If curious, you can visit the Italian city of Genova via Genova Righi webcam up on a hill that offers a stunning overview of the city.
The first time I checked in this morning, the temperature was reading 31 celsius but as I write this, I see it’s a much calmer 26 now ... humidity 74%.
A quiet day today I think.
I think I arrive once there are flowers on the kitchen table ...
Here in Genova there is always someplace to buy flowers and Paola’s round dining table invites flowers, even if I still haven’t quite organised a vase. Today one of my water bottles has been sawn-off to play hostess to flowers bought at a market on Piazza Scio where we also discovered a large market and the sweetest smallest tomatoes.
These last few days have been days of long conversations, where two old friends caught up on 5 years of absence and massive life changes. We reminisced, laughed over pizzas and red wine, caught boats and journeyed through that favourite space we most enjoy – the place where the land meets the sea.
Genova was good to us, providing us with the very best foccacia at the beginning of each day or, on alternate days, unbelievably good breakfast cappuccino. We had days of wandering, cherry gelato, inexpensive yet good red wines, slow mornings and late nights.
Pippa came to me 2 weeks out of New Zealand, via Haiwaii and Vienna, and our 5 days passed quicky. Yesterday we caught a train to Milan to say goodbye at an airport bus stop in a city on fire with heat and humidity. We talked through the 2 hour train trip to Milan, and then, after the goodbye, I possibly became one of the few people to have travelled with a slightly nervous, world-wandering friend, from Genova through to Milan only to leave her boarding her airport bus while I returned on another train within the hour and head straight back to Genova.
That would be the train where the air-conditioning in my carriage was broken. Being a creature who prefers heat not too much above 20 celsius yesterday was a struggle and I struck out in search of a cool place only to find myself standing on tiptoes in a corridor, trying to catch something of the slightly cooler breeze as it came in through a high window.
A very short elderly woman spotted the breeze in my hair, and came to stand in front of me, continuing to fan herself furiously as the breeze was never going to reach her. We all laughed, her son too, and I resisted the temptation to offer to hoist her up to the high window.
Eventually a harried, sweating conductor came to our rescue and led us through to carriage 5 ... or I think that was what he was saying. I flopped into an air-conditioned 6 seat carriage with two men who left at the next stop. I could only smile over my own paranoia that they were moving away from this smelly foreign woman.
Those last tunnels before Genova held us captive longer than necessary, as our train queued to weave its way into the main station ... the station I didn’t really know how to get ‘home’ from.
I read bus stop lists and decided on Bus 33, it would reach Piazza De Ferrari eventually and I was too tired to do more than smile as Bus 33 climbed up into the hills behind Genova and took me around my destination, the one marked out clearly by the giant ERG sign down there near the old centre ... round and then down.
I saw the city from the heights and its a beautiful city ...
In these days of wandering without intending to talk, I have discovered some truly special people anyway ... the lovely man with the vegetarian cafe, who has since asked if one of my photographs of him might be used in an article for the Corriere della Sera; the man and his wife with the farinata shop close by and the pizza people…
The woman who sells me my breakfast foccacia discovered I come from Nuova Zelanda today ... we reached a point of understanding and agreement via gestures and our few words in common, regarding the fact that we both loved our countries of origin but admired each other’s too.
The cafe where my favourite cappuccino is made is called Cafe Boomerang, in honour of the owner’s visit to Australia, and the gelato guy had an ‘I love you!‘moment when he realised I wanted the details of his shop for this website.
The internet cafe people are just as I left them last year but the vegetarian cafe has free wifi too, so I’ll wander between them, so as not to seem too internet needy perhaps ...
There is so much here in this tiny corner of the city, so much to love. I’m holidaying with Gert for a few days now, trying not to talk to or photograph interesting strangers but it’s difficult.
Even the man operating the boat trips to Camogli, San Fruttuoso and Portofino is going to cycle New Zealand next year.
It’s good to be out ...
Ciao for now.
There’s this check-list that automatically unfurls like a kite in the wind on the day before flying ... my to-do list arrives at DEFCON1 and I find myself achieving at an extraordinarily high level, writes this wanderer at 23.49 on ‘the night before leaving’.
Today I unexpectedly babysat Little Miss 5, chose paint for two rooms in the new house, had 100 business cards printed for the new site, had a print made for the guy who hosted my exhibition in his brasserie, dropped it off, bought a couple of light shirts because Genova will be warm, and then returned home to some work for the NGO and yes, packing.
My packing technique has changed over time and these days everything I don’t want to lose goes into my photography backpack and is carried as hand luggage which means I usually arrive at my destination slightly broken by the weight of it all.
Camera, lenses, flash, battery charger, card reader, voice recorder, phone, charger, at least one usb cable, laptop, laptop power cable, book, wallet, glasses, comb, business cards, pen ... will the journal with the important notes and interviews fit in too?
Suitcases have been a huge learning curve during this year of intensive wandering. I arrived in Belgium with a backpackand a big black hand luggage bag for my laptop and camera gear. Time passed without much travel however eventually I was wandering again, having updated to a wheeled suitcase, making the mistake of not having any kind of external pocket for my book, passport and wallet with the first one. I bought a small pilot’s wheeled suitcase with outer pocket but then bought the big camera ... although last time I was in Genova, I lived out of that bag and half the available space was taken up by my equipment. I think my Genovese neighbours might not recognise me if I’m not wearing the red or the green striped shirts with my jeans this time.
Finally a good job came along, one where they wanted to pay a photographer, I had money and found a real suitcase, one that allows me to fit in my favourite feather pillow if I want.
Oh yes, a feather pillow princess ... you didn’t guess?
So anyway, it’s ciao from this Belgian-based me who has just agreed that a 4.40am alarm would be the best idea ...
Some extracts: A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone.
The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.
...I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.
But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they are other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other peoples' stories and books.
Nina’s Ornamental blog is the place I wander to when I’m in need of that feeling I found in New Zealand.
I used to live in this funny little cottage with huge windows on the edge of a harbour, and I had a beach for each mood back in Dunedin. And there was a creek my Labrador and I ran away to when we lived in the mountains beside Fiordland National Park. Lake Te Anau did just as well.
There was a tiny road that twisted and turned, taking us to a small bay in Marlborough Sounds while we lived on the Airforce Base in Blenheim, and there once was a place where the mighty Clutha River flowed into a smaller quieter side-stream and that became ‘our place’ while we were living in Cromwell ... although some days we’d throw off our responsibilities and race through the Kawara Gorge to visit the Arrow River in Arrowtown.
My dog was a wanderer too and travelled all over New Zealand with us. She died at 16.
I always had a special place and a dog in New Zealand. Here, in Belgium, I miss the wild peace of home. Just ‘being’ in Nature is far more difficult, perhaps because Nature is much less powerful by virtue of so many centuries of ‘civilisation’.
I’m looking for a golden labrador crossbred with some kind of sheepdog because I’ve had labradors since I was 9 and the best was a crossbreed.
Meanwhile I couldn’t resist parking my bike and taking this photograph because the scenery on the way from the new house to the old apartment is nothing to sneeze at ...
Tot straks from Belgium.
These last few days, I’ve been trying to capture the Genova I fell in love with while staying in Italy last year ...
There was a paragraph where I tried to describe the quietly sublime beauty of a Sunday morning spent alone in that city I love.
I wrote: Sunday, my first day alone and the city is emptied for football. Slipping and tripping through the air comes the sound of the most exquisite violin ... drifting from some open window. Delicate notes that create this perfect sound for an afternoon spent lying on a bed reading. I am lazy on this first day spent as a solitary creature, alone in a strange city where I know no one.
I wanted that music but stopped short of shouting from my open window to whichever neighbour was playing the music.
I came home and forgot it about mostly, just pulling the memory out in moments peace.
Yesterday I was in FNAC, thinking I might like one book to celebrate this month’s pay cheque when I had this idea about making a fool of myself and asking about a delicate solo violin ...
The shop assistant listened and then said ‘Bach!’.
She took me over to a listening post and she was right. If this isn’t the music I heard then it’s close enough to delight and carry me back into that place in time.
Below you can hear something of the music on the cd titled Bach 6 Solo Sonatas & Partitas, Viktoria Mullova.
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.
Katherine Mansfield (one of my favourite New Zealand writers)
I had passed by Cafe Stanny on the train as I travelled to and from Brussels city, and I have slid by it via the Number 8 tram so many times but I had never quite managed to step off and visit its red and welcoming friendliness.
Today, I had no destination in mind, I was simply escaping a really bad day and so there was nothing to lose as I climbed off Tram 8 with my small travelling laptop.
Cafe Stanny’s lunch menu is diverse enough to offer something for everyone, with soups, breads with a range of fillings and things I can’t quite remember. I chose a most divine bacon and onion omlette for lunch and it came with a soft brown heavily-grained bread that was delicious.
The music indicates good taste (an important criteria when wandering, laptop in hand). The atmosphere, now that it is summer, is open door with benches both inside and out. The staff were friendly and the decor lovely - appealing and a tug on the strings of memory for this kiwi so far from home. A deep blue bar/counter with stools, and stools along the high tables at the two large windows in the front.
Back in winter, I remember being attracted to the warmth of Cafe Stanny’s red exterior and the promise of its fogged up windows, clients bicycles piled up outside calling to me in but I was rushing, always rushing through that stretch of the city between here and there, I never made time to detour a little.
Cafe Stanny’s is lovely, a new favourite of mine but come see for yourself.
It’s at Stanleystraat 1, 2018 Antwerpen, located on the Tram 8 line and close to Berchem Railway Station ... seen from the train on the left side as you pull into the station (I think).
You can’t miss the red.
After a long and toilsome march, weary of the way, [the wanderer] drops into the nearest place of rest to become the most domestic of men ...
But soon the passive fit has passed away; again a paroxysm of ennui coming on by slow degrees, Viator loses appetite, he walks about his room all night, he yawns at conversations, and a book acts upon him as a narcotic.
The man wants to wander, and he must do so, or he shall die.
Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 1855
Most days we have spent 10 hours out taking photographs, returning to the apartment to organise and process them but I have never managed to keep up ... having taken 586 photographs on Saturday alone. My photo folders are overflowing and after a hectic 48 hours of good people, a beautiful hotel, a niece from New Zealand, 2 kiwis who lives here, a little too much red wine on a warm Istanbul night and amazing photographic opportunities, here I am, processing and trying to put things back in order, having not even had time to view the images taken at 6.30am Saturday out on the Bosphorous.
Istanbul is one of those cities where I can’t stop using my camera, it’s a passion, a compulsion and a pleasure but my body is protesting.
I fly tomorrow.
And as a result, this Istanbul journey can only be described as truly remarkable.
Last night was a mix of marvellous coincidence and good friends. I introduced friends and hosts, Lisen and Yakup, to Hayden, the New Zealander of Zen Turkey.com, who has lived here forever. Over dinner and drinks, information was exchanged that will benefit both and I was happy.
Maybe it’s a kiwi thing but we love making connections, meeting new people, introducing people who can surely help each other while knowing that they will like each other too. Dinner over, we were sitting outside in old-town Sultanamet when Hayden’s phone rang and another voice from my Istanbul past arrived amongst us.
I had twice travelled to Eceabat, on the Gallipoli Peninsula and taken the WWI tour with TJ. Like the lovely guys on Flanders Fields, there is nothing that TJ doesn’t know about the Commonwealth soldiers left behind in the war.
He runs tours there and has some nice places to stay. You can find TJ’s website here.
TJ was calling Hayden to say that he had just flown in from Australia and how about meeting for drinks. Gert and I got to tag along too. It was an excellent way to end a lovely day.
I struggled with how to title this post but I knew it had something to do with the nostalgia inspired by scent and a yearning for familiar things…
I woke early here in this Istanbul world and decided to get up. I’ve been alternatively working on photographs, with an occasional detour out into a new book I’m devouring but don’t have much time to read - The Attack by Yasmina Khadra, is worth checking out if you’re looking for an interesting fiction about suicide bombers.
It’s too early for anyone else and there is the promise of hot fresh borek if I’m patient, so I quietly found a banana to eat while my Turkish tea stewed in the top pot.
The banana was ripe and breaking it open delivered me back, just for a moment, to my childhood of bananas bruised by their trip to the river’s edge in our picnic box.
Savouring that scent here in Istanbul, so very far from the world I grew up in made me stop to think about the way that scent has been taking me ‘home’ lately ... the way that smell has become something akin to an album of memories I carry inside of me.
You see, there is a particular soap I use occasionally, it’s one that transports me directly back to a childhood of happy visits to Nana and Grandad’s Invercargill house. And a colleague of mine delights me by smoking the same cigarette brand that Nana once smoked, a long time ago. Gidon is less than excited by this fact that he reminds me of Nana ... as he is younger than me.
Shampoos and conditioners pick me up and transport me but they come from so many periods of this strange life of mine ... there were those childhood toiletries, then there is that one I used in America, another was discovered in Istanbul and they too offer a surprisingly powerful journey into memory.
It’s like that these days but the house is waking now - remembering took longer than I expected and my tea-glass needs refilled. Soon there will be piping hot borek in my tummy and here I am, creating a whole new set of memories in this different someplace else.
Istanbul is being so good to us.
Today Lisen and I interviewed a Roma fashion designer while we tried to choose, from a stunning array of dancing costumes, a gift for Miss 4.
We began the day eating delicious gozleme at the organic market, had a tasty kofte lunch at Ayvansaray and, took incredible photographs all day because the people and the sights we saw were simply incredible.
A stunning stunning day, here in the city of Istanbul.
Huge thanks to Lisen and Yakup, the best host and hostess a person could wish for.
I’m writing this, 8am on my first morning back in Istanbul. The air is a little chill after the blue-sky warmth of yesterday but I love it. It’s fresh, people are walking by and across the road the pharmacist … the eczane, is opening his store.
Istanbul is breaking open. There are new leaves on the trees and yesterday, tulips in full-bloom lined the coastal highway we took back into the city.
Did I mention how good it is to be back here?
Last night, Lisen and Yakup created a Turkish meze kind of meal for us. A cold meal of many plates, to be accompanied by Raki … it was delicious, as is most Turkish food.
The sweet flavour-filled tomatoes were cut into wedges, drizzled with good oil, basil and salt. There was a lovely potato salad with parsley and dill. A cold red lentil and bulgar patty that was so very good. We had a little Passchendaele cheese, brought in from the flatlands, served together with Turkish salami and a stringy Turkish cheese that is a huge favourite of mine. Olives marinated in some lovely concoction of herbs and oil, hummus, a yoghurt and herb dip, bread – with another saucer of herb-enhanced oil for dipping.
This morning, as I write this, Lisen is cooking my most favourite of Turkish foods – borek - layers of thin pastry cooked with cheese and herbs. My cup runneth over and we haven’t been here 24 hours yet.
And having written such loving descriptions of the food, you need to know that the food isn’t my big Istanbul passion. I love the city even more and today I’m heading into the city that fills another part of my soul ...
We’ll be wandering in Taksim, with a visit to Robinson Crusoe – a favourite bookshop, the flower passage, Galata Tower for that 360 degree view over the city with the Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea below. Galata Bridge and the fishermen leaning over the edge, the probably through into Sultanahmet with Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.
Today is a day for full-immesion in this stunningly beautiful crazy-busy city I love.
I’m looking up and in the sky there is the shiny glint of a jet airplane caught in the sun’s grasp, pushing silently east; I’m thinking there are four hundred people going somewhere else. I’m hoping that most of them realise the freedom of being 38,000 feet up and headed somewhere new.
Anik See, from A Taste for Adventure
It was good to be back in a country where the call to prayer was a part of my day. It felt like a homecoming of sorts ... although the excessive quiet of my Belgian life had made me forget just how noisy a big city could be.
I fell into a coma-like sleep that first Cairo night but my travelling companion had no such luck, and no mp3 player. Apparently the market below us went on until 3 or 4 in the morning, writes this laughing woman.
Life was lived in a surreal style there.
I learned that I will probably travel to Israel and Palestine, with a return to Cairo in January, and it seems that I will be needed for 3 months in Berlin at the end of 2009 ... do you see how it is?
The siren that police use to alert other drivers of their presence seems to be a novelty item at the market below. Stunningly noisy ... all through the night. Always pack your mp3 player when staying in a hotel like mine in downtown Cairo.
I made a recording ... and on playback, I hear the call to prayer, quite loudly, as if windows are open but really the mosque was very close.
Then I hear this tired woman say at the end of the call to prayer recording, ‘5.10am Cairo’ as she laughs quietly.
I went back to sleep.
Hearing it still makes me laugh.
Flying toward Cairo, imagining all my research thoroughly done, I slept for a while ...
I woke to find two blank forms on the empty seat next to me, to be filled out in preparation for passing through Customs.
I dug out a pen and started working on them. Suddenly there was this ‘moment’ ... one of those heart-stopping ones. The questionnaire asked me to write the country I had purchased my visa in.
I hadn’t, instead I had read, on all the best websites, that you purchased a visa on landing.
Oddly enough, it made the flight a little bit longer, wondering what would happen if this New Zealander was caught trying to enter Egypt without a visa. How stupid would that seem ...
Cairo Airport knocked me off-balance after the frozen 4am departure from down-town Antwerpen, the sanitised high-tech ride through a snowy Zurich airport. Arrivals was my first taste of the big Middle Eastern city; the muggy heat and the exchange rate for the Egyptian pound only added to the surreal nature of my journey however ... I joined one of the many queues leading to the banks where you purchased your visa and exchanged euro for pounds, so quietly thankful.
To give you an idea, the exchange rate at the moment is 1 EUR = 7.78750 EGP
My 50 euro became approximately 390 Egyptian pounds, a difference I never really managed to get during my 5 days in the city.
At the end of my first full day in Cairo I returned to my room at the Carlton Hotel, not to be mistaken for the Ritz Carlton. My bed was the place I retreated to at the end of the day. A place of peace where I could replay the day and its unfolding.
There was the photography, as always ... my client, her Egyptian film-maker, the gallery owner and then Cairo herself on that first day. The Egyptian Museum stunned me with its collections of mummies ... pharaohs from the 18 to 20th Dynasty found in Thebes. There was a group found in Deir el Bahari cachette, and it consisted of the mummies of: Seqenenre, Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, Tuthmosis I, Tuthmosis II, Tuthmosis III, Seti I, Ramses II, Ramses III. Another group, found in the tomb of Amenhotep II ... Amenhotep II, Tuthmosis IV, Amenhotep III, Merenptah, Seti II, Siptah, Ramses IV, Ramses V, Ramses VI, (and three women and a child.)
Magical names I thought myth ...
And there was me, strolling through this massive museum near the Nile, passing by artefacts so ancient that I couldn’t begin to grasp the time that had passed between them and now.
A note: if you need a little respite from Cairo’s carbon monoxide, the museum has filtered air and was a little oasis of calm but for the fact that I was surrounded by the likes of Amenhotep the I and II. The corselet and a gameboard belonging to Tutankhamon were there ...
The Lonely Planet had recommended our hotel but promised nothing extraordinary, a place to sleep, friendly staff, a rooftop restaurant and cleanish rooms.
We found the staff friendly and helpful and there was a sense of family amongst those who took care of us. The elevator was old but seemed to work perfectly.
We amused the night manager by asking to see the fire escape. He led us out back and pointed to the spiral metal stairs disappearing up into the narrow alleyway darkness but failed to mention the padlocked fire escape door we noticed when we were up in the roof restaurant for the view. I’m sure there’s a contingency plan but we were put off asking anything more because he laughed and gently tease us about the fire escape whenever he saw us after that.
I always struggle with the initial restrictions of other countries ... in this instance, don’t drink the tap water, avoid ice in drinks, and salads washed in tap water. I ended up settling for a hunk of tender roast sheep with a little rice for lunch, lentil soup and rice for my dinners.
The noise was a constant, a market on the street directly below .. I’m glad I packed my mp3 player.
But that was the day when I began to love my Cairo life.
I felt an incredible overwhelming of the senses as the taxi flew through the (far too) long underground traffic tunnel taking me to downtown Cairo ... the driver completely ignoring the 50km speed limit, then calmly settling down to wait, windows open, as we were caught in the middle of the tunnel’s 3km length with carbon monoxide choking us.
I noticed that Cairo drivers talk to each other via their car horns ... a gentle reminder they are there, that they want to change lanes and anything else that needs discussing out there on the road.
I hadn’t known what to expect ... perhaps Istanbul but the only similarity to Istanbul was only that it was so different to most of my everyday life.
Later, I read that Cairo has some 17 million people in the metropolitan area and is the sixteenth most populous metropolitan areas in the world ... a busy city indeed.
It was full of people and pollution and when I looked round, from my 6th floor balcony, I could see this layer of rubble and dust on rooftops.
The first 48 hours was challenging in almost every way.
Challenging but it was oh so excellent to be out again.
I had an impromptu interview with the owner/baker just along the road ... the place where Simon and Paola warned me I could buy the best focaccia in the world.
They were so right, photographs of it to follow. Meanwhile here are some more of his wares.
