George Clooney Slept Here

Welcome to George Clooney Slept Here, the “IT” site for luxury travel! Pull up a Spazio lounge chair, pour yourself a glass of Krug Dlos du Mesnil 1995 and let us tell you what we’re all about.

Whether you just want to peek in on celebrities and their notorious indulgences or you’re ready to climb on through to the world’s most exclusive vacations, you’ve come to the right place.

It only makes sense to vacation where the A-list vacations. When you want a new great room for your mansion, you look to an architect. When only a pre-nup will do, you head straight to a lawyer.

When it comes to travel, what better experts than the unapologetically wealthy? With all their promotional junkets, film festivals and red-carpet appearances, celebrities not only rack up frequent-flier miles, but they have wallets big enough to do  it with panche. Enjoy!!

If you’re a writer, Key West is on your bucket list, likely in the number one spot.

This bohemian island city, the southernmost in the United States, is where Ernest Hemingway
produced nearly half his life’s work including To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s where Tennessee Williams wrote Streetcar Named Desire, supposedly while listening to Billie Holiday records, and where he partied with Truman Capote, James Leo Herlihy and Thomas McGuane.

This two- by four-mile island that’s nearer to Havana than Miami is said to have more writers per capita than anywhere including 13 Pulitzer Prize winners. Whether drawn by the tropical climate or its famed zany hedonism, writers such as Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost, Ralph Ellison, John Dos Passos, Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein and Elizabeth Bishop are just a few whose names have appeared on Key West mailboxes.

If you’re truly ambitious, your bucket list contains the hope to be an invited presenter at the prestigious Key West Literary Seminar, held every January since 1983. Or your list could be like mine, just wanting a little recognition for your wild-ass dream to make a living doing what you love.

When I visited Key West in the early 1990′s, I had already written a couple books, but hadn’t yet convinced a publisher they deserved airing. I’ll never forget gazing reverentially at the second-floor studio behind Hemingway’s Whitehead house, the place where he wrote every morning whether hung-over from a night of hard-drinking with Sloppy Joe Russell or sore from a dust-up with Wallace Stevens. I remember feeling giddy, inspired, thinking to myself, “Someday, like my fellow Kansas City Star alum, I,too, will be recognized for my words.”

So when I went back to Key West last month to celebrate the anniversary of its April 23, 1982 secession from the union, a raucous reenactment complete with parades and water balloons of the day the city declared itself an official nation–The Conch Republic–in protest of the roadblock that was deterring tourists, I couldn’t resist returning to Hemingway’s home.

The six-toed cats, heirs to Hemingway’s beloved “Snowball,” a gift from a Cuban sea captain who believed the extra toes brought good luck, still roam the one-acre grounds. Pictures of his four wives still hang in the parlor. And, of course, the studio with his leather writing chair, his books and his typewriter still looks as it did between 1931 and 1938 when he was there every day pounding the keys.

But this time, as I descended the steps leading to and from the famous studio, it suddenly hit me. The vow I made 20 years ago had come true. Fifteen times, in fact, I’ve signed a contract with a publisher who believes in my work.

I noticed a certain bounce in my step and as I looked up at Key West’s clear, cerulean sky, gave a nod and a grateful, “Thank you, Papa.”

Now, if I can just get the Key West Literary Seminar to call.

The Florida Keys, a necklace of coral islands stretching 127 miles from the tip of the Florida peninsula, epitomizes the art of reinvention. Not only have the Keys and the people who live there survived countless floods and hurricanes, including three that finally put the kibosh on Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railway that connected these free-standing tropical islands to the rest of the country, but they’ve managed to do it all with an uncommon panache.

Pilgrims from other places end up here with a dream to try something new and the cojones to create a whole different reality for themselves.

Take Joe and Ronnie Harris, for example. New Yorkers through and through, they worked for NBC until Joe, on a diving trip to Key Largo, turned around and saw what he called the world’s most beautiful sunset. That was in 1991 and, before he was able to regain his senses, he was the proud owner of a small beach and the 11-room hotel that fronted it.

And since what’s a Florida hotel without tropical greenery, he and Ronnie, his eventual wife, started buying plants, so many that they noticed their two-acre property had morphed into a botanic garden.

Today, Kona Kai Resort still features nightly, knee-weakening sunsets, but Joe and Ronnie watch them under the tropical fronds of their very own botanic garden, a 501c3 non-profit complete with an ethnobotanist, educational programs and tours of their more than 250 species of plants.

Joe, who has been known to say that “plants are people, too,” sees this as his new life mission.

On the tour, led daily by Rick Hederstrom, a bright, eager young ethnobotanist straight from London’s Kew Gardens, I learned that West Indian mahogany contains catechin, an anti-oxidant that reduces the risk of heart disease, that the seats of Henry Ford’s first Model T’s were stuffed with Spanish moss and that if you place the top of a pineapple in your backyard garden, it’ll eventually grow into a pineapple bush — if you happen to live in the appropriate climate. With the plants in this botanic garden, I could have waterproofed a blow gun, plucked a needle used in Haitian voodoo or temporarily stunned some fish, making them easier to catch.

My main thought while on this tour is was why can’t every kid in America see this. Maybe they’d realize there’s more to life than the tiny screens they worship.

Kona Kai also has an art gallery, topped only by that sunset that I enjoyed while munching on Jamaican cherries, star apples and other exotic fruits grown right there in the Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai.

While in the land of reinvention, I also met Bob, a former pilot from Arizona, and Kristie Thomas, a former travel agent from Wisconsin, who have taken another plant — cacao — and turned it into some of the best truffles and chocolates this side of the Atlantic. The duo, who met a few years ago when Christie’s sailboat was hit by lightning in Brunswick, Georgia, poured their entire retirements into Key Largo Chocolates, a booming concern that, in less than a year, has already grown out of one location. Their slogan, “Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen” is only topped in creativity by their pastel pink and green shop at mile marker 100.5 that turns out such handmade concoctions as three-dimensional chocolate seashells, key lime pistachio bark, key lime truffles and chocolate-covered wine bottles.

Suzanne Holmquist, a former producer for the BBC, resurfaced in Key Largo after marrying an American engineer and boat maker. They recently added the African Queen, the 100-year-old steam boat used in the 1951 movie of the same name, to their fleet. Even though the celebrity vessel is registered as a national historic site, it had fallen into disrepair after its previous owner, a Humphrey Bogart enthusiast, died in 2001. After a six-month, $70,000 restoration, the African Queen is now back plying the waters of the Florida Keys. And as for Holmquist, she and her husband run Calypso Sailing Company, a fleet of tall ships, out of their bullet-ridden home (it was once used in a stakeout of drug runners) in Marina Del Mar.

Further down the Overseas Highway, at mile marker 48.5, I witnessed yet another reincarnated career. Richie Moretti ran a successful Volkswagen dealership in Orlando before buying a little mom and pop hotel in Marathon that was going into foreclosure. He rescued it, running it as the hotel it had been since the 1940s.

Its salt water pool, almost a redundancy sitting next to the ocean, eventually became an “inn” for rescued ocean creatures. First there was a tarpon, then a school of tarpon, a Goliath grouper, some lobsters and eels. In the mid 1980s, when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage, the school kids who came to the motel on field trips kept asking Moretti “where are your turtles?”

They sure couldn’t miss them now. The entire motel has been converted into a rescue operation for injured sea turtles. Moretti even bought the nightclub next door for use as a hospital, complete with operating rooms, doctors (well, veterinarians) and a couple ambulances. Since it opened in 1986, Moretti’s Turtle Hospital, the only such facility in the world, has rescued more than 1000 turtles, releasing most back to their ocean homes after propeller injuries, flipper amputation and the removal of viral tumors caused by the fibropapilloma virus that affect 50 percent of the world’s sea turtles.

So watch out if you’re heading to the Florida Keys. It might just inspire a whole new life.

Being a parent changes everything. While most celebs pick Christmas and New Year’s to visit St. Bart’s, the posh Caribbean magnet for all things chic, Beyonce and Jay Z headed to the eight-square-mile island to celebrate Easter. It was three-month-old daughter Blue Ivy Carter’s first big vacation.

Not that the proud parents didn’t sneak in some alone time. They spent a day sunbathing at Ansse de Grande Saline, an isolated half-mile beach where development, at least for now, is verboten.

It’s one of the tiny island’s 17 beaches and to get there, B and J had to scramble over a sand dune and hope the anole lizards didn’t take a hankering to the drinks they sipped from coconut halves. After all, they only wanted to soak up some powder white beach time without a diaper bag.

Easter holidays in St. Bart’s certainly wasn’t the celebrity couple’s first trip to this secret little French paradise where the ruling families, descendants of the original 17th century settlers, purposely keep prices high, limit the size of the airport and import everything from France. Homes, even modest ones without a beachfront, can cost upwards of $7 million which is why you’ll find such names as Steve Martin and David Letterman on St. Bart deeds. Jimmy Buffet, also a St. Bart’s homeowner, supposedly wrote “Cheeseburger in Paradise” at Le Select, a nondescript, but fabulous restaurant (Mick Jagger has entertained there), one of many wedged in between the Hermes, Gucci, Cartier and other high-end shops.

No, B and J are what you might call “regulars.” In 2009, in fact, Beyonce performed a controversial New Year’s Eve show at a Nikki Beach party thrown by Muammar Gaddafi’s son. In the audience were Usher, Lindsay Lohan and Microsoft founder Paul Allen whose 416-foot yacht, Octopus, can often be spotted at Gustavia Harbor.

During the notorious holiday party season, when Beyonce and Jay Z were a little tied up with the impending birth, rooms at the handful of hotels leap in price ten times over. A week at a villa can run up to $150,000. A long-time resident described the season as “summer camp for wealthy, well-known New Yorkers, business tycoons, music stars, and Hollywood celebrities.

“It’s like the whole island is Studio 54 at its peak,” he said.

In recent years, the hottest, most over-the-top New Year’s bash has been thrown by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Price tag? More than $7.8-million, but what do you expect when you fly in such entertainers as Prince, Gwen Stefani and the Black Eyed Peas? The Red Hot Chili Peppers rang in the 2012 party that was held as his $90-million Gouverneur Bay Estate, the same estate once owned by the Rockefellers. On the 400-name guest list? Jon Bon Jovi, Marc Jacobs, Harvey Weinstein, George Lucas and Martha Stewart, to name just a few.

Abramovich’s yacht, the world’s largest private yacht, measures 536 feet, has two helicopter pads, two swimming pools, a submarine and 80 onboard staff.

St. Bart’s, also known as St. Barths and St. Barthelemy, sits across from St. Marteen/St. Martin. It was originally discovered by Christopher Columbus and named after his brother, Bartolomeo.

Now go spend that trust fund?

Someone needs to tell Caitlin Brotz that she could get a lot more than $12 for the anti-aging serum she developed from pomegranate, blackberry and carrot seed oil.

After all, the big guns–the Lancomes and Crème de la Mers and La Prairies–charge up to hundreds of dollars per ounce for their anti-wrinkle creams.

“I always have to chuckle at their prices,” says the 30-year-old creator of Olivu 426, an all-natural beauty products business she runs from a small storefront in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. “I know exactly what goes into their products and the mark-up is insane. And I know good and well we could get a lot more for our products, but I chose not to go that route.”

But don’t let the meager price tag fool you.

“The reason our anti-aging products make up a good 30 percent of our business is because they work,” Brotz says. “We make everything fresh daily and use nothing but all-natural products.”

One of her most ardent fans, a 50-something teacher, decided to pit Olivu 426’s Night-Time Repairing Serum against a popular Lancome product. For a month, she applied Olivu 426 to the left side of her face and Lancome to the right.

“She appointed her husband as judge,” Brotz says. “Not only did our product win hand’s down, but her husband was so impressed, he now uses our products, as well.”

Men in Sheboygan, she says, don’t like to admit they use “product,” but thanks to the influence of Brotz’s newly-minted husband, a semi-professional football player who uses Olivu 426 to control acne caused from sweating in his football helmet, they’re starting to embrace the more than 120 products offered by Olivu 426.

Indeed, it was a male athlete who inspired Brotz to start making all-natural beauty products in the first place. When she was 22, her then-boyfriend, a semi-professional snowmobile racer, was building a track out of wood chips. When it accidentally caught on fire, he was burned on 60 percent of his body and life-flighted to Milwaukee. Because his body (and the resulting skin grafts) could no longer tolerate lotion with alcohol, Caitlin started researching all-natural products with healing properties.

The 426 in the business name, in fact, was Adam’s snowmobile number.

The other unique feature of Olivu 426 is that customers to the tiny 700-square-foot storefront are invited to make their own products, start to finish.

Just like paint-your-own pottery that spread across the country a few years ago, Olivu lets amateurs create such products as avocado whip lotion, emu oil body wash and lavender hydrating face mist. Or they can make lip balms, sugar scrubs, lotions and even insect repellent. The hard part is choosing which of the 150 types of herbs, scents and essences to add to their potions.

“We have everything from tomato leaf (it smells like a juicy Tuscan tomato) and orange Satsuma to baby powder and Brazilian water lotus,” she says. “But oatmeal milk and honey is probably still our most popular. It’s great for people with sensitivities or allergies or for those who can’t tolerate much of a scent.”

As far as she knows, Olivu is the only place in the world that offers customers that make-your-own option.

“Oh, there are places you can go and add your own scent, but our customers get to do it from start to finish right in our own test kitchen using the same blenders we use,” she says.

Eventually, she’d like to franchise the make-your-own aspect that is highly-popular with the Wisconsin bachelorette party set.

Right now, she’s focusing on growing the internet business that makes up a good third of her business.

“People visiting Sheboygan stumble into our store and get hooked, particularly on the anti-aging serums,” she says, adding that she has regulars from across the country and as far away as Japan.

“I didn’t even think about that when I put up the website,” Brotz laughs now. “I hadn’t stopped to consider overseas shipping.”

All, I have to say, Caitlin, is you better get ready. Olivu 426 is going to be huge.

Olivu 426, 511 N 8th Street, Sheboygan, WI 53081, 920.783.0809.

When your room key features a black and white photo of Betty Ford dancing on the Cabinet Room table, you have to figure you’re probably not in an ordinary hotel. Other hints would be the spiritual menu that dispenses every religious literary work from the Talmud to the Koran. Or the 36 by 48-inch portrait of Michael Richards (Seinfield’s Kramer) hanging outside your door.

Yes, I’m at the Hotel Lucia, the downtown Portland boutique hotel that doubles as an art museum. I’m here, not to gawk at Hotel Lucia’s art, though I certainly did, but for the rare opportunity to take in a Mark Rothko retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art.

Not many people know this about the artist whose color-saturated abstract paintings made him so famous, but he grew up here (after immigrating from Russia with his family) and took his first art class here. In fact, his first one-man show, staged in 1933 long before his paintings were selling for tens of millions of dollars, was curated at the very museum hosting this current show, 45 pieces that trace his work from the late 1920’s until shortly before his 1970 suicide.

Curator Bruce Guenther assembled the impressive exhibit from private collections, museums, the National Gallery of Art and Rothko children that famously sued to reclaim the nearly 800 paintings in his estate. They were successful in securing the return of all but 100 paintings including Homage to Matisse that sold in 2005 for a record $22.5 million and White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) that broke that record two years later, selling at Sotheby’s for $72.8 million. The exhibit moves from his early figurative works to the brooding subway series he painted for the WPA to the transcendent abstractions that created his legacy.

That Hotel Lucia is running a special Rothko promotion is not a big surprise. It has, after all, developed quite a reputation with its permanent exhibit of 680 black and white photos from the portfolio of another Portland original, Pulitzer-prize winning photographer David Hume Kennerly. In every corridor, guest room, bathroom and even elevator, Kennerly’s stunning photographs tell the story of American politics from Nixon on. In fact, it was a bit disconcerting sleeping in a bed so close to Dick Cheney and Leonid Brezhnev. Luckily, Kramer and Ansel Adams were there to weigh in. Even the 24-hour fitness center and the business office where I printed out my boarding passes showcased art, colorful pieces by Portland artists Mike Russo and Gregory Grennon.

One of my favorite features of Hotel Lucia is their “Get it Now” button. That means that, even if it’s 3 in the morning and you’re craving khao ka moo (a Thai dish involving stewed pork leg, for those who have never craved it), all you need do it push the button and voila!, they’ll figure out a way to make it happen. Which is another reason this hip and sassy boutique has a dedicated clientele of Hollywood and music stars. Although my lips are sealed as to who wanted what, here is a short list of “Get it Now” requests over the years: chocolate milk and Dom Perignon (at the same time), a fruit and vegetable juicer and an exotic, but legal mushroom, four unripe mangoes (don’t ask), a separate room for the luggage, 24-hour dog sitting and a TV mounted on the ceiling.

The other worth-mentioning feature of Hotel Lucia is the amenities They’re all local (I like that in a hotel) from Portland’s own Mada bath goodies to Portland Roasting coffee and Smith teas.

Included in Lucia’s Rothko promotion are tickets to the Portland Art Museum, a $20 certificate to the museum’s gift shop and two “Red on The Rocks,” colorful cocktails inspired by Rothko’s paintings.

The Rothko respective runs through May 27 as does Hotel Lucia’s “Rothko in Retrospect” package. To book, call 866.986.8086 or visit www.hotellucia.com.

Tourist destinations are not created equal. Here’s the top five reasons ya’ gotta love Montreal:

1.The majority of the population drives a BMW. Or that’s the joke. In Montreal, BMW stands for bike, metro or walk, all sustainable forms of transportation. The Metro, the underground rail that moves more than a million people on an average weekday, is a regular art museum with more than 100 works of public art from Marcelle Ferron’s magnificent stained glass at Champ-de-Mars to the only authentic Guimard entrance outside of Paris. It’s also one of the world’s most architecturally distinctive subway systems with each of 68 stations designed by a different architect. And since the metro is linked to 10 major hotels, you can conceivably visit Montreal, even in the dead of winter, and take nothing but shorts. Everything you could ever need from malls to fine dining is linked up to the metro. As historian Jean-Claude Germain said, “The metro is for Montreal what the boulevards are for Paris or the canals for Venice.”

2. Equal rights are taken seriously. Peek into the annals of most city histories and you’ll likely find a male, usually memorialized in a big bronze statue, usually riding a horse and carrying a weapon. Just last year, Montreal decided to officially recognize a female co-founder. For most of its 350-year history, Montreal gave the founder nod to Paul Chomedey de Maionneuve who led a group of missionaries to the Ville Marie settlement in 1642. Now Jeanne Mance, a French nurse who started a hospital and saved the colony by securing money from France, has her own statue and her own place in the history books as city co-founder.

3. Artists make grand and important statements. Cirque du Soleil and the National Circus School converted a 475-acre landfill into one of the world’s largest gathering places for circus arts. Called La TOHU (it’s a French term that means fertile confusion and renewal), this non-profit built a LEED-certified performance space (it’s round, made entirely out of recyclables and uses electricity transformed from landfill gas), hosts visitors to the recycling center and gives environmental safaris.

And in an effort to live by their stated social economy principles, La TOHU also refuses to hire anybody who doesn’t live right there in the once-impoverished Saint-Michel environmental complex. This site that was once a limestone quarry and a monstrous landfill is now an inspiring green space with 3 miles of bike paths and free events for guests to gather and ooh and aah such innovations as a micro-power station that converts biogas from the landfill into electricity and an ice bunker cooling system visible through a glass floor.

4. The anthem of the anti-war movement was written here. It was at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth hotel where John Lennon and Yoko Ono, during their second Bed-In For Peace, wrote “Give Peace a Chance.” When the celebrity couple checked into the hotel at midnight May 26, 1969, they’d already made headlines with a honeymoon Bed-in at Amsterdam’s Hilton two months earlier. But it was at the Montreal Bed-In, also attended by Tommy Smothers, Timothy Leary, Petula Clark and a group of Canadian Radha Krishnas, where the song “Give Peace a Chance” was composed and recorded, eventually reaching No. 14 on the Billboard chart.

5. There’s a cool (23 to 28 degrees) hotel that’s 100 percent sustainable. The Montreal Ice Hotel, with its 24 rooms and suites, is built entirely out of ice and snow, requiring nary a tree to lose its life. Unlike similar snow villages in Finland and Quebec City, this hotel is right in the city, on the very site, in fact, where Expo 67 was staged. It has an ice bar, an ice restaurant (it seats 60 and is helmed by Michelin star chef Eric Gonzalez), a wedding chapel and a convention center.

Getting rejected by Brad Womack on the 15th season of The Bachelor may have been the best thing to ever happen to Ashley Hebert.

Not only did she get her own show (Season 7 of The Bachelorette), but she was able to invite suitors to a 3000-square-foot villa at Fiji’s ever-amazing Namale Resort and Spa. And she’s not the only celeb to have had her name carved into a huge piece of wood at this luxury resort in Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island.

Russell Crowe, Donna Karan, Meg Ryan, Edward Norton and Tom Selleck are just a few stars whose names have been carved and hung from the doorway of a Namale bure, just one of many special touches guests can expect at this remote getaway on the Koro Sea.

Namale is owned by motivational speaker/author Tony Robbins, himself a bit of a household name, and has everything from its own private waterfall to one of the best fitness centers in the South Pacific. It even has a bowling alley where you can bowl barefoot.

Namale’s slogan, “Separate Yourself from the Rest of the World” is no exaggeration. It has 325 acres, 200 of which are protected rainforest, and only 19 bures and villas. That means you pretty much have the place to yourself. Each bure (Fijian cottage) has a thatched roof, Fijian hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, infinity pools and hanging beds.

As remote as it is, there’s plenty to do at this five-star resort from horseback riding and picnics at the waterfall to couples massage and yoga classes at the 10,000-square foot spa.

But perhaps my favorite feature, besides the fact that Tony provides scholarships for the kids of all employees, are the stones each guest receive. When a guests checks out, he or she is invited to carve a note into the stone, a memory will stay on this property in paradise forever.

If you’re one of the 114 million (a new record) that caught Madonna’s Super Bowl half-time show, it may interest you to know that the all those Vogue covers, flashing lights, booming loudspeakers and interactive stage effects were designed by a Montreal multimedia studio named Moment Factory.

Since 2001, this hip studio and its team of 12 designers has created installations for more than 300 events from Latin America to the Middle East. Madonna found them through her association with fellow Montreal company, Cirque du Soleil.

Whenever she’s in Montreal, either to talk flash or just enjoy a little Canadian je ne sais quoi, Madonna stays at the Hotel Le-St James, a 60-room boutique hotel in Old Montreal. A former 19th century bank, this five star hotel was chosen by PBS as the most romantic hotel in North America. With exquisite marble, inlaid wood floors, Ming urns, Victorian paintings and hundreds of valuable antiques from owner Lucien Remillard’s eclectic art collection, this swanky hotel exudes European refinement. Oh, and Madonna’s not the only celeb that likes the 3500-square-foot penthouse, the private hidden table at XO Restaurant and the discreet spa located in the old bank vault. Arnold Schwarznegger and the Rolling Stones are just a couple names you might recognize.

Here are a couple other great Montreal spots for star gazing:

Built in 1967 for Expo 67, Montreal’s World Fair, the Chateau Champlain offers by far the most stunning view in Montreal. From the arched windows of its 611 rooms, guests get a panoramic view of most everything worth looking at in this gorgeous city.

Fidel Castro most certainly uttered a few “que lindos” and “muy magnificos” when he stayed here the first week of October 2000 while attending the state funeral of his good friend, Pierre Trudeau who was, if you believe a former associate of mobster Meyer Lansky, nearly the target of a mafia hit for associating with the Cuban dictator. Enforcer Mike Craft told the Toronto Star that in the summer of 1974 he was ordered to off the former prime minister for trading with Cuba despite an American boycott. Although the hit was called off before “mission accomplished,” Craft reported that the mobsters were hoping to get back at Castro for closing down their Cuban gambling operations in 1959.

But by 2000 when the cigar-smoking dictator made the trip to Montreal for the funeral in Notre-Dame Basilica, all was forgiven. In fact, the tour buses that stop out front of the hotel are not carrying concealed weapons. They’re simply listening to their guides explain the hotel’s nickname: the cheese grater, so named for those arched windows that provide the breathtaking view of Place du Canada. George Clooney and Rihanna have also looked out those windows.

It’s undergoing a major overhaul at the moment, but you can expect significant tongue-wagging this spring when Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton reopens. This historic landmark was the site for the first of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s many weddings. On March 15, 1964, just a year after meeting on the set of Cleopatra, the famous couple checked into this iconic Montreal hotel for Nuptials Number one. The bride wore yellow chiffon and an $180,000 diamond and emerald necklace while a Unitarian minister did the honors. Located smack dab on Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, this hotel, that has also hosted Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, is within walking distance of many of this historic city’s high end boutiques, galleries and museums.

Another historic event that would have been covered by People magazine had People magazine existed back then was John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous “Bed-In for Peace” at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth. When the celebrity couple checked into the hotel at midnight May 26, 1969, they’d already made headlines with a honeymoon Bed-in at Amsterdam’s Hilton two months earlier. But it was at the Montreal Bed-In, also attended by Tommy Smothers, Timothy Leary, Petula Clark and a group of Canadian Radha Krishnas, where the song “Give Peace a Chance” was composed and recorded, eventually reaching No. 14 on the Billboard chart.

Today, it’s a one-bedroom suite with framed gold records, pictures and other memorabilia.

What do the Smurfs, Vin Diesel and Stephen Spielberg have in common?

They’re all planning to film in Montreal this year.

Diesel, in fact, is here now, reviving the third installment of his Riddick Chronicles. This one, called Dead Man Stalking, is filming mostly indoors at Mel’s Cite du Cinema in Montreal’s industrial district between the Champlain and Victoria bridges.

Probably a good thing, because it has been snowing non-stop here in Montreal for the past 24 hours. I’m here, staying at Marriott’s Chateau Champlain, to attend Montreal En Lumiere, a 11-day winter festival with arts exhibitions, live performances, international chefs, light shows and tonight’s big event—-Nuit Blanche, an all-night party than runs until 6 tomorrow morning.

I’m told there will be dancing, a giant Ferris wheel, an ice lounge, life-sized Snakes and Ladders, a 330-foot slide, drummers from South Africa, classes in bottle juggling, gourmet Belgium chocolate makers, comedians, costumed street performers, tours of Egyptian mummies and more.

I knew I was going to like this place on my first day here when, walking down Sainte-Catherine Street, I was invited to participate in a student protest. More than 10,000 students (someone estimated 43,000) were carrying signs, wearing red stripes of paint across their faces and vehemently showing their opposition to the government’s plan to double tuition from $2200 to $3800 over the next five years.

As much as I love a good demonstration, it was hard to feel too much sympathy as my daughter, who is going to college next year, will face annual tuition in the neighborhood of $50,000.

Still, you gotta love the passion of the Quebecois–be it student protestors blocking Jacques Cartier Bridge, one of the island’s main thoroughfares, right before rush hour to their love of gastronomy to their arts.

Look for stories over the next week about this passionate city. For now, though, I’ve got to run. Nuit Blanche is about to begin.

Soweto is overcrowded, dirty and noisy. It has high unemployment, a rickety infrastructure and a tangle of narrow streets lined with shanties fashioned from corrugated iron sheets. It’s also one of the most fascinating, joyful, high-spirited places I’ve ever visited.

We’re sitting on a patio at Sakhumzi, a restaurant just down Vilakazi Street from the small home where Nelson Mandela lived with Winnie before his 1962 arrest and 27-year imprisonment.

We’re drinking Castle Lager, a pale lager introduced in Johannesburg in 1895, and discussing how the smiley, a popular street dish in Soweto, got its name. A smiley, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is a sheep’s head, charred on a braai, or grill, that, along with eyeballs and brain, can easily feed the second row of rugby scrum. The name, we’re told by our waiter, comes from the toothy grin that remains after the lips of the sheep’s noggin have been scorched off.

Also on our conversational docket is the unlikelihood of two Nobel Prize winners living within blocks of each other on the very same street. Mandela’s home, now a museum with pictures, quotes and such memorabilia as the boots he wore on Robben Island and the championship belt given him by Sugar Ray Leonard, is on one side of Vilakazi Street and, a few blocks down on the other side, is Bishop Desmond Tutu’s home, still his main residence.

It’s a Sunday, and all over this township of 3 million, we see (and hear) church congregations, decked out in matching iridescent robes, singing and praying together under scrub trees, next to dry riverbeds and in the street beside the mechanics who are lined up to assist anyone needing a tire changed or an axle greased or an oil pan bolted back to its engine.

Like every day, Soweto’s genius is on display. With unemployment soaring at around 50 percent, entrepreneurs are as common as pill bottles in a retirement home. Across the street from the Sakhumzi patio, one such impresario, a juggler built like an offensive tackle, tosses beanbags, balls, knives, fire torches and zinging repartee, all of which he deftly fields before passing a hat to the fun-loving crowd.

Outside tourist museums such as the Hector Pieterson Memorial, a moving tribute to the Soweto student uprisings that led to the ending of apartheid, crafty businessmen sell frames made from discarded Coke cans, zebras carved from table legs and statues made from bottle caps. Street musicians sing, old friends tap-dance in unison, all hoping their near-professional efforts will coax a five-rand note from passers-by.

Soweto, an acronym for South Western Townships, is actually a cluster of sprawling townships southwest of Johannesburg. Like many things in South Africa, Soweto sprang up to accommodate segregation. It was established in the 1950s as a dormitory for black mineworkers, far from the “white” eyes of the inner city.

Before 1990, when apartheid was finally overthrown, blacks could neither own businesses or visit white establishments, so underground beer halls known as shebeens sprang up all over Soweto to sell homemade sorghum beer, pap, meaty stews and bread dumplings. Often closed down by apartheid cops, these makeshift bars continued to reappear because of their importance in unifying the community and providing a safe haven for activists and organizers.

We wander into one of these shebeens, run from the family living room, and get peppered with questions.

“Ah, the U.S.,” said one friendly patron, handing over the bet he lost to his drinking buddy. “I was just sure you were from Buenos Aires,” an assumption undoubtedly stemming from the stream of Argentians to the 2010 World Cup.

Perhaps the most well-known shebeen is Wandie’s Place. Opened illegally in 1981, Wandie’s is run by Wandie Ndaba who finally got an official license in 1991 and has since added a small B&B. Richard Branson, Evander Holyfield, Jesse Jackson and Quincy Jones have all shared a mug of umqombothi with Ndaba.

Like the shebeens that keep coming back, like the Nelson Mandela Museum that, when the Mandelas lived there, was burnt down and bombed twice (even the guard dog was poisoned after only one week), like the people themselves, Soweto continues on undaunted, resilient and ever-joyful.