The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul is like a litmus test for designer labels. Browsing the wares here is the best way to assess a brand's viability: The more frequent its fakes, the greater its mass-market cachet. Last week, when I braved its halls, the stalls were piled high with Prada and Dolce bags (no surprise), but also with G-Star and Loewe knockoffs (take that, Canal Street). Strangest of all? The piles of ersatz Ed Hardy, which succeeded in looking just as cheap and tacky as the originals, making them probably the best buy there.

The Bazaar wasn't anything like I expected, although there were a few supposedly high-end boutiques tucked in a corner. One of them had an alabaster mannequin posed like a Helmut Newton nude: legs splayed, hands on hips, naked but for an enormous black fur coat suggestively hanging open—Russian-hooker-chic. The stallholders in that section were clearly courting rubles and pounds. The refreshingly direct advance—"Excuse me, where are you from? Can I help you spend some money?"—was repeated, as necessary, in Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, and English.

No doubt it's those international tourists—Russians with private jets, new-moneyed Chinese—behind Starwood's decision to pick Istanbul as its road-test location for the W Hotels chain in Europe. (The branch here will be the lone brand beacon for at least a year, until clones in St. Petersburg, Manchester, Verbier, et al pop up.) The hotel's housed in a cluster of Ottoman-era row houses that were once servants' quarters for the nearby Dolmabahçe Palace, with huge souk-inspired rooms, disco-dark corridors twinkling with pink crystals, and a two-story branch of New York's Spice Market. (Exporting Vongerichten's restaurant to a town that already has a real spice market? Ballsy.)

France is hardly known for its bonhomie. Foie gras, the guillotine, and doe-eyed nymphets, yes, but not for giving visitors the red-carpet treatment. And it was the carpet—a ratty navy and purple one—that reminded me of that Gallic offhandedness last time I passed through Newark. I was booked on L'Avion, the lavender-heavy all-business-class French airline that operates a shuttle service from NYC to Paris. (It rents planes from Lufthansa, hence the occasional untranslated Achtung sign onboard.) The problems, of course, started at check-in.

The latest in an ongoing series of opinionated dispatches from our widely traveled contributor Mark Ellwood

I don't own hiking boots, performance fleeces, or even a sleeping bag. I don't do mud, and I'd take a city sidewalk over a scenic view any day. But I'm not foolish enough to turn down the chance to go on safari in Botswana—even if my pre-trip briefing included some disconcerting clothing instructions. "No bright colors: Red or pink will scare the animals! And no dark colors, either: Black and navy lure mosquitoes." That left me to pack just three white T-shirts, a gray hoodie, and a pair of Banana Republic khakis from the nineties—traveling light by necessity. I jammed in a jug of industrial-strength bug-zapper just in case, though I assumed that a regular intake of quinine-juiced G&Ts would be my, ahem, natural remedy.

Twenty hours and three flights later, I landed at Khwai River Lodge in northern Botswana. The African veldt feels like a time warp: Without power lines to break the horizon, it's easy to expect a velociraptor to come tearing out of the waist-high grass, or at least Raquel Welch to appear in her fur-trimmed bikini. Only the buzz of light aircraft feels jarringly modern.

My favorite pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale was the Korean one—mostly because the work inside had a wit and playfulness that came as a relief after all the nod- and hmm-inducing stuff around it. A black cube inside featured a small number of bright white-spotlighted skeletons that resembled a dinosaur exhibit for kids—the difference being that these were the bones of Wile E. Coyote, Tom & Jerry, and other American animation icons. It was jarring, amusing, and totally bizarre.

Nine months later, Hyungkoo Lee (the artist responsible) has shipped those cartoonish skeletons to America, added some new work, and cloned the black walls-and-spotlight setup of the pavilion, all for New York's gargantuan Arario Gallery. And this June, he'll continue with his subversively witty work at Art Basel—which is just like Art Basel Miami Beach without Paris Hilton or any of the fun parties. He's also planning another gimmick: One of the cartoon skeletons is already on loan to the boffins at Basel's Natural History Museum, and they're using their dinosaur-reconstructing techniques to "re-create" an animal from those conceptual innards. Expect a post-Chernobyl-like creature—but produced with typical Swiss precision.
Hyungkoo Lee solo show, through Saturday, Arario Gallery New York, 521 West 25th St., (212) 206-2760, ararionewyork.com