Urban Magic

What I Did On My Holidays – Montreal Pt.1

Posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 2 Comments

Alas, I went to Montreal before I owned a camera, so this is going to have to be done the ol’ fashioned way… are you sitting comfortably?

The gentleman in my life was invited to attend a conference in Montreal for a few days in 2006, the year of the World Cup, and quickly decided that this was an excellent way to have a holiday.  I leapt upon the bandwagon, swearing that for the days immediately preceding the conference I would eat nothing at all (a pledge I did not keep) so that for those few precious moments when all our needs were theoretically on institutional expenses, I could stuff myself like a barrage balloon.  We would stay in luxury, buy every travelcard and visit every cultural monument expenses could permit… as it turned out, this didn’t entirely happen, but I’ll try not to jump the gun on this story.

Since a writer’s income is, at best, unreliable, and at worst, a bit piss-piddly, I am a natural skinflint.  If my soul is ever captured in art, suspect that attached to the canvas will be a sign advertising a 2-for-1 offer.   But so it goes.  In order to fulfil my skinflint nature, we found the cheapest flights we could which involved the interesting and entirely horrific trick of changing planes at Detriot.  I have been informed that freedom of speech and freedom of thought are, despite the litigation laws of the day, still extant, so let me say two things: 1.  I have never in all my life been so uncomfortable as I was on a Northwestern Flight from London to Detriot and 2.  US border controls are utterly horrific and inane.

We weren’t planning on entering the US at all, since Canada was the final destination, but Detriot Airport didn’t have an international transit lounge and so, diligently, we filled out our green landing cards with questions like ‘were you involved in the Nazi genocide 1939-45?’ and ‘have you come to the USA to commit acts of terrorism’ (pick either box ‘yes’ or box ‘no’.)  We then arrived at customs where for 3 hours, 1000 people tried to shove and elbow there way through the chaos of custom control while one woman with a gun shouted and screamed and on occasion threatened the punters, a very large percentage of whom did not have English as a first language, to get their asses into line.  How I pined for Heathrow Airport and its lovely orderly cues laid out in lovely orderly lines.  How I pined for more than one copper and less than one gun on my side of international arrivals…

Arriving at customs we were subjected to the usual questions.  The answer ‘I’m going to Canada’ was met with appropriate snottiness, and once my fingerprints and retina were scanned, I was let through.  The first sign to greet me on arrival to the US of A was a poster proclaiming ‘US Customs and Immigration – We Are The Best.’  I should point out that on my return via the US back from Canada, my fingerprints and retina was scanned again, and I was met with the statement, ‘I see you’ve never entered the US before’ which leads me perhaps to think that this is bureaucracy too far… but who knows…

Because it had taken 3 hours to get into the US, it only took us 20 minutes to get out again, boarding a little, half-empty plane for Montreal.  We arrived at roughly 2 a.m. local time, and our taxi driver took us to our bed and breakfast where we were, according to both the sign and the man who greeted us, staying in the ‘Princess Charlotte Suite’.  Next to us were the ‘Queen Anne’ rooms and a room related somehow to a Duchess whose details temporarily evade me.  We all shared a bathroom, which alas did not go by the name ‘The Prince Regent Baths’.

Jet lag overcome, we set forth exploring Montreal.

First up, my French is lousy.  I can just about apologise for my inability to speak it, and there my abilities end.  I have, alas, acquired just about enough of a wide and eclectic range of languages that I am now incapable of speaking any at all.  Thankfully, the population of Montreal, while automatically speaking French, was willing to switch to English in the face of my incomprehension.  My boyfriend, having somewhat better French, would make the occasional stab at the language, and on resorting desperately to English, would at the very least be congratulated on the authentic quality of his ‘bonjour’.  Canadian French was, incidentally, not like French as we were taught it at school.  Breakfast was lunch, lunch was dinner, and in between floated a strange abuse of words that would have caused my French teacher’s nose to wrinkle with disdain.  Breakfast was, by the by, one of the great pleasures of Montreal, since it almost invariably consisted of eggy bread with maple syrup, one of god’s greatest gifts to man.

The city itself is…

… well…

… imagine a fairly standard American city laid out on a fairly standard grid pattern.  Stick one hell of a massive river down at its base, around which the streets become tighter and almost European in terms of tourist-trod time, throw in the remnants of major league docks out on the islands, put the menus in both English and French, serve up hamburgers and hot dogs on the same menu as duck casserole, make the buses new and the streets pock-holed and cracked, make the graffiti bright and angry and the department stores universal; stir in regional pride and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, stick a surprisingly steep hill bang smack in the middle, throw in a rusting ancient fun fair of crumbling joy rides and machinery turned into a thing not what it said on the cover, melt a lot of cheese over the chips and you have, in a strange, uneven, yet entirely familiar and recognizable form, Montreal.

Call me a decadent foreign whatsit, but cheese on the chips is a fashion that has yet to really win me over, yet I think it, along with eggy bread and maple syrup, is my dish of choice for defining Montreal.  Other key features that defined it for me was a great long jutt of land heading out to what my mental compass considered the west, surrounded at its tip on all sides by masses of rolling river water laden with heavy freight ships.  We cycled along it one day, and in the curiosity of the ride, encompassing sculpture parks, leafy suburbs, industrial waste grounds and leafy by-ways, I failed to notice that I was a) getting serious sun burnt for the only time in my life and b) had cycled 20 km.  The next day my knees refused to behave properly (cycling is not something I do that often) and I lay in bed experiencing Montreal TV while the boyfriend attended the conference.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in French was, I thought, about as surreal as it was going to get.  Then Dr Who came on, and there were daleks, and i had to redefine my expectations.  The only bit of French I picked up from that experience came from watching the world cup.  ‘Penalty shoot out’ I worked out after a while, was ‘Le Barrage’, a trivial piece of information that made my linguistic holiday.  I was in a bar when England lost to Paraguay, and curiously enough, no one seemed very sad…

I also discovered the wonderful bonding powers of Neil Gaiman, when, sitting in a coffee shop reading Neverwhere (one of the greatest London fantasies I’ve ever read – although I feel I should point out for my honour’s sake that I read it about 2 months after finishing A Madness of Angels and was a little bit surprised…) – a man turned to me and spoke to me in French.  I mumbled that I didn’t speak French, and he switched easily to English (I have such envy of people who can speak many languages!) and announced that Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of all time.  (A valid point.)  We then fell to talking and, on discovering that I wasn’t Canadian, he cheerfully informed me that he was a surveillance expert who spent his time working for the police on bugging criminals.  Not really expecting to hear this in a coffee shop in Montreal, I blathered emptily and deeply regret now the opportunity to steal his life’s story.  If you’re out there – tell me all!  It was however a pleasant experience in a foreign land, and one which managed to cement in me, especially after the US Customs and Immigration fiasco, the idea that Canada really was better after all…

It turned out that we had chosen our dates for visiting Montreal at a curious time.  Formula 1 had come to the city, and at nearly 9 miles distance we could hear the buzz of the engines like a bee was trapped in the room with us.  Canada Day was also upon us, there was a jazz festival going down, and – joy of joys! – a firework competition had come to Montreal.  I love fireworks.  I mean, I really love fireworks, I’m the girl standing at the front going ‘whee’. In Quebec there also seemed to be Quebec Week happening, but as we discovered, part of Quebec nationalism was being very reluctant to explain itself in any language other than French.  However, our trip to Quebec City and beyond is a story for another time…

What I Did On My Holidays – Vienna

Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

One of the very few holidays that doesn’t come with the epithet ’so I went with my boyfriend…’ the Vienna expedition was a cunning plan formulated with me and my parents to take the train all the way from London to Vienna.  Which, as a surprise to us all, we did!  I guess my family has a sort of history of taking trains when going across Europe – with the opening of Eurostar and, even better, the plummeting of its prices, trains trips between London, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Rome, Montpellier,  Tolouse and, of course, Vienna, all became viable and exciting possibilities.  The TGV is cool, Thalys is comfortable, SNCF has its moments of wonder, Tren Italia is fun so long as you avoid the commuter trains, and Die Bahn in Germany is every part the pristine, compact symbol of German efficiency you, as a blinkered tourist, would hope it to be.  We took the Eurostar at a not-too-godforsaken hour from St.Pancras to Brussels, changed for the train to Cologne, ate dinner as the sun went down in front of Cologne Cathedral (ironically the only photo I have of the whole trip owing to circumstances too complicated to explain) and finally caught the NightLine to Vienna as the mist rose on the Rhine valley.  Oh boy did those mad German counts like their spiky castles on top of forested hill valleys… but that’s a story for another time…

Cologne Cathedral

Vienna is, by the by, all whipped cream.  For a start, 90% of the food comes with whipped cream either dolloped on the plate itself or cunningly integrated into the recipe and cake, particularly sachertorten, is the specialty.  Even leaving the food aside, the centre of town is a whole architectural dollop of whipped cream, from the paintings of chubby cherubs up every wall to the great Hapsburg Palaces dumped down left right and centre.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire is famous mostly for declining, but when not actively declining the aristocrats of the Empire were busy building every kind of baroque adornment that expensive taste could afford.  The exterior of the largely baroque buildings look almost austere, great big walls and big windows, but the interiors are packed so full of silver and the images of aristocratic warriors it’s a wonder there was room for people at all.  The cathedral at the heart of the city, St. Stephens, boasts one of the tallest spires in Europe, as well as regular gatherings of men and women dressed in mock-18th century dress trying to sell opera and Mozart concerts to the passers by, and if you look with a religious eye, there is Catholicism galore to be seen in gold crosses and saintly images scattered all over the place.  Culture, art, opera, and, of course, psychiatry, are all big things in Vienna, and it’s hard to turn a corner without encountering at least one of the above.  My family as a collective even decided that, since we were in Vienna, we should do the Viennese thing and go to the opera – my first ever opera trip – and paid a small fortune to sit in the highest, most distant seats I’ve ever experienced in my life, in an opera house of so much marble, real and otherwise, and such grandeur that really you didn’t need the show.  Opera remains not my thing.  The cake, however, was a major Viennese compensation…

Vienna gives the stranger the impression of a rather prissy city, in some senses.  My few attempts to speak German, the only language of which I have even a GCSE-grade grasp, were usually rebuffed by looks of, at best, curiosity, at worst, contempt, and I quickly fell back on letting my Dad doing the talking.  The streets are clean and orderly to the point of feeling slightly unnatural to my Londoner’s senses; the impression you couldn’t help but take away was that this was a society where the scorn you earned for littering was of a deeply penetrating, soulful kind, rather than the usual shrug of the city stranger.  The suburbs, where we were staying, and which are in truth little more than an extension of the inner city, hinted at some of the less imperial parts of Vienna’s past; endless matching courtyard-based blocks, samey shops and empty bars that could have been anywhere in Europe.  Vienna was, after all, the city of the Third Man, a Cold War spy shop almost up there with Berlin for its intrigue.

A canal runs through the heart of the city, built off from the Danube, and as a day-trip, and because we could, we took the boat up the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava.  The Danube is a Real River, at least as far as my imagination marks it.  It’s great, fat, rolling, churning, with a freezing wind on it even in high summer and all along its banks symptoms of its uncontrollable spillage; trees bent backwards, half-submerged shacks and lost wooden pillars for tying off your boat to a long-vanished bank.  This blog isn’t about Bratislava, but since I’m here, I’ll say two things; that is has a lovely small heart surrounded by a great deal of run-down sprawl, and that the Slovakian for ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is ‘Macho Puf’.  These were the two main impressions I took away from this experience.  That, and that on the Austrian-Slovakian border, you can farm ostriches.

One of the reasons why the Austro-Hungarian Empire had such a patchy time of it was that it was constantly being attacked from outside, and I can’t really walk away from this blog without mentioning my all-time favourite bit of history – the second siege of Vienna.  Oh yes, dear reader, the second one, because the first one was really a bit of a wash-out.  The second one, on the other hand, is celebrated in plaques and monuments across the city, since it was the nearest Vienna has ever come to being conquered in its history.  I’m not talking some wishy-washy nearest to being conquered – I’m talking a matter of hours between salvation and disaster.  I guess it’s fair to say that after three years of a history degree, my period, such as it is, are those nine weeks in autumn 1683 when Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans.  In other words, I know a lot about what happened in a two and a half mile radius in Central Europe for 9 weeks.  But make no mistake – it was an awesome, and arguably world changing 9 weeks.  Certainly, if Vienna had fallen, it’s likely the world as we know it would not be so today.

The Turkish Siege Camp

So, naturally, I was kinda excited by Vienna, and very much enjoyed my time there.  However, it was also rather alien to my usual cultural horizon, a fact I think best summed up by my trip with my parents to a modern art gallery.  We found ourselves, as is our way, seeking at the end of some half hour of wandering, the blissful relief of a bench, and after much searching, found what seemed to be the only bench in the gallery.  It was placed directly facing a huge black canvas, just black, plain black, whose title was ‘Untitled’.  We considered this for a while, trying to work out whether This Was Art, before finally noticing, to our left, another black canvas, slightly smaller than the first, but in every other way identical.  We craned in to see it, and this too was called ‘Untitled’.  Art or not art, I dunno, but it was, in its own quaint way, very Vienna….

What I Did On My Holidays – Istanbul

Posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 1 Comment

I love Istanbul.

By now, dear reader, you may have noticed a pattern in What I Did On My Holidays – I do cities.  I vaguely get the idea of going on holiday to the countryside/mountains/beaches/forests etc., and find all of the above very pretty and pleasant in reasonable doses.  But the NHS makes me pay prescription fees for my asthma drugs, and having been born and raised in a city, I now find myself medically incapable of breathing properly unless surrounded by buses, trucks and carbon monoxide, so cities are my destination of choice.

And Istanbul is a city of cities.  For thousands of years it’s been one of the most important urban centres on the planet, sitting bang smack between Europe and Asia.  The Roman Emperors became the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople; the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and it became Istanbul, the heart of an empire which at its height stretched from Budapest via Baghdad to Algiers.  The fledgling Russian Empire spent many hundreds of years seething over Istanbul’s control of the Dardenelles’ strait (pity the city of Azov on the Black Sea, which spent most of the early modern period being burnt to the ground over this particular naval punch-up) – in the first world war, the Allies attempted a disastrous landing at Gallipoli to seize control of the same stretch of water.  The city itself has suburbs stretching all the way from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and for hundreds of years was the home of Christians, Jews and Muslims in every size, shape and form.  You can’t really escape the history in Istanbul, since it’s built into practically every wall.

The Hagia Sofia, is every part as huge and towering as its reputation would suggest, if sadly fallen into a bit of neglect despite the tourists, and like much of Istanbul it was built by the Byzantines and converted by the Ottomans.  It towers over the district of Sultan Ahmed, named after its principal mosque, a white edifice of long gardens and fresh running water.  In the early modern period this part of the city, which sticks out into the bay where the strait from the Black Sea meets the Sea or Marmara, was known as the Golden Horn, and has on its end Topkapi, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, a place of cool shade, endless courtyards, hidden nooks and long stone balconies.  Beneath all this you can walk through a two thousand year old cistern, an underground network of man-made caverns to rival the mines of Moria, where occasionally you can catch the glimpse of fish in the darkness, or eat sticky Turkish ice cream on a park bench overlooking the sea.  Bridges run from Sultan Ahmed to Galata, which was in the old days the quarter for foreign embassies and which now is a great bustling shopping and eating hub, which never seems to sleep and where the average walking speed after the hour of 9 p.m. is lucky to get above 2 miles and hour, the crowds grow so thick.  Crossing the bridges by anything other than the trams which run through the centre of the city can be a little nerve wracking, as they are constantly covered with men and boys fishing, and your time is spent dodging flying hooks and wriggling bait.  Turkish flags were hanging off these bridges when we went to visit, and boats pass by constantly, from the cruise ships and passenger ferries through to fishing boats and a constant stream of freighters coming down from the Black Sea.  Galata and the thrivving shops in that area are every part as globalised and commercial as anywhere else in the world, and the talk and dress could come from any busy, cosmopolitan hub, but further away are districts like Fenir, where the dress is conservative and commerce thrives around a market of spilt vegetables, torn plastic bags and broken cardboard boxes that stretches all the way from the chief mosque down to the waterfront.

It was in Fenir that we encountered gaggles of grinning children, whose English consisted of the two words, ‘hello?’ and ‘money?’ and who followed us harmlessly wherever we went.  It was also the first place we tried to get food on our first night of arrival, and encountered the curious custom of meeting the fish we were going to eat before it was served, a thing our feeble Turkish wasn’t really up to understanding.

Uphill from Fenir, back towards the sea and there is the oldest shopping hub of the city, the Grand Bazaar, where walking speed is a poor 1 m.p.h. and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not for sale.  It started in a Byzantine covered market, which still exists to this day, and where one hot afternoon we found our way up onto the crumbling thousand-year-plus old roof just as the mosques of Istanbul began the afternoon call to prayers.  This barrage of noise came from all around and lasted a good fifteen minutes as every muezzin of every mosque seemed to be operating to a slightly different time and in a very different key from his neighbour.  Some brisk muezzins belted through their call to prayers like men in need of a trip to the bathroom; others, such as the one who woke us up at 5 a.m. every morning during our stay with friends in the suburbs, would begin and stop, begin and stop, as if constantly self-checking his call for grammatical errors.  A friend of mine once described certain things he had seen or heard in his life as ‘rocking chair moments’ – a thing you would tell your grandchildren about in 60 years time when sitting in a rocking chair.  The sound of an entire city being called to prayer, heard from on top of a Byzantine roof in the very heart of Istanbul, is going to be one of mine.  The bazaar now stretches into the streets all around the area, a bewildering network of alleys and roads thronged at all hours, and hides within it occasional wonders, such as mosques built by long-dead Viziers and queens.

Public transport in Istanbul is a mix of ferries, underground lines, taxis, trams, public buses and a system that I guess I shall call a bus, but which is more like a public run mini-truck headed in a certain direction into which everyone piles elbow-to-elbow and out of which people hop at pretty much whatever location seems most convenient.  It is also the only city I have ever been to in my life in which a funicular is integrated into the public transport system.  Istanbul is a city of many hills, and the sweating tourist quickly comes to think of the well-tended gardens outside the mosques as a wonderful opportunity to sit in the shade, as well as a sight to see.

I was born in a very Turkish area of London, so was looking forward to the food, and was well rewarded.  Pide is essentially a Turkish form of pizza; yoghurt featured quite a lot in many dishes, although its drinkable cousin, ayran, wasn’t really my cup of tea; fish was everywhere.  Throw something into the Bosphorus and it will literally pop and jump with fish leaping up to catch it, although, alas, pollution has encouraged the influx of vast populations of jellyfish, which make for a quaintly alien presence in the water.

A past-time that was reasonably common in the back streets and which myself and my boyfriend indulged in regularly, was the playing of backgammon while drinking coffee (which was essentially raw caffeine with a little water on top) from a tulip shaped glass cup.  One night, the boyfriend, being braver than I, even risked doing all this while smoking chocolate flavoured shisha, although neither his complexion nor his game benefitted from the adventure.  The back streets of Istanbul also throng with cats, thousands of tiny cats of every shape and variety that nose at the feet of strangers and are kicked away by the locals, used to and annoyed by their presence.

Since the Ottoman Empire was kinda my thing at university, a quick word on some of the previous inhabitants of Istanbul.  Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, a dude if ever there was one, built his mosque right by the bridge to Galata, designed by the architect Sinan Pasha, and it is a strange mix of the zen-austere and subtly intricate, both majestic and impressive, and restrained.  When Mohammed the Conquerer captured Istanbul in 1453, it’s said that he was distraught that the defenders had fought so long and hard, thus ensuring damage came to his beautiful city.  Sultan Mehmed IV was rumoured to have run through the streets of Sultan Ahmed at night in his night robe randomly beheading people he saw.  Sultan Ibrahim the Mad was said to have sent out an image of cows udders cast in gold with instructions that women found resembling this physical feature should be bought to his fur-fettish harem.  When he was eventually murdered and overthrown by his own guard, family and staff, his surviving brother and heir to the throne, Mustafa the Imbecile, refused to leave the harem until he saw proof of his brother’s death, and was eventually – so the story goes – maneuvered out of the harem through a hole in the ceiling.  Within the harem itself there were many generations of utterly fearsome women – Hurrem, wife of Suleyman, was one of the most powerful people in the empire, as well as the founder of mosques, schools, hospitals and the champion of clean water supplies throughout the city and land.  For decades, during the difficult times at the start of the seventeenth century, it was said to be the time of the ‘rule of the women’ as the mothers and queens of the Sultans exercised power through them and from behind the shady walls of the harem.  The pirate Barbarossa eventually became admiral of the Sultan’s fleet; Lady Mary Wortley Montague stumbled upon the beginning of innoculation as we now know it in the city in the 1690s, and many floppy-shirted, somewhat stoned poets drooped around the rooftops of the city during the early Victorian period.

A week and a bit wasn’t really time to skim the surface of this city, and I would love to return one day – although perhaps, secret ambition probably never to be fulfilled – perhaps one day, I can do it by train?

What I Did On My Holidays – Verona/Aida

Posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

First thing to be said about my trip to Verona is this – myself and boyfriend did very much not go and stand under Juliet’s balcony.   Because let’s face it, the idea is kinda silly.  What we did manage to do was walk for 3 and a half hours in search of a place to stay before ending up back where we’d started.  A word of warning for all potential travellers to Italy – if you’re thinking of going down the Bed and Breakfast route (which we were!) charge your phone and make sure you’ve got credit first. 

Verona is a city – or maybe a town, I don’t really know how you make the judgment – in Northern Italy with a very pretty old heart and a Roman Arena bang smack in the centre just to cap it all off.  Like most places we visited in our trip through the area, finding a grocers was one of the toughest challenges we had, and every waiter at every restaurant/gelateria recognised us for English before we’d even opened our mouths to speak.  The old town is caught in a loop defined by a fast flowing river, across which are a number of bridges, including one that was part of a castle, which was quite exciting.  A small cathedral lies to the north, replete with golden icons and, in a fashion that slightly confused me, marble statues of saints wearing what looked like triangular halos.  There are symptoms of changing ownership throughout Verona’s history, built into its streets; a church bearing the crest of arms of the Austrians in a square with the book-holding, open-jawed lion of St. Mark, looking down onto a fashion emporium selling Milanese leather shoes with a poster in its window advertising Verdi sung in a Roman amphitheatre.

To be honest, my boyfriend and I had kinda missed the minor detail of there being a Roman arena which was still in-tact enough to be used to house an opera festival capable of sitting around 20,000 people until we were actually confronted with the fact.  Despite the fact that neither he nor I are what you’d really call opera buffs – in fact, this was the second opera I’ve ever seen in my life, and I now feel a bit opera-d out - we figured that for the price of a cheap seat on a stone step, it’d be an experience worth having.

Through a coincidence of timing, the opera we ended up seeing was Aida.  The ticket said it started at 9 p.m., which surprised us, and we told ourselves that we could file in about 8 p.m. and get a ‘good seat’, since being just on stone steps, our place was unassigned.

Oh my we were a bit out of our depth…

Shuffling in at 8.15, the stone steps of the Roman arena, and I kid you not when I say Roman arena, a great giant stone splat on the landscape where once tens of thousands cheered for blood-splattered gladiators – we found the terraces already heaving with people wedged in buttock to buttock, speaking every language within a 200 mile radius.  The arena changes the opera it’s performing every night, so dozens of tech crew were swarming over the stage until right up to the word go, raising the largest set I have ever seen in my life while lighting crew focused some seriously punchy lamps to shine down over the heads of an audience packed in their thousands onto a stage that dwarved anyone on it. 

Announcements were in three languages – the German announcement was nothing short of hillarious, as I have never heard such a sultry voice wrapping itself around the words – and there were four intervals throughout the show for the stage to be reset.

Then the show began.

I have no idea what Aida is about.  I mean, I got the basic gist, but right now I still couldn’t give you a full account without consulting a book.  But I have never, in all my life, seen such a spectacular show.  Not necessarily a very good one, in that much of my time was spent worrying about the state of my bottom and wondering whether it really was 1 a.m. and they were still going, but utterly, utterly spectacular.  At the start of the show, the audience were invited to light little candles as a tradition of the arena, and as the sun went down, hundreds, quite possibly thousands of these little flames were struck in the audience as if at a cathedral.  Then over 60 flame torch-bearing Egyptian soldiers entered and spread themselves around the venue as the performance began.

The piece that I can only guess was the half-way closer was the ultimate in ridiculousness.  It featured continual processions containing no fewer than…

60 Egyptian palace guards.

30 Ballet dancing soldiers.

20 scantily clad ballet dancing slave girls.

20 Captured slaves.

30 High priests.

30 Scribes and general officials.

20 Nubian slave children, aged 3-6.

4 Horses.

Like I said, I have no idea what actually happened.  For the truly nerdy, I also have this warning; if you’re using 6 discharge follow spots to light the stage, for please be sure that 1 of them isn’t more punchy than its neighbours.  Nerdy moment over.  I should also add that even if opera wasn’t my thing, the conductor was worth every penny we paid for the ticket, an entire dramatic/acrobatic performance in his own right…

But I can honestly say, I have never, in all my life, sat through anything quite as ridiculously, astoundingly, absurdly over the top as Aida at the Verona Arena.

Graffiti – European and London

Posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures, London | 1 Comment

Holloway Road, London

Rio Terra M.Foscarini, Venice

Railway line, Milan-Malpensa

Holloway Road, London

Venice

So, I don’t know why, and don’t really know whether it’s an expression of something cultural/political, but as a general impression, I always get the feeling that there is more graffiti in continental Europe than in London.  Sure, most of it – as with most of it in London – is the unintelligable scribble of a mark whose meaning is known only to the painter and a few select friends/rivals.  Some of it is linked to crime; some of it is kids playing, some of it is standard political protest – which in my own quaint way, I sort of cheer for – and every now and then, some of it is a splash of colour on concrete.  The railways of Europe are particularly heavily painted on.  Brussels Midi is a particularly boring, depressing station but the tracks leading out of it are three inches thick with every kind of graffiti you could ever see.  The railway lines of Italy are also covered in paint, so much so that you begin to wonder how the painters got access to some of the stuff they’re drawing.  Alas, I didn’t own a camera until a few months ago, so these are only some of the more recent pictures I stumbled over when last in Europe!

What I Did On My Holidays – via Dubai

Posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

Not planning on writing about airports as a general principal, but Dubai International deserves a mention, because I have never transitted through such a ridiculous, amazing, spectacular, silly, over the top cultural melting point as Dubai. 

Yes, I was transitting, and yes, I was doing it to save cash on my way to somewhere else.   We flew in at night, and from the air Dubai was an orange-stained sandy blur, a darkness punctuated by the occasional pools of brilliant light, sand dotted occasionally with the white blobs of a mansion and the distant burning orange fires of oil wells across sand and water as we flew in over the Persian Gulf.  But the airport itself was brilliant white, at least on the inside, which was what we were ushered straight into.  Brilliant white with blue carpets and more people than you will find on the busiest shopping streets on the silliest of days.  Once you’re through passport control and into the departures lounge, you enter a world of all worlds.  Beneath lamps shaped like flying saucers and golden palm trees are shops selling whiskey, shisha pipes, DVDs of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, DVDs of Die Hard, clothes, bags, books, magazines, newspapers in every language you’ve ever seen, holidays, destinations, food of every kind; the first thing I saw on exiting was a Starbucks, and between every cafe was a line of computers for internet access, all constantly in use.  There are prayer rooms for men and women, bathrooms and water fountains immaculately maintained, great sweeping windows that allow you to look out onto the constantly in use runways, everywhere noise and hassle and people shopping. 

In fact, the only thing that Dubai seriously lacked, was a place to rest while waiting for the flight.  There were plenty of chairs, but every single one was occupied with people, and where there was space, the places beneath the chairs were occupied with people sleeping, stretched out on luggage, towels or blankets where they had them, while feet passed constantly a foot from their faces.  Flights to every corner of the world were constantly being declared in English and Arabic, five screens of departure information barely enough to contain one hours worth of take off data, and every costume and colour of skin could be seen trying to work out which gate their flight went from.  Gates were called late, which was in its own way quite frustrating as, just beyond the security desk, you could see empty chairs waiting to be filled; but once past the security desk, opportunities to shop declined, which perhaps explains everything.  It was 1 a.m. local time when we first arrived, and 3 a.m. when we departed, and the bustle was still going strong.

On our return trip, we arrived 5 a.m.ish local time, and things were calmer.  Still no chairs, of course; every patch of ground occupied by sleepers and the slumbering.  We found a pillar to snooze against as the sun came up behind us and it was, between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., when our flight departed, mildly calmer.  There is a romance about still moments in places that have been busy; it is the same in the sound of a train on a quiet night, or that moment in the city when, on a busy junction, the bustle stops, and you can’t hear the sound of cars any more.  Then again, there is also that fatigue from having already been on a plane for 8 sleepless hours, which perhaps lends more romance to a thing than the thing deserves.  Transitting is never fun, and I must admit, I have no great yen to go visit Dubai any time soon.  But I have never seen such bustle in so small a place in my life.

What I Did On My Holidays – Seoul

Posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 2 Comments

So, I’ve just come back from holiday!  And I have a lot to say about it, but I figured that I might as well start on something that I was going to start on ages ago; brief accounts of other places.  With my writer’s hat on, I entirely cheer for the idea that urban magic exists in every city of the world, and works in different ways in every city of the earth, and with this in mind, and since my holidays are 99% of the time in other cities, this is the beginning of my all-purpose tour of Places I Went To On My Holidays, starting with a trip I had last year to Seoul.

We flew to Seoul via Dubai in order to save money, and Dubai International Airport merits its own entry just for its own ridiculousness.  From Dubai we flew into Incheon International Airport, which is a fair haul outside the city on the coast of South Korea.  Incheon is, by the by, the scene of a very savvy bit of tactics on the part of the US Military during the Korean Civil War, when the U.N. landed troops there, cutting off an invading North Korean army.  Make no mistake; it was a landing governed by bonkers Cold War logic, but if nothing else, you gotta admire the strategy.

Anyhow, it’s a slightly strange thing landing at Incheon International.  By bus from there to Seoul, you get the impression that you’re riding a strip of road set in endless endless yellow sand with the sea washing the edges, and can’t help half-thinking any second now the whole airport will just sink.  Then there’s a short strip of low hills populated with rice paddies – which from train at least, is what most of Korea looks like, flooded paddies of either rice or cabbage – and then a city that goes on forever. 

From what I can tell, Seoul is set around two major landmarks; the Han River, which is a great wide fat sluggish thing with government and financial buildings pressed all around, and Namsan, which is a semi-forested hill in what I came to think of as the ‘heart’ of the city, topped by the red-white spike of Seoul Tower.  Get out of the airport bus at Chongmuro, at the foot of Namsan, and the first thing the unprepared tourist smells, whether you like it or not, is fish, cabbage and traffic fumes.  At first I thought I wouldn’t become used to these smells; I did.  While Seoul gets very hot in summer, every building and most public transport is also air conditioned, and every now and then there’ll be a thunderstorm and a lashing of rain to take the edge off.

It’s a strange city, to a westerner.  A lot about it seems very similar.  The hotels are pretty much like hotels anywhere, although the ‘Korean style’ room comes with no bed, but a pile of usually neon-coloured mattresses and blankets you lay out on the floor.  Oddly, the thing that bewildered myself and my boyfriend most about Seoul’s hotels were the sheer array of buttons you had compressed into one remote control.  You could control room temperature, lights, TV, alarms, and occasionally, the toilet, from a whole array of unintelligible symbols.  Our attempt to work out which of the 8 buttons on the toilet in our hotel made the toilet flush led to a small flood before we finally solved it.

Outside, the streets were both familiar and strange, and this is best summed up by pizza.  Pizza!  (We thought.)  How familiar and western!  We’ve had two weeks of rice and cabbage, as a treat, let’s have pizza!  And indeed, we went into a place that is entirely recognisable from every city from New York to Berlin, and there was fairly standard pizza on offer.  Then there was the pizza by boyfriend had; even were it not covered with an exciting array of Korean spices and pickles, the rim of the pizza was made of cookie dough.  A small pot of blueberry sauce was provided, so that the meal became a main course, followed on the same dish by blueberry cookie pudding.

Breakfast was also an adventure.  Korean food has many Good Things about it, not least the things that can be done to shredded beef.  But a few days of rice, kimchi (which is essentially fermented cabbage buried in a barrel for months on end, soaked in vinegar and allowed to mature, and which no amount of good intention could make pleasurable for me) and strange sliced of rectangular grey slime also made from - you guessed it – cabbage, pulverised and crushed with unknown nuts and chili – and we began to crave something more delicate on our stomachs.  After a little searching, we found a place called Paris Baguette, which did everything the westerner might crave from croissants to coffee.  But like all things Korean, it had a twist; doughnuts containing red bean curd stick in my imagination most.

Fish – or things that may once have shared and ocean with fish – were also a strong theme.  Wandering the streets of Eujiro, a tight network of streets largely populated by trendy youth, the smell of fish was very strong.  By night, club signs flashed all the time, and the clothes shops never seemed to close, letting in a constant flow of kids wearing slashed jeans with copper-dyed hair.  Their older fellow countrymen could occasionally be seen, but most were dressed far more conservatively, unless they were businessmen in white shirts and black trousers out in the beer houses.  It was in the backstreets of Eujiro that I also saw no less than three of the only street fights I’ve ever seen, all between Korean gentlemen who seemed to have become so involved in debate with their rivals that the only way to settle the matter was to attempt to break brooms over each other’s heads.  Sadly – but perhaps fortunately – taekwondo, the traditional-ish martial art of Korea, did not seem to be prevalent among the population, and the mass of onlookers seemed to regard such fights as a fairly standard way of settling a debate.  A feature of Eujiro that I particularly enjoyed were the street vendors selling everything from mobile phones through to Robbie Williams calendars and my favourite late-night snack; chilled pineapple slices on a stick.

Another feature of Seoul are the underground shopping centres which seem a fairly strong feature of most major underground stations; and which make navigation around said underground stations quite tricky, as sometimes it can be easier to go through a bookshop and up through a leather clothes shop than to follow the signs for the exit.  Needless to say the majority of the inhabitants of Seoul had better English than I was ever going to achieve Korean, but there was also a lot of commercialised abuse of the language going on.  T-shirts bearing such mystic comments as ‘Hortative Remarks’ or inspirational slogans like ‘Work, Play, Family United Individual!’ or words to that effect.

Traffic in Korea is quite frightening, being a constant.  The history, while very impressive, is often also rebuilt, courtesy of various occupations, abuse and then a re-discovery that seemed to have kicked off in the 1970s.  However, accident can sometimes lead you to odd places.  A cry of ‘lets see what’s up here!’ from my boyfriend while walking through the national park that lies directly north of the city is and is easily reachable by metro, let to the accidental discovery of a 70-foot tall golden Buddha surrounded by no less than 10,000 miniature golden Buddhas, tucked away, unsignposted, in the middle of a forest.  Thinking of history, the Korean declaration of independence, which can be found inscribed in stone in a small park near Jongno Tower, is a masterpiece of tactfully never once blaming the Japanese while screaming hatred and anger for the occupation of their country between every chiseled line.

As a consequence of history, the U.S. military still has an influence in Korea, and it can be seen in Seoul, particularly in the streets of Itaewon, where the hamburger joints are rolling with American accents as much as local adventurers out for a meal.

Taking the train out of Seoul is an adventure in its own right; the line to Suwon, a city graced with one of the few surviving very obvious pieces of Korean history in the form of a thick city wall along which tourists and dog walkers alike can ramble, reveals just how much Seoul sprawls.  Allotments cling to tiny strips of land by the railways, and great pink towerblocks inscribed on the sides with letters and numbers for identification cluster round little glass clumps of communal living.  One of the most curious and striking features were the repeated blood-red neon crucifixes shining from numerous Protestant chapels and churches scattered across the landscape.  Nearly every town seemed to have a church, whether a wooden chapel or a community-hall brick building, which by night added an eerie quality to the horizon of artificial light.

With my tourist hat on, I have never ever been so impressed by a tourist office as that that Seoul boasts near Jongno Tower.  Almost entirely deserted at any hour, it was staffed by the most multilingual, helpful staff I have ever met.  This in contrast with the tourist office in the small town of Bulgoska, in the south of the country, whose answer to the question ‘where can we stay here?’ was to judiciously purse the lips, consider and then reply, ‘why you want to stay here?  I don’t think here good for you…’

One final word on the strange juxtaposition that was Seoul, and came in the form of the TV channels we watched.  A huge range of US TV had been imported, most of it subtitled rather than dubbed, and you could not turn on the TV without an episode of CSI in one of its incarnations playing.   On the channel over you could find Korean historical drama, which consisted to my uneducated eye of many men with substantial beaded hats looking judicious at each other and stroking their impressive grey beards.  On the next channel, Chinese drama continually and frustratingly failed to have any spectacular kung fu battles, despite the number of hands put on swords; the next channel was Korean modern domestic drama, which seemed an odd escapee from the 1960s school of drama; then the Buddhist evangelical channel; then the Protestant channel; then a channel dedicated entirely to the playing of one computer game over and over again and then, finally, the channel that myself and my boyfriend found so strangely compelling, the channel dedicated to playing the Korean game of baduk, or go in the west.  I cannot describe how fascinating it was watching this thing that neither of us fully understood to the ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaahhhs’ of many judicious commentators.

Seoul was a fascinating experience, one I feel I barely scratched the surface of.  Strange, fascinating, and in its own special, neon-lit, bustling, smelling, cabbage-stained way, traffic-honking, train-rumbling, fan-whirling way, deeply magical…