… for a Day
A small duffel bag would be ideal to pack if you are going over to your friend’s place to spend the day together, or if you are going for a sleepover or a pajama party. You would not be carrying any linen or too many clothes if you are going for just one night. But you would be carrying your toiletries, and maybe a little bit of make-up if you plan to head out of the house.
1.Pack your towel and clothes at the bottom – you are not going to need them as soon as you arrive at your friend’s place! Also carry light – pack only one extra set of clothes, and your nightwear.
2.If you are going to carry an extra pair of footwear (oh it so goes with the dress you are going to wear when you go out for dinner!) then carry it in a shoe bag. Duffel bags do not come with shoe bags, so you will have to arrange for one!
3.Carry your toiletries and make-up material in two separate pouches, so you do not make a mess or have to empty the entire bag on your friend’s bed while hunting for the kohl stick!
… for the Weekend
You would need a slightly larger duffel bag when going off to somewhere for an entire weekend. You would or would not carry bedspreads or blankets depending on how you are traveling, how far away the place is, is it a camp or an indoor get-away etc. You would also be carrying more than just one extra set of clothes. Definitely the number of things you would pack would be more.
1.Lay all the linen, bedspreads, blankets etc., at the bottom on the back.
2.Try to carry clothes that you can mix and match – any bottoms with any tops. That way you have lesser things to pack and more room in the bag. Pack the clothes in two stacks above the bottom layer of clothes – bottoms in one stack on one side, tops in another on the other side.
3.Big duffel bags usually have two small compartments on the sides. Use these efficiently. You can pack your make-up and toiletries pouches into one side compartment. Extra pair of footwear can go into the other.
… for a Long Trip
When headed for a long trip, a duffel bag acts more like an accessory bag, with most of your clothes going into a bigger suitcase. Your footwear, your jackets, everything would go into your main suitcase. So your duffel bag may suddenly seem too empty! But there is in fact a lot that can go into it.
1.Carry your money, passport and visa (if you are flying), travel tickets (plane or train, any), and all essential documents that you may have to produce in the course of the journey in your duffel bag. Read the rest of this entry »

The most unusual places in the world listed below should have something interesting and bizarre that would interest the readers.

Socotra, Republic of Yemen
This is one of the most unusual places on earth with features that are out of the world. For a moment, one would feel that he has traveled to a different planet. The Dragon Blood Tree is one of the important features of this island. The branches of this plant give it a mushroom-like appearance. The desert rose is another plant with a weird appearance. The stem of this plant resembles the legs of an elephant. The Dorstenia gigas is a plant which can even grow in rock; it doesn’t necessarily require soil as a medium for growth. All these and other features make Socotra one of the most unusual places on earth.

83-42, Greenland
It is one of the few pieces of land in the northernmost region of the earth. Located in the Arctic ocean, this permanent point of land is also referred to as Schmitt’s Island. The unusual or unique thing about 83-42 is that even while the surrounding area is covered with ice, this part of land remains black. The area of 83-42 is 35 m x 15 m; elevation is just 4 m.

Mount Roraima, Venezuela
This mountain has a shape that resembles a hood. Unlike other mountains which taper along the tip, Mount Roraima has a table-top that rises 400 m. Another interesting fact about this place is that it rains here almost everyday. The surface of Mount Roraima is formed of sandstone.

Salar de Uyuni
Located in Bolivia, the Salar de Uyuni island is marked by breathtaking landscapes that offer vasts tracts of salt and other interesting features. Salar de Uyuni is known for the largest salt desert in of the world. The area covered by salt is so large that it becomes difficult to find any reference in determining the skyline. There is also a hotel completely made of salt in Salar de Uyuni. The gigantic cacti found on this island is also one of the unique features of this place. All these features make Salar de Uyuni amongst world’s most unusual places.

The Richat Structure
The Richat Structure is circular, and is located in the Sahara desert near Ouadane, Mauritiana. It has a diameter of approximately 50 km. This place seems unusual since it is the only prominent feature in the surrounding huge desert. The Richat Structure is used as a reference point/landmark by space crews. Years of soil erosion has resulted into the formation of this structure. Earlier it was believed that a meteorite could have created the Richat Structure. However, this theory was ruled out; also the flat floor of this structure doesn’t provide any clue about the fall of meteorite.

Ice Hotel, Sweden
This hotel is constructed every year from ice. The village of Jukkasjärvi near Kiruna in Sweden is where this ice sculpture is created annually. Steel is used in creating the frame for this construction, since a substance that is a portmanteau (blend) of snow and ice forms the binding material for blocks of ice. The sub-freezing temperatures help in retaining this ice structure. Ice taken from Torne river is used in the construction of this hotel. It is therefore, amongst most unusual places to live in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)

Located at 11 Wall Street this works as the backbone of New York’s economy. It is also called the “Big Board” and let me tell you, it is the largest stock exchange in the world by dollar volume and it has 2,764 listed securities and that is the second largest number of securities that a stock exchange holds in the world. The share volume of New York Stock Exchange was exceeded by that of NASDAQ during the 1990s, still New York stock Exchange comes up to be the largest and biggest financial hub of the world, definitely with London Stock Exchange and Tokyo Stock Exchange to compete with. NYSE Euronext operates the New York Stock Exchange, which is a result of the merger of Archipelago Holdings and Euronext. This momentous place has only four rooms for deciding the fate of the world. There is another trading room located at 30 Broad Street but that was closed recently in February 2007.

The main building of NYSE was made a National Historic landmark in 1978, which is located at 18 Broad Street between the corners of Wall Street and Exchange Place. New York Stock exchange was established sometime around 1792 as a result of the Buttonwood Agreement that was signed by 24 stockbrokers outside 68 Wall Street under a Buttonwood tree which was the site of the stockade fence earlier. In March 1817, it became a proper organization that drafted a constitution and named itself New York Stock and Exchange Board. Anthony Stockholm became its first president. This is how New York Stock Exchange started with only 24 stockbrokers and now it is world’s largest stock exchange.

It provides efficient methods for people to sell and buy shares of stock of companies, which are registered for public trading. It provides the discovery of a price so that the fairest price can be chalked out for both the parties. Since January 24th, a new system of Hybrid market has come to the fore wherein the trading, routing of stocks and execution can be done electronically except for very high priced shares or deals but on the trading floor there is a lot of human interaction and it is a place where people are always busy since they are constantly making decisions, constantly executing expert judgments. There is not a specific place where a listed stock can be traded or a stockbroker can trade. Exchange members who are interested in buying or selling gather around a specific stockbroker who is not a direct employee of NYSE but is employed by an NYSE member firm. He auctions in an open outcry and gets the buyers and sellers together. So this is just little information that I could give about the historical New York Stock Exchange.

New York University

New York University is the much sought after University for the teachers as well as the students. It is the place to know more, experiment with ideas and give more flexibility to your thoughts. This is the place to be for all the academicians and intelligentsia and they are already there. Its campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan. It was founded in 1831 and is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational research university that was founded in the interest of those people who are interested in higher learning. It has a student count of around forty thousand who are a part of the fifteen schools, colleges and divisions occupying six centers across Manhattan. It facilitates its students to go out and study abroad in London, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Madrid, Accra, Shanghai, Florence and even Singapore now is added to the list. United Arab Emirates has also opened avenues for the students of New York University to come and study in Abu Dhabi that would be funded by the government of United Arab Emirates. It has been the Numero Uno dream school of America for four years consecutively now according to Princeton Review. It has been the alma mater and work place for 31 Nobel Prize winners, 9 national Medal Of Science winners, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 19 Academy award Winners and many more like Emmy, Grammy and Tony award winners. In spite of being a very urbanized campus it still has student bodies, in fact the very first student fraternities in the country were established in this University.

The mascot of the school is a “bobcat” and almost all the teams participate in the University athletic Association. The university was established when the residents of the city felt that the place needs an institution for their children to go and get education from, which would educate them without any class, caste or creed in mind; the admission to the university would be totally based on the merit of the student, that is when the New York university was established. The logo of the university is an upheld torch, which is derived from the Statue of Liberty and that was designed in 1965. The campus, cultural setting and environment of the University add to its appeal. It has a heritage that can be boasted of and it is on its way to create history.

This is the least I could write about New York Stock Exchange and New York University but I am hoping that those who were not interested and were not too keen to know about these two milestones in the history of New York would certainly want to know more about them, after reading the article.

Up to two hundred firefighters were sent to the Episcopal cathedral of St John the Divine, the world’s biggest, to tackle the fire, which began in the gift shop.

The damage was thought not to be as bad as had appeared when the flames were rising before daybreak.

“Some events will be cancelled, but as long as there’s space and we can use it the services will go on,” the vicar bishop, Don Taylor, said. “But it’s just painful to see this church engulfed in smoke.”

The neo-gothic cathedral on the Upper West Side of Manhattan has enough floor space to accommodate Chartres and Notre Dame.

Church officials were worried about the fate of the Barberini-designed 17th and 18th century tapestries woven on the pope’s official loom.

“There was such a heavy smoke condition inside that the firefighters couldn’t see anything,” the New York fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, said.

“Thermal imagers allowed them to pinpoint exactly where it was and limit the damage.”

No one is thought to have been hurt in the building, which is visited by about 250,000 people a year for religious services, concerts and cultural events.

Work started on the cathedral in 1892 but, for lack of funds, it is still far from completed.

Its famous visitors have included Martin Luther King Jr, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Bishop Desmond Tutu.

Duke Ellington performed his Sacred Concert there in 1968.