The best of the web: Food, postcards, pandas, Joshua trees, country walks, solo travel and Asian tailors

• My other great passion is food and I write about this over at The Gooseberry Fool so I particularly enjoy reading articles that combine the two. This week The Guardian has an article on where you can find the best examples of top 10 classic dishes around the world, from sushi in Tokyo to pizza in Naples.
  

  “Ask a New Yorker for the ‘best burger’ and they are liable to laugh derisively. ‘That’s impossible,’ they’ll reply. ‘Do you mean old school or new school, retro or nouveau?’”

  Meanwhile, The Observer has a lovely article about foodie tourism in New Zealand.

• Lara on Cool Travel Guide has written a series of posts on postcards. Does anyone still send them, she wonders. Do people still read them? I certainly do – I love the aesthetic of a good postcard and find it pleasurable to sit in a café with a good cup of coffee and a stack of postcards, choosing the right image for the right person and reliving the highlights of the trip. It’s much nicer than sitting in an internet café and I feel that I am making more of a connection with people – especially the old and very young who may not use the internet.

• This week’s Carnival of Cities is hosted on the Family Travel site. Browse the posts on cities ranging from Seattle to Trieste. You can also enter for next week’s carnival, which will be hosted on the Perceptive Travel blog.

• Gadling writes about tracking pandas in the wild in China. Apparently panda turds smell like fresh bamboo.

• World Hum asks what would Joshua National Park be without Joshua trees? Not a hypothetical question since global warming could render the park too warm for its namesake trees within 50-100 years.

• KiwiWriter identifies the five essential ingredients of a good travel blog.

• Heather on her Travels shares the experience of a walk from Blaise Castle to Kings Weston in Bristol, complete with tea and a lemon drizzle cake at the end.

• Are you travelling solo? (Or even worse, NOT travelling BECAUSE you don’t have a travelling companion). Kim on Wild About Travel + Writing recommends the best holiday destinations for the single traveller. She also has a post with common sense advice for the solo female traveller. If you want to meet someone special, then follow Window Seat’s guide to the top single cities in the US – New York is full of single girls, while San Jose is full of single men.

• Tailoring in Asia is very good and ultra cheap so a visit to the region is a good excuse to get some bespoke clothing. Window Seat has a guide to how to do it.