All posts tagged: holidays

Michigan city defends itself against accusations of favoring Muslim holidays over other faiths

Michigan city defends itself against accusations of favoring Muslim holidays over other faiths

Published by Sam Flores

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — The city of Dearborn responded Saturday to a lawsuit accusing it of celebrating Muslim holidays and ignoring religious holidays of other faiths by blaming attacks against it on its diversity and “welcoming nature.” A statement from the Detroit suburb issued by a spokesperson came in response to a lawsuit on Thursday that accused the city and its mayor of spending thousands of dollars to celebrate Muslim holidays while ignoring Christian and Jewish holidays. The lawsuit in federal court revived complaints about city government that arose a year ago after the Dearborn mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, told Ted Barham, a local pastor, that he was not welcome in the city and he would stage a parade when he left. The lawsuit by Margot Cleveland, a journalist for The Federalist, accused the city and its mayor, a Democrat, of favoring the Muslim faith over other religious beliefs in a city with a population of over 100,000 people that is majority Arab American. It said the city for too long “has been a hostile place …

‘Like a Bond villain’s lair’: I climbed the Dolomites to the world’s most spectacular mountain hut | Dolomites holidays

‘Like a Bond villain’s lair’: I climbed the Dolomites to the world’s most spectacular mountain hut | Dolomites holidays

Published by Sam Flores

‘I think my boots are falling apart!” shouts Nigel just as we hit the pinnacles, a whole range of them jutting up and out from the mountainside, all thrillingly tall, spiky and knobbled. Through them we painstakingly step, fingers aching in gloves, heads sweating in helmets – squashing up narrow chimneys, squeezing through mighty boulders and inching along slender ledges on a twisting path that’s only just discernible through swathes of sharp white scree. I know how Nigel’s boots are feeling: the going is far harder than I was expecting. This is only the first day of our annual trip to the Dolomites, a vast range of breathtaking sawtooth peaks in northern Italy, but my head’s already full of the thought I have every year as we start out: “If only you’d got fitter.” But it should be worth all the scrapes, bumps, scares and sweat. Somewhere up ahead, hopefully not too far, is Rifugio Passo Santner, or Santnerpass Hut, a spectacular mountain refuge that, as everyone who sits near my desk at work knows, has been …

How to navigate fasting holidays while using a GLP-1 drug

How to navigate fasting holidays while using a GLP-1 drug

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Millions of people worldwide – as many as 1 in 8 adults in the U.S. – are on GLP-1 medication, such as Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy and Zepbound, for treating diabetes or for weight loss. These drugs are adding a medical twist to religious observances that involve fasting, such as the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, which will be observed from sundown on Sept. 20 until nightfall on Sept. 21, 2026. Traditionally, fasting on Yom Kippur means forgoing food and water for about 25 hour, which can strongly affect a person’s metabolism. Other religious traditions include different types of fasts. For example, Muslims who fast during Ramadan neither eat nor drink from dawn to sunset, but they break their fast each night. Christian and Hindu …

The other side of Croatia: ‘a landscape that could out-Tuscany Tuscany’ | Croatia holidays

The other side of Croatia: ‘a landscape that could out-Tuscany Tuscany’ | Croatia holidays

Published by Sam Flores

‘You’re going to Samobor? You must try kremšnita,” my Dubrovnik friends told me before I set off on my trip north. “But I’ve already had kremšnita in Zagreb,” I told them. They do it better in Samobor, they insisted. I wasn’t about to get embroiled in a battle of the cream cakes in a region where Croatians, Slovenes and Austrians all like to celebrate their own versions of this decadently thick, fat custard slice topped with puff pastry and icing sugar. But I was more than willing – happy, even – to follow everyone’s suggestions to try kremšnita in Hotel Livadić’s Kavana Livadić, in Samobor’s main King Tomislav Square, a mere half-hour drive west of Zagreb. The excellent kremšnita at Kavana Livadić, Samobor. Photograph: Mary Novakvoich It lived up to the hype – delicately rich, creamy and with a light touch. After spending a few weeks in sun-bleached Venetian Dalmatia, amid the scrubby, limestone Dinaric Alps, I had swapped empires and was firmly in Habsburg Croatia. Here, in Zagreb County’s prettiest town, handsome baroque houses …

Burrata and beyond: a foodie tour of northern Puglia, Italy | Italy holidays

Burrata and beyond: a foodie tour of northern Puglia, Italy | Italy holidays

Published by Sam Flores

‘I don’t eat mozzarella outside Puglia,” says our friend Savio. “It’s not the same.” Savio is a very opinionated foodie, so I take his words with a pinch of good Puglian sea salt (see below). He was adamant about the superiority of the stretched-curd cheese from his home turf. Puglia is also the birthplace of ingredient du jour burrata, which originated in Andria, a few miles from Savio’s home town of Barletta. Andria forms one part of the triangular Barletta-Andria-Trani (BAT) province, but despite the cheese connection and Barletta having miles of palm-backed, sandy beaches, it is often passed over for better-known parts of Puglia. So I asked Savio’s company, Unexpected Italy, an app that calls itself the antidote to overtourism, to organise a trip to the area. Illustration: Guardian Graphics About a century ago, in the hills outside Andria, farmer Lorenzo Bianchino was snowed in and couldn’t get his milk to market. To save what he could, he revived an old technique for preserving butter (burro, hence burrata), stuffing cream mixed with mozzarella scraps (stracciatella) in …

A taste of home: discovering Sweden’s local food heroes | Sweden holidays

A taste of home: discovering Sweden’s local food heroes | Sweden holidays

Published by Sam Flores

‘It’s a magical place, and not just because of the hotel.” Standing outside the greenhouses at Högbo Brukshotell, two hours north of Stockholm, Stefan Johansson is talking about far more than hospitality. The former head chef, now responsible for sustainability at Högbo, has spent much of the past decade helping reshape the way this corner of Sweden grows, cooks and thinks about food. The catalyst was disarmingly simple. Years ago, a journalist asked Johansson why he was cooking the food he was cooking. Like many ambitious Swedish chefs, Stefan trained in Stockholm’s top restaurants, where ingredients from around the world were only a phone call away. The question lingered long after the interview ended. “Before, I wanted food to be spectacular; I didn’t really care where it came from,” he says. “Then I closed the window of where we source from down to the region. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.” Instead of looking farther afield for inspiration, he began looking closer to home. Högbo Brukshotell sits in the former Högbo ironworks, a …

Kent is having a champagne moment: ‘English wine has gone from a joke to world-class’ | Wine holidays

Kent is having a champagne moment: ‘English wine has gone from a joke to world-class’ | Wine holidays

Published by Sam Flores

The grapes are turning purple on tall green vines, which stretch down towards the distant flint-and-limestone tower of Chilham church. These rows of Pinot Meunier, destined for English sparkling wine, are 51% owned by French champagne house Taittinger. “England is now the most exciting wine region,” says host and sales executive Hilary Sharp as she leads me around Domaine Evremond vineyard, which opened its visitor centre last year to coincide with the launch of its first wine. In his 2023 book Vines in a Cold Climate, drinks writer Henry Jeffreys charts the rise of English wine “from a joke to world-class in 30 years”. The book opens with an alcohol-fuelled scene of vine-planting at Domaine Evremond in May 2017: unseasonably cold, rainy, muddy, with rambling anecdotes from anglophile Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger about “English women encountered in his misspent youth”. The vineyard is named for the exiled French aristocrat Charles de Saint-Évremond, a symbol of hedonistic Anglo-French cooperation. The bon vivant introduced champagne to England and party-loving Charles II made him governor of Duck Island in St James’s Park. …

Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route: a trek through the mountains of north-west Sweden | Sweden holidays

Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route: a trek through the mountains of north-west Sweden | Sweden holidays

Published by Sam Flores

I wasn’t exactly in “Sunday best”, but I had made some effort. Well, I’d changed my underwear for the first time in a couple of days and given myself a baby-wipe bath. Still, as we filed into the chapel at Alkavare, I felt more a member of an expedition than a congregation. We sat on the low wooden benches, waterproof jackets rustling and leather walking boots stamping on the flagstone floor to keep warm. Fortunately, the priest, Mogens Amstrup Jacobsen, appeared to be a “man of the Gore-Tex”, as well as a man of the cloth, as he unzipped his own black rain jacket to reveal his dog collar. As the service began, the Arctic wind whipped through cracks in the dry stone walls, insulated only with reindeer hair, and candles flickered in their brass sconces. I had hiked to Alkavare following the Präststigen, or “Priests’ trail”, a 37-mile (60km) route from Kvikkjokk that could stake a claim as Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route, and certainly one of its most beautiful. The Präststigen follows the path …

‘So big and so close’: spotting endangered bears on a trip to northern Spain | Spain holidays

‘So big and so close’: spotting endangered bears on a trip to northern Spain | Spain holidays

Published by Sam Flores

Once upon a time, in the woods outside Pola de Somiedo, lived a family of Cantabrian brown bears. The villagers reported sightings of a mother bear who had lost a leg to a hunter’s trap, her two cubs and two adult males, either of which might have been the father. In those days, at the end of the 1980s, they seemed to be the last of their kind in this part of Asturias. Meanwhile, the wider population dropped to about 60 bears across the surrounding Cantabrian mountain range that gave the species its name. They have since clawed their way back from the edge of extinction here in northern Spain, and nature guide Luis Frechilla believes their numbers may now be upwards of 500 again. “They’re still classed as endangered,” he tells me, until the official count hits 1,000. But relative abundance makes them much easier to see today in Somiedo natural park – one of Spain’s first such protected areas, established in 1988. Somiedo natural park. Photograph: Biosphoto/Alamy Setting his scope on a tripod …

Going for gold: an early autumn road trip across Finland’s sparkling lake district | Finland holidays

Going for gold: an early autumn road trip across Finland’s sparkling lake district | Finland holidays

Published by Sam Flores

I wasn’t sure what to expect from an autumn trip to Finland, my first ever to the country, but spending an afternoon sprawled on a deck chair beneath blazing blue skies certainly wasn’t part of it. After a morning walking beneath the leafy canopy at the Mustila Arboretum – the oldest, most extensive botanical garden in the country – and a lunchtime wine-tasting (more of which later), my friend Sara and I pitched up at the Sahanlahti resort, deep in the Finnish Lakeland, only to find sun-drenched scenery that felt far more Mediterranean than Nordic. Sahanlahti was the second stop on a mid-September road trip from Helsinki to the shores of Lake Saimaa; a journey in search of ruska, the spectacular autumn colours that blaze for a few short weeks before the long Finnish winter sets in. However, on our opening drive east from the airport to the Radalla resort, set on Lake Urajärvi, most of the thousands of trees we drove past were resolutely green, with just the very tips of the leaves tinged …