As you can see from the Getty image here, the newly opened Beijing Terminal 3 is one gargantuan structure. Built in a mere four years, the terminal required entire villages to be relocated for its construction. Terminal architects even claim that it’s the largest building in the world. Period. We have no idea if that’s true, but it sure sounds impressive.

Beijing’s New Air Terminal

If ever a hotel were an icon, the Plaza New York is one. And with tomorrow’s reopening after two years and $400 million in renovations, the famed hotel will once again take a prominent spot on any list of Manhattan’s most luxurious lodging options. Featured in films from Arthur to Almost Famous, the Fifth Avenue landmark has downsized to just 282 hotel rooms from its former 805. Much of the building, which was given a roof-down overhaul, is now devoted to condo hotel units and private residences.

For nightly rates of $795 and up, guests may indulge in luxury perks like private butlers on each floor, bathroom fixtures plated in 24-karat gold and centralized room control panels that do everything from dim the lights to change the television channels.

Luckily, travelers who choose to stay elsewhere can enjoy the hotel’s lavish atmosphere with afternoon tea in the opulent surroundings of the Palm Court. By late spring or early summer, the hotel plans to open a high-end retail shopping area, a Caudalie Spa, a renovated Oak Room and Oak Bar, a Champagne bar and a Warren Tricomi Salon.

Traveling abroad as an exchange student can be a life-changing experience, but it can also be a harrowing one, especially when your home stay family’s cultural traditions and lifestyle differ drastically from your own. For most students, small traumas (like my friend who ended up sleeping in a room above the livestock in her Nepali host family’s home only to wake up one morning covered - head to toe - in itching bites courtesy of the bugs inhabiting the animals’ living space) build character and teach independence. When I was 14-year-old exchange student staying with a family in France, my personal traumas involved embarrassment over not understanding how to shower in the curtain-less bathroom without causing a flood and discovering I had unwittingly eaten gizzard one evening thanks to a gap in my vocabulary.

Unfortunately for one Maine teen, the experience of being a foreign exchange student involved real trauma. Jonathan McCullum, a 17-year-old student, reportedly dropped to a scant 97 pounds from his starting weight of 155 lbs when he ended up with a family that failed to feed him adequately. When McCullum returned home from his year living abroad in Egypt, his family was understandably shocked to find their son had lost one third of his bodyweight. Not the AFS organization is in hot water over the mess. As for the host family, their religious practices apparently involved a great deal of fasting. The story below also suggests that the host family balked at having to feed a strapping American boy, whose appetite exceeded that of the daughter they sent to the United States as part of the exchange program. Whatever the truth, it’s a sad story and a cautionary tale for anyone considering a study abroad home stay program.

Student Starved During Egypt Stay

Today San Francisco celebrates the opening of its first newly built hotel in three years. With a location next to the Moscone Center, the 550-room InterContinental San Francisco will be prime stomping grounds for the hoards of convention-goers the center attracts each year. Leisure travelers will find themselves near popular SoMA attractions like Yerba Buena Gardens, the SF MoMA and the massive Westfield Centre shopping complex.

The hotel stands out for offering floors with just 22 rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows in every room and an indoor lap pool. Both the hotel’s Luce Restaurant and lobby-level Bar 888 have been getting a lot of hype in all the local foodie and drinkie publications, so we expect both venues to be pretty happening over the next few months.

Several stories I’ve read pegged the hotel’s rates at $200+, but I found a standard king available on a Saturday night in April for $170 with advance payment and $189 for a flexible reservation.

Today Sofitel announced that it will embrace wind power at its nine U.S. locations. But don’t expect to see windmills whirring away in the parking lot. The company will purchase its blustery new power source in the form of renewable energy certificates from wind energy supplier Community Energy. The move will allow Sofitel to offset approximately 2 million pounds of carbon dioxide annually and makes it the first hotel chain to become an EPA Green Power Partner. We applaud Sofitel for going green!

Sofitel Hotels Become First Hotel Chain in the U.S. to Choose Wind Power and Become EPA Green Power Partner

If you’re going to be in New York this weekend and you love travel, consider checking out the New York Times Travel Show, a veritable smorgasbord of travel information from resorts, hotels, spas, cruise lines, tour operators, tourist agencies and adventure travel companies from around the world. Along with vendor booths and live entertainment performances representing a vast array of cultures, the show features a Taste of the World Pavilion filled with international cuisine and cooking demonstrations, a Spa Pavilion offering sample treatments and discounted packages at spa resorts, travel author appearances and special travel deals offered to folks brave enough to book their next vacation on the spot. And with travel experts Rick Steves, Arthur Frommer, Ian Wright and Stephanie Abrams - among many others - leading seminars, the show offers a rare chance for face-to-face learning from leading peeps in the industry. Cost: $15.

In case you were in any doubt that getting poop-canned wasted and acting up on a flight can land you in the big house, may we present the fate of Jose Roman, a traveler who just got sentenced to 10 months in the slammer for threatening the crew during a JetBlue flight last summer.

Man Gets 10 Months for Flight Disturbance

Oh, those crazy Poles. Who knew that a recent exhibit showcasing women’s undergarments throughout history would gain the country more recognition than Washington’s recent decision to upgrade Poland’s military forces. But yes, it’s true. And we wish we could go, ’cause there’s something gratifying in knowing that women’s underwear did not simply begin to torture women with the thong’s invention in recent decades. This exhibit shows that it’s always been a bit tortuous! Phew. At least the universe is not tilting wildly out of balance.

But we digress. Poland’s Museum of Industry in Opatowek has garnered more attention than you could fit in the cups of a triple-E bra with its current exhibit From Pantaloons to G-Strings. Among the many items on display are knee-length cotton underpants of yore, corsets and the dumpy cotton underwears that became de rigueur for Polish women during the 1980’s communist regime. In fact, if there’s anything you take away from this exhibit, folks, take away the fact that communism is just plain bad for women’s underwear. Freedom, on the other hand, leads to thongs. Go figure.

Lastly, how hilarious is it that the AP photograph flying around the internets with this story features a little boy skulking through the shadows behind rows of women’s panties? Now that’s some subversive journalism.

Unmentionables on Display in Poland

Just as we suspected, US Airways has decided to raise checked baggage fees. Starting May 5, 2008, travelers flying US Airways flights will have to fork over $25 for the privilege of checking a second bag on any flight booked on or after Feb. 26, 2008. And just like United, which also raised its second bag fee earlier this year, certain passengers will be exempt:

* Dividend Miles Preferred members (all tiers)

* Active military personnel

* Unaccompanied minors

* First Class and Envoy passengers

* Star Alliance’s Silver and Gold status members

US Airways New Baggage Policy FAQs

Downtown Boston’s Seaport District now has its very own Renaissance property. The 471-room Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel has adopted a maritime theme: an exterior designed to look reminiscent of a ship’s wind-filled sails, seagulls flocking above the front desk, blue hues in the rooms and wave-like structural features incorporated throughout.

While the hotel hopes to attract leisure travelers thanks to a location within walking distance of Fanueil Hall, the Boston Harbor Walk and the New England Aquarium, it is wooing business travelers with amenities like a DS-3 line Internet connection (28x faster than a T-1), rooms outfitted with flat panel televisions and connectivity panels that power multiple electronic devices at one time.

Travelers who stay at the hotel for two nights or more by Sept. 3, 2008 will receive a $100 Savvy Savings Certificate good toward a two-night stay at any Renaissance property in the U.S. or Canada. To score the savings, you’ll have to book through the site or call the hotel’s reservation number (1-800-834-7282) and use promo code PX3. Nightly rates at the hotel start at $169.