Countries
-
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…
You May Also Like
Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland
-
India and its Idiosyncrasies: Namaste to the Newbie
There is broad consensus that the dramatic increase in food allergies in Western society is partly due to the ultra sanitized world we have created for ourselves. Mr. Muscle and his army of military grade detergents have inadvertently blunted our immune systems to the point that they can’t defend us from ostensibly benign microbes later in life. Not so in India. Sanitation and serviceable sewage systems have unfortunately been deemed surplus to requirements in this sprawling sub-continent and in a country where children are more familiar with Dengue Fever than Dettol, peanut allergies are unlikely to make an impression. It’s a very serious cloud complete with an imperceptibly small silver…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
Berlin: Please Mention The War
“Yeah, Paris is nice, but I can bring you around the corner and show you where Hitler blew his brains out. You can’t say that standing outside the Louvre”. It was hard to argue with our sprightly tour guide, even if I was in a particularly argumentative mood. Standing outside the Brandenburg Gate on a brisk January morning I was freezing and numb to the wonders around me. That would soon change. The ensuing week would imbue me with a fascination for history, a reverence for Berliners (and a disaffection with EDM) which has sustained to this day. Perhaps no city on earth has facilitated as much horror as Berlin…
-
Rio de Janeiro to New Delhi: Poverty and Pride of Slum Life
If sitting on the Copacabana, sipping beer and gazing across the idyllic Rio coastline is not heaven on earth, then it is astonishingly close. The weather is invariably stunning, the water glistening and all watched over by Christ the Redeemer himself. I can’t claim to be a beach lover, but nowhere has been closer to converting me than the Copacabana. However, this is all a matter of perspective. Because my Brahma wasn’t served from an Irish Bar wedged into the sand in the middle of the beach. It was brought to me by the array of people that trudge up and down the beach, a case of beer on their…
