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In-flight phone calls: Good or bad?
Confessions of a Chinese taxi driver
Summer cold snap: Ice World 2012 brings Harbin ice sculptures to Macau
10 best Korean restaurants in Seoul
World’s most beautiful towns

Posted: 18 May 2012 03:24 AM PDT

If you forgot to call your mom to water your plants next time you take a trip, not to worry. You can now do that on the plane.

At least that will be the case for travelers flying Virgin Atlantic between London and New York.

The airline has launched a mobile phone service on its new Airbus A330 and refurbished Boeing 747 aircraft flying that route for Vodafone and O2 network customers.

While other airlines have done this in the past, some successfully (Air France, Emirates), others abandoning the idea after passenger complaints (Qantas, Lufthansa), Virgin is the first British airline to do so.

While flying outside U.S airspace (the Federal Communications Commission bans the use of mobile phone on planes), passengers can make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, access emails and use basic Internet services via GPRS.

Confessions of a Chinese taxi driver

Posted: 17 May 2012 09:34 PM PDT

by Debbie Yong, Sean Hanratty

Shanghai taxi drivers belong to a nation of their own: they enjoy noodles, they protect their pinkie nails and they like racing traffic lights.

And they also meet more people in a day than many of us would in a week.

Eight fearless Shanghai taxi drivers, who pilot a variety of conveyances and come from all over China, share their unforgettable moments and countless perils behind the wheel.

All cabbies requested only their family names be used for this story.

Name: Mr. Zhang
Years driving: Six years
Company: Bashi Taxi
Hometown: Shanghai

Summer cold snap: Ice World 2012 brings Harbin ice sculptures to Macau

Posted: 17 May 2012 03:00 PM PDT

by Zoe Li, Hong Kong Editor

Ice World 2012 will open in Macau on May 19. It's averaging 30 C this summer in Macau and how do denizens of Asia's gambling capital handle the heat? By artificially cooling down a big hall to minus 8 C and admiring intricate ice sculptures to pass the time.

For the second year in a row, Macau is pulling off an immensely popular exercise in extravagant energy consumption. The Ice World 2012 is a 1,670-square-meter hall at the CotaiExpo that is maintained at a constant winter temperature, much colder than Macau ever gets naturally.

Co-organized by the Heilongjiang Provincial Ice and Snow Art Development Co. Ltd., the ice art in Macau was created by masters from the province of China's famed Harbin Ice and Snow Festival.

Macau Ice World 2012 Coolest hands in the north: master carvers from Harbin came to Macau to create Ice World.

Also on CNNGo: Harbin Ice and Snow Festival to open 'China-Russia Tourism Year'

10 best Korean restaurants in Seoul

Posted: 17 May 2012 09:22 AM PDT

by Alex Jung

'Best of' lists are controversial, unscientific, inherently subjective and are guaranteed to result in bellyaching. But they are good for precisely this reason: they get us talking about food.

In order to compile our own list, we spoke with a number of certified "foodies" – people who obsess about food about as much as we do. One of those people is Jun Kyung-woo, the co-author of best-selling book Dining in Seoul.

"The first question is: how do you define Korean food?" says Jun. "Is it the ingredients? Is it Korean because it exists in Korea? Is it what Korean people actually eat?"

Indeed, the constantly shifting topography of Korean cuisine now includes dishes like pizza topped with fried shrimp and sweet potatoes and Chinese food like jjajjangmyun (black bean noodles). Respectively, they are branded "Italian" and "Chinese" food, but are so heavily Koreanized that they would be unfamiliar to native inhabitants of those countries.

"Korean food has deep roots," says Jun. There is a long, dynamic history that includes a certain ingredients and flavors like soy, garlic, red pepper and techniques like salting, pickling, and braising. So while an outlandish pizza might be an entirely Korean product, for this list, we are looking at food that has a long genealogy on the Korean peninsula.

That being said, our conception of Korean food isn't narrow. We value the bowl of naengmyun from the restaurant that has operated for over three decades as much as the artfully constructed plates that filters Korean flavors through molecular gastronomy.

There is an astounding breadth to Korean cuisine. We'd like to think that this is a start.