Word: waxing
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...disappoint. Atlas Obscura has quickly become a travel guide for voyagers in search of destinations that would normally never crack tourist itineraries. In Liverpool, there's an art installation consisting of 100 identical statues of the naked artist. In Zurich, there's the Moulagenmuseum, dedicated solely to displaying wax representations of painful facial diseases. And in Brooklyn, there's a secret tunnel under Atlantic Avenue, where the body of a murdered British man is still likely hidden somewhere in the walls. More helpful still, Atlas Obscura includes a map for each oddity's location and frequently includes tips...
...come outfitted in 18th or 19th century dress, but in a wild-style fabric that's from another time and place altogether. It looks at first like "traditional" African patterned cloth--and it is--but the tradition turns out to be complicated. As Shonibare discovered years ago, those "African" wax-print textiles are actually produced by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the batik cloth of their Indonesian colony, then started selling them in Africa, where they were adopted as, ahem, native dress. "Even things that were supposed to represent authentic Africa," he says, "didn't turn out to fulfill...
...With ornate geometrical tattoos covering his body, Tim is not the kind of guy you'd expect to wax poetically about a 19th century French painter. But then Hiva Oa is not your run-of-the-mill tourist island. With just 2,000 lucky inhabitants and one hotel, it's a place where the sight of a boy washing his horse in the surf on an empty black-sand beach, or copra drying in someone's front yard, is common. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a distinct group of 14 isles within French Polynesia, located...
...back of the museum is a reconstruction of the Maison du Jouir, complete with a reproduction of Gauguin's elaborate front-door frame that reads in French: "Be mysterious ... Be loving and you will be happy." A wax figure of the artist with palette eerily stands at one end of the house...
...orders - he gets many - are to "go to the towers, go to the cafe and look for the violin," and his employer sums up the theme of his mission as "Reality is arbitrary." In today's economy, who is going to complain about a boss with a tendency to wax philosophical...