IRAN | Monday, 22 Mar 2010 | Views [565]
Until 1989 traffic was permitted on the historic bridges of
Isfahan. It is hard to believe it could have been so. These days the lower
arches of their 400 year old stone and mortar structures conceal tea houses,
their upper youths and couples ... Read more >
IRAN | Monday, 15 Mar 2010 | Views [644] | Comments [1]
Far out in the desert, Yazd from above is a series of eggshell domes and the tall square section towers – badgirs – that in summer capture breezes and funnel them down to cool the houses of the rich. The poor make do these days with AC.
At street ... Read more >
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES | Tuesday, 9 Mar 2010 | Views [636]
Sharjah is one of the smaller Emirates, formed in 1971 when the ruler of Abu Dhabi brought the six Trucial States of the Gulf Coast into federation. Before that there had been nominal ties with Britain to prevent piracy and safeguard shipping in the ... Read more >
PAKISTAN | Tuesday, 2 Mar 2010 | Views [1065] | Comments [1]
The main building, or rather buildings, of the Indus Valley
School of Art and Architecture were transported stone by stone from the
downtown, where they were due to be demolished, to Clifton, part of the endless
Cantonment district that flanks the ... Read more >
PAKISTAN | Sunday, 21 Feb 2010 | Views [908]
During the week the Pak Air Force Museum is quiet save for
the roar of civilian jetliners and military transport planes taking off from
the nearby airport and air force base. As with military museums everywhere it
is a curious mix of obsolete hardware ... Read more >
PAKISTAN | Sunday, 14 Feb 2010 | Views [618] | Comments [1]
As well as the usual markets selling everything from
industrial chemicals to paper products Lahore has several that specialise in
second hand wares. Some of these are obviously local – dead format electronica
and spares for the ever present Suzuki ... Read more >
AUSTRALIA | Saturday, 25 Jul 2009 | Views [648]
The last stage in any journey is, typically, transit. A day
spent, or lost, in the maze of airport security queues, check-in counters and
passenger lounges. Some of which were curiously free of clocks. As if the
no-time of international ... Read more >
NEW ZEALAND | Saturday, 18 Jul 2009 | Views [690]
After the fortified, post industrial desert that is California New Zealand seems neat and lush and almost impossibly tidy. The flyovers are discrete, parks numerous, streets clean, and cities mercifully free of homeless people, crackheads and whores.... Read more >
USA | Saturday, 11 Jul 2009 | Views [600]
Many people, but especially Calvino, have written of the formlessness of Los Angeles; the endless centreless sprawling web of streets and roads and sub suburban housing.
And indeed at many levels this is true. There is no single plaza train ... Read more >
USA | Saturday, 4 Jul 2009 | Views [574]
In San Francisco you reach finally the Pacific, that vast unquiet ocean whose waves hammer also on my next and then final destinations, New Zealand and Australia. The water is cold, and wreaths the land in layers of fog and mist that separate the ... Read more >
USA | Saturday, 27 Jun 2009 | Views [1388]
Chicago has two tall buildings. Actually it has many, for its downtown rivals only Manhattan for density, but two stand above the rest in their efforts to thrust up into the sky.
One, the Sears Tower, was for many years the tallest in the world.... Read more >
USA | Saturday, 20 Jun 2009 | Views [607]
In the 1950s Philadelphia was one of the largest cities in the USA, and in the previous century had even briefly eclipsed New York as the largest in the country. Then began a slow, catastrophic decline that saw its population contract by 40% from ... Read more >
USA | Saturday, 13 Jun 2009 | Views [741] | Comments [1]
New York, while not infinite, at least aspires to that
condition, and the narrow island of Manhattan is filled with regular
rectangular iterations of crystalline concrete growth, rhomboid and enormous at
the northern and southern ends, and dipping ... Read more >
SPAIN | Saturday, 30 May 2009 | Views [767]
Madrid is an imperial city, built by royal decree when the
old capital of Toledo, defensive atop a hill and wrapped on three sides by the
Tagus river, was found too polyglot, too constricted, too linked to the
centuries old Moorish presence on ... Read more >
SPAIN | Saturday, 23 May 2009 | Views [631]
To reach the Alhambra, that paradise of fortified palaces and gardens, you walk uphill. First along winding streets and twisted lanes, through an arched stone doorway, and then up a broad path that cuts through trees growing with tropical fury. ... Read more >
SPAIN | Saturday, 16 May 2009 | Views [815]
Andres lives just north of the Gothic Quarter in the 19th Century district of Eixample, or enlargement, that surround the old city of Barcelona. The flat he shares with students from Chile and Argentina is on the roof or sixth floor, though because ... Read more >
AUSTRALIA | Saturday, 9 May 2009 | Views [673] | Comments [1]
There are many remarkable things about the Picasso Museum, Barcelona - a fact that is in itself unremarkable given the central role Picasso played in so much art of the 20th Century.
This being Barcelona the museum is full of tourists, but ... Read more >
SPAIN | Saturday, 2 May 2009 | Views [1775]
Barcelona has its share of tourists. Actually it has the
share of other cities as well, for the crowds that gather around the main Gaudi
monuments – La
Pedrera , the Familia Sagrada , Parc Güell – do so in
numbers that would seem more appropriate ... Read more >
AUSTRALIA | Saturday, 25 Apr 2009 | Views [1324] | Comments [3]
In the 1970s a group of Norwegian artists bought an
abandoned and near derelict farmhouse in the Monserrat region of southern
Spain. Over the next four years they restored and repaired and now, 30 years
later, it is a thriving community of international ... Read more >
TURKEY | Saturday, 18 Apr 2009 | Views [687] | Comments [1]
There was a rally at the Blue Mosque Istanbul yesterday. It
was political – commemorating the death of former Prime Minister Turgut Özal , who died
in office in 1993 - with crowds of people,
television cameras, stages, and huge, truck mounted ... Read more >
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