Travel Art & Travel Writing: A Curious Heart’s Wanderlust in China brings to life a curious traveler’s experiences in China. You’ll taste the food and enjoy the outdoor social life of China. You’ll know how to identify the different temple types by their names and architectural features. You’ll learn about Chinese structures, both traditional and contemporary. And you’ll dive deep into the mythology and folklore of China: exploring the layers of history, ritual, and myth that underlie the customs and folk traditions of China. Travel with me through China and explore its culture: • Chinese travel sites (Chasing an Elusive Ideal in Modern Day Shangri-la), • Chinese customs (Getting Social in Suzhou’s Night Markets), • Chinese holidays and festivals (Ancestors and Immortals: a Foreigner’s Introduction to Ching Ming Festival), • Chinese temples and religious life (A Brief Introduction to Chinese Temples), • Chinese mythology (The Story of the Nian & Myth and Mooncakes: The Cosmological Symbolism of the Zhou Revolution), • Chinese cooking (The Floral Mandarin Fish & Snow Fish), • Chinese contemporary architecture (Post-Modern Architectural Irony in Suzhou’s The Gate To the East). Dave Alber creates Hybrid VR Paintings ™, Travel Art, and Travel Writing. His Travel Art shares an experience of wonder at our cultural continuity and universal humanity. Dave Alber is the inventor of Hybrid VR Paintings ™, which are physical/virtual hybrid paintings that occupy a physical space in the gallery while simultaneously manifesting within the virtual world of 360° panoramic technology. Books by Dave Alber include: • Travel Art: Intimations, • The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories of Endangered People, • The Taotie in Chinese Art, Culture, and Cosmology. You can receive Dave Alber’s art book for free at http://DaveAlber.com.

Travel Art 2019: Ravages of Time & Permanence of Wonder by Dave Alber. Enter the Art Experience! Introducing Hybrid VR Paintings… physical/virtual hybrid paintings that occupy physical gallery space while simultaneously manifesting within the virtual world of 360° panoramic technology. Travel Art 2019: Ravages of Time & Permanence of Wonder features: • Illustration & Comics • Impasto Oil Paintings • Travel Art & Travel Writing • Hybrid VR Paintings ™ Travel Art 2019: Ravages of Time & Permanence of Wonder traces an artist’s trajectory from comic art and travel illustration to impasto oil painting and Hybrid VR Paintings ™. Visual journalism and Travel Art represent images from seven countries across three continents. Travel Writing explores Asian food culture, contemporary architecture, and a traveler’s literary pilgrimage to the real Shangri-La. Travel with me to China, India, Nepal, Indonesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, the United States, and on into the virtual world. Dave Alber creates Travel Art and Travel Writing. His Travel Art shares an experience of wonder at our cultural continuity and universal humanity. Dave is known for his impasto oil paintings and for being the inventor of Hybrid VR Paintings ™. Dave’s books include: • Travel Art & Travel Writing: A Curious Heart’s Wanderlust in China, • Travel Art 2018: Intimations, • The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories of Endangered People, • The Taotie Image in Chinese Art, Culture, and Cosmology.

Hybrid VR Paintings are virtual reality paintings by Dave Alber. Have you ever been in an art gallery and become so fascinated by a colorful painting that you wondered what it would be like to actually enter into that painting? With Hybrid VR Paintings and the VR Paintings app, you can enter colorful and thick impasto oil paintings and experience them as fully immersive 360° virtual reality experiences. In your new life, living within these colorful oil paintings unbounded by edges, you can turn left and right; zoom in and out; climb out of the painting and return to the gallery; and then view the painting again as a flat image; read information about the painting and the exhibition; and explore other VR rooms and VR exhibitions in the VR gallery.The only gallery where you can do this is The Floating Gallery™, a VR art gallery without floor or ceiling. This VR gallery itself is in fact an oil painting. It is a fully immersive 360° oil painted gallery, within which you can explore room after room of fine art collections.All of the framed art on the walls of these rooms may be entered as Hybrid VR Paintings™. Each painting in The Floating Gallery is a physical painting that actually exists in the real world, and which, within the virtual world of the VR Paintings app, becomes a fully immersive VR reality. Interactive buttons allow you to move from gallery to gallery; to enter the paintings as 360° environments; to view the flat art; and to get more information about the art. The VR Paintings app is best experienced with Google Cardboard , Oculus Go, or other VR headsets. However, The Floating Gallery also works with an unassisted iPhone or iPad. (In other words, you may use it without VR goggles.) Features: •Explore The Floating Gallery™ • Enter Hybrid VR Paintings™ • Enjoy paintings and galleries as fully interactive 360° VR environments • View paintings as flat images • Retrieve information about paintings and exhibits • Connect with online resources such as downloadable PDFs. Artist and VR developer, Dave Alber says, “VR Paintings connects the long continuity of the oil painting tradition with the immediacy of 21st century technology. Not everyone sees the value of art, but friends of the art tradition will certainly want to explore this marriage of art and VR technology.”

Sheds new light on the importance of the diaries of Xu Xiake (1587-1641), a compulsive traveller who spent a lifetime visiting and writing about China's 'beauty spots'.

In this, the first full-length study in English of China's best-known travel writer, new light is shed on the importance of the diaries of Xu Xiake (1587-1687) a compulsive traveller who spent a lifetime visiting and writing about China's 'beauty spots'. The general view of his work, that he brought a sober, analytical approach to a genre previously the domain of the dillentante and that his writing was 'utilitarian' and lacking in literary merit is cast aside, revealing Xu to be a figure of his age, his concerns perfectly in tune with the exuberant tastes of other late Ming literati. Essential background is provided with a survey of the history of Chinese travel writing in general with particular emphasis given to the late-Ming period and a resume of Xu Xiake's life. The core of the work examines the wealth of new information to be found in a longer version of Xu's account of his great journey to southwest China, rediscovered in the 1970s. Detailed study of Xu's use of language serves to underline the breadth of achievement of a man who utilised traditional and contemporary Chinese poetic language in order to express an emotional response to the landscape through which he passed. This is reinforced by a complete annotated translation of a deeply personal essay, written towards the end of Xu's life. The book covers a broad spectrum of voguish sinological subjects relating to late Ming China ranging from the huge growth in all forms of geographical writing to the anthropological analysis of the non-Han peoples of southwest China. This book will interest both seasoned sinologists and anyone who has spent time travelling in China or is interested in the art of travel writing.

Legendary travel writer Theroux drives the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines.

This book documents the impulses that drive Elisabeth Eaves' insatiable hunger for the rush of the unfamiliar. She is both restless vagabond and astute observer as she crisscrosses five continents, chasing the exotic in both culture and romance. She loses herself in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, rekindles old love and new passion in Cairo, and finds an intinerant brotherhood of raucous men in the land Down Under. Like the random possessions she leaves in her wake, from Australia to Yemen, she also leaves behind a string of lovers. But this is about more than just sensual conquest; it is also a journey of self-discovery, in which her pursuit ultimately guides her home - back cover.

"Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye."--

I found no one to accompany me, and was determined to do; so I trusted to fate, and went alone. In 1797 in Vienna, Ida Pfeiffer was born into a world that should have been too small for her dreams. The daughter of an Austrian merchant, she made clear from an early age that she would not be bound by convention, dressing in boys' clothing and playing sports. After her tutor introduced her to stories of faraway lands, she became determined to see the world first-hand. This determination led to a lifetime of travel--much of it alone--and made her one of the most famous women of the nineteenth century. Pfeiffer faced many obstacles, not least expectations of her gender. She was a typical nineteenth century housewife with a husband and two sons. She was not wealthy nor well connected. Yet after the death of her husband, and once her sons were grown and settled, at the age of forty-one she set off on her first journey, not telling anyone the true extent of her travel plans. Between that trip and her death in 1858, she would barely pause for breath, circling the globe twice--the first woman to do so--and publishing numerous popular books about her travels. Usually traveling solo, Pfeiffer faced storms at sea, trackless deserts, plague, malaria, earthquakes, robbers, murderers, and other risks. In Wanderlust, John Van Wyhe tells Pfeiffer's story, with generous excerpts from her published accounts, tell of her involvement with spies, international intrigue, and more. The result is a compelling portrait of the remarkable life of a pioneer unjustly forgotten.

The Taotie Image in Chinese Art, Culture, and Cosmology by Dave Alber. The taotie, also known as the “beast mask”, is the most distinctive feature of Shang dynasty art. It is a fascinating motif in Chinese art and, for centuries, has inspired curiosity as to its meaning. In this book, cultural scholar, Dave Alber, explores the many meanings of the taotie image. • What was the meaning of the taotie among traditional Chinese art historians? • What is the taotie’s influence in Chinese art history? • What is the most probable cultural origin of the taotie? • What function did the taotie image serve in Shang dynasty cosmology and psychology? • What is the Pan-Asian diffusion of the original motif? • How does this art motif enrich our experience of Chinese architecture, history, and contemporary music? Dave Alber, MA originally presented the content of this book as a lecture at Henan Polytechnic University (HPU) in Mainland China. The Taotie Image in Chinese Art, Culture, and Cosmology is written in dual-language English and Chinese. Thus, it is a great tool for learning either English or Traditional Chinese. With almost one hundred photographs from Dave Alber’s travels in China and Asia, it is also an ideal book for studying Chinese and Pan-Asian art.