates & ticket prices

● Chester Cathedral (+A Donkey’s Tale)- 25/12/2018 2:00 pm

Center seats: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £15; Adult £21

Rear seats: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £11; Adult £19

Restricted (受限制的) view: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £9; Adult £15

● Winchester Cathedral (+The Bear and the Piano)- 26/12/2018 5:00 pm

General Tickets: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £16; Adult £19

Theatre Card Members: £16

● Beverley Minster (+The Bear and the Piano)- 27/12/2018 6:00 pm

Center seats: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £15; Adult £20; Senior (Over 60) £15

North Aisle (走道): Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £10; Adult £16; Senior (Over 60) £10

South Aisle: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £10; Adult £16; Senior (Over 60) £10

Rear seats: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £12; Adult £18; Senior (Over 60) £12

● Durham Cathedral (+A Donkey’s Tale)- 28/12/2018 7:00 pm

Front seats: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £16; Adult £20 Side Aisles: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £14; Adult £18 Rear seats: Child (18 Months to 17 Years) £11; Adult £16

【推荐2】More than great drinks, great rewards

Enjoy all the benefits and more with your membership to our Loyalty Program!

Whenever you pay with your membership account, you’ll earn a Star.

Collect more Stars, earn more rewards.

Three ways to join us

Buy a Starbucks Card handy to create an account.

Track your Stars online or through the mobile app, and we’ll send an email when you’ve earned a reward.

You can also join from your phone.

Download the Starbucks? App.

One of the most exciting benefits of being a member is using our mobile app to: pay for purchases; view your Stars and rewards; access iTunes? Pick of the Week; see current offers.

Or you can join with specially marked coffee purchased at the grocery store.

Enter your Starcode (limit 2 per day).

Look for the Starcode symbol on specially marked Starbucks products where you buy groceries.

Three levels with increasingly greater rewards

To reach each level in our Loyalty Program, you need to collect more Stars. ( Remember, to earn a Star you must pay with a registered Starbucks Card. )

Welcome level

To earn your first rewards, just register a Starbucks Card.

Birthday drink or treat on us; birthday coupon (优惠券) for 15% off a purchase at StarbucksStore.com.

Green level

Collect 5 Stars within 12 months and you’ll be in the Green level.

What is included in the Welcome level plus

★Free in-store refills (续杯) on hot or iced brewed coffee or tea

Gold level

Collect 30 Stars within 12 months and you’re at the Gold level.

What is included in the Green, level plus

★A free food or drink item after another 12 Stars earned

★Personalized Gold Card

【推荐1】Tourism is a leisure activity, whose prework means just the opposite. Acting as a tourist is one of the clear characteristics of being "modern" and the popular concept of tourism is that, it is organized within particular place and occurs for a period of time, which is arranged beforehand. Tourist relationships arise from a movement of people to, and their stay in, various destinations. This necessarily involves some movement, that is the journey, and a period of stay in a new place or places. The journey and the stay are by definition outside the normal places, of residence and work, and are of a short-term and temporary nature, and there is a clear intention to return home within a relatively short period of time.

Modern societies engage in such tourist practices. New socialized forms of transportation and hotel facilities have developed in order to cope with the mass character of the gazes of tourists, as opposed to the individual character of travel. Places are chosen to be visited and be gazed upon because there is an anticipation (期望) especially through daydreaming and fantasy of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those who have been there. Such anticipation is also constructed and stays through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as films, TV, literature, magazines, records and videos which construct and reinforce this daydreaming.

Tourists tend to visit features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday experience. Such aspects are viewed because they are thought to be in some sense out of the ordinary. The viewing of these tourist sights often involves different forms of social patterning with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or townscape than is normally found in everyday life. People hang around these sights in a way that they would not normally do in their home environment and the vision is objectified or captured through photographs, postcards films and so on which enable the memory to be endlessly reproduced and recaptured.

One of the earliest research paper on the subject of tourism is Boorstin's analysis of the "pseudo-event" (1964) where he argues that contemporary Americans cannot experience "reality" directly but are happy with "pseudo-events". Isolated from the host environment and the local people, the mass tourist travels in guided groups and finds pleasure in fake or man-made attractions, and is cheated into enjoying the pseudo-events and disregarding the real world outside. Over time the images generated of different tourist sights lead to a closed self- perpetuating(自我延续的)system of a false belief that provides the tourist with the basis for selecting or deciding potential places to visit. Such visits are made, says Boorstin, within the "environmental bubble" of the familiar American style hotel which keeps the tourist from the strangeness of the host environment.

The Museum of Innocence

Love and Madness in Istanbul

It’ s all an elaborate (详尽的) and precisely constructed lie: a museum built to tell the story of a self-referential book created around the contents of the soon-to-finish museum. A tale of love and loss, but mainly madness, which is entirely fictional but in which the very real author plays a central narrative role. It is the Museum of Innocence.

The story focuses on the character of Kemal (凯末尔) and his love for a beautiful shop girl and distant cousin Fusun (芙颂). Kemal’s story is one of lust, obsession and eventual ruin. Were the character real? I expect that most of us would distance ourselves from him in the same way that Istanbul’s high society do in the novel.     1    . And this is especially the case when one reads through Kemal’s story of madness and presents himself or herself in the collection of objects that represent Kemal’s love and loss.

The museum follows the narrative of the book precisely presenting 83 displays that each reflects one of the book’s 83 chapters to accompany the storyline     2    . In this case, as in many, the items that we accumulate in our lives are the reminders to help us recall those memories.

    3    . Mounted on the ground floor is a display of 4,213 cigarette stubs, each noted with a time or date or comments speaking to the very moment it touched her hands, her lips, and so became a part of her story.

Though it’s hard to match the visual appeal of that first display, representing chapter 68 of the book, the combination of sights and sounds throughout the three-story museum evokes (换起) the story in a way that reading alone couldn’t hope to do.     4    . You could surely visit the museum without having read the book or give it a read with no intention to visit the museum but, frankly, you shouldn’t pick up a copy a month or two before a trip to Istanbul, and give yourself the pleasure of experiencing the story twice in different forms.

If, like Kemal, you find yourself longing for some tangible physical reminder of the experience? Not to worry, there’s a well-stocked gift shop full of small souvenirs and Orhan Pamuk’s other works.

【推荐3】Japan’s biggest airline is betting that the future of travel isn’t traveling at all.

For the last month, a married couple has been interacting with a robot—called an Avatar—that’s controlled by their daughter hundreds of miles away. Made by ANA Holdings Inc., it looks like a vacuum cleaner (真空吸尘器) with an iPad attached. But the screen displays the daughter’s face as they chat, and its wheels let her move about the house as though she’s really there.

“Virtual travel” is nothing new, of course. Storytellers, travel writers and artists have been inspiring the senses of armchair tourists (足不出户的旅行者) for centuries. It’s only in recent decades that frequent, safe travel has become available to the non-wealthy.

Yet even as the worlds middle classes climb out of the armchair and into economy-class seats, there are hints of a post-travel society coming. Concerns about sustainability (可持续发展) are causing a loss to carbon-intensive airlines, which do harm to our environment. And the aging of wealthy societies is both limiting physical travel and creating demand for alternative ways to experience the world. For the travel industry, virtual reality offers an inviting response to these trends.

Of course, far-out technologies encourage far-out claims. ANA doesn’t plan to start selling Avatars until next year. Profits, too, will probably be a barrier. By one estimate, the global market for this kind of technology will be worth only about $300 million by 2023. By contrast, ANA’s traditional travel business brought in more than $19 billion last year.

But if the business case for virtual vacations is still weak, the market for technologies that bridge physical distances between families and coworkers seems likely to only expand. ANA’s robots may not replace its airplanes any time soon, but they’ll almost certainly be a part of travels high-tech future.

【推荐1】Expecting to travel abroad but lacking a loose budget? Interested in meaningful volunteering programs but worried about issues like your security or working conditions? Here comes a right place for you — Kindred Spirit Elephant Sanctuary (保护区).

 Volunteering with elephants and bringing them back into their natural habitat

 Making a difference in the conservation efforts to save elephants living under awful conditions

 Helping teach English to the communities and raising awareness about the captive (圈养的) elephant situation

 Wandering the forests and observe elephant’s natural behaviors in their home environment

Our sanctuary has rescued 5 elephants from the tourism industry and we have now brought them home to live out their lives in the forest, in semi-wild conditions. We need volunteers to help us keep these elephants happy and healthy in their natural habitat. With volunteer support, we hope to return more elephants to the forest soon.

 Performing research on the natural elephant behaviors and the surrounding forest

 Taking part in community projects such as teaching English at the school and to other locals

 Carrying out litter pick-ups with the kids to educate on waste management

Day 1: Pickup from Chiang Mai at 9 am. Travel through a national park and stunning mountains until you arrive in our unique village. Meet your homestay family and the other volunteers, and immerse yourself in hill tribe culture.

Day 2: Wake up early to hike in the forest and find our elephants. Spend the morning recording and learning about these amazing animals and their natural behaviors. Return to the village in the late afternoon and take part in our community & camp & teaching projects.

Day 3: Another early start to hike to observe our elephants one last time. Return to Chiang Mai in the afternoon.

【推荐2】WE COMBAT ANIMAL DISEASES TOGETHER!

We want to prevent serious animal diseases such as foot and mouth disease, classical swine fever and African swine fever from spreading to Finland. These and other animal diseases can be transmitted from one country to another by animals or by meat and dairy products even if they are packed for personal consumption or intended as gifts. Travelers like you play an important role in preventing the spread of animal diseases.

Don’t bring meat, meat products, milk and dairy products from non-EU countries to Finland!

A ban on personal imports applies to meat and dairy products brought into Finland by travelers or ordered and sent through the post. The ban applies to food stuffs intended for personal consumption or as gifts and to pet food. If you have food products of animal origin with you, throw them in a waste container in the point of entry or contact Customs!

Bringing meat-containing products as presents and for personal use from an EU country to Finland

At the moment, there are EU countries with cases of African swine fever. In those countries there are restriction areas and, as a rule, pork and wild bear meat or products containing these meats may not be imported from these areas into Finland. Import is allowed only under very strict criteria controlled by local authorities. However, the sales of these meat products within the country may be allowed. In the EU, the disease has been detected in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium and Italy (Sardinia), for instance. It is difficult for travelers to know and prove from which area meat products originate and whether the products on sale meet all criteria. This is the reason why we recommend that people avoid importing any meat products containing pork or wild bear meat as presents or for personal use from countries with African swine fever.

PLEASE NOTE! Never leave any food waste or leftover in the environment or places where they may be eaten by wildlife. Never give food waste or leftover to production animals or to pet pigs.

Thank you for helping us to prevent the spread of animal diseases. We wish you a pleasant journey!

【推荐3】Roger Federer, who recently became the oldest man to hold the No. 1 ranking in men’s tennis at the age 36, will bring a 12-match winning streak (连胜) to the BNP Paribas Open, which starts this week at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

Federer, a five-time winner of the hard-court event and a 20-time Grand Slam singles champion, on Tuesday was seeded No. 1 in a field that has been given up by injuries to several excellent players. Among those missing are world No. 2 Rafael Nadal (hip injury), Stan Wawrinka (knee), who lost to Federer in the 2017 final, David Goffin (eye) and Andy Murray (hip surgery).

Federer, who has spent 305 weeks of his career at the top the Assn of Tennis Professional world rankings, must reach the semifinals (半决赛) at Indian Wells to keep his No. 1 status. If he exits sooner than that, Nadal would regain the top spot. Federer has a first-round bye (轮空) and a seemingly easy projected route to the quarterfinals, where he likely would face No. 5 seed Dominic Thiem of Austria.

Five-time Indian Wells champion Novak Djokovic, who had a small medical intervention (干预) on his troublesome right elbow earlier this year, was seeded 10th in the tournament. Djokovic has played only four matches this year because of his elbow problems and hasn’t played a tournament since he lost to Hyeon Chung of South Korea in the round of 16 at the Australian Open in January.

Maria Sharapova of Russia will face Naomi Osaka of Japan on Wednesday with their match scheduled for not before 5:00 p.m.

On Thursday, Serena Williams will play Zarina Diyas of Kazakhstan and Victoria Azarenka of Belarus will play Heather Watson of the United Kingdom during the evening session (7 p.m. start).