Travel

Return to Croatia

En Route to Croatia

We just flew over the mountains of Eastern Europe en route to Frankfurt from Dubai. Qantas have teamed up with the United Arab Emirates airline, so we did the first leg from Sydney to Dubai with Qantas, and the second one from Dubai to Frankfurt with Emirates.

I really enjoyed stopping over at Dubai this time, as we were able to marvel at all the strange dress codes in the shopping arcade corridors, and then relax in the Emirates flight lounge until our flight was called. They’re much better than Qantas in terms of service at the moment.

Looking down on the snow-tipped mountains just now. I think of student days travelling by deux chevaux from Paris to Ukraine during the Cold War, when Russian troops marched into Prague and stopped us from going there. (See “My Travel Journal” posts on this blog).

March 15, 2018 0 comment

Travel Writing

A Tuscan Village Holiday

Italy: Fast Cars

Driving on the autostrada is a relief after Rome. Watch on the right, my partner says repeatedly, having been traumatised when the mirror on our rented manual Fiat Punta was flattened against a truck in Rome’s crowded streets. I’m the driver, having learnt to conduire à la droite in France, as a student there. Mark will prepare lots of fresh dishes, based on heavenly tomatoes, plucked straight from the fields. When we get to the outskirts of Siena, we ask for directions to our destination.

Tonni: an Etruscan Village

A rusty sign on a hedge, after winding roads and an unsealed gravelly stretch, marks the hamlet. First settled during the Etruscan era. Dogs, cats, a few children and a smiling woman with false teeth greet us. Several small cars are parked on the narrow gravel street, mediaeval buildings, the lot set in field and forest—oak, laurel, elms, conifers, and the ever-present cypress pines.

February 3, 2018 2 comments

Travel Writing

The Bridge at Mostar

The bridge is pleasing to the eye. It’s perfect in its simplicity. You can only appreciate the grace of its arcs from a distance, or from the pebbly beach down below.

Looking up you see a figure standing on the topmost point of the arc. A man is waiting until the amount of money offered by spectators on the bridge reaches a certain point. Jumping is dangerous. If satisfied with the offering, he will jump into the Neretva River below the bridge. It’s a drop of twenty-four metres. The water is always cold. A young Australian man died last year when his body hit the cold water. Up above, the temperature had reached nearly forty-five degrees celsius. He died from a heart attack.

mostar-man-waiting-to-jump The Mostar Bridge is in Southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country today inhabited by 113,169 people. The bridge was destroyed by shelling in 1993 during the Croat-Bosniak war. The Old Bridge, an Ottoman structure, stood for 427 years. Reconstructed with international aid, gathered by UNESCO after the war, it has become a World Heritage structure. It is constructed of 1556 stones.

I first learnt about this bridge from a Bosnian refugee in Sydney during the nineties. He was giving a cultural talk in a Second Language class I was teaching at the time. This inspired me to one day visit Bosnia-Herzogovina and see this bridge for myself. I got the chance this month while staying in Croatia, a three-hour bus trip away. We had to pass through three border stops, as a slim coastal strip belongs to Bosnia.

The bridge is whole once more, but the people in Mostar remain split, torn asunder by trauma left over from the war. Moslems live on the east of the town, worshipping in mosques, while Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbians are on the west. Healing takes a long time in these situations. The three entities tend to choose segregation rather than forgiveness at this stage. stones-mostar-bridge-2015

October 15, 2016 2 comments

Travel Writing

Copenhagen is Amazing!

It’s on the opposite side of the earth from Sydney, the language spoken is very different, and it’s much colder in autumn. But Copenhagen is an amazingly liveable city. We felt surprisingly comfortable there, and were impressed by this city during our brief visit.

the-little-mermaid-copenhagen

There were 18,000 doctors visiting the city for a cancer conference, so we were lucky to find reasonably priced accommodation. Some of the medicos stayed in Sweden and commuted by car across the bridge joining the two countries. Hotel Nora, recommended by Trip Adviser, was comfy and relaxed. Admittedly, my visit was short, but here are some first impressions of the city and its people:

The Traffic

cyclists-rule-the-roads-copenhagen

The city is flat and cyclists fly along the streets along dedicated bike paths, sharing the space with pedestrians and cars. Helmets are not prescribed by law. There are two bicycles to every person in the city. Cars are fewer and smaller than in other cities. As a result, noise and carbon pollution are much less. Motorists must give way to cyclists, and the latter to pedestrians, in the final analysis. Only one taxi driver felt that motorists were unfairly treated by the laws.

A Caring City

preschoolers-pram-minder

We saw evidence of small refugee children being expertly cared for by middle-aged Danish women, almost certainly on a volunteer basis. The Danish babies were well looked after too, as evidenced in the photo above.

The Buildings

typical-danish-buildings

Aesthetically pleasing. There’s a seamless mingling of old and new, with evidence of expert architectural input at work down through the centuries. I thought of our Sydney Opera House, an iconic building that had been designed by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. And I thought about how, as a young nation, we hadn’t been quite ready to benefit fully from Utzon’s expertise for the interior of the building.

Food and Entertainment

restaurant-copenhagen-lunch

We had lunch in a Copenhagen cafe, and ordered a traditional open rye sandwich called Smorrebrod, with cream sauce and seafood. Our friendly Ethiopian taxi driver had told us that the Danes only enjoy one outing per week; he was still missing the dance/music culture of his native homeland, thirty years on. It made me wonder about the multicultural system in Denmark by comparison with the one that we have here in Australia.

The People

They seem happier than the citizens in many other countries. This reminded me of my sister’s thoughts on the people of Bhutan. In Buddhist Bhutan Gross National Happiness (GNH) is used as a measure instead of gross domestic product (GDP). I wondered if Denmark had been influenced by this idea. At the same time, the work ethic in Denmark is very strong, and citizens are proud and patriotic. This was evident at a glance.

Taxi Drivers

Many of the drivers we met were from Ethiopia and other African countries. They were able to discuss cultural differences in a sophisticated manner, indicating their easy assimilation into the society. The only problem for one of them was not being able to fall asleep easily in summer, when the sun is still up until 10 o’clock at night.

The Royal Family

“We love her,” people said when questioned about Princess Mary, originally from Australia. “She learnt the language so quickly and adapted to our ways”. She also gave birth to four children, heirs to the Danish throne.

oryal-palace-amalienborg

October 15, 2016 0 comment

Travel

The Great Beauty

In the movie “The Great Beauty”, the 2013 Italian film by Paolo Sorrentino, a tourist, after taking photos in Rome, collapses and dies. The message is clear: See Rome and die!

Like the protagonist in the film, my abode while in Rome (in my case, the Palatino Hotel) was almost overlooking the Colosseum. A flight of stairs opposite the hotel led up through an archway between walls covered by vines to the top of the hill. From there, you looked down on the ancient stadium, constructed for gladiatorial events two millenia ago.

At one stage in the movie, the ageing protagonist, Jep, thinks back on his life, which has also been the life of the city, and realises he has spent most of it searching at parties on the rooftops and in the gutters for what he calls la grande bellezza – “the great beauty”. He actually finds the underbelly of the city: gangsterism, triviality, hypocrisy and decadence.

A perfect day for a walk

We could walk in any direction for hours, to be overwhelmed by ancient beauty. Ten minutes’ away to the west was the Roman Forum. You had to pay twelve euros to wander around in here. It was well worth it, and there was less chance of being relieved of your wallet by pickpockets in here.

An ancient street in the Forum

Statue of twins suckled by the wolf

Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome, were said to have been suckled by a she-wolf, after their mother was forced to become a vestal virgin. Roma was named after Romulus, who favoured the Palatine Hill on which to construct the town that became Rome.

I took many photos and videos on my i-phone while wandering around the ancient ruins in the Forum, visited on 15th October, 2015 one day before our 40th wedding anniversary; which we celebrated in Rome and in Paris, two of our favourite cities. The following photos I found online:

The Roman Forum

The Garden containing Statues of the Vestal Virgins was beautiful and full of pathos. It harks back to an ancient cult of which little remains today. The virgins were chosen from aristocratic families to watch over the eternal fire that represented the city’s life force. One of their more macabre tasks was to prepare the mixture containing salt to be spread over sacrificial bodies.

The Vestal Virgins

As in all cultures, but particularly as regards “the Eternal City”, there is an underbelly, symbolised by the ruins of the Colosseum, where unspeakable acts of horror were committed at another time.

the-movie

September 15, 2016 1 comment