Jane Levere
How to pick up "status skills" abroad
Adult education can be a beautiful thing. Lovers of the finer things in life—like Aston Martin cars and Valrhona chocolates—can learn about them by taking special courses offered by their parent companies... often in exceedingly pleasant surroundings.
Learning vacations can teach you everything from how to drive an Aston Martin and gamble in Monte Carlo’s renowned casinos to how to make truffles using Valrhona’s fabled chocolate. At the very least, they'll turn you into a great date.
Other “status skills” you can pick up include glass-blowing—taught at a school outside Seattle founded by the famed artisan, Dale Chihuly—wine and scotch-making, tango and ballroom dancing, and even learning how to be a mahout, or elephant driver. Hint: It's all in the knees.
And these courses won't set you back a semester. Waltz lessons, given by Vienna’s famed Elmayer Dance School, are 50 minutes long, while Glengoyne Distillery, a scotch producer outside of Glasgow, offers two blending courses, one two hours long and another a half day. Both include a tour of the distillery and necessitate the drinking of fine scotch...
How to pick up "status skills" abroad
Adult education can be a beautiful thing. Lovers of the finer things in life—like Aston Martin cars and Valrhona chocolates—can learn about them by taking special courses offered by their parent companies... often in exceedingly pleasant surroundings.
Learning vacations can teach you everything from how to drive an Aston Martin and gamble in Monte Carlo’s renowned casinos to how to make truffles using Valrhona’s fabled chocolate. At the very least, they'll turn you into a great date.
Other “status skills” you can pick up include glass-blowing—taught at a school outside Seattle founded by the famed artisan, Dale Chihuly—wine and scotch-making, tango and ballroom dancing, and even learning how to be a mahout, or elephant driver. Hint: It's all in the knees.
And these courses won't set you back a semester. Waltz lessons, given by Vienna’s famed Elmayer Dance School, are 50 minutes long, while Glengoyne Distillery, a scotch producer outside of Glasgow, offers two blending courses, one two hours long and another a half day. Both include a tour of the distillery and necessitate the drinking of fine scotch...
Jane Levere How to pick up "status skills" abroad Adult education can be a beautiful thing. Lovers of the finer things in life—like Aston Martin cars a... more
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1
Blend Scotch
Glengoyne Distillery offers two courses—one two hours long, the other a half day—to individuals interested in learning how to blend Scotch. Both courses include a tour of the distillery, a tasting and scotch-blending sessions; they are taught in Glengoyne’s ”sample room,” whose walls are lined with sample bottles containing whiskies at different stages of maturation.
2
Tango Immersion Courses
Borello Travel and Tours sells four and eight-day tango immersion courses at the Mansion Dandi Royal, an early 20th century Art Nouveau home that is now a hotel, in Buenos Aires’s San Telmo neighborhood. Packages include a welcome reception with live bandoneon music and champagne, daily group tango lessons in the hotel, and entrance to "milongas" where locals dance the tango.
3
Mahout Course
This course takes place at the elephant camp at Anantara Resort Golden Triangle, near Chiang Rai, Thailand. Students are instructed by a qualified Thai mahout and English-speaking guide, and learn basic commands, daily care of an elephant, and how to mount an elephant—either up its side or by leap-frogging over its bowed head—among other other skills.
4
Royal Delft
The last producer of the famous handmade pottery from the Dutch city of Delft offers a two-hour guided tour of its factory that includes a tile-painting workshop. A professional painter supervises the fun; the tile then is glazed and fired, and can be picked up or shipped in a few days.
5
“King of Grapes”
Viviani Destination Management runs a two-year “King of Grapes” program that takes place only in the fall. In the first year, participants visit a Napa Valley winery, hand-pick Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, destem them and begin the process of wine-making. In the second year, they return to Napa to blend their wine, which is then aged, bottled, corked and given a private label.
6
Pilchuck Glass School
Founded by master glass artisan and Tacoma native Dale Chihuly in 1971, the Pilchuck Glass School today has its own 54-acre campus nestled between the Cascade Mountains and Puget Sound, and offers five consecutive sessions of 17-day courses from May to September. (Chihuly does not teach but is on the school’s board.) For novice and experienced glass-blowers, these cover everything from kiln-casting and conceptual flame-working to Venetian glass-blowing and the making of mosaics.
7
Cooking With Chocolate
Valrhona’s Ecole du Grand Chocolat offers two courses for non-professional chocolate enthusiasts; one teaches you how to make chocolate cookies, ganache, mousse and cakes, while the other teaches you how to make chocolate candies, including truffles and filled or chocolate-covered sweets. Conducted in French and English, the courses are held at Valrhona’s headquarters in Tain l’Hermitage, near Lyon, France.
8
Gambling Courses
Both the Casino de Monte-Carlo and the Sun Casino run gambling courses, the most exclusive of which is the former’s “super private initiation.” Offered in the evening, this course lasts two and a half hours and brings participants to the heart of the casino, the private Cabaret Salon. Games taught include European roulette, Punto Banco and blackjack.
9
Waltz Lessons
Founded almost 100 years ago by a former army officer, the Elmayer Dance School is located in a palace in central Vienna, and teaches dancing and etiquette based on the traditional Austrian imperial system. Besides running classes for young Viennese, the school also offers group and private lessons to visitors, as well as entry to the final ball at the Imperial Palace, the “Elmayer-Kranzchen,” each ball season.
10
Performance Driving Courses
Only owners of Aston Martin automobiles can take performance driving courses at the company’s proving grounds in Millbrook, United Kingdom; Lommel, Belgium; and Troy, Michigan. The one-day courses teach owners how to operate their Aston; they are offered from April through September in all locations.
[source: https://www.forbestraveler.com/luxury/learning-vacations-story.html ]
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