As touched upon in the installment dedicated to Ayvalık, Turkey’s Northern Aegean coast has been the scene of a flurry of major historic activity, which in turn led to some exciting ruins awaiting visitation in every second village- if you have a partner in crime, that is, but as (un)luck would have it the blog’s industrious…
Author: pocketdiarybudapest
The Stillness of Quinces- A Visit to Ayvalık
There is a special kind of stillness that you can only ever experience around the Mediterranean, the stillness of summer days around midday, when the light is white and shimmering and thick with heat, and although you know there is movement around, a slight breeze, a cat furtively sliding by on silky paws, someone carefully…
Pleasures of the Over-familiar: Goran Bregović Wedding and Funeral Band @ Arad Open Air Festival
When you are a regular concert goer of a certain age, you reach a point where some gigs attain an almost mythical status which manifests itself in your retelling them in the Homeric tradition to anyone who cares to listen, with details varying slightly from account to account to the degree that you yourself, and…
The Importance of Being Somewhere Else-A Preamble to the Turkish Travel Diary
Travelling southwards on Turkey’s Aegean coast I remembered two articles I’ve recently read, both concerned with topics related to how we travel these days. The first one was an analysis of how our travel pictures, especially of the ’insta-variety’, all look the same- right now I can’t find the particular article for the life of…
Procrastinator’s Log, Stardate 0818
So I have decided after much thought (actually, none whatsoever) that the only way in which my spending innumerable hours on the Internet each day of my life would seem to make some sort of sense (it does not have any, in all frankness) is if I made note of certain bits of information which…
In Wine There is Truth, in A38 There is Music: Best Concerts of Sziget 2018 Part Two
#5 La Femme As a part of my Summer of the Ignoramus project (the season is interchangeable, the ignoramus remains) I arrived at the La Femme gig knowing principally that they were French. As in did not just have a French name because it was cool, in the way all high street store T-shirts have…
A Matter of Energy: Best Concerts of Sziget 2018 Part One
This is somewhat of a novelty list for me: for the first time ever, I have managed to keep it down to an actual ten acts, and not go for some esoteric number like 12 or 17. I haven’t landed one of my favourite bands at number one, a crime to which I plead guilty…
And on the Last Day Cometh the Monkeys and the Flood- Sziget 2018 Day Seven
It’s been a strange and somewhat unwelcome Sziget tradition, but the rain insists to come on the last day of the festival and insists to do so in the manner rain generally prefers in summer time, in the form of the mother of all storms. As with any form of extreme weather, even such a…
The Fangirl Awakens: Sziget 2018 Days Five and Six
Day five started early with the yearly pilgrimage to the VOLT stage, this time at 3 PM, which in szigetian translates into bloody morning, to catch Black Bartók– previously it’d be for Hangmás, of which Black Bartók is basically a second coming, with a slightly modified line-up. The scheduling obviously meant a scarce crowd idling…
An Islandful of Wonders: Sziget 2018 Days Three and Four
Day three is the day when most festivals end, on Sziget it’s the ‘it finally began in earnest’ day, also the day when I could spend a good session of moaning over my spritzer that maybe the line-up isn’t all that it’s hyped up to be, and I literally (few things feel more satisfying than…
Pocket Diary Budapest 