The airport is just a glorified hangar, and much as I had rehearsed looking at Sarajevo as just another tourist destination, I know all too well I’d seen this place before, on grainy footage of UN planes landing and taking off amid occasional shelling. As our driver makes steady progress towards the city centre, conversing…
Category: travel
Budapest corner with Istanbul: Gül Baba’s Rosegarden
Humans are seldom happy with what they have. Say you’re offered a bank holiday right in the middle of the week, and in a more positively disposed moment you do admit that this arrangement could perhaps function in the long run, making people more focused on the tasks they have on the four working days…
A Cabinet of Viennese Curiosities for Beer and Book Lovers
So there I was, in the world’s most livable city, on a fine spring evening, in excellent company, listening to one of my all-time indie crushes and feeling deeply miserable. Not just any kind of misery, but an existential dread that bends one into a tortured Egon Schiele silhouette, sends one onto the couch of…
Best of 2018- Travels
A visit to Juventus’s stadium in Turin. Do it even if you don’t like football all that much, or support other clubs. It’s not ridiculously long and the guides are entertaining- provided you speak Italian, as English versions are mainly available only from tape, which I say is fine given we’re in Italy and all…
How Berlin Was Made
On the first day God decided that he would need to furnish some new living quarters for himself and went off to IKEA. On the way there he found a second-hand shop specialized in Communist vintage, a lot of abandoned metal and a golden eagle which had belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm. He returned home in…
Things You Can’t Do in Vienna in Eight Hours
It’s one of my firm convictions that all those 24, 36, 72 hours in this or that city guides are basically the subversive work of the devil trying and very likely succeeding at ruining your holiday, and probably the rest of your life, but that is another, more metaphysical matter, altogether. There is simply no way…
Sunday Bender in Visegrád
I’ve never met a medieval fortress I liked, or, to be more precise, one I was genuinely impressed with. The problem obviously lies with the fact that novels and history books, paired with an active imagination, raised the bar of what I expected to a level no grouping of ruins, no matter how well maintained,…
Fifty Shades of Blue: Alaçatı and Cunda Island
For the final stretch of our trip we decided to hop south of Izmir, an adventure which also included one intense hour in the centre of Izmir itself, naturally stuck in traffic, through which we learned that keeping your eyes peeled for the highway is an absolute must if you want to avoid the hot…
Along the Turkish Aegean at the Mercy of Whimsical Gods
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…
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…
