Crop Over is the biggest festival in Barbados , and is that island nation’s version of Brazil’s Carnival. Historically, the event marked the end of the sugar harvest, but now that tourism has well overtaken sugar production in the Bajan economy, it’s become a great excuse to throw a five-week long summer party. It’s all about to come to a climax on Monday, August 2nd — the end of Crop Over, also known as Grand Kadooment day.

Writing about Marrakech, the celebrated writer Elias Canetti said this: “in order to feel at home in a strange city, you need to have a secluded room, to which you have a certain title, and in which you can be alone when the tumult of new and incomprehensible voices becomes too great.” La Mamounia , the recently renovated historic luxury hotel of the Red City, makes for an excellent refuge. It achieves sanctuary, from sights and smells and other sensory assaults in a city where everything seems heightened

When I visited Shanghai last year, its most famous Art Deco landmark, the Peace Hotel on the Bund, was covered in shrouds for renovation. It had been that way since 2007, but now the covers are off as the hotel has just reopened as the Fairmont Peace Hotel , . The hotel originally opened in 1929, in one of Shanghai’s heydays.