France is one of the preferred tourist destinations worldwide. The romantic Paris with its myriad of attractions like the Louvre Museum, the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower, to name some of the most famous, is a hotspot for tourists and receives millions of visitors each year. But if you want to visit France and do something different, why not choose a music or art festival? Here are some interesting options so you can start making plans.

France Festivals is the French federation of international music festivals and its website gathers informations about the festival offer all over France. It is a good resource to find an event near your home swap destination and allows to search by Date, Style or Region, and it even has a map search feature. Here is the URL of France Festivals: http://www.francefestivals.com/uk/

We also have two hand picked festivals for you:

Besançon International Music Festival, one of the oldest classical music festivals, will have its 64th edition in 2011.
When? From September 16th till October 1st, 2011.
Where? Besançon, Franche-Comté, France.
More info about the festival (website content in French): http://www.festival-besancon.com/

Rock en Seine Festival
When? Three days in August, 2011: 26, 27 & 28.
Where? Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, near Paris, France.
Interesting performances: Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys, My Chemical Romance, Death in Vegas.
More info about the festival: http://www.rockenseine.com/en/

Image: Photo by Michael Maggs, Wikimedia Commons.

Today we will continue with our list of festivals, so you can find one to attend during your next home exchange, or try to find a home swap to participate in one of these music events. We want to share different festivals, and this time we will focus on Salsa!  Salsa is a style from Latin America, particularly Cuba and the Caribbean, that incorporates some elements of jazz and rock to the Cuban Rumba and Son.

More than music, the Oxnard Salsa Festival is also about the dance and the sauce. A treat to your senses. Hear it, dance it, taste it!
When? July 30th and 31st.
Where? Plaza Park, Oxnard, California, USA.
Interesting performances: Orquesta Charangoa, Orquesta Son Mayor, Janeen Puente Orchestra, among others.
More info about the festival: http://www.oxnardsalsafestival.com/
One important detail: admission and parking are free.

Benidorm Salsa Festival
When? Starts July 14th and closes July 17th.
Where? El Palacio de Cristal, Gran Hotel Bali, Benidorm, Alicante, Spain.
More info about the festival: http://www.benidormsalsafestival.com/ (in Spanish)

Salsa & Zouk Beach Festival
When? Starts July 8th and closes July 10th.
Where? On the Pier in Scheveningen, The Hague, Netherlands.
Interesting performances: DJ Lubi (Lubi Jovanovic)
More info about the festival: http://www.salsabeachfestival.nl/

Image: cjansuebsri / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last year we posted an article about how enjoyable the beaches around the UK are and we mentioned how the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) studies water quality to publish a free guide of recommended beaches. Well, the 2011 Good Beach Guide has been recently published so you can check out where the best UK beaches are and plan your summer home exchange accordingly. No beach is better than a clean beach, right?

This is the link where you can download the recommended beach list. Use it to enjoy and support the best UK beaches.

This time, we gave ourselves the treat of visiting more parts of the MCS Good Beach Guide website and we found it really interesting. It has a “beach of the day” section with details about one of the recommended beaches,  it has information about safety in the beach, and also news related to the marine world. For example, regarding this last point, currently they have some information about early sightings of basking sharks and they request that people report any sightings. By following the link from this information you can learn about how other sightings in the UK and Ireland that are important, and you can notify them with just a few clicks if you see a basking shark, jellyfish or a marine turtle. Of course there are also links to learn more about these beautiful animals, and if you have children it will be a good resource to share with them.

Image: graur codrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Opera, ballet, orchestras, theatre, musical theatre, contemporary dance… The list can go on and on. Music is alive in New York and its landmarks are related to music one way or the other. Just as Hip-Hop and Rap are creations from the Bronx, most of New York’s landmarks are from another of its five boroughs: Manhattan. Carnegie Hall, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Central Park, Times Square, Wall Street, Broadway and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are all located in the island. How are they related to music? Let’s see.

Carnegie Hall: It is the place were musicians dream of performing. Mostly linked to classical music, the hall received jazz early, while it was still gaining “form”, in 1912, when it hosted the performance of James Europe and the Clef Club Orchestra, one of the largest popular music ensembles, that had jazz in its repertoire. New York was an important place for the development of jazz music and famous performers, like Louis Armstrong left their mark there.

Central Park: The largest green area in the city, it is the perfect spot to have open music concerts in the Spring and Summer, having a schedule that covers from concerts of the New York Philharmonic to less classic genres, like Afro-beat or Caribbean music. For a complete guide about the activities and things you can do in Central Park during your visit:  http://www.centralpark.com/. This website has a lot of information, which is very valuable when one is trying to come up with a programme for a home exchange vacation.

More ideas for your house swap to New York in our next post

We have a “Tour guide to visit Memphis” type of post today, with a list of points of interest and things to do while you swap houses to the city of the Blues. It is just a list, if you want more information please use the links provided at the end of each description and get ready to swap!

Beale Street - Mentioned in our previous post, since the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century it has been the home of bars and clubs where the blues was born, grew up and matured. Musicians like W. C. Handy (writer of the first popular Blues song), B.B. King and Louis Armstrong are among the many that once performed in Beale Street. There are also many festivals and concerts organized in Beale Street so you may want to check what is scheduled for the days you will be in Memphis.

Memphis in May - A festival that lasts a month probably has a wide entertainment offer. In this case it is worth mentioning the music festivals, the barbecue cooking contest and the international promotional events. http://memphisinmay.org/

Museums - There are several museums in Memphis, so we will mention a few: the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (http://www.staxmuseum.com/), the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum (http://www.memphisrocknsoul.org/), the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (http://www.brooksmuseum.org/) and the Pink Palace Family of Museums (http://www.memphismuseums.org/).

Graceland - Elvis Presley’s famous estate cannot be left out of the tour but there is also Sun Studio, where “The King” recorded his first hit song. Sun Studio: http://www.sunstudio.com/

The Memphis Zoo - A zoo does not need a long description, there are hundreds of species in the Memphis Zoo and many educational tours. http://www.memphiszoo.org/.

There are more things to do and see in Memphis, like a very good offer for sports fans and also many parks to get in touch with nature, so please visit the following link for more information on these and other things to do in Memphis: City of Memphis - Tourism Information.

Travel and music, two things related to leisure that combined have great power. We have made our contribution to show how it could be fun to combine them in our previous posts and we will bring more examples in the days to come. Now, it is time to present a city that has a diverse offer when it comes to live entertainment, specially music and theatre, so we will take our home swap bags to Chicago taken by the influence of jazz and blues.

Chicago (Illinois) or the “windy city” is one of the most populated cities in the USA and as such it has many places for visitors to discover and enjoy. It is also the place where the word jazz became associated to the music genre that was born a few years earlier in New Orleans and were the blues became electrified.

The city has many attractions so no matter when you travel to Chicago, you will find several things to do to plan your stay. You can enjoy the lake shore, the nightclubs, specially worth mention are the jazz clubs :), the sports played in the city (baseball, basketball, ice hockey, “soccer”, American football), the shopping areas, the fine restaurants and the probably not-so-fine but still delicious local versions of pizza, hot dogs, sandwiches and ethnic dishes.

There are thousands of things to do in Chicago, but remember to save time for music. Here are some suggestions:

Jazz City Concerts - Jazz in city parks (the main city of the Jazz Institute of Chicago has more information on events: http://www.jazzinchicago.org/)
Chicago Blues Festival - http://www.chicagobluesfestival.us/
Lollapalooza - http://www.lollapalooza.com/
Explore Chicago - All you need to know to plan your perfect home swap to Chicago.

Where else? There is no better place to get in touch with these styles, for both we find their origins and current best expressions in the United States of America. They were originally African-American expressions, the Blues, bound to sadness and melancholy, originated in the late 19th century and Jazz, spontaneous and improvised, is somehow a more “refined” style and has been adapted to give rise to many sub-genres.

If you track down Blues and Jazz, they will take you to specific places in the USA, so we have selected a few cities that are directly connected to these styles: New Orleans, Chicago, New York and Memphis. Today we will take you to New Orleans, to the roots of Jazz music.

New Orleans (Louisiana) - Jazz’s birthplace, where everything started. Jazz is the musical genre that most authentically expresses the artist’s mood, as improvisation and interaction are vital to each performance. New Orleans jazz was based on call-and-response with a main melody and a counter-melody, and it soon became popular in other areas of the USA.

Depending of the time of the year you choose to travel to New Orleans, you can also enjoy a great party during Mardi Gras, or an intense dose of music in the Jazz Fest (officially the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival), a festival where not only jazz is celebrated but also other styles related to New Orleans and Louisiana.

More information to plan your home exchange to New Orleans:

New Orleans Tourism Web Site - http://www.neworleansonline.com/
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival - http://www.nojazzfest.com/

Cultural events and expressions in Vienna are not only related to music. Yes, you are probably going to enjoy Viennese operettas and waltzes, classical concerts, jazz performances, experimental music or even modern dance if you want, but the buildings, the gardens, the modern areas and the nightlife are all worth your attention when you plan to swap houses with a Viennese citizen.

Some of the beautiful buildings and sites that serve as testament of Vienna’s glorious past and proudly kept inheritance are:

- The Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs dynasty: Hofburg Palace
- The Baroque Palaces: Belvedere Palace and Schönbrunn Palace
- Related to the above-mentioned: the Belvedere Garden and Schönbrunn Zoo, the oldest zoo founded in the 18th century.
- The Palace of Justice
- Karls Church
- Vienna’s Ringstraße (ring boulevard): the State Opera, Burg Theatre, the House of Parliament, the City Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts…
- The Spanish Riding School with its unique Lipizzan horses: because in Vienna music has even been blended with the equestrian world.

And of course, the modern side of the city can stun you too:

- Haas House
- The Gasometer
- Many cutting-edge residential apartment buildings
- Hundertwasser House

As an end note: you cannot swap houses to visit Vienna and forget to try the irresistible Viennese combination of coffee and pastry, they are going to leave a mark on your senses that will not be easily forgotten.

For more information about interesting things to discover in Vienna you may visit:
http://www.wien.info/en/

National Geographic has published an article in their online Travel section with 20 “out-of-the-ordinary” destinations for 2011. If you want to get inspired by their article and the photos they published you may read the original article (see the link at the end of this post), but we are just going to list the places they selected to see if we can entice you to swap houses with someone there. Some are cities, some are whole countries, but they are all interesting.  If you want to know if there are home swappers in any of these countries, all you have to do is click on the country name and let yourself be surprised. If you travel to them all, you will go on a trip around the globe!

– Black Sea Coast, Crimea
– Dominica
– Fjord Norway, Norway
– Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec, Canada
– Kodiak Island, Alaska
– Kurdistan, Iraq
– Laos
– Messinia Region, Greece
– Namibia
– Palawan, Philippines
– Papua New Guinea
– Plitvice Lakes, Croatia
– Sardinia, Italy
– Scottish Highlands, Scotland, UK
– Shikoku, Japan
– Shimla, India
– Tunisia
– Tasmania, Australia
– Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
– Uruguay

If you want to learn more about each of these destinations and the reasons that led to them being the ones selected, you can read the original article in the following link:

20 Best Trips of 2011

Field trips are probably one of the most interesting activities one gets to experience in school. If you are home schooling your children then you can use home exchange to take your kids to destinations never reached by school field trips and you can do it more frequently. You can swap both within your country and abroad, without being drawn back by the costs. As you may know by now, home swap is close to being the perfect option for family travel and costs much less than the other lodging alternatives.

Some lessons that can be learnt while swapping:

Geography - travelling could help in several topics related to geography, like:
– Natural environments: you can visit parks, reserves, Natural Heritage Sites, areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
– Different cities that sustain their economies on different activities or have different organization patterns (fishing towns, cities with ports, cities in rural areas, small cities, huge metropolis).

Image by Rosemary Ratcliff /FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Science/Biology - while travelling your children could get in touch with different species, different environments, natural cycles, tides, climate… If you live in the city and swap to a rural house you will have hands on training on plant growth, farm animals, and depending on how far from a big city you get, even an astronomy lesson in a clearer sky.

Languages - the advantages of getting your kids hear a foreign language from native speakers and interact with them to practice their own pronunciation is priceless.

History/Arts - visiting museums and art exhibits, taking tours in historic sites where tour guides can tell the story with those interesting little details that get kids involved, attending different musical shows, listening to traditional music from different areas/countries.

Physical Education - Trekking, biking, swimming, surfing, skiing, attending sport matches or learning about non-professional sports…

Extra lessons:
– Respect other people’s possessions.
– Learn about how differences make people interesting.
– Get in touch with different cultures.
– Using the Internet.
– Trust.

As we always say, home exchange may fit into several plans and home schooling seems to be one of them. There is another plus: as you won’t be tied to school schedules you would probably be able to travel during the off-season which means you can get better deals at attractions, less crowded tours and many other advantages.

Some useful resources about home education:
HEAS - http://www.heas.org.uk/
Education Otherwise - http://www.education-otherwise.org/
A family that shares their experience