Jeremy HildrethAuthor Archives:
A museum with a deep sense of place
This week The Wall Street Journal ran my story about the adored and adorable Pitt Rivers museum of ethnography and world archeology in Oxford, England (as opposed, I guess, to Oxford, Mississippi). You can read it here. For length, they did cut an anecdote about my first visit:
It was 2002, and I was just starting [...]
3-day immediate-benefits place brand consultation offer
Long-term engagements can have advantages for both consultants and clients. But they take time, they cost a lot, and even more problematically, they tend to create grandiose expectations about the results those “big branding programmes” can achieve.
Besides, the truth is: there are times when you just want mentoring — a dash of practical advice and [...]
Everything I know about place branding
Benefits and hazards of place branding
Are you legible?
Just as a writer bears ultimate responsibility for being understood, “If you’re a place, it’s up to you to present yourself legibly,” to make sure people can get your story.
This is some of the advice I give in a casual but insightful essay that Thinkingplace have published in their quarterly. I use examples from my [...]
Outskirts of Bangkok: the monk, the BMW and the Death Railway
Dispatch from Bangkok
Sat 3/23/02 12:28 PM
It was 90 degrees in the shade today.
Fortunately, we spent most of our time in the air conditioned sixth car of the weekly government excursion train to the River Kwai Bridge.
The highlight of today’s 15-hour, $5 roundtrip rail adventure obviously was the bridge, which we were able first to walk [...]
My first encounter with Communist China: And I’d thought Wal-Mart in America was cheap!
Dispatch #2 from Kunming, China
Tue 3/19/02 8:46 AM
In this Chinese city of 3.3 million, there are few outward signs of communism.
On the contrary, Kunming is a grimy, bustling semi-metropolis teeming with commerce. It has more in common with what I expected to find, and did find, in Hong Kong than with what I expected from [...]
Macau confidential: “Happy! Happy! Happy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
Dispatch from Kunming, China
Sun 3/17/02 6:25 AM
Dear Friends,
We’re now in Kunming, capital of the Yunann province of the People’s Republic of China. We’ll be here only long enough to arrange permission and transportation for the Burma road, then we’ll head out. In the meantime, we’re enjoying spending $12 USD per night for a hotel room [...]
In Hong Kong, a shampoo Jean Valjean
From: jeremyhildreth
To: triplist
Date: Fri 3/15/02 3:35 AM
Subject: Dispatch from Hong Kong
Dear friends,
As I travel the world for the next three months, I’ve promised to keep in touch with all of you as much as possible. Please feel free but not obligated to reply to these dispatches.
I arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, [...]
Heat Treatment ‘02: Revisiting the travel writing that started it all
In 2002, just before coming to England to do my MBA at Oxford, I burned up three and a half months by taking the most extraordinary journey I may ever take.
And writing about it.
Adventure in Timor 4: A destination in the making
Day 7
Leaving my hotel about ten o’clock on Friday, One Last Bar is where I went first. Here I met a UN adviser named Scott who advised me that the next bar to go to was a Brazilian place down by the beach called Exotica. I took a taxi (it’s just outside of central Dili, [...]
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