Cities
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Athens – Mythology, Democracy – and Souvlaki
According to Greek Mythology, Athena was the goddess of skill and the arts (among other things) and was worshipped for her cunning, creativity and craft. However, this reverence was not universal. Arachne, a maid from northern Greece, was a weaver of prodigious precision and her ability was matched only by her conceit and hubris. She quickly amassed an army of acolytes convinced that her abilities represented the apogee of human endeavour but such acclaim was not enough for Arachne. Awash with arrogance, she ultimately challenged Athena herself to a weaving competition. Athena readily accepted and both set about weaving the most stunning work they could. While Athena wove a picture…
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Rome: Meditations from the Eternal City
Reading ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius is deceptively time consuming. Accounting for all of its nuts and bolts my copy amounts to a slender 256 pages – detailing a year of Harry Potter’s adolescent antics routinely fells more than double the amount of trees. However, so laden are each of its credos, so drenched are its assertions with moral implications that range from the subtle to the seismic that my reading of it became something of an ordeal. Aurelius himself won wars in less time than it took me to actually finish it, but I recommend doing so sincerely and unreservedly. He remains among the world’s most influential philosophers and one…
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A Tale of Two Cities
New Delhi is a city of 30 million people and is the capital of India. It is the second most populated city in the world. Butter Chicken is among New Delhi’s world famous dishes and you can expect a bowl of it for 300 Rupees. Less than €3.50. It is estimated that over 2 million of the city’s residents live in slums. This is a map of its metro rail system; Tokyo, the capital of Japan, has a population of 37 million and is the largest city in the world. Sushi is among the city’s famous culinary exports and you would be set back at least 3,000 Yen to get…
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Sarajevo: A Tragic History Artfully Told – But Bring a Packed Lunch
In his book ‘Shadowplay’, Tim Marshall recounts meeting a Serb for dinner in the midst of the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1995. Having listened to the Serb denounce NATO’s bombing campaign of Belgrade, Marshall retorted that Bosnians had endured more in a weekend of the Siege of Sarajevo than Serbs in Belgrade had gone through in two months. Marshall is quick to acknowledge that he was hardly complying with his title of ‘Diplomatic Correspondent’ but that’s not to say that he was wrong. Sarajevo is a remarkable city. Its people are warm, its vistas stunning and the city’s streets hosted some of the 20th century’s most consequential events. Archduke Franz…
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India – Incredible and Intoxicating: A Week in The Golden Triangle
I don’t know if the phrase Stockholm Syndrome carries any weight in India but it describes my relationship with the country succinctly and accurately. It’s a part of the world that introduces you to norms entirely warped from an occidental orientation (such as the curious cruelty of the caste system) and surreptitiously swipes closely held luxuries upon entry, personal space being the most glaring example. And I can’t wait to go back. Not even the English language escapes distortion although there is precious little of it around. ‘Road’ no longer refers to lane adorned tarmac used by relatively homogeneous motor vehicles. Instead a ‘road’ is a disheveled morass of fumes, both…
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Vietnam, Vidi, Vici: From Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City
In Norse mythology, Balder was the God of Light and Purity. He was said to be so beautiful that light shone from his body and flowers bowed before him as he walked past. I don’t know who his modern day equivalent is, but as I marched out of the tailor in Hoi An in my custom made suit, I was willing to bet that it was me. My last piece on Vietnam ended in Hoi An, a pleasant canal-riven town. It offers markets and ornate bridges but most importantly, it offers tailors. Custom suits, typically the preserve of Louis Copeland and his cabal, are a volume business here and you’re in…
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Poland at Christmas: A White Warsaw with a Red History
Arriving in Warsaw was to have my emotions assaulted unlike any other part of my week in Poland. No longer was the skyline the preserve of the rustic and endearing buildings of yesteryear. Rather, as I peered outside from the train station, towering skyscrapers crooned over the skyline like cranes above a construction site, dominating all around them. I was in a very different place, perhaps even a different century. Even in this company, The Palace of Culture and Science stands out, known colloquially as ‘Stalin’s Penis’. Soaring into the sky at 237 metres it was constructed in 1955 and remains the tallest building in Poland. Its construction was ordered…
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Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland
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Morocco: Care for the Desert Menu?
Morocco is one of the most chaotic countries that I’ve been to, and so it’s a touch ironic that its colonial past was indirectly determined by that uber-organised bastion of central Europe, Germany. As a recently re-unified German Empire gradually advanced its military capabilities at the dawn of the 20th Century, Anglo – French hegemony became increasingly insecure. In an effort to strengthen their relationship in the face of the Germanic Sword of Damocles, Britain and France embarked upon the ‘Entente Cordiale’ in 1904. This manifest itself as a series of political agreements to foster a ‘warm understanding’ between both nations. One of these agreements was the British allowing the French…
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Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland
Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ details the barbaric brutality imposed on Eastern Europe from the Second World War through to the end of the Cold War in 1989. Encompassing the entirely avoidable and heart-achingly tragic famine in the Ukraine and the nadir of Western Civilisation that was the Holocaust, it is a painful but necessary read for anyone intent on travelling between the Baltics and the Balkans. Poland is afforded more attention than anywhere else and having read it one would be forgiven for assuming it to be a country shrouded in its history’s shadow for eternity. Mercifully, this is not the case. My sojourn through Poland would last a week and…
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Vietnam, Vidi, Vici: From Ha Noi to the Hai Van Pass
Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts….. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery……… By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost.“ – Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried ‘The Things They Carried’ is one of the pre-eminent books about the Vietnam War. It is haunting and visceral in equal measure while affording the reader as comprehensive an understanding of war as can be gleaned from print.…
