🎢 A 16-day roller coaster ride | Bulletin #157

This week: we're going to Argentina and Uruguay! 🌎

July 01, 2026

Kew Palace & Queen Charlotte’s Cottage 📍 London, United Kingdom 📸 Andrew Afram

London's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew employ a full-time "corpse flower watcher" every summer, tasked with one of horticulture's more pungent vigils: alerting visitors the moment the titan arum decides to bloom. The plant, native to the rainforests of Sumatra, takes seven to ten years between flowerings. When it finally makes its move, it does so with commitment: the bloom lasts only 24 to 48 hours, during which it generates its own heat to better disperse an odor described, with impressive consistency, as rotting flesh. Crowds line up anyway. Kew has learned to treat each blooming as a ticketed event, complete with late-night openings, because apparently for a significant portion of the population, "smells like a crime scene" is a compelling reason to leave the house!

HOLA, ARGENTINA!

We’re planning our next Adventure with our friends at Skyscanner, and this time we're heading way down south to Argentina and Uruguay! Have any recs for Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Colonia del Sacramento? Please send them our way! 🇦🇷 🇺🇾

THIS WEEK IN AWA AWESOMENESS

🌭 Hot dogs on us
💎 A family run cinema
⚾️ A 108 year losing drought
🎢 Riding a rollercoaster for more than a day?

Happy (almost) American Independence Day to those who celebrate. We're heading into the Fourth with four fun facts you can share at the BBQ no matter what country you’re in!

Gem Cinema 📍 Jaipur, Agra 📸 Marjorie Becker Photo

THE REEL RETURN

When Gem Cinema reopened in 2020 after sitting dark for fifteen years, 85-year-old projectionist Bhawani Sinh ji returned to fire up the same German projectors he'd been running since 1962. The theater - Rajasthan's largest when jeweler Maniram Kasliwal opened it in 1964 - had been shuttered by multiplexes, but the family refused demolition offers and simply waited. They even kept the gem-shaped ceiling motifs intact, named for the family business that made it all possible…

Wrigley Field 📍 Chicago, Illinois, USA 📸 Marjorie Becker Photo

CURSE OF THE FRIENDLY CONFINES

When the Chicago Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016, they broke a 108-year championship drought, the longest in North American professional sports history. While baseball analysts might blame decades of mismanagement and rebuilding, Cubs fans know the real culprit: a Greek tavern owner's goat, ejected from Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series, whose owner cursed the team on his way out. For over a century, one of baseball's most beautiful ballparks was home to the sport's most spectacular losing streak.

405 HOURS AND 40 MINUTES

In August 1977, a nineteen-year-old named Richard Rodriguez climbed onto a Coney Island roller coaster and rode the ride again. And again. And again… for over 104 hours, he ate hot dogs, M&Ms, and milkshakes mid-ride, pausing only for brief bathroom breaks. He then waited thirty years and did it again, better: in 2007, at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the United Kingdom, Rodriguez rode for 405 hours and 40 minutes (or 16.9 days), breaking a record that, it bears noting, he himself had set. The only person who could beat Richard Rodriguez, it turned out, was Richard Rodriguez.

This week’s secret link winners are in for a tote-ally awesome prize: a new AWA tote bag! Happy searching; hope you bag the prize! 🔍👝