Soundtrack: every song about spending time in airports, but especially “Departure”, R.E.M. So begins the next adventure: getting home. Right now, L and I should have been sitting in Qatar business class, somewhere over the Mediterranean, perusing the champagne and whisky menus, before lying back in our seats and having a nap 36,000 feet up in the air. Maybe I’d […]
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Soundtrack: “Barcelona”, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe Final day in Barcelona, last day in the Iberian peninsula. Why is it called the Iberian peninsula? I have no idea, I didn’t get around to googling this, I got bogged down in how Portugal and Spain ended up as two separate countries, and how Catalonia considers itself to be a place all […]
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Soundtrack: “La Isla Bonita”, Madonna Our last full day in Seville. We started with a little wandering the local streets, a bit of shopping. As luck would have it, the nearest barbershop to out apartment was the eponymously names The Barber of Seville. I’ve been holding off on the shaving so that I could get a shave here, and when […]
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Soundtrack: “Swimming Horses” Siouxsie and the Banshees Our last full day in Lisbon, and we’d booked a food tour to make sure we got a taste of just about everything that one muse consume in Lisbon. It was a walking tour, a mix of history and culture with stops for food, and we were promised at least 17 different tastes […]
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Soundtrack: “To here knows when”, My Bloody Valentine Well I kinda managed to take it easy today. Started off with breakfast near the banks of the Liffey at the Irish Potato Cake Company, who even though they were flat out (apparently South African rugby fans like potato cakes, who knew) put together a decent full Irish breakfast. Potato cakes filled […]
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Soundtrack: “Money Changes Everything”, Cyndi Lauper (and any other song with money in the title really) Macau for a full day. I’m sure there are people for whom Macau is their favourite place in the world. Some of them might even be from outside of Macau, who visited and found this former Portuguese colony to be all they’ve ever looked […]
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Soundtrack: [intentionally left blank] I don’t know how, given the time my head hit the pillow, that I was awake before the alarm. Possibly the magic of travel brain, that just kicks in to make sure I don’t oversleep and miss a flight (even when I also set two alarms to make sure). I’d given myself plenty of time to […]
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Soundtrack: “Personal Jesus”, Depeche Mode; “All Around the World”, Lisa Stansfield; “Abracadabra”, Lady Gaga (again) Cebu, one of the central islands of the Philippines. For thousands of years inhabited by folks who generally seemed to mind their own business, and who otherwise spent a chunk of their time perfecting the cooking of pork. Then one day a Portuguese/Spanish guy named […]
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Soundtrack: “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”, The Police Bit of a catchup time, am pushing out a couple of days at the same time. We’ll see how it goes. Manila. It’s a big, tall, loud city. From my 9th floor hotel room I can hear all the sounds of Malati, cars, horns, scooters, trucks, people, machinery. I truly sympathise […]
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Soundtrack: The Vietnamese National Anthem / “50 Years”, Uncanny X-Men [Disclaimer: I’m writing this entry a day after the events, and am a bit tired and headachy, so if I fail to capture sufficiently in the words below the sheer wonder I felt all day, well that’s on me.] If we want to go with the idea that there are […]
Read moreSoundtrack: Having hit peak Timur, it was time today to leave Samarkand and head further down the Silk Road to the old capital of Uzbekistan, Bukhara. I keep remembering and then forgetting that these are kind of the footsteps of Marco Polo, who came through here 800 or so years ago. Would have been cool if he’d been like the […]
Read moreVilnius (though the locals barely pronounce the second i) the capital of Lithuania (which is spelt locally as Lietuva) is an interesting place. It’s the second largest city in the Baltics, with just a few less people than Riga, Lithuania is the most populous of the three countries, and as Laura told us yesterday, has a more spread out population […]
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