Istanbul with Krisia!

I just spent a week in Istanbul with Krisia. It was EXACTLY as much fun as it sounds, as in: a lot…We basically played incredible amounts of Backgammon (hence why I chose this picture, because under the outer chess cover, this is a backgammon set), drank LOTS of Turkish tea which is bitter but you get used to it, as it complements the food nicely, ate tons and tons of food and walked around a lot in between Krisia’s lessons.

Istanbul is just a magical place. I had been steadily dreaming of it since I first set foot in the Middle-East three years ago, and finally, it was time to pay a visit to this city of dreams. It is such a warm, friendly…exciting city. It feels so confident. Istanbul is just a powerhouse. It has a strong identity, and Turkish people are proud of their culture and their identity without being arrogant, so you end up in a place that has a strong cultural flavor, yet the atmosphere is light and fun. It was very much what I needed, and I enjoyed every minute of my stay there.

We ate our body weight in food, which was delicious. We ate stuffed mussels (check out Krisia’s post about Midye Dolmasi in July) almost every night, comparing different recipes until we found out that our two favorite ones came from…brothers who alternated locations in Kadikoy (the section of the city where Krisia lives, on the Asian side). We ate all sorts of rice and kebab and meat dishes, all more delicious than the others, and manti, which is Turkish ravioli:

That, my friends, is a picture of the best Manti on the planet. We sat there, quite stunned to realize that we were eating art as food. And we finished our meal in silence, aside from a few satisfied groans, which, try as we might, we were unable to suppress. It was my last meal in Turkey and I know I will dream of it for years to come. If you can’t quite tell what is on the plate, it’s meat-stuffed pasta (very small) and a dollop of garlicky fresh yogurt with spicy oil drizzled on top, and some sumac and I think dried mint. Delicious.

To be fair, I didn’t just eat and play backgammon, although I did mostly that. While Krisia was teaching one day, I went over to the Asian side with the ferry, behold the skyline:

And finally visited Sultan Ahmet (the mosque on the left with the six minarets). This neighborhood was the only part of Istanbul where the men were less than completely gentlemanly and respectful and would actually follow me and harrass me and other tourists with “excuse me…what’s your name? excuse me!! where you from?” If you’ve been to Istambul, you know how unusual it is for people to bother you. Which was a very pleasant thing…

The mosque was nice…but I was really moved by the underground cistern, not far from it, in which I spent about an hour, walking along the wooden platforms in between the columns and over the water. It was damp and fresh, dark and otherworldly:

Apparently, from what I’ve been able to find out on the internet (I had no idea then because I was just walking around absorbing the experience), this cistern was built after the Nika revolt in 532 AD. After the Ottoman Turks conquered the city, the cistern was forgotten about and no one knew it existed, it was rediscovered in 1545 and used to water the gardens of Topkapi Palace. I am glad I followed Krisia’s advice who strongly urged me to spend the money and go in…It was perfect and quite strange. In the Northwestern end of the cistern, they’ve uncovered two columns with the head of a medusa as a base, here’s one of them:

I’ll spare you the archeological details because in short, they don’t know why only two columns were shaped that way. It’s just cool, and that’s enough for me.

We also had a brief foray into the Grand Bazaar and the Egyptian Spice Bazaar (I like to think of the Grand Bazaar as History’s First Mall because it is cramped and full of shops, just as driven to consumerism, there are no indications of what time or time of day it is, there is a food court for sustenance, you can buy anything at all you need or want or don’t, and I can’t stay there more than 45 minutes, all of which are my criteria for what a “mall” is). Here is a glimpse of my favorite one of the two, the Spice Bazaar:

Walking between the two bazaars, you wind your way through bazaar-y streets, full of market stalls, and random stalls in the middle of the road, where kids sell (Kris, what did you call this again??I can’t remember) funny drawy-things, or electro-LIKIT (mosquito-killing liquid-dispensing plugs from RAID) men carry HUGE boxes on their backs, sell Turkish flags or cherry-juice from an engraved metal pitcher strapped to their back.

If you look up, once in a while, you’ll see strange signs advertising very specialized shops. :-) a running theme, I suppose, in my travel blogs.

So that’s a flavor of Turkey: rich, diverse, very different, relaxed, hectic, pleasant…deep.

Here’s one last photo, one of the moments I’ve often returned to since leaving Istanbul. Admittedly, it was a very touristy environment for witnessing a mystical dance, but I’d always dreamed of seeing whirling dervishes and nothing was going to ruin it for me. I hope that you can feel something special in the photograph, because it was a moment of heightened experience for me. It seems wrong to have frozen their circular whirling motions and deprived it of the uplifting music that accompanies them in their journey, but still. I am transported back when I see this photo.

Thank you Krisia for being so wonderful…it was so good to see you and spend a whole week of laughing, quantum physics, Bartholomew and Backgammon, Manti and and ferries, Kadikoy and milshakes in the yard. :-)

city bicycles

The city of Lyon in France just put a few hundred bikes out for its citizen’s use. The shiny brand-new bikes are tied to posts and available for trips through the city, as you can pick them up and drop them off at various hubs. The first half-hour is free and the yearly subscription costs a pittance. One great idea towards sound ecological public transport alternatives! Unfortunately, while I was in Lyon, I didn’t get a chance to ride them since the hub I was at didn’t accept credit card payments…

a day that warrants clapping

one finds oneself one day walking along the street of the city where one lives, and clapping in rythm with one’s own step, and then turning the corner and seeing the homeless man who sometimes parades around the city half-naked waving his arms about chasing what looks like imaginary demons…also clapping slowly in the sunshine, on this brisk fresh day.

But then again, one might just laugh, and say to oneself, “this is a day that warrants clapping”.

And more days should be clapped to and welcomed. In step, and heartily, if you please. We have much to celebrate in a world where things can become so bloody and so tragic so very quickly.

packaging

I love packaging. I love series. I love when both are combined. One of my favoritest things about our conference hotel in Bulgaria was the “first-day-welcome-packaging” of all the toiletries in the shelf in the bathroom, in striated card paper embossed with a coat of arms and sleek-print labeling of the contents. The next days we were given the “scaled-down” version of everything in little plastic-wrappings and sample envelopes. But the sheer array and collection was so pretty!

un cafe parisien

I was walking around the Champs Elysees after running an important errand and suddenly decided to go and see “The Sheepman”, a 1958 George Marshall movie with Shirley MacLaine and Glenn Ross and Leslie Nielsen. One of the best comedy westerns of all time, with a great cast and a great script was the description and that sounded good to me.

Short notice…didn’t find anyone to come with me, so I called Kelly up (she’s in London) on my cell phone just to point out I wish she were here and we could go to the movie together, and she asked me to go to a cafe in her name. They don’t really have non-chain-store French-style outdoor terrace cafes in London. So I said I would.

I raced to the Latin Quarter area (Metro Odean, in Saint-Germain-des-Pres) and wound my way into the small streets to Catherine street, found the cinema then went deeper into the neighborhood to find food and the promised cafe.

I ate quickly and then sat front row at the terrace of a very small cafe, at the rounded corner of three very narrow but busy streets: rue de Bucci, rue Mazarine and rue Dauphine. This is the neighborhood where Oscar Wilde’s hotel was, and Moliere made his first appearance as an actor, stone buildings, aged cobblestones, narrow winding passages…

I ordered a “noisette” (hazelnut) which is espresso with a dash of milk and as I sipped it, things fell into place so quickly. This is the Paris that I love: no matter how busy and full of cars and little “mobylettes” a street is, because it is small and narrow, and because the people take over in this pedestrian of all cities, any street eventually feels pedestrian.

People spill onto sidewalk, sitting at their hundreds of cafe terraces, almost telling the passing cars: “look how far we are, we could totally take you over if we only wanted to, so count yourself lucky”. People cross in front of stalling traffic, ignoring zebra crossings and red lights, ignoring even moving cars, because they know this is their city, and they have the right of way. This is what I find admirable: in a city where everyone is in a perennial bad mood, drivers never really lose their temper at rude pedestrians crossin in front of them. It’s just accepted, and even revered. Cars have actually STOPPED in the middle of traffic for me to cross when I was on a sidewalk, one foot on the road. So uncalled for, and so…parisian.

It’s also the sounds that make it so pedestrian. You hear people talking, the rumble of voices covering the car and motor sounds. It’s not something I’ve experienced anywhere else, but then I haven’t been to Rome.

Sitting at that cafe in Kelly’s name was this rising foray into the Parisian way of life that is so unique in itself. I wrote for close to a half-hour, watching the people walk by in their very French way: the businessman with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, crossing the street, the couple arguing, the cheerful man with a side-step. And all the animated voices around me, communicating about work, about life, about Iran and Irak and I was drifting in and out of the conversations, enjoying the fact that here, people actually make time at least once a day for some, to sit outside, on the sidewalk, have a coffee, a bear or a cold drink and just talk. People here talk so much! It’s insane. I heard from a cell-phone specialist that they tried to do the “unlimited minutes after 8PM” deal here in France and they had to discontinue it because people took “unlimited” literally!

I walked out of the movie later, and lazily just walked, which is the best thing about Paris. It is a canvas for walking, and not sight-seeing but just walking. I let the streets show me the way, and stopped in this small street where a young man and woman who looked street urchins were playing instruments. They were both very skinny and dressed “a la Oliver Twist” complete with ragged short hair cuts, suspenders, leather caps. The young man was playing the violin and the young girl was playing an old accordion, but she moved in and out of her instrument while balancing herself on her toes with high steps that looked like she was being animated by strings from a high-perched pupeteer. Their music was very nostalgic, at the same time sad and funny, and so Oliver Twist kept popping into my head.

An man about sixty was leaning out of his third-floor apartment window for their performance, and I looked at him as I leaned in the dark entrance I had found as a discrete vantage point. He disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared and sent out a coin from his window to the performes. The coin bounced on the pavement and they both curtsied and nodded with a hop. I ran over and picked up the coin, dropping it into the violin case along with mine, smiled at them both and walked away.

And I realized that this is what I most love about Paris: walking away from beautiful live music at the moment I choose to.

I followed the banks of the Seine for a long time, until I came across the Solferino passage, a pedestrian bridge where about a hundred of youth were picnic-ing at sunset (at 10:30PM) playing guitar and drinking red wine and beer. I listened to a group of ten spanish-speaking singers and guitarists sing a beautiful song and then walked away, crossed over the Seine and stopped next to the Louvre to peek over the wall to the banks of the Seine where a brass band was interpreting some 80’s song that I don’t remember now with the words “I want to be alive, I want to be alive” and strangely, it was beautiful to see that dozen of musicians about five meters below me, next to the water, through the trees, holding their large golden instruments, and all of that being lit by the passing boats, red, white, blue, green lights, reflecting onto the water, making the leaves of the trees translucent, shining off their instruments, through their cigarette smoke and their hair, bouncing off their black clothes, and delineating their arm movements.

I cut across the Jardin des Tuileries and called my parents as I walked, and then continued on to Opera, where I caught the regional train home.

But it was all thanks to Kelly. Her cafe request enabled the rest of the magical evening to unfold as it did, or at least it prepared me to accept it, which in the end makes all the difference.

It was a great cup of coffee, Kel.

our cocaine

It’s sick how much Google has infiltrated our lives. People in business take Google into account, because it’s such a market force. People in Public Information and PR take it seriously because of the implications it has for their work, it’s the main search engine for nearly everyone you know, and we all use it for the deepest, as well as most obscure searches in the world. The detail that ten years ago you would have been condemned to live without answering, the lyric to that long-dead song that you heard once in your life and remember three words to, all of those things would have remained answerless. It wouldn’t have been worse, either.

But Google has now made it into a verb, as in “I googled you” or “did you google him/her?” “googling someone”. I’m sure everyone has googled themselves.

But have you ever tried the tab on the main page of Google called “Images”? It’s right above the box where you type in your search criteria, and all you do is click on it, type a term and serach it to get images instead of words as results.

I did that recently and after a bunch of very useful search results…I typed in my first name…Do it, you’ll get a kick out of it. The results for my first name were a babe in stilettos with long blond hair, leaning in her black swimsuit against an old ruin, a bunch of purple flowers of various sizes, beautiful enough, a brick in the wall of a Switzerland with the name of its residents, including my first name….and a german lady crouched beside a huge HUGE sow feeding her fifteen piglets.

It was a humbling moment to see my name in the title of that photograph.

my brother in Paris

We went to the world’s most famous air show and all-things aerial expo: le Salon du Bourget (there are practically no photos of human beings…i.e. us four that went, but there are some cool pictures of plane spare parts !!! as well as some I think, of the maiden flight of the Airbus A380, the Titanic of planes)

we also went to the Musee d’Orsay, and so can you, since Nic took pictures of almost all the works of art in the museum. Which I think is great, because now I can access them from my computer. Be sure not to miss the “Origin of the World.” It’s the one where we all look like morons posing in front of it.

Nic also went to visit Abdu’l-Baha’s apartment in Paris, in the Trocadero neighborhood (overlooking the Eiffel Tower, which he also visited) while I was in Lyon for a day. I’m impressed he managed to match the EXACT tint of the real-life Eiffel Tower on his photo gallery background. I have been trying to find words to describe that color but for some reason “taupe” just doesn’t cut it.

We met up with some old friends from Congo in La Defense…and because of “budgetary constraints” ate at…Mac Donald’s. It’s not something that readily pops into your mind when you think of Paris, but if you’ve ever lived here, you’re forced to frequent fast-food restaurants at some point, at least if you hang out in large groups of young people: they’re everwhere, they’re not expensive compared to other options, and even begrudgingly, everyone will agree that they can find “SOMETHING” to eat. Now that they have apple slices and large selections of salads (both of which I don’t eat when I end up at Mickey D’s) it gives everyone a healthy cop-out! :-) I think that this slide-show is definitely worth taking a look at, especially for those of you in the US, since you get to see what the dining experience is like at Mac Donald’s in France…

All MD’s in the Paris area have wireless internet and this one specifically is so posh (there are probably over a hundred leather couches) and well lit because it is made to accomodate the corporate crowd of La Defense…

We had quite a good time. If Nic ever puts it together, the best gallery he could compile was “Nic eats his way through Paris photo-gallery”. I was the official photographer of “Nic eating a freaking huge savory crepe, “Nic eating a big Nutella crepe” “Nic eating three pains au chocolat” “Nic eating a huge rose-shaped Italian ice-cream in the Latin Quarter” “Nic eating a delicious mini-raspberry pie” “Nic eating his third quiche Lorraine” “Nic eating a great DONER KEBAB THAT ONLY COST 5 EUROS”. It was very entertaining, and probably one of my best memories of Paris so far…watching someone eat their entire body weight in food in the span of a week. :-)

Sofia, Bulgaria

I went to Sofia for a three-day conference last weekend and it was just great…!

It was a public information conference (i.e. How to DO public information and public relations) and I learned so much, I met inspiring and exciting people from 35 European countries and became quite close with the Scandinavian and Baltic representatives. Through my conversations with my new friends, I gathered endless amounts of information about Finland, Norway, Estonia and Latvia, about the landscapes, the people, the communities, the traditions, the food, the winters, the summers, the online habits, the job opportunities, the youth, the universities, the cultures…riveting.

Especially for someone who, growing up in Congo didn’t actually believe that people lived in places like Estonia. I didn’t think that those places were actually real…Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Lapland, Ukraine…the cold northern places were an image in my mind that I got from the first Superman movie I think. I must have seen it when I was 8 or 10 or something, and there is a point in it where Christopher Reeves is in an icy cave with kryptonite for company.

That’s what I thought those places were. People-less, and a setting for temporary super-hero demise.

On Saturday night, the night before our departure, a small group of us wandered off into Sofia, and walked for about an hour in the streets looking for a nice place to spend the rest of the evening.

To make a long story story short, we didn’t find that place, since most of what we found in Sofia were bars where everyone was seated and where the staff completely ignored us, the music, which was eminently danceable was loud and no one danced.

In one place, we walked in hoping to find some space to dance and were told that the girls didn’t need to pay an entrance fee, but that we all had to buy fruit juices once inside. We walked in and found no place to sit or stand: every chair was either sat on or had a “RESERVED” sign placed in front of it. We tried to dance for a little bit, and then watched a bunch of Danes watch vodka being spilled onto the large tiki-decorated bar and being lit on fire…repeatedly. One of the spirited guys from the vodka-burning-watching stood on a table and danced for about 45 seconds until an employee asked him to cease and desist.

Needless to say we walked out again, unsatisfied but stimulated by the ambient weirdness of the city.

Old, unkempt soviet-ish buildings along deserted streets on a Saturday night at 11PM…in the center of the city. Empty neon-lit tramways and buses, cruising the equally empty streets. A strange dungeon-style entrance to a club or bar, a Casino or grand hotel…an interior decoration store that could best be described as “the eighties meet the Stone Age”, and whose customers I could only imagine would be real-life Flinstones. Small closed but lit boutiques with one type of item, lined the streets: stores selling only men’s shirts wrapped in plastic, or only selling plastic flip-flops and surfwear.

Trash cans overflowing with what looked like a week’s worth of rubbish broke the monotony of the streets of empty market stalls. In the liveliest section of Old Sofia we saw older couples walking next to each other. No youth, no crowds… but lots of empty trams and buses.

All the young people were, as it turns out, sitting, drinking and talking animatedly in large, over-decorated bars.

The night was fresh and cool, and our walk was entertaining, because everything was so unexpected. At one point, we saw a dog repeatedly walk half-way across a large street (in front of a casino) stop, sit, turn back, lie down and repeat this a number of times, which just added to the strangeness.

After about two hours of this, we left, not without walking past the center of the administrative part of Sofia, with impressive buildings like town-hall, and square-cobble-stone streets.

We ended up buying a bunch of sodas from a street-vendor-sidewalk-gas-pump-place and watching a couple of hours of weird late-night TV. It’s a definite good-time guarantee to zap through cable channels in a foreign country at two in the morning. Mostly because of the dumb American shows that make no sense when taken out of context, followed very quickly by strange dialogues and wacky long-lost 80’s songs.