Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Discovering Chinatown

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Posted 19 Apr 2010 — by Jonathan
Category Music, Photos, Travel

As I think I’ve said before, the joy of passing from one district to the next in New York is the rich, seamless transition from one predominant culture, one predominant attitude, into another. Probably I’m seeing that through rose-tinted spectacles, as a tourist – not appreciating that for some the transition is far less painful. It’s probably so for the locals of South Bronx who see wealthy artists moving in and raising the rents, or for Italian families in Little Italy who can’t help but notice that as Chinatown grows, so their community contracts. It was doubtless once so for the many families in Tribeca, Nolita and Williamsburg that have had to move on as property prices have soared. Nevertheless, to the tourist, the endless variety of communities one ecounters in the city is remarkable.

Of all of them, Chinatown is probably the easiest to locate and get to grips with, and yet equally perhaps the hardest to interact with. It’s been a constant on my trips to NY, somewhere I’ve always gone, and somewhere I’ve always been at my most touristy – taking photos, peering at food stalls, always walking, never stopping to really take in what I’m experiencing. The Canal St area is such a bustling, fast-paced neighbourhood. But last week, on the final day of my first stint in the city, I strolled South of Canal St towards the Financial District and, appreciative of the blazing sun, found myself taking a break in Columbus Park. It was just as busy as everwhere else in Chinatown, but the provision of benches, and grass upon which to sit, gave me an opportunity for a breather and gave me, in turn, one of my happiest travel moments. Having weaved through the crowds, and admired the many, complex board games being played by the locals, I found a seat and watched a traditional Chinese band set up their instruments and pass around reams of sheet music.

It would be very easy to accuse me of cultural tourism – only engaging with something if I encounter it packaged up and prettified in an outdoor space, and I’m consious too that claiming to love a style of music so far removed from the Western tradition makes me sound positively pretentious. But sat in the sun, watching groups interact, games unfold and listening to cascades of strange, beautiful notes and thunder-clap cymbals, I felt like I was experiencing a moment of real beauty, and marvelled at the sound of the songs I heard. Very short clip, below.

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Stay warm

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Posted 18 Apr 2010 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel

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Nolita wall paintings

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Posted 11 Apr 2010 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel

The more I write about the disparate districts of New York, the more likely I am to declare each and every one of them my favourite; but another that always inspires me when I’m here is Nolita; a tiny little community north of Little Italy (hence the name), it’s vibrant, fashionable, and everything is probably terribly expensive. This difficulty can be circum-navigated if, however, you only do what I do – which is shuffle through the bustling streets watching for people, windows and – especially – walls.




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Mirror / Dash

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Posted 11 Apr 2010 — by Jonathan
Category Music, Reviews, Travel

Family Bookstore is a terrific little arts bookshop based in Los Angeles, and this month the owners are running and curating a little pop up shop in NY’s Chinatown; it’s ostensibly mid-way between a shop, a gallery, and an impromptu arts space, and I went down there last night to go through the books, admire the pictures and – most importantly – to enjoy a live performance by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who treated the small hipster audience to a 40 minute wall of feedback and guitar noise.

Playing in the corner of a high ceilinged, white-walled warehouse, they started quietly, sat over their guitars, sawing and scraping at the strings with nail files and drumstricks, occasionally picking out shards of fractious counter-melodies with their fingers. Gordon was the most demonstrative, occupying centre stage, sometimes sat, rocking her guitar back and forth, colliding it into her amplifier, sometimes standing, arched over the mic whispering phrases into the ether. Her tired, expressive croon is a marvellous instrument in itself – at times I thought I heard it, but it was just the sound of Thurston wringing a squeal of feedback from his guitar. Sometimes Gordon would yelp ‘let’s dance’ – a counter intuitive invitation if ever I heard one, for the music was as experimental and formless as any you’ll be likely to hear.

For all that, however, the musical and personal bond betweem Kim and Thurston is so profound, so developed, that the music never seemed pointless or pretentious. It was explorative, enthusiastic, rather than high-minded. And it actually sounded extremely beautiful sometimes – an other-worldy, cacophonous orchestra of cicadas one minute, a soundscape of echo the next. Once or twice Kim played a formal riff for a minute or two, and the whole thing began to churn with the rhythmic intensity of Neu!, only for a deliberate or accidental hum to lead the pair snaking in another direction.

Mindblowing stuff.

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Heel disintegration

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Posted 08 Apr 2010 — by Jonathan
Category Travel

The heels of my shoes arch slightly, the shape curved, a thin band of wood and rubber worn down by my ever-so-slightly off-centre way of walking. On my left shoe, the left hand side of the heel is eroded. On my right, the right. This must mean, I have concluded, that I walk with my feet pointing outward. I am like the cheerful cockney on an old music hall stage.

Much of my heel, part of my shoe, has been sliced and scraped into the paving stones of Manhattan. I walked for hours, yesterday – long thick, springly roads, yielding in the baking sun; back and forth past cafes and bars; down thin passages and across squares teaming with students from NYU, neighbourhood drunks, afternoon chess. As I mentioned before, you wouldn’t believe how hot it is here. It got as high as 92°F yesterday. As I stumbled through East Village, neck craned to catch sight of the heavy blossom, bending the brances, and the iron and steel of the staircases, snaking up the houses, I wondered to myself, “how can a city full of such tall buildings cast so little shade”.

So I back up, veer left, catch sight of some new diversion, and forget the heat, striding off excited, toes pointing outward.

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Bristol

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Posted 17 Mar 2010 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos, Travel

After my appointments in Bristol on Tuesday afternoon I got a cab back to my hotel in Clifton, got changed, and slowly walked back into town, enjoying the wonderful light and the surprising quietness of the streets, which were largely deserted. I didn’t cover a great distance, but I was still getting my bearings, walking a kind of convoluted, figure eight, cats-cradle route. After a while the streets began to get busier, and I noted that I was swimming against the tide of Bristol’s student population, who were finishing up at University for the day and heading home. I divided my attention, as I walked, between the views across the city and the people who crossed my path; enjoying watching each person approach and file past, quicker than I in their desire to get home and put the day behind them. Some alone, others in two and threes, chatting, shoving and clutching at each other as they passed, preoccupied with their thoughts, their conversations.

A couple approached slowly, both dressed in black. They were positioned close, but something about their body language told me early that they were arguing, and by the time they pulled level, the girl had pulled her arm away from his and crossed the road, clambering up to the raised walkway, continuing alone for a time. The boy waited a bit then sprinted after her, falling into time with her steps. I stood, watching. Unless they whispered, as far as I could tell they exchanged no further words, but looped their long, loose arms back around each other’s waists. Another couple, their body language so different, were dressed in identical tracksuits, talking intently. A girl walked by swinging a bag and fingering her telephone, her eyes lovingly smudged with eyeliner and mascara. And three more girls, ordered from right to left according to the severity of their fringes, floated by in a way that suggested they would be amazed to be told they had shared the pavement with anyone at all.

I envied their purposefulness, their having somewhere to go. That’s the problem with being alone in an unfamiliar place – you tend to just drift, fill time, speculate on the evening ahead, not knowing what it holds. One’s mind is never in the present; it hovers moments ahead, visualising conversations or incidents that will never occur. People become symbols, or else characters in an imaginary play. Up ahead the road dipped, and I began to descend, wondering where I would end up. And another person passed by, and this time, catching my eye, offered a smile. Too startled to return it, I nevertheless basked in the memory for a good fifteen minutes, glad to be acknowledged – feeling that I had been included in, welcomed into, the city’s shape.

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i am no navigator

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Posted 15 Oct 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel


Totally lost in Budapest; or Buda to be more precise. Went for a stormy, windswept walk there the other day and totally lost my way – ended up scrambling down from Várhegy into Víziváros and, despite thinking I knew at all times where the Danube was flowing (to my right, to my right) I ended up losing my bearings completely – creating along the way a far longer, more tiring walk than I had intended. But a pleasant one regardless. Here’s a photo taken somewhere along the way.

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amazing parliament buildings

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Posted 14 Oct 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Politics, Travel

If the grandeur and status of the Houses of Parliament has anything at all to do with encouraging our elected politicians in the UK to feel it was legitimate to fiddle their expenses, surely the problem is, if anything, worse in Hungary?

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szimpka kert, budapest

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Posted 13 Oct 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel

Rather than soak an experience in and then think about it, analyse it, write about it later, I’m going to have a go at transcribing my thoughts about the latest chapter in my Budapest adventure as I experience it, so consequently I’m crouched over my iPhone while I should be drinking in my surroundings. On the other hand, I am sitting in the pitch black.

A couple of people have mentioned Budapest’s ruin pubs to me since I arrived, but it took my friend Laura recommending Szimpla Kert to me to get me in the door of one of them. The ruin pubs are essentially ad-hoc bars created in the space of one of the city’s many ruined buildings. In Szimpla’s case, it is housed inside a crumbling mansion, a haphazard sequence of rooms, some without proper ceilings, and a huge courtyard in the centre of District VII, the pock-marked, culturally rich part of the city that proved to be first a haven and then a prison for the Jews of Hungary during the thirties and forties.

Everything inside the pub is delapidated and decaying, but the extent to which the space, and the objects within it, have been repurposed is absolutely staggering. Each room has it’s own character and is as cosy as the last, even if some are filled with broken chairs, upturned bathtubs and old televisions. The space I’m sat in the at the moment contains 13 of the latter, suspended from the ceiling, each showing a gradually evolving psychedelic image. Apart from the TV’s, there is no lighting. So until one’s eyes adjust, one is basically sitting in the dark. The room opposite, by way of contrast, is just a few seats and a wall, upon which films are projected. To my left, dimly visible through the archway, a room with ivy snaking across the mesh roof.I’ve really never been anywhere quite like this before – it is the comfiest, richest, most dramatic and at the same time most basic pub I’ve ever frequented.

It’s absolutely wonderful, in short.

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much in demand, apparently

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Posted 12 Oct 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel

After lunch, yesterday – which included a couple of pints of Dreher (not just the best Hungarian lager, but the lager which invented lager) – I returned to my hotel room, and, suddenly heavy, conked out on the bed.

Actually, I’ll start this story 18 hours earlier. On Saturday night, just minutes after I had checked into my hotel, I decided to go and do a bit of exploring – deciding that since it was Saturday night, I’d head down to the bustling tourist district of Budapest. I made the mistake, in doing so, of carrying my Rough Guide to Budapest in my hand, marking me out immediately as a tourist.

I got about three streets down into town, when I was interuppted by a voice. I stopped.

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”.

I looked up, and found two, youngish, and quite pretty blonde girls confidently approaching.

“Um, yes”, I said.

“Do you know where ____ is?”, one asked, saying a name which I couldn’t recognise.

“No”, I admitted, “I’ve no idea, sorry”.

“But it’s an Irish pub!”, the other exclaimed, “and you’re English, right?”.

I agreed that I was, but explained that I’d just arrived and would find it hard enough to navigate my way back to my hotel unguided, let alone dispense directions to others. While one girl studied my streetmap, the other chatted amiably with me, asking what I did for a living, what I was doing in Budapest, and for how long I’d be staying. The girls, apparently, were from a rural part of Hungary and were in the capital for the first time.

I’m pleased to say that, by the time the first girl was finished with the map, I’d concluded that I was witnessing – and taking part in – a carefully scripted scam. When the second girl asked me if I’d take the two of them for a drink, I was able to smile warmly and assure them that, sorry, I didn’t have the least intention of doing so. The girls nodded, not bothered, and moved on.

It doesn’t take much creative googling to confirm that, however great my charms, I wasn’t the first nor the last guy that would be approached by those girls this week.

Walking on into town I allowed myself to smile, first at the fact that, being in a position of strength, I had actually enjoyed talking to the girls (it can be lonely arriving in a new city) and second in the knowledge that, had I been my friend Dan, I’d probably be held hostage in a Budapest basement by now.

So, yesterday, a couple of hours into my nap, I was woken by a knock at the door. Room service? Half asleep, I sat up. The knock came again, insistent, even though I’d left the ‘don’t disturb’ sign on the handle. I got up and shuffled over to the doorway. Outside was a woman, perhaps in her late thirties, who greeted me as if she knew me, but spoke impenetrable Hungarian.

“I’m sorry”, I stammered, confused. “Can I help”.

She managed to find enough English to insist “I come in”, and begin to push on the door.

I held firm, still half asleep, unsure what she wanted.

“I’m sorry”, I repeated. “Which room do you want”.

“This one”, she replied, and again pushed as if to come in.

I was still thinking she was hotel staff, and was on the point of giving in, when I decided to ask one more time.

“What exactly do you want”, I demanded.

She leant closer and, pouting, made a loud, passionless, kissing noise. Twice.

Mwaa-mwaa.

I figured it out. Surprised at my reaction, I reached out – she was by now half way into the room – and gave her shoulder a firm, steady, gentle shove.

“Problem?”, she said, surprised.

I guided her backwards, nodded my head definitively – at last in possession of the facts – and concluded what I think was my first ever encounter with a prostitute by closing the door firmly in her face.

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shapes in budapest

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Posted 12 Oct 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel





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early signs

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Posted 10 Oct 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel

Just arrived in Budapest and, so far, I’m not sure what to think of it. My plane landed this evening, meaning I’ve had that strange, slightly disorientating feeling of arriving in the city at night, where everything is obscured from view, or else at best lit artificially. The early signs were almost completely useless; watching the lights of the city from the window as the plane swooped down towards the airport – my first reference point, the first thing I could see clearly in the black was a shopping mall on the outskirts of the city. I strained my eyesight and caught sight of a logo – it read ‘TESCO’. I long to visit somewhere where the imprint of British and American commerce is not so all-pervading.

In the taxi from the airport, unable to read the road signs or adverts, and listening to the cabbie’s radio, I mused that in many ways Budapest is as far out of my comfort zone as I’ve been. I’m well travelled through the well-signposted cities of Western Europe. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon. I’ve extended my reach to a smattering of coastal cities in North America. But this is my first city with a history of Soviet occupation, my first city with a dialect that completely baffles me. It is also, I realise, the first time in my life I have ever been in a landlocked country. Culturally, linguistically, gastronomically, architecturally; my frame of reference is distant and uncertain.

Then, checked in to my hotel, I tried to get my bearings – walking down to Belváros, the city’s downtown, its hub. I know it’s the tourist district, so I don’t expect too much. And so I enjoy my stroll and work up an appetite. But I feel like I’m in any European city, and the expected wave of strangeness never arrives. Instead, I muse, I’m experiencing a city typical – rather than atypical – of Western Europe: Benetton, Burger King, Subway and Tesco. So I decide that I’m probably just in the wrong frame of mind and return to my hotel. Tomorrow morning I will locate the heart of Budapest – and I’m still optimistic I’ll be blown away.

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vilamoura

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Posted 24 Sep 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos, Travel


This is the place to be if you like Golf. Vilamoura, down on the Algarve, Portugal’s number one tourist destination, is a kind of vast, cultivated mecca for the sport. The hotels and the roads dot and skirt at the edges of the enormous golf courses – and people like me (wearing my businessman hat) come here to pretend we’re on holiday when in fact we’re working. No one has played any golf. Instead I’ve just spent four days in meetings and bars, discussing education publishing and, actually, rather enjoying myself. Have managed to avoid overdosing on alcohol, have eaten some good fish – and am off out shortly to enjoy my final evening here before I return to Brighton. Went out earlier and took some photographs of the surrounding area; they’re below – it’s a strange environment. No-one around. Thick, unyielding grass, professionally manicured. And lots of plush villas and half-built hotels. This is not my holiday destination of choice. But it’s kind of fascinating anyway.



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rotterdam

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Posted 10 Jul 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel

I spent a couple of days in Rotterdam last week. It’s a funny, eccentric, ugly little city – a million miles from Amsterdam, even if it’s only a matters of kilometres away.

Where Amsterdam’s waterways are romantic, evocative, Rotterdam’s, as you might expect – it being Europe’s largest port – are purely functional; murky waters impeded by tugs and cranes. Similarly, it’s architecture, built from the ground up after the city was flattened in the war, is constructed for practical purposes. It’s as if the buildings of the city sprang back from desolation simultaneously, without conferring. Nothing matches, nothing is complimentary. It is a higgledy-piggledy, matter-of-fact city. Ossip Zadkine called it a city without a heart, for its historical centre is absent. There’s another centre there now, but it’s not altogether convincing. Still the ships pass through its river, of course – so it’s a city with an artery.

It’s the Netherlands’ workers city. At the conference I was attending we were told a lovely story, apocryphal or not. It’s a tradition in Rotterdam, we were informed, that when one buys a shirt in one of the city’s boutiques, it is sold with the sleeves already rolled up, so that one can begin work immediately. Perhaps because it’s a city where people work, rather than play, it has a much more multicultural feel than I had expected – with women in headscarves visible on every street. Indeed the current mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, is a practising Muslim. Almost half of the population are not native to the Netherlands or have at least one parent born outside the country. On the plane back to London, I noted, the landscape is barely visible – instead one hovers above an endless sea of warehouses and petrochemical industries. There are no landmarks, just endless, featureless industry.

In the city itself, it’s rather different – especially late at night. By day it’s not quite right to say that Rotterdam works. It also shops. At night, it’s not true to say it sleeps. As well, it parties. Not in the same way that Amsterdam parties, however. There are no coffee-shops, no hip bars. Instead there’s a succession of outdoor cafes, blaring out Euro trance music. The clientele drink late. As well as a working city, a multicultural city, it’s a young city, too. When me and Sam called it a night on Tuesday – at 3am – the revellers surrounding us were showing no signs of stopping. One girl managed a monumental, drunken tumble on the street in front of our table. A hop, skip and a jump, trying to right herself. Eventually she lost her footing, her head colliding gently with a nearby chair. Her friends crowded around her, concerned. Because they were pretty, men crowded around them, faking concern.

The next evening we took a river taxi across the Nieuwe Maas to the Hotel New York, where we drank cool beer and ate dinner. The night before we had ordered a kind of Amstel we’d never seen before – three quarters of a bottle before we realised it was alcohol free. From the river Rotterdam is transformed, because although it remains ugly, there’s something wonderful about a river through a city, just as there is a shoreline. We stumbled after the last Metro of the night, and the staff showed us another Rotterdam characteristic – they were welcoming and generous of nature. Smiling at our uncertainty, a guide hastily gave us three free tickets and ushered us onto the train.

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amid the noise

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Posted 11 Apr 2009 — by Jonathan
Category General, Travel

I seem to have oriented my visit to New York around the Hudson River – it’s been my most consistent and regular landmark, a kind of distant light that always let’s me know where I am. This isn’t a spiritual observation. Most evenings I’ve been in the West Village, or Chelsea, and on each occasion the sun has set magnificently over the nearby river, drawing me closer on my wanderings. Tonight I’m sat outside The Kitchen, an arts space on W 19th St, and the sun is throbbing over to my left. I’m waiting for a show by So Percussion and Matmos, which promises a showcase of “the range of colors and expressive possibilities of percussion, from subtle, quiet gestures to raucous, no-holds-barred explosions of sound”. The literature makes sure to point out that Matmos craft sound from “amplified crayfish nerve tissue”, which sounds like a warning of sorts…

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view from hoboken

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Posted 10 Apr 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel

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you bet

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Posted 09 Apr 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel

I’m so ridiculously suggestible. I’ve only been in the US for a few days and I’m already picking up figures of speech (if not the accent). I just went round to talk to a colleague for a few minutes and ended up agreeing to do some work for her; as I left she said “thanks a lot”, and I replied – as if it was the sort of thing I always said – “you bet!”.

I’m turning into an American!!!

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sunset over hoboken

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Posted 09 Apr 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Music, Photos, Travel

I went out for a few drinks today, starting out in Greenwich Village before wandering West to the banks of the Hudson. I’ve still got some rather lovely shots of Boston to post, so I should really do those first – but I can’t resist publishing tonight’s photos. The first shot is the very first glimpse I had of the sunset, reflected in a glass doorway as I turned a corner towards the water. The second is the sun setting over Hoboken. Both were sighted as the cool wind both woke and sobered me up, to a soundtrack consisting of the marvellous first album by Blue Roses; a record I suspect I shall forever associate with the West Village and the Hudson River.

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newky brown, abroad

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Posted 08 Apr 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel

Given that I’m a Brit, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I find it rather heartwarming that I encounter so many Anglophiles abroad. I’m in a pub in Greenwich Village (I in turn feel a bit too self consciously British to just call it The Village – I’m still in formal mode) and a guy sat beside me is explaining his enthusiasm for all things English. As we talk, the waitress comes over and takes his order. He very deliberately makes sure he’s getting cheddar on his cheeseburger, and muses over what he’ll have to drink.

“I tell you what”, he says. “The Newcastle looks pretty good right now”. He nods to the waitress. “Yeah, I’ll take a Newcastle”.

I know that he isn’t actually wrong. When I order a San Miguel in Brighton I don’t ask for a ‘San Miguel Continental Lager’, so there’s no reason he should have to ask for a Newcastle Brown Ale.

To my right are two guys much more comfortable in their American skin. Granted, they both order Stella, but they both belch proudly after their first gulp. One cries “Yeah baby. Let’s get this party started!”. They start talking about bitches.

I start to drink up.

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what a difference a day makes

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Posted 06 Apr 2009 — by Jonathan
Category Photos, Travel

It’s too easy to assume that when you go away the weather will be wonderful, and getting it wrong – especially when you’re on holiday – can be really hard to get over. A few years ago I went to Cyprus on holiday and the weather was just so much cooler than I’d expected, the sun up less, the water colder than anticipated. It was a real downer, and I had to concentrate on forgetting the disappointment in order to enjoy myself (which I eventually did, but it took a while).

Work trips tend to be a bit less make or break, because at least half of the time you’re stuck in a dreary conference centre or an office, so the bad weather – like I experienced in Portugal last year – should only be an irritant. It still takes practice to be so reasonable, however, and I’ve lost track of business trips where I’ve had to gee myself up after the initial disappointment of poor weather.

Boston is hardly the Bahamas, of course, and I knew I’d be arriving in late Spring, but the weather has recently really improved in the UK, so I was a bit underwhelmed by the torrential rain which greeted me on Friday and the blustery wind which blew me from pillar to post yesterday. I’d looked forward to visiting the Boston Public Gardens, having heard them described as the epicentre of the city. So when I found them yesterday, desolate and bleak, I quickly moved on and explored Downtown instead.

Here’s what the gardens looked like yesterday.


And here they were this afternoon. It’s no understatement to say that they simply burst into life overnight.

Today has been the sort of day which restores one’s faith in the world – Boston on April 5th 2009 felt like heaven; balmy, beautiful, good-natured and brimming with cheer.

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