Have just got back from a short trip to UK and Morocco and wanted to share my thoughts about one of the most beautiful places I’ve stayed in.
I’ve been in Fes, Morocco for a few days and I stayed in the Medina – the old city, organic, smelly, bustling with life, more than nine thousand small alleys turning it into a one gigantic labyrinth.
But this post is not about the Fes or the Medina, is about the house I’ve stayed in. (website here).
Alaa, an Iraqi architect, and Kate, his wife, an internal decorator from Norway, have turned the old palace of Dar Seffarine from a two decade abandoned house into a beautiful place. One can feel the soul and love that’s been put in the decoration of the house, and this, for me at least, is a precious feeling.
Not once I had the feeling of being in a hotel, but in a home, sharing dinner (delicious by the way) with friends and fellow travelers.
Dear Alaa and Kate, thanks for a very special time.
After I got back from this trip, many friends asked me if I “liked” it. Me, I have a long history of being unable to answer simple questions, but this one is one of the hardest so far.
For me, Havana was both a semi-traumatic and a great experience, the mix I found on Havana streets has no comparison to anything I’ve experienced anywhere else in the world.
I guess it’s the stack of my childhood memories, growing up in socialist Romania, that was all of the sudden brought back to life. I was staying in a “casa particular”, renting a room with a cuban family in the Vedado area. From there I would go exploring the neighborhood, stroll down via Calle Neptuno down to Central Habana and spend the evenings on Malecon, looking at the sea and listening to Rhumba rhythms in the distance.
Like one of my dear friends used to say, “living the good life”. If you’re a tourist, a visitor, a white man, asian, have double citizenship, have political connections, basically life is good if you’re anything other than a Cuban.
When I was growing up, people coming visiting from the West were commonly referred to as coming from “the outside”. This expression is still used today. I remember my reactions to anything coming from the “outside” – toys, books, candy, cartoons. And people. I would look at them as if they were coming from another planet, aliens coming from a world where anything was possible, magical beings coming and going as they pleased, superheroes.
Now I was one of them. More than the food and travel restrictions that hinder the cuban life (special permit required to travel inside Cuba, that was a new one for me), more than the economic struggle, poverty, censorship, one can sense the feeling of isolation and the eternal wait for change, crossing the finish line. I know that feeling all too well.
But underneath all this, there is actually pure joy, creativity, dancing. I’m not talking about the fake carnival acts that happen in the tourist areas of Old Havana. A Rhumba celebration show at the Writer’s House in Vedado brings all participants to life, moving to the hypnotic rhythm for hours, while rain is falling.
Music has something magical here, it’s pure, true, raw. Like dancing, it brings memories from a very long past, it cries, it paints the air in wild colours, it’s savage, unchained.
Don’t know if I liked Havana. But I’ll go back.
Just when you think you finally understand what’s going on with all this stuff that’s supposed to help you with your work, it manages to surprise you yet again!
So, lesson for today:
Web templates created in Lightroom are not saved with the catalog. Everything else seems to be, but the web templates are located in an obscure file somwhere on the C: drive in Windows. I have no idea where since all my photo files including Lightroom folder are on external hard drive and it never occurred to me (duh!) to think that in their ultimate wisdom, Adobe have spread important files all over the place. Given that my old PC (over two years now, who thought it would last that long??) can’t even load the BIOS anymore, there’s no chance I’ll get those back very soon.
So it will be a while longer until I get to post them on the website.
The photo is not really related to anything above. Taken on Malecon at sunset.
I was in a sort of a pseudo-philosophic mood these past days and since I’ve always had trouble tackling the BIG questions (who we are, where we are going, what is the nature of man, is Microsoft better than Apple, etc you get the picture), I thought I’d take on a simpler one and determine why do I travel.
For one, it’s the job I do, but that’s not really the point, what I wanted to understand is why I travel volontarily, and then I was just curious to know why people travel in general.
For me is harder and harder to find significant differences in the places I go to. Sure, there are always the cultural differences, different food, different climate, different races and so on, but when it comes down to it, we are all pretty much alike. We all want the same basic things and to a certain extent, we all have the same basic values.
Still, apart from being a deterrent for travelling, for me is actually an incentive. I love the humanity, the bond that I feel ties us all in, and the limitless possibilities for communicating. I also manage to feel “at home” in most places I go to, and I take them for what they are. Of course, these are all additions, and the main reason for travelling, for me, is to see, and experience.
See and experience what?
Well, there are beautiful landscapes, great food, beautiful cities, historic sites, beautiful wildlife etc. Sometimes, there are difficult conditions that must be overpassed in order to get to experience these beautiful things – lack of roads, wars, malaria, political conditions, etc But still, it’s just great to see how beautiful this world is. So basically is about enjoying something special. Special or beautiful? Hm.
So with this kind of hippie-makelovenotwar-singkumbaya attitude I was browsing the net looking at info about places that i would love to go to. Then I found this:
Simply to see a country where the Cold War is still being fought, where mobile phones and the internet are unknown, and where total obedience to the state is universally unquestioned is, for many, reason enough to visit.
That’s a really long way from any reason I thought anyone would have for wanting to travel to a country, but maybe I was completely wrong. Is the social voyeurism the ultimate travel rush? Go all this way to see how some people live under dictatorship? I mean, not go there in spite of the dictatorship, but because of it? And I’m not talking about undercover reporters or human rights activists, but about regular people? Apparently so, since the quote is from Lonely Planet and they have a reputation for knowing pretty well what people want.
Ok, I grew up in a communist country so maybe this thing just pressed the wrong buttons. But certainly made me wonder where exactly the whole “travel” concept is going.
I am off to the airport in a couple of hours so I will be pretty quiet for the next week or so. I thought I’d post an old image before I leave, of a truly special place.
Is hard to define what I love about Cairo. Apart from all the mayhem and dust, is truly a beautiful city, so full of life. Legend says that whoever drinks from the Nile (to a certain extent, that’s whoever drinks tap water 
) will be back. Don’t know if that’s true, but after almost 2 years here I am, on my way back to Cairo, even if it is for a short time.