A Classy Place to Meet, With a Bonus, The New York Times

Just because you’re an enviably wealthy business traveller, doesn’t mean you can’t scrimp and scrounge. Even if you’re staying at The Ritz. According to Perry Garfinkel, it makes great financial sense to splurge on a suite and save time and money by using it for meetings and power lunches instead of booking conference rooms and enduring surly taxi drivers and snotty Maitre’ds. This growing trend, he writes, also helps cement better relationships with ‘clients’ (in a hotel room?) because of the intimate setting. And, save money by buying refreshments from a store. You’ll save at least $50 out of your $900,555,889 fortune!

Steaming into Bangladesh, The Times

“The miasma of corrupt odours” described by Nick Redmayne as he takes a trip into Dhaka on a century-old steamer should help us Indians feel right at home. Although he summons many standard South Asia cliches about our neighbour, his ‘foreignness’ allows him to see facets many of us in India cannot, perhaps because of our shared history. Such as the 400-year-old Armenian church and cemetery in Dhaka, ramshackle remnants of the Armenian community that once thrived here. Dhaka, he writes, is no world-heritage designate, “but for an ‘old town’ experience it’s streets ahead.” Besides, it’s cheap.

Have Pantsuit, Will Travel, The Nation

To ‘dress for success’ is painful says Patricia J. Williams, as she ponders the role clothes play in the dreary march from conveyor belt to taxi stand to hotel: “‘Sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits’ is how Hillary Clinton put it. And with those simple words, the peculiar misery haunting… my entire professional life flashed before my eyes.” Suited and booted, you can’t wiggle your toes, leave alone take off a sweaty jacket “because you’re worried about bra straps”. More about clothes than travel, the article underlines how the power suit can be as confining as a corset when you’re on the go.

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