What $100 Buys in... Shanghai

For travel features and news, check our blog daily. Vegas by bus A line of Vegas.com Arrow buses now drops visitors off in front of hotels and top city landmarks. vegas.com, from $3. Chicago culture The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies has moved to a building across from Grant Park. spertus.edu, $7. Cruise news Celebrity Cruises has a new ship, Celebrity Solstice, sailing the Caribbean. celebritycruises.com. L.A. lunch The first DineLA Restaurant weeks are Jan. 27¿Feb. 1 and Feb. 3¿8. A three-course lunch costs $15; dinner is $25. dinela.com. Tour for two You can tour Miami Beach in GoCars, mini two-seater cars equipped with GPS. gocartours.com, $49. Swiss railway The new Lötschberg Base Tunnel through the Alps is open to passenger trains. The Bern-to-Milan trip is 30 minutes shorter. Polar explorer Lindblad Expeditions has added a ship to its fleet. National Geographic Explorer begins sailing the Arctic this summer. expeditions.com. Wholly Moses A Grandma Moses painting exhibit opens Jan. 26 at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla. ringling.org, $19. JetBlue online JetBlue has signed deals with Priceline and Orbitz to list its flights on the search engines for bookings and travel packages. New air route Aer Lingus, Ireland's national carrier, has launched a nonstop route between Dublin and San Francisco. Virtual passes Continental is testing a system at Houston's airport in which passengers can use images sent to their cell phones as virtual boarding passes. Green rentals Enterprise, National, and Alamo are now offering customers the option of purchasing a $1.25 carbon offset per car rental. The sister companies will match contributions up to a total of $1 million. Argentina tour Cultural and historic tours of three Buenos Aires barrios are now available for iPods. mptours.com, $15. Photo sharing Flickr's new "Places" tool allows people to search for photos posted to the site by users in more than 100,000 locations around the world. D.C. cabs By April, taxis in Washington, D.C., are expected to install meters, abandoning the zone system for charging passengers.

Cab ride: $35 You can fly to Sarajevo International Airport, 15 miles northwest of Jahorina, from most major cities in Europe and the U.S. (from $700). The taxi ride to Jahorina is just under an hour. Cabbies often whip around the mountain's switchbacks, making for a nail-biting drive. Ski rentals: $15 per day Ski shops and hotels at the base of Jahorina rent skis and snowboards for around $15 per day. Ski Rental Peggy is a local favorite; the shop stocks such cool brands as Atomic and Blizzard, and there's a rustic café and bar next door (011-387/57-270-210, peggy-jahorina.ba). Apple treat: $3 Koliba, a restaurant with simple cowhide benches and waiters who take orders on PDAs, serves some of the best meals in Jahorina. Specialties include cevapi, ground beef and lamb croquettes in a pita, and tufahija, a stewed apple filled with lemon, nuts, and whipped cream (011-387/57-272-100, termaghotel.com). Ski lesson: $22 Jahorina first made it onto the map in 1984, when it hosted the women's Alpine events of the Sarajevo Olympics. Today, a one-day pass costs $22; a week is $124--that's only $37 more than a day at Aspen. Above the tree line, Jahorina has some intense runs: The moguls below the Ogorjelica lifts will work your knees. The slopes by the Poljice T-bar are great for beginners. At the nearby VLSKI ski school, instructors charge $22 for a one-hour lesson (011-387/65-998-616, vlski.com/eng). Ski lodge: $66 Slope-side accommodations cost about $100 per night. The Hotel Nebojsa has a large disco and a glassed-in winter garden (011-387/57-270-500, hotel-nebojsa.com, from $66). The rate at the chic Termag Hotel includes access to the hotel's outdoor skating rink and Turkish bath (011-387/57-272-100, termaghotel.com, from $144). Bosnian beer: $1 The road that weaves up the mountain is lined with small family-owned stores that sell German and Croatian chocolates, bottles of Bosnian Nektar beer for $1, and $3 round plastic sanke (sleds) for kids. The lights along the main run below the Poljice T-bar stay on most nights for sledding. Hot wine: $2 Skiers can warm up with Turkish coffee or mulled wine, spiced with cloves and cinnamon, at one of the cafés just below the Ogorjelica summit. From the deck of Zacarani dvori ("Enchanted Palaces"), the Bosnian foothills seem to stretch to the horizon (011-387/57-233-096).  

It's 8 p.m. on a Friday, and a fashionable group of men and women is sitting around the pewter bar at Proof on Washington, D.C.'s G Street. "Do you cook?" asks a 30-something lawyer with shaggy black hair as she tilts a glass of red wine toward the guy next to her. "If my apartment had come without a kitchen," he replies with a grin, "I wouldn't have noticed." Everyone laughs knowingly. In the last few years, as more young professionals and empty nesters have bought homes in the nation's capital, D.C. has shifted from being a city of chilly Federal buildings to a place where cutting-edge restaurants, late-night cafés, and underground bars open more frequently than local politicians are busted for scandals. Brasserie Beck is one of several large, bistro-style restaurants that debuted last year. Designed to look like a train terminal, Beck runs about the length of a block, with train-station clocks set to different time zones. The 100-beer selection is equally impressive: There are nine on draft, such as Campus, a pilsner from Belgium that's exclusive to Beck. The menu--steamed mussels served with frites, duck almondine--was crafted by chef Robert Wiedmaier, who also opened Marcel's, the city's premier French restaurant. Central Michel Richard, started by the chef who made Citronelle one of the nation's top restaurants, has a playful interior, with leaning towers of plates stacked around the dining room. The bistro is often populated with D.C. celebrities--that is, lobbyists, lawmakers, and media types--who like to rev up an evening at the marble bar with a clementine mimosa. But the real draw is Richard's food, which comes with a more reasonable price tag than Citronelle's. Most of the dishes, from a "faux gras" terrine (made with chicken) to braised rabbit with spaetzle, don't top $20. Just north is the historic corridor of U Street. Classic pit stops like Ben's Chili Bowl, a diner that's been around since 1958, are wedged between old and new clubs that play host to jazz musicians. In the 1930s, Duke Ellington often performed on U Street, then called Black Broadway. Some of the fiercest Saturday-night sessions are held at HR-57, which takes its name from a 1987 congressional directive that called on Americans to preserve jazz. Right off U Street is Busboys and Poets, a bookstore that also has a café, a theater, a bar, and a restaurant that serves pizzas. At one end, hipsters browse for books near a photo collage of Martin Luther King Jr.; at the other, friends sip microbrews and watch a film about the Bush administration. Busboys and Poets is an homage to Langston Hughes, who rose to prominence in D.C. while working as a busboy. The area of Adams Morgan has been undergoing its own renaissance. It's still popular with the college crowd, but there are now a few nightspots that appeal to a more sophisticated clientele. Bourbon, on 18th Street, is the place for bourbon aficionados: The 140-plus pours include a 16-year-old Black Maple Hill bourbon from Kentucky with hints of brown sugar. One block west is another atypical retreat. Named after the Paris subway, Metropolitain is a subterranean bar (below a bistro named Napoleon) specializing in champagne and other sparkling wines. The decor is inspired by the 1970s, with gold-and-white wallpaper and cushiony leather couches--but there's no sitting around after 10 p.m., when DJs spin disco. Champagne also gets prime placement at Proof, where some 40 bottles of bubbly and wine are available in pours ranging from two to eight ounces. Portraits of George Washington and Hillary Clinton flash across flat-screens above the bar. Proof, like many things in the nation's capital, was inspired by the founding fathers. In this case, it's a nod to Benjamin Franklin, whom the bar quotes as saying, "Wine is proof that God loves us." Proof 775 G St. NW, 202/737-7663, proofdc.com, wine from $6.50 Brasserie Beck 1101 K St. NW, 202/408-1717, beckdc.com, beer from $7 Central Michel Richard 1001 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 202/626-0015, centralmichelrichard.com, "faux gras" terrine $14 Ben's Chili Bowl 1213 U St. NW, 202/667-0909, benschilibowl.com, chili $5 HR-57 1610 14th St. NW, 202/667-3700, hr57.org, cover from $8 Busboys and Poets 2021 14th St. NW, 202/387-7638, busboysandpoets.com, pizza from $8 Bourbon 2321 18th St. NW, 202/332-0800, bourbondc.com, from $5 Metropolitain 1847 Columbia Rd. NW, 202/299-9630, napoleondc.com, wine from $6

In 1966, London's St. Pancras train terminal was marked for demolition--it was dirty, decrepit, and fast becoming a drug haven--when poet John Betjeman launched a campaign to save it from the wrecking ball. Thanks to a $1.6 billion renovation, the 140-year-old St. Pancras is back to its Victorian Gothic glory. It's now the U.K. terminal for 27 high-speed Eurostar trains (and new tunnel technology has trimmed the trip to Paris by 20 minutes). A bronze of Betjeman stands in the station, gazing at the 100-foot-high ceiling. 011-44/20-7843-4250, stpancras.com.