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Article: VIDA URBANA - MUMBAI

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 01:51:28 +0200

Published in National Geographic Traveler
JUNE 2010

INDIA’S GATEWAY CITY is still the country’s biggest urban conglomeration and continues to be the most charming megopolis on the subcontinent. As sparkling new buildings go up to accommodate the spoils of India’s booming economy, and bars, clubs and shopping malls open their doors to provide for the country’s burgeoning jetset, old-school life in the city and centuries-old Indian culture ticks along in the background. A couple of days in Mumbai can be an expedited trip through history: against the backdrop of colonial architecture, you can see first-hand everything from centuries-old fishing traditions, to new and upcoming artists and designers of our day. Mumbai really has it all…

Scout out the retail gems
The idea of shopping in India usually conjures up ideas of crowded markets and endless haggling, but Mumbai also has a great stock of shops and boutiques with clothes, jewelry and furnishings made by cutting-edge local designers. Check out Bombay Electric on Best Marg in Colaba, described by the International Herald Tribune as “a beacon of experience and a landmark for progressive design in India.” Inside you’ll find all manner of men’s, women’s and children’s designer clothing with a strong Indian edge, as well as a trove of kitschy retro prints, jewelry, shoes and scarves. Don’t forget your credit card, however; the tags in this little boutique are definitively western-style.

For something with a little more earthy flavor, have a browse in fabindia, one of the country’s fastest flourishing retail brands. “It is time for India to discard its outdated policies and to lead the world in forging a new development pathway,” says William Nanda Bissell, businessman, author, and brains behind the chain. The store is packed to the rafters with simple, high-quality Indian-style clothing like salwar kameez, kurtas and saris as well as home textiles, jewellery and organic foods. The products are all rurally sourced, with an emphasis on traditional craft methods and hand-made products. The upside is that they have kept their costs down, so you’re getting PC ethno-chic without the designer price tag.

Hippie out at Good Earth, a high-end fabric and furnishings store in Colaba (next door to Bombay Electric) that sells all manner of embroidered and printed bedspreads and cushions as well as a stunning and highly original collection of ceramic dinnerware. Check out their home spa section too for scented candles and sandalwood, jasmine and rose soaps.

For a dyed-in-the-wool food bazaar, lose yourself for a couple of hours in the Crawford Market. You could be forgiven for thinking you’d been transported to 19th century Europe upon entering through its giant Norman-Flemish-style portal whose overhanging frieze was designed by Lockwood Kipling, father of novelist Rudyard Kipling. Originally Mumbai’s main wholesale food retail spot until as recently as the late nineties, Crawford Market now also sells all manner of other imported foodstuffs as well as hardware and cosmetics. Even if you have no interest in buying the food itself, you’ll get eye candy by the bucketload from the mountains of fruit and veg and the light streaming in from the high windows of the old building.

Hit a spiritual high
“The Banganja Tank is a local gem – it’s like a little piece of rural India, right in the center of the city,” says Mumbaiker film director Kaustav Mukerji, who cites this urban pool as one of the best and most peaceful places to visit in the city. The tank, which is surrounded on all sides by steps, or ghats is said to date back 5,000 years to the legends of the Ramayana. This peaceful area, set against the burgeoning skyscrapers of neighboring Malabar Hill, is great for an afternoon stroll. Get lost down a few of the narrow streets behind the Kashi Math temple and you’ll find yourself in the midst of a residential maze of tiny houses that eventually leads out onto the city’s rocky shore. The lines and lines of laundry flapping in the wind here are a sight to behold.

Take a short rickshaw ride up the coast from here and you can’t miss the Haji Ali Dargah, a mosque built on an island out at sea that’s connected to the land via a pedestrian causeway. It’s a 15th century complex built to enshrine a merchant-turned holy man. Go late afternoon and you’ll hear musicians playing in the courtyard in time for sunset, while Thursdays and Fridays are by far the busiest days, with tens of thousands of pilgrims making their way out to the rock.

On a lighter note, why not try a little laughter therapy? Hasya yoga is yoga with a twist that will have you in stitches during the short, half hour session. The method includes practicing lots of different types of giggles in a group surrounding that will leave you light and tickle-bellied. Call Madan Kataria on +91 22 26 31 64 26 for more details.

Relive the Raj with a Haj to the Taj
Although Calcutta was officially the capital of colonial India, the British very much left their mark on Mumbai too through their very particular style of Indo-Saracenic architecture that formed a hybrid of the styles from both the UK and India. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly known as the Victoria Terminus) is probably the most seminal of the large, British-built edifices, with its elegant Victorian Gothic style that combines a great deal of traditional Indian architecture in its dome, turrets and arches. Step inside for a taste of commuter chaos and too look up at the stained glass windows and moldings that surround the inside of its enormous dome.

A close second in terms of wow-factor is the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (and you can save your tongue by calling it the Prince of Wales museum, or the Bombay museum) with its raj-era architecture and rambling manicured gardens. Art and history buffs will enjoy the exhibits of old Indian artefacts, though you might find the curatorship a little dry.

Finish your afternoon on a full Merchant Ivory note with high tea at the Sea Lounge inside the Taj Mahal Hotel. The building itself has quite a history, erected just after the turn of the 20th century by none other than Jamsetji Tata, founder of one of India’s biggest names in industry today. Go for some chaats (snacks) in the tea-time buffet here and enjoy a pot of Darjeeling overlooking the Gateway of India and the harbour – the most British way to end a day in Mumbai.

Uncover today’s art pioneers
If contemporary art is your thing, then its well worth spending a few hours surveying the galleries dotted around Colaba to see the best of what today’s Indian artists are up to. “India has become an art buyer’s destination,” says Abhay Maskara, curator and director of Gallery Maskara in Colaba, “we have many visitors who come looking for signatures and often go back with more radical works from our gallery.” Maskara is situated on 3rd Pasta Lane in the southern part of the neighborhood of Colaba and you’ll recognize it from the cute mural on the front wall. It’s a funky building well worth a visit for its original and poignantly curated shows set in a stripped down warehouse space.

Continue south on the Colaba Causeway, turning left at the fire station, and you’ll come to Project 88, another cutting edge joint with regular contemporary shows. Also worth a look is Mirchandani and Steinreuke, on Mereweather Street just around the corner from the Taj Hotel.

Exhale into the ocean
When wedged between rickshaws in the middle of a traffic jam, it’s easy to forget that Mumbai is in fact a city by the sea, with the wide-open swathe of the Indian Ocean serving as a giant ventilator to the smoky urban density.

As far as urban beaches go, Mumbai’s Chowpatty Beach might be a world away from the string bikinis and surgery enhanced bodies of the likes of Miami and Rio, but it’s still a legend in its own right. A giant sandbox for the city’s cool kids, many of whom come during the day to kick back under the trees, or to paddle in the water fully clothed, Chowpatty is also worth visiting at night, especially at weekends, where it becomes a veritable playground with rides, sideshows and street food.

Get up at dawn and head over to the Sassoon Docks, just south of Colaba, to watch the colorful boats come in with their daily catch. Locals come here to buy fish at wholesale prices, but the spectacle of the thousands of kilos of fish being offloaded onto the land is a spectacle in itself.

Still, if the early hour doesn’t agree with your jetlag, then get the day’s catch in its second phase at the wildly popular local eatery, Trishna’s Seafood Restaurant in Khala Goda. The interior is a small, windowless, badly decorated pokehole, but the food and the atmosphere made by their enthusiastic clientele more than make up for it. The specialty here is crab, lobster, jumbo prawn and pomfret, which all come in a variety of styles, from curried to baked in the tandoor, and the Hyderabad-style fish is a sure winner.

Paint the town red
On the surface of things, Mumbai might look like the city that shuts down and goes to sleep not long after sundown, but in reality there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to enjoy a night on the tiles well into the small hours; it’s just a question of tuning in to the right vibes.

Kick off your evening with a Kodak sunset moment, at the famous Dome, an open-air rooftop bar on the top floor of the Inter Continental Hotel along the city’s stylish seaside Marine Drive. Get here while its still light and grab a front row couch seat for the sunset to the beat of the hip lounge music. The bar also serves appetizer plates and sushi, and if when night falls, you still don’t feel like moving, you can also take dinner up here high above the city.

“Think of a super-sexy, immaculately-dressed, power-wielding SoBo couple and you’ve got a fair idea of what the place looks and feels like,” writes Neha Sumitran in Mumbai’s Time Out magazine about the city’s latest schmoozy nightspot, Valhalla. Business lounge by day and chic tapas bar by night you can come and feast on the likes of Griddled Chermoula King Prawns, fizzy battered Bombay duck, or jalapeño patata bravas. Once the energy takes hold, Valhalla is likely to keep going into the wee hours, especially at weekends.

“Bluefrog is not a music venue in Mumbai, it’s THE music venue in the city,” says one reveler and aficionado of Mumbai’s most famous nightspot. Open every day except Monday, it has a constant stream of live music from blues, acoustic and folk to DJs spinning electronica, techno and house at weekends. Rock up to the bar for cocktails and martinis and get in before 9pm for Happy Hour, otherwise phone ahead and book a table for dinner; the menu is mostly Mediterannean with a great selection of marinaded meats on the wood-fire grill.

Partied-out partygoers often head for a late night kebab at Mumbai’s seminal Bade Miya stall on Tulloch Road in Colaba before hitting the sack – highly recommended late night munchies, especially the lamb boti variety.

For a protracted next-day R and R, while away the early afternoon with a Sunday brunch at Indigo, conveniently situated in the centre of Colaba. The action starts at midday and ends whenever you are defeated by the gargantuan flow of Mediterranean-Indian food laid out across the bar and grilled on the barbeque outside. Reserve in advance for this highly popular social event, and try if you can to turn a deaf ear, or a sense of humour, towards the terrible cover band in the corner who will regale you with ‘eighties power ballads for the duration of your meal.

BOX:
Chic but intimate at the Gordon House
The Gordon House Hotel, tucked away on a side street in the shadow of the Taj Tower in Colaba, is Mumbai’s most appealing boutique hotel option. The reworked colonial-era building has a bright and homely feel, with four floors of rooms set around a courtyard design, each floor harboring a different style of room, from Mediterranean to Swedish. The downstairs restaurant All Stir Fry draws in the cool crowd with its special DIY noodle bar, and its in-house night club, Polly Esther’s, is a popular Saturday night clubbing option. For this reason, don’t expect to get too much sleep at weekends…

Logistics

Where to stay:
Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Apollo Bunder, Colaba; +91 22 66 65 33 66; www.tajhotels.com – the crown jewel of Mumbai, this expansive modernized colonial-era hotel in the middle of the city is a luxury must.
Gordon House Hotel, Battery Street, Colaba; +91 22 22 87 11 22; www.ghhotel.com – intimate and homely, Mumbai’s best boutique option.
Bentley’s Hotel, 17 Oliver Street, Colaba; +91 22 22 84 14 74; www.bentleyshotel.com, – Clean and basic with colonial character, a great budget choice.
Hotel InterContinental, 135 Marine Drive, Churchgate; +91 22 39 87 99 99; www.intercontinental.com – With all the necessary mod-cons, and right on the water’s edge at Marine Drive.

Where to eat:
Trishna, Sai Baba Marg, Khala Ghoda; +91 22 22 70 32 13 – local seafood favourite.
All Stir Fry – downstairs at the Gordon House, this is a sparky pan-Asian canteen-style food with a chic twist.
Leopold Café, Colaba Causeway, Colaba; +91 22 22 02 01 31; www.leopoldcafe.com – a Mumbai institution, there’s almost nothing that’s not on the menu here.
Chetana, 34K Dubash Marg, Kala Ghoda; +91 22 22 84 49 68; www.chetana.com – In Khala Goda, walking distance from Colaba, this is an excellent vegetarian restaurant, with epic thali choices.
India Jones, Trident Hotel, Nariman Point, Marine Drive; +91 22 66 32 57 57; – set inside the Trident hotel in Marine drive, an excellent high-end pan-Asian treat.
Indigo, 4 Mandlik Marg, Colaba; +91 22 66 36 89 80; www.foodindigo.com – hang with the jetset for dinner, or spend a Sunday afternoon brunch here.
Bade Miya, Tulloch Road, Colaba – for delicious and highly sought-after late night kebabs.

Where to party:
Dome, InterContinental Hotel, 135 Marine Drive, Churchgate; +91 22 39 87 99 99 ext 8872 – evening drinks are a must here at the rooftop bar with the best view in Mumbai.
Valhalla, Eros Builiding, First Floor, Churchgate; +91 22 67 35 35 35; www.valhalla.co.in – the latest bar and club to hit the cool circuit.
Bluefrog, D/2 Mathuradas Mills Compound, NM Joshi Marg, Lower Parel; +91 22 40 33 23 00; www.bluefrog.co.in – Mumbai’s definitive live music venue.

Where to shop:
fabindia, Jeroo Building, 137 MG Road, Khala Goda; +91 22 22 62 65 39; www.fabindia.com – modern designs from rural crafts.
Bombay Electric, 1 Best Marg, Colaba; +91 22 22 87 62 76; www.bombayelectric.in – cutting edge clothing with an Indian twist.
Good Earth, 2 Reay House, Colaba; +91 22 22 02 10 30; www.goodearthindia.com – contemporary Indian furnishings, ceramics and spa products.
Crawford Market – old-school fruit and veg market chaos.

Article: DROOL BRITANNIA

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 01:44:35 +0100

Published in National Geographic Traveler
March 2010

GLOBALLY RIDICULED for the likes of its greasy fish and chips and soggy scampi, England has long been a nation with a severely deflated culinary mojo. But in the last few years, there have been rumblings of revolution in the air, led mostly by a generation of young chefs and restaurateurs bent on reviving the best of the Olde English kitchen and the art of nose-to-tail eating. Vanessa Able hits the food trail in London to discover what this revolution tastes like and whether it entails more than just entrails.

IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE SERVICE at St John’s restaurant in London’s Smithfields, and a London Porker, also known as a Middle White pig, is getting a shave. Cleansed and disemboweled, it lies peacefully with a half-smile on the counter top while the last remaining strands of black wiry hair are scraped from its ears, cheeks and snout. The sound of the knife blade scouring the skin sets my teeth on edge, but the kitchen’s porcine barber, a fly-in American chef from New York’s Gramercy Tavern called Ben, is oblivious to the rasping noise. He picks the beast up by grabbing all four trotters and lovingly turns it on its side, exposing the giant slit down its middle from where all its intestines have been removed.

“This is the glamorous part,” Ben remarks dryly, adding: “I don’t even shave myself, and here I am shaving a pig.”

Set in a former smokehouse around the corner from London’s largest meat market at Smithfields, the St John restaurant has become a London institution. Extolled by ‘Kitchen Confidential’ chef Anthony Bourdain as “an eye-opening, inspiring, thoroughly pleasurable yet stripped down adventure in dining,” the place opened in 1994 as a no-frills establishment serving up good, simple British food. Since then, it has risen to become a symbol of what is being called the revival of English cuisine.

Yes – English cuisine. No, it’s not an oxymoron, and there’ll be no sniggering at the back, please. It’s true that for centuries Britain has been lampooned the world over for the pitiful state of its national dishes: food critic Bill Marsano once wrote that, “the British Empire was created as a by-product of generations of desperate Englishmen roaming the world in search of a decent meal.” Comedian Jackie Mason joked “Britain is the only country in the world where the food is more dangerous than the sex,” while more recently, former French President Jacques Chirac somewhat un-diplomatically observed of the British, “You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.”

Ouch. And as an Englishwoman, it hurts my national pride to admit that such derision has not been not entirely unjustified over the last few decades: after all, think of a good British meal, and what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Most likely the cholesterol-and-fat banquet of a full English breakfast: runny eggs, singed bacon, oily sausage, blackened tomato and (ugh!) tepid baked beans.

Over at St John, however, the revolution is in full swing. There’s not a tepid baked bean in sight as the barman chalks up today’s ‘Elevenses’ menu, a bill of bar snacks: Welsh Rarebit; Bone Marrow Toast; Snails and Oakleaf; Eccles Cake; Mackerel; Globe Artichokes; Lamb, Bread and Green Sauce; Peach and Champagne Jelly. Next door in the office, the lunch docket is rolling off the printer: Rolled Pig’s Spleen and Bacon; Venison Saddle, Beetroot and Pickled Walnut; Grouse; Stinking Bishop and Potatoes; Chitterlings; Lamb Sweetbreads; Smoked Eel; and of course the shaved and roasted Middlewhite, served with marrow and parsley sauce.

You’ll be forgiven for feeling like you’ve fallen down the culinary rabbit hole into a medieval English cookhouse: St John espouses a vigorously imaginative style of cooking that goes beyond the fine cuts and filets to include the whole animal – ears, cheeks, trotters and all- onto the menu, drawing from old English traditions and recipes that were based on seasonality and thrift.

Over in the kitchen, a tray of roasted shallots is being pulled out of the oven. One of the chefs eagerly explains to me their destiny: “you get a piece of toast, and you squeeze the shallots out of their skin while they’re still warm. They’re nice and sweet: you spread them on the toast and eat them with goats curd and chopped mint. Such a simple thing, and it just works,” he enthuses, feeding me a spoonful of the goat curd to demonstrate his point.

Simplicity is one of the buzzwords of the revolution. This became outstandingly clear to me after an evening’s ‘research’ spent hemorrhaging my wallet in the company of stiff suited businessmen at 24, glitzy restaurant of celebrity wunder-chef and self-proclaimed ‘ambassador of British cuisine’, Gary Rhodes. The self-conscious minimalist serving of the food (try 3 small lettuce leaves passed off as a £10 salad) and the stuffy, forced-fancy atmosphere (I felt like I was sitting on a spike all night), combined with the SWAT-style security check upon entering the building all combined to feel so unnecessary.

Here, among the whitewashed walls of St John, where everything from the phrasing of the menu to the actual preparation of the food, unpretentiousness is next to godliness. The idea being that the less fuss that is injected into geometric chopping, fussy presentation and complicated sauces, the more the diner’s attention focuses on the inherent quality of the foodstuffs they are ingesting.

Sounds sensible, and so pragmatically English. But head chef Chris Gillard, fingers black with the sticky tar-like goo of cuttlefish ink, quickly corrects me: “Food here is not so much English as it is Fergus.”

The Fergus he is referring to is Fergus Henderson, the restaurant’s chef-founder who has been extolled as one of the frontrunners of the movement to invigorate English cooking. Famously self-effacing and commonsensical, Fergus usually shuns all such accolade, and yet his bold no-nonsense approach to cooking English food has inspired a new generation of chefs in the country, including Chris.

Fergus, whose battle with Parkinson’s disease has cut down his kitchen hours over recent years, is not in the restaurant today. I’m disappointed not to be able to meet him, and so I start grilling Chris about him. I ask him how he finds the experience of working with Fergus and he replies, “inspiring”, citing his love of simplicity and “passion and love of a good lunch” as what set him apart.

“It probably comes from the fact that he never had a formal training; he never learned to cut things into cubes,” Chris explains. He points over at a pot of boiling carrots: “Those are going to be served as they are,” he says. “Why cut them?” He studies my face for a sign of recognition. “Does that make sense?”

Yes, I suppose it does. Fergus’ cookbook, “Nose to Tail Eating – A Kind of British Cooking” contains all sorts of pearls of wisdom of this uncomplicated, all-inclusive nature including how to eat radishes at their peak and theories of jugged hare, as well as the skills of making everything from pressed potatoes and mushy courgettes to the more daring deep-fried lambs brains and pig’s cheek and tongue.

Which is precisely what I’m tucking into just over a mile away on Commercial Road in Spitalfields. This east-end neighbourhood has recently undergone a facelift after years as one of the city’s more salubrious areas, and is today home to St John’s other branch, Bread and Wine. This joint is considered the more casual of the two, with the menu featuring smaller dishes, better fit for sharing. The lunch list today includes pigeon, smoked sprats and puffballs, but being in adventurous mood, I am more excited by the pig’s cheeks. They lie before me on a white plate, a three-layered pear-shape of tongue, cheek fat and skin.

This particular pig doesn’t seem to have had as good a shave as its counterpart in Smithfields.

“Eeeuwww, it’s all hairy!” exclaims my 19-year-old godson and dining companion, whose eyes nearly popped out of his head when I ordered the dish to come with an ox heart salad. An architecture student, Alex is by no means a culinary heathen – in fact I’m constantly surprised by the delicacy of his teenage palate. And yet here we are, two children of the British Isles, born and raised on British soil, neither of us having ever sampled half of these long-forgotten delicacies our country has to offer.

Offal has always played a major part at the British dinner table, especially in the north of the country. The UK has seen a staggering rise of 67% in the sales of offal since 2003, a figure that shows suggests a return to old traditions that took a particularly hard blow with the modernization of eating habits of the past 50 years, and during the mad cow disease crisis in the 1990s when a lot of offal, especially cows brains, was banned.

I’ll admit I’m amazed to discover that the pig’s cheeks are extremely tasty, though the alarm bells of guilt do ring out with every mouthful of hairy fat. The ox-heart, mercifully un-fatty, is sliced into thin strips, slightly charred and served with a watercress and pickled walnut salad. I expected a novelty flavour requiring some kind of acquired taste, but it is, in fact, delicious. Even Alex is a convert…

“It’s not for the squeamish,” warns Tom Pemberton, presumably catching the perturbed look on my face as I peer into a simmering pot of pigs’ heads. There are four of them in total, turning and waving gently with the action of the boiling water with all the tormented dismay of a Hammer Horror. Tom reaches in with a knife to poke at the meat. “The bones are still in there. Look, there are the teeth,” he demonstrates by pulling back the now flaccid meat of the jowl to reveal a set of blackened gnashers.

Tom is making brawn. “It’s something people have often heard of, but they don’t know what it is,” he explains. “The meat is quite gelatinous, and you take it off after you’ve cooked it. It falls off very easily. Then you pack it into a terrine mould, straining the water that you cooked it in, but the jelly that comes from the bones sets and makes a terrine and that’s called brawn.”

Tom is the head chef and owner of the Hereford Road restaurant in Bayswater, and today he’s giving me a beginners guide to English kitchen essentials. Next up I’m shivering in the cold room of the prep area in the basement of the restaurant as he excitedly pulls various ingredients off the shelves to demonstrate the variety of his daily fare. Smoked eels hang off the edge of the rack next to a tray of Cornish mackerel and wild sea bass. On a lower shelf are the tiny, plucked bodies of wood pigeons and English quails, calves kidneys, the heart of a pig and a bunch of duck breasts that are being salted. Tom holds a pot of razor clams up to my face and one of them bulges out and lunges towards me, making me jump. “People find these a bit freaky,” Tom assures me, explaining that they have to be cooked alive for optimum freshness.

“It’s an interesting thing that in Britain everyone can cook a good pasta, but no one can make a good Shepherds Pie any more,” Tom laments as we sit among the white walls, wooden tables and red leather booths of his restaurant. “I started cooking in 1994, and the really popular thing then was a misnomer of ‘Modern British’, which wasn’t British at all but just a mixture of Italian and French.”

“People spoke about peasant Italian and French cooking with this kind of received knowledge, and you kind of felt like saying, ‘Well, hang on mate; you’re from Suffolk. You’ve only been to France once!’”

So is there a revival going on? Tom seems to think so. The sweetbreads, calf’s kidney, ox liver and deep-fried calf’s brain on the menu today hark back to his own roots: “As a child, I really liked offal, which,” he admits, “is unusual.” His father came from the north of England and was raised on a cheap and practical diet of tripe, kidneys and black pudding, which were very common household dishes before the rationing of the Second World War and the supermarket revolution in convenience and microwave meals that followed.

Tom particularly prides himself on his restaurant’s braised oxtail, positing that Hereford Road might be the only place in London that prepares the appendage whole. As far as he is concerned, the use of offal in the kitchen is not a novelty, but a cracker-barrel staple. “British food is simple and it gets to the point. I really like that side of it.”

There’s still room for schoolboy humour, however. It’s 3pm, the quiet hour just after a hectic lunch service and before preparation begins for dinner; I’m taking a break with the jocular Peter Woods, and we’re giggling over lamb’s testicles. “They taste very similar to sweetbreads,” he says, “very soft, very delicate, and slightly creamy…” and with that we both descend into chuckles. “They didn’t go down so well,” he recounts of one of his less popular dishes with a chortle. “I think it was the wording more than anything.”

Peter, who previously trained at the Savoy Hotel and Marco Pierre White’s Belvedere restaurant, is the head chef at The Northbank restaurant just next to London’s Millenium Bridge. Opened in 2007, it has a more formal, business-like air than the understated St Johns and Hereford Road restaurants, combined with a spectacular view of the Thames and the brown-brick behemoth that is the Tate Modern. Braised Beef Cheeks, Vegetable Wellington, Honey Roast Quail and Pork Belly are served on white tablecloths against a background of quirky, rather hypnotizing toile de jouy wallpaper depicting scenes of modern London.

Despite the darkness of the cloudy August sky shadowing St Paul’s Cathedral at our backs and the former residence of its architect Sir Christopher Wren just across the river, Peter reminds me that today is nonetheless the Glorious Twelfth (of August), otherwise known as the first day of grouse season. “And next month we’ll be getting pheasants and partridges,” he continues, enthused at the prospect, “but no oysters, not yet. You can only get oysters in months that end with an ‘r’.”

Seasonal cooking and local sourcing are the second and third commandments of the English cooking revival, and a subject that seems to light a fire in the eyes of every English chef that I talk to. It means that the menus are in constant flux, with ideas and dishes changing depending upon the time of year and what their local suppliers have in stock. All quite mind-boggling for a generation raised on supermarket imports that don’t think twice about eating asparagus at Christmas, or figs in the spring.

“It’s refreshing to see English chefs going back to a more traditional way of cooking and doing more research into what we’re using,” says Peter, as he leads me into the kitchen to show me a box of (in season) girolle mushrooms. “They’re lovely, real nice. Lovely, lovely mushrooms,” he eulogizes, almost a bit misty-eyed.

As emphasis shifts from exotic global ingredients to seasonal items grown on British soil, so local farming has also undergone a boost in recent years as demand for special gourmet ingredients has flourished. Farmers markets are burgeoning all over the country, but if you’re in London, then best place to start any hunt for local products is at one of the great city markets: Smithfields in Farringdon for meat, Billingsgate near Canary Wharf for fish, and the gorgeous Borough market at London Bridge for all that and more besides.

Locals will grumble (as locals are wont to do) that Borough Market has been overrun by tourists in recent years, but if anything the new wave of interest in the market and its products has helped to invigorate its original spirit. Set within a network of alleys and high-ceilinged warehouse-type spaces in the brown-brick backstreets of the city’s south bank, the market is a weekly convention. It’s an orgy of gourmet fare, with blackboards and hand-written signs at every few paces proclaiming venison, boar and pheasant pies, black pudding loaves, hot and spicy cider, Whitby cod and haddock, Isle of Manx kippers, Cumberland bacon and wild mushrooms, to name but a few.

Anyone skeptical of Britain’s cheese prowess should head down Park Street to Neal’s Yard Dairy for a mind-boggling selection of British cheeses. Heavy-duty shelves holding hefty cylinders of matured cheese line the walls in a shop where cheery, knowledgeable staff thrust pieces of cheddar or goat’s cheese at you, and hold lengthy court as to what’s in season, recommending the best cheeses of the month. The collection is impressive: 63 varieties in total, with only five sourced from outside the UK. It’s enough to make me want to roll out a Union Jack.

The word is spreading. You don’t even have to go out as far as the fields of East Anglia to feel the swelling consciousness about local sourcing. Chef Tom Aikens, who runs two restaurants in Chelsea, is a socially engaged cook who takes an active role in working with organizations like Project Dirt and Capital Growth who are aiming to create over 2,000 community food growing spaces in London by 2012, and End of the Line, a campaign aiming to curb destructive global fishing habits.

I meet with Tom at Tom’s Kitchen, his gourmet café that’s a regular haunt of London’s upscale Chelsea crowd, after a lunch of beetroot, feta cheese and pomegranate salad and a plate of pan-fried scallops. Though not as ardently English as the other stops on my gourmet tour, what’s attractive about Tom’s Kitchen is the effortless English warmth exuded by the wooden tables and white tiled walls, and the extensive menu that just about covers every food craving from waffles to steak tartar, but nonetheless leaves room for a host of British classics like beer battered cod and 7-hour braised lamb shoulder.

“The average customer is more in tune with what they should be eating, asking questions about food, where it comes from, etc,” says Tom. “It’s great because it means restaurants and chefs have to buck their ideas up as well.” Part of that process, according to Tom, involves striking a balance between producing a varied and affordable menu, a comfortable and congenial atmosphere and garnering a responsible code of practice in terms of food suppliers. “To me, food is not just about what we eat, it defines our values, health, status, environment, as well as our culture, politics and economy.”

The revolution is simple, it’s locally sourced, its organic and responsible; it’s slow-cooked and seasonal and it wastes nothing, and it’s not for the easily nauseated. It’s characterized by classics such as St John’s now signature roast bone marrow and parsley salad (Anthony Bourdain’s death row meal, according to his ebullient introduction to Fergus Henderson’s ‘Nose to Tail’), Hereford Road’s braised oxtail, Northbank’s hog’s pudding and Tom’s Kitchen’s 7-hour braised lamb shoulder. And in the spirit of true British-ness it’s obstinately humble, self-denying, and right on time.

“We don’t do revival,” Trevor Gulliver, co-owner of St John, modestly assures me. “We did not set out to be some kind of movement, we are just very happy when folk decide to come eat with us for the particular way we go about our restaurant,” he says, dropping in the little secret to their success: “you must simply do today that what you think is right and continue that way.”

Pig’s trotters anyone?

ENDS

Article: THE incredible SPIDER-GOAT AND OTHER VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 02:22:01 +0100

Published in Esquire
FEBRUARY 2010

THEY’RE OUT THERE. The dreamers, the visionaries, the techno-geeks with one hand clutching Wired magazine and the other tapping away at their crystal ball blogs. Modern-day soothsayers, they’re the guys telling us how it’s going to be not so many years from now: avatars, self-driving cars, digitally engineered personalities and spidergoats. It might sound like sci-fi, but these technologies are already out there, locked in the science labs and just waiting to be let loose on the world. So what exactly is in store for us in the next 25 years? What great changes will we see before we shuffle off this mortal coil? We asked some of the world’s leading futurists for a forecast…

Thomas Frey is talking about search technology with the verve of an excited kid:

“A few months ago I lost my glasses, and I was looking around for them and I was thinking to myself wouldn’t it be cool if we could take our physical objects and put them into the digital world, and that way I could just go into a search engine and find where I put my glasses.”

It’s the kind of statement that, if heard at a cocktail party, might create a very quick perimeter around the speaker. You’d assume the person deluded, or at least guilty of having had a few quick drags on a joint before leaving the house.

But Thomas Frey is no such madman - he’s a futurist; one of a breed of global techno-geeks that spend their time dreaming up weird and wonderful scenarios for the future and then advising corporations and governments about what to do with their resources and investments.

And what Thomas Frey is excited about today is a group of Japanese scientists who are really seriously developing something called Smart Goggles, that is, a pair of glasses with a tiny built-in camera programmed with image recognition that learns to identify, remember and map the things that its looking at.

But Frey doesn’t just stop at the miracle of the intelligent glasses: he sees further into the future for this technology. “Ratchet that forward a few years and you have a million people, or 10,000,000 people wearing these glasses, everywhere they’re going, they’re putting out this constant video stream and recording everything they see all around them. We are then spidering the entire physical world in real time.”

What he’s talking about is a three-dimensional map of the world that could potentially be searched for objects and people. The map would be constantly updated by citizens walking around with cameras in their glasses that would be creating a perpetual map of – um – everything.

Sound like the twilight zone? Well that technology is really not so fantastical, given the rate with which search technologies and object recognition devices are developing. It’s just a matter of knowing what’s at the cutting edge around us. And that’s Frey’s job, a task in which he obviously takes a huge amount of pleasure.

Frey, a former IBM engineer garnered a staggering total of 270 awards during his time at the company, more than any other person has ever received. He’s also a member of the triple nine society, a club for people with extraordinarily high IQs in the 99.9 percentile. Call him an idea junkie, the nutty professor, or simply a geek, it’s hard not to be struck by his exceptional brightness and the twinkle with which he delivers his loopy ideas.

Frey’s think tank, the da Vinci Institute, a non-profit futurist advisory group has a lot of pots on the boil right now in terms of social projects they are working to implement with local governments. One of Frey’s favourite topics is that of alternative transportation – driverless cars, personal mobility vehicles and electric skateboards – and the lack of infrastructure for these vehicles in a car-mad society. So the plan is to start small; make examples of forward-thinking communities like Broomefield in Colorado, which Frey hopes will soon transform into the World’s First Alternative Transport Friendly City.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love cars, but those days are changing.” He goes on to explain: “We’re manufacturing something like 60 to 70 million cars per year in the world, and the cars we’re manufacturing are lasting longer. And there’s a recent study done by the World Bank that shows there are more people entering into the middle class. The size of the global middle class will more than double by 2030.” This means more and more cars being manufactured and sold, and Frey predicts that before long there could be anything up to 3 billion cars in the world.

“What happens then is that we start running into breaking points. We run out of roads to drive them on, we run out of places to park them.”

The solution? Driverless cars. “Within 10 years, I believe we’ll have a pretty much blanketed internet over most countries, so that anywhere you drive, you’ll be within internet connectivity range. Once that happens, we can start developing cars that drive themselves.”

Blimey! But it still sounds like sci-fi. When are we really going to see cars that drive themselves? Well, the answer is, they’re already out there. The US Department of Defense launched a challenge back in 2004 called the DARPA Grand Challenge that called on teams of inventors to design a vehicle that could drive itself through a specified course. In 2007, they upped the stakes to simulate an urban environment through which the cars had to obey traffic rules and co-ordinate with other vehicles on the road. The race was won by a team from Carnegie Mellon University who pimped up a 2007 Chevy Tahoe with a combination of GPS, light detection and ranging sensors, video cameras and other mechatronic technologies.

Take this technology, refine it 25 years down the line, and you could be looking at self-driving vehicles that run according to information over the internet. “On-demand transportation,” says Frey. “You don’t need your own vehicle, you can just summon one with a bleeper.”

Alternative transportation is not the only idea the da Vinci Institute are currently working on: there’s another project on the boil down in Lafayette, Louisiana that’s working to (curb your disbelief here) control the weather. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Louisiana coastline back in 2005, claiming almost 2,000 lives, local governments in the area have been very keen to look into schemes that can mitigate hurricane control. But why look at limiting damage when you might have the option of taking out the ultimate insurance policy: a technology that could eliminate hurricanes altogether, or at least redirect them somewhere else.

It’s a concept fraught with both moral and practical difficulties. The earth’s weather pattern is an extremely complex beast – surely starting to mess with the divine balance of things will only lead to some awful 2012-style apocalyptic scenario?

“Those are exactly the issues we are running into,” Frey assures me. “The whole issue of unintended consequences. We were real close to having a major insurance company underwrite the sponsorship for the project, but they pulled out based on this issue.”

Don’t exhale just yet though: Bill Gates has already filed a number of patents for just this type of hurricane-calming technology. The idea is that there would be a number of giant dredging machines stationed in the Caribbean that would pull up cold water from the bottom of the sea and send it to the surface, thus cooling the surface temperature of the sea and eliminating the causes that contribute to the making of a hurricane.

It might seem like the ideas Bond baddies are made from, but these technologies are a reality that Frey is helping to ensure via his co-operation with the government of Lafayette and the launch of a competition for scientists all over the world to present their own ideas and solutions.

Whether someone will actually come up with a viable plan for this technology or if the process of trying to figure out a way to control hurricanes will open doors to new innovations remains to be seen.

Frey is, after all, the first person to admit that some of the ideas he propagates look more like sci-fi than a picture of our lives 25 years from now. He says with a proud smile: “We tend to tear down the walls and make it safe to discuss crazy, off the wall ideas. And a lot of time during those discussions you hit upon something that could actually work.”

Off the wall might be an understatement. Frey’s official picture on his company website shows him in some sort of 15th century dandy outfit, presumably referencing Leonardo da Vinci, with a giant red feather curving downwards from a velvet hat. On his personal blog, FuturistSpeaker.com, you can see Frey making an enthused presentation to the camera about leveraging animal intelligence. Below are the words ‘Crazy idea?’

Frey looks straight into the lens and with the hint of a wry smile starts to talk about how the intelligence of deer could be augmented to teach them to read road signs that would warn them of oncoming cars, before moving onto the concept of teaching swallows to read diagrams and blueprints so their nest-building skills could be harnessed for human construction purposes. He goes on: “What if we could just train silk worms to knit us a shirt? What if we could train trees to grow into the shape of rocking chairs?” The mind boggles. Whatever next? Training monkeys to write Shakespeare? Teaching cows to shit burgers?

“Is that a crazy idea? Yes, it’s a crazy idea, but it’s not that far-fetched,” Frey assures the camera. I call him on it: Thomas, some of your ideas sound absolutely insane… But he’s not plucking them from thin air – the science does exist to back him up.

“Last week at MIT they created the world’s smartest rat,” he tells me. “They call him Hobie J. They flipped some switch in his genetic makeup and now he is much more clever than any other rat that ever existed. So that starts you thinking, can we increase the intelligence of deer so that we don’t run into them on the roads, or the intelligence of birds so that they don’t fly into cars or aircraft?”

I suppose by that rationale, the answer has to be yes. And the rabbit hole goes even deeper. I present you the spidergoat. Think The Fly-Jeff Goldblum genetic hybrid, only with arachnid powers and scary zombie-like eyes. For real – scientists at Nexia Biotechnologies in Canada have successfully managed to combine spider genes with goat embryos, thus producing the potentially terrifying hybrid.

But have no fear, this is not the stuff of nightmares: “The goats, when they grow up, look pretty much like regular goats,” Frey explains, “but they produce milk that can be spun into something like a spider web. These fibers are stronger than any other fibers out there. They’re calling it BioSteel. This sounds like one of the most outrageous, crazy ideas ever possible, and yet they’re already doing it.”

Ouch, I think my brain might explode. I’m glad when Frey finally turns the conversation to a technology I know at least something about: the humble iPhone. “The iPhone really changed my life,” says Frey, “but you can’t really call them mobile devices any more; they’re like little computers.” We go on to start gleefully geeking out about various apps that we like on the phone, including Shazam and Urban Spoon. “One I find just fascinating is the inclinometer. It measures the incline that the phone is at and it’s almost like a carpenter’s tool. It’s very sensitive, and when you lay it down it becomes a level…”

Frey sees the future of these current technologies as being without limit, as long as their developers have half the imagination he does. “Every time you add a new sensor to the iPhone, it becomes exponentially more sophisticated.” He envisions a time when “you’re walking down the street and you say ‘Oh I like the jacket that that person is wearing,’ then you could pull out your cell phone and click on it and using object recognition software, you could pull up that object onto your phone, and zoom in on it, then you could actually purchase that item and have it delivered directly to you.”

But what if you order it and the size is wrong? “In the future, everyone’s going to have their body scanned in, so that when you order clothing online, it should fit perfectly every time.” Of course. Thomas Frey has an answer for everything. Or at least he has a suggestion for everything.

“The presentations I make are intended to spark people’s imaginations,” he admits, “but I’m the first one to never claim that the ideas are 100% correct.”

The future’s bright, the future’s a hurricane-killing, electric skateboard-riding spidergoat with video camera glasses. Bring it on.

Other Futurists:

Eric Corey Freed – Sustainable Architect

Founder of progressive eco-architecture firm, organicARCHITECT, Freed is a pioneer in the tradition of Organic Architecture that was pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. His California-based company promotes an organic and ecological approach to design embracing new sustainable technologies. Freed is the author of the 2007 book Green Building for Dummies and the more recent Green$ense: Rating the Real Payoff from 50 Green Home Projects.

“The technologies that we have available now are pretty impressive and they include very space-agey sounding things. Solar technology has made leaps and bounds, just in the last 10 years thanks to a flood of government incentive programs and a global competition, which I think is a good thing.

“Solar technologies are going to be radically different: instead of a simple panel that is placed in the path of the sun, the solar panels themselves are going to be more fully integrated into the design of the building. You’ll see them in the form of overhangs and solar shades and window coverings. The solar panels themselves will become more translucent so that we could essentially tint our windows with them so as the sun comes through, the solar panel generates electricity, keeps the occupants warm and provides light.

“You’re also going to see a lot more of these monolithic installations, essentially a plaster or stucco that you paint onto the building when the entire building surface becomes a source of solar energy production.

“There have also been some very interesting breakthroughs in wind turbine technology, including vertical turbines, urban turbines and turbines that can function in a much lower wind speed. Again, I think you’ll start to see wind turbines integrated into the building, and that the building’s shape itself would change to capture some of this wind and direct it to a turbine that might be embedded into the core of the structure of the building itself.”

Dr James Canton – Social Scientist and Global Futurist

Dr Canton is the CEO and Chairman of the Institute for Global Futures, a think tank that advises governments, global organizations and businesses around the world about how to harness innovations, future trends and how to best utilize them. Canton is recognized by the Economist as being one of the world’s leading futurists and he’s also the author of two books on future trends and innovations. Most recently, he acted as the Futurist Science Consultant for the movie Surrogates starring Bruce Willis.
“One of the largest and most fantastic innovations that will transform our world will be what I call the mergence of a alternative synthetic culture. The world of synthetic intelligence, which will be pervasive. Both virtual synthetic intelligence and mobile synthetic intelligence will be huge.

“One example is DEPs, digitally engineered personalities. These will be virtual artificial intelligence that will live in your house, in your car, in the network. It will be a virtual world, a cloud. It will be there to serve you, to find information and negotiate for you, and even do your work for you, and help you with you memory or your self.

“The second things are androids. They will be fully autonomous and mobile creatures that will look like humans and act like humans. They will be surrogates for humans. They will be extension of our selves, a physical, freestanding extension of us.

“The third will be fully autonomous robots that will completely transform our culture, and this will happen in 25 years. What I mean by that is, people will have multiple relationships with different kinds of robots. Some of these robots they will take as companions while others will be helpful in terms of our business.

“The area of video games really is the experimental laboratory for the future of surrogates and other kinds of robot extensions of the human self because it will give us pleasure and maybe even pain, but more importantly will give us the chance to experience actual physical environments that we are not in through our surrogate. We will have complete sensory experiences that are very similar to the movie Surrogates. We’ll have sensory ability, we’ll be building memories, we’ll have sensory capture, we’ll have this expanded Force Feedback.

“The next technology that I think will be fantastic will be fully immersive games where you are not just watching the game or experiencing Force Feedback from the game, but you are entering the game world and you are actually physically in that virtual reality. You’re navigating through it and you have sensory, visual, auditory experiences in that world. That means everything from playing sports to having sex, to interacting with people, to experiencing pleasure. You may want to climb Mount Everest; maybe you’d like to bungee jump off a bridge; or you’d like to engage in some kind of rock music – you’d like to play in a band maybe; or maybe you’d like to sit down with Degas and talk about art, or Leonardo da Vinci and discuss with him his fantastic flying machines.”

Glen Hiemstra – Futurist

Founder and Owner of futurist.com, a free website about future trends, Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, author and consultant.

“Among the things I personally find most exciting at the moment are the emergence of nanotech solar cells, made by printing a liquid with ink-jet type printers, so cheap that they can be installed everywhere, leading to at least 25% or more of electricity coming from solar. Tied to this is the emergence of very cheap nano-batteries, which grow organically, assisting in the conversion of transportation to mostly electric (vehicles) within 25 years.

“This, as well as the $10 genome – get your genes decoded for $10. This will lead to a leap in systems biology knowledge, at a price that enables widespread health benefits beyond the rich countries.

“The last innovation I heard about that really blew my mind was a very simple one. Hydrovolts is a company developing a simple rotating drum to suspend in irrigation canals to generate electricity. If the company is successful, suspending 10 such drums per mile in canals could greatly enhance electricity generation worldwide with simple, cheap technology.

“The most forward-looking technology on the market today have to be cell phones with built-in projectors, which went on sale in the U.S. on December 16, 2009. Prototypes have been around, but they haven’t been available.

“The meaning for Latin America is that such phones open up much wider computing possibilities without the need for a computer beyond the phone, as well as the applications that allow typing without a keyboard and computing for everyone who can afford a cell phone. For example, a student would only need a phone and a small white board on their desk to project a large display on. The future is all about education and communication and so this seems significant.”

Dr Lee Hood – Revolutionary Biologist

Inventor of the technology that finally led to the decoding of the human genome in 2001, Lee Hood is a proponent of the ‘systems’ approach to biology and medicine, best expressed in his theory of P4 practice: that is, predictive, personalized, preventative and participatory. His general idea is that the future of medicine lies in an emphasis on sustaining wellness rather than curing disease. Dr Lee Hood is the founder of the Institute for System Biology in Seattle.

“The focus of health in the future is going to shift from disease to wellness. We’re going to be educating people about how to keep well effectively rather than only deal with them when they get sick. P4 medicine is really a paradigm change. It’s fundamentally going to recast and reshape what healthcare means.

“Gadgets of the future might include a little handheld device that will prick your thumb to make 2,500 blood measurements twice a year. Information will be sent to a server, analysed, and you and your physician will get an email that says ‘you’re fine, do it again in 6 months’, or ‘go see your oncologist’.

“I think more and more, telemedicine will be a critical part of healthcare delivery. Even in isolated clinics in Alaska, you can have access to the highest quality expertise from nationally ranked medical centers that could communicate with physicians and let them deal more effectively with the rarer diseases that the ordinary GP might have some difficulty with.

“One of the most exciting new technologies is being able to do genome sequencing and analyse the information. It’s possible to get an analysis from companies today of some of your genetic variability; my own feeling is that in the next 10 years we’ll see the cost of individual genomes coming down to under $1,000, and I think at that point, it’ll start to become a routine part of your medical record.”

SIDEBAR: The future today

Here are a few of our favorite technologies emerging into the mainstream today that sound too much like sci-fi to be true.

Energy That Cleans
Imagine a world without landfills, but where all waste goes to a recycling plant to be converted into energy. Californian company adaptiveARC have developed specialized processors that basically turn trash into power through a method called Cool Plasma Gasification. 100 tons of anything from sewage to non-recyclable landfill and refinery waste can fuel up to 6,000 homes per day using this method that’s cleaner and more efficient than fuel combustion.

Waving Brains
The exhausting tasks of changing TV channels by having to reach for the remote control, or controlling your computer desktop with a mouse could soon be a thing of the past as scientists look into harnessing the brain’s waves to control objects directly without having to go through an interface. Sci-fi? Actually, it’s a reality in the Intel labs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where scientists are developing a chip to be inserted into the brain that could enable you to lower the volume on your television without moving a muscle. Meanwhile, at Toyota HQ, a more useful and philanthropic project is underway, that of a technology that allows severely handicapped people to move their wheelchairs just by thinking about the direction they want to go in.

Spray-on Solar Power
When you think of solar energy you might first imagine gigantic solar panels hogging your roof or taking up half of your garden, but now thanks to research being done in the University of Texas in Austin, solar cells could be virtually invisible, coming in the form of a spray can and applied to walls, rooftops and other surfaces with the touch of a button. The potential of this new technology is mind-boggling: you could spray your bicycle, car, sweatshirt; and have portable energy at the squeeze of a (hopefully environmentally-friendly) aerosol.

Biological Batteries
Algae seems like an unlikely candidate for the world’s next big energy source, and yet the recent spotlight on biofuels has lead to a rise in interest in the green weed’s capacity as power generator. Recently, Swedish scientists have discovered that a type of seaweed called Cladophora produces a type of cellulose with an extremely large surface area that’s easily able to charge and hold electricity. The battery cells are set to be paper thin and to be used for alternative energy ideas, like powering home sensors by being papered onto the walls of houses.

Smart Armor
As warfare becomes increasingly virtual and sci-fi, so the technology behind it is looking more and more like something out of Robocop. The latest innovation to hit the military drawing boards is an intelligent armor, suitable for soldiers and for vehicles, that is able to monitor its own rate of destruction through a aid of an electric current flowing through special sensors called piezeoelectric sensors. The effect is a bit like in video games when you can see your own energy levels rise and fall in a sidebar. Also, look out for developments in BioSteel –the stuff produced by the notorious spidergoats introduced to us by Thomas Frey- being used as a bulletproof material for armor.

ARTICLE: THE LOVESICKNESS CURE

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 17:22:13 +0100

“DO YOU BELIEVE in witchcraft?” asked Doña Eugenia as she flaked chunks from a deer antler onto a piece of crumpled newspaper.
I shifted in my seat but Casey didn’t flinch as he watched her add black rock filings into the mix. “Well, isn’t that why I’m here?” he replied.
Casey and I were in the village of Amatlán, two hours south of Mexico City. We sat in plastic garden chairs in Doña Eugenia’s hovel, a bunker-like room painted blue with concrete floors and dust piled up in the corners. Standing against the back wall was an altar like a display case from a religious junk store. A table covered in lace-print plastic, it was overlaid with candles, crucifixes, incense, vases of flowers and bowls filled with fruit and sweets. A bible lay open at Psalm 91; ‘He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty…’
I had butterflies for Casey, who was surprisingly collected, in light of what he was about to go through.

An hour earlier, he had been less plucky. Driving under the cold morning shadows of the cliffs of Tepotzlán, he had just two questions rotating on his cognitive turntable: “Why the hell am I doing this?” and “Am I crazy?”
Casey had recently split with Mel. He had signed the divorce papers from the sanctum of his Mexico City apartment after two years of marriage and a decade of being together. On the road to recovery, he was crushed by guilt. It was a kind of loitering, ecclesiastical culpability that sang him to sleep at night and still lingered behind his diaphragm with the first consciousness of morning; a guilt that was really remorse for things said and unsaid, done and not done.
“I still think about her every day,” he said, “that’s why I’m doing this. I still just feel bad.”
Casey came across Doña Eugenia while touring the Tepotzlán valley south of Mexico City with his aunt. He had asked around the locals for a real curandera, a healer, or a witch doctor, and was directed to a small farmyard overrun with chickens, goats and a pack of mangy dogs.
The curandera had taken him into her altar room and passed a raw egg over the contours of his body, later studying the formation of the yolk as she mixed it with some water and spun it in a glass.
“You are mourning the loss of a woman that was very close to you,” she told him, advising him to expel his grief by way of ritual cleansing in order to be able to continue with his life.
Casey jumped straight onto the idea and called me to break the news. “I’m going to do it,” he declared.
“Are you sure? Do you even know what it entails?”
“Yes I’m sure. And I need you to come with me. Because I think she’s going to do some terrible things to me. I think I’m going to need someone to drive me home.”

We arrived at Doña Eugenia’s farm unannounced. The sun had only just risen and she was inside the smolder of the darkened brick building that was her kitchen. She emerged, stout and smoky in black loafers caked in mud and her hands buried in a towel. The look she threw us was one of faint aggravation and reserved skepticism. Casey re-introduced himself and she nodded, softening.
She asked us to sit while she finished her chores. She crossed the courtyard several times with a bucket and a mop while we sat on makeshift plastic chairs and watched her four dogs drift between sleep and sudden, bewitched ear scratching.
Doña Eugenia eventually returned and asked Casey one more time if he really wanted to go through with this. His affirmative reply barely skipped a beat, so she handed us a shopping list: one banana; one liter of milk; three rolls of toilet paper.
“Three?” Casey asked, his anxiety starting to bleed through.
“Three,” she confirmed. We were, apparently, erring on the side of caution.

He was given the choice, and Casey opted for the field rather than the bathroom. Doña Eugenia’s house was fairly secluded, so with the exception of a couple of docile-looking horses, there was no one in the vicinity to witness what was about to pass.
We perched at the end of the field, the three of us, close to a cluster of trees and a small slope that Casey was to use as a latrine. He sat on one of Doña Eugenia’s plastic chairs, staring intently at the ground while the curandera pounded his back. He turned to her and asked, “How long does this usually take?”
She shrugged. “Un ratito más.” A little while longer.
I was pacing around them, trying to keep a lid on my percolating nerves. A few minutes earlier, Doña Eugenia had fed Casey her dusty mixture of deer antler shavings, seeds, rock filings and yam root, adding a banana milkshake as a kicker.
It was poison, pure and simple. A toxin administered in just the right quantity, and with a flurry of candles, chanting and burning incense in front of three statues of the crucifixion. It was intended to make Casey very, very sick.
“I can definitely feel it,” he told me, passing a hand over his stomach. “Something’s definitely happening here.”
Standing, he walked a few paces from me, bent over and started to vomit. The liquid was pouring out with all the verve of a natural spring. He’d been told not to eat for 12 hours, so all that was passing out was water, clear as crystal liquid, tinted with the pale white sheen of bananas and milk.
“Well, I guess it’s started,” he said, wiping his mouth and returning to his chair.
Doña Eugenia went back to her house, leaving us alone in silence. I placed a hand on his shoulder and he immediately shot up and ran back to the spot where he had heaved moments before. Another outpouring. I averted my eyes this time, focusing instead on the cliffs around us and the bright sunshine that was bouncing off the dewy grass. A few orange daisies were pushing their way up through the thick muddy ground, against the odds, it seemed.
From a distance, one of the horses raised its head, mid-graze, and looked up at Casey with phlegmatic composure, hints of foaming spittle leaking from the side of its mouth.
“How are you doing?” I asked as he made his way back to the seat.
“On a shittiness scale of 1 to 10, I’m coasting at about a 7,” he said, breaking off a piece of toilet roll and drying his eyes.
“Well, it could be worse,” I intoned, and he nodded his head as he sequestered his gaze to a point in the grass a few meters ahead. One of Doña Eugenia’s dogs appeared from behind the trees and came to sniff around the site of Casey’s last outpouring. He gave it a couple of licks before losing interest and padding off in the direction of the horses.
Casey continued to drink from the water bottle. The more he drank, the more he threw up, until the poison eventually moved south to his bowels, sending him running down the slope and into the cluster of trees.
“This is terrible,” he moaned, leaning forward into his pain on the plastic chair. “I feel terrible. Remind me the next time I get the bright idea to try something culturally experimental.”
“But this is a spiritual process for you,” I reminded him. He chuckled a moment then leapt out of his seat again, clutching the toilet roll and shouting, “I don’t know which end it’s going to come out of any more…’
Between bowel movements four and five I asked him, “Do you think this will really help you to forget Mel?”
“I don’t want to forget her,” he said, his head bowed down between his knees. “I just want to clear up some bad feelings. You know, about the divorce and all. I think I acted like an asshole.”
“So, just guilt, then?” I asked, “Is this an attempt at atonement?” But Casey was running for the trees again before he had time to reply.

His insides finally out, Casey was lying with his right forearm sheltering his eyes on a dog-eaten couch in Doña Eugenia’s brightly-colored altar room. A picture above his head portrayed the scene of a semi-naked hunter about to brain a lion with a rock. A print on the opposite wall, framed in gilded wood, depicted the silhouette of a palm tree on a desert island in the midst of a garish orange-yellow sunset.
“I’m so tired,” he said from under the muffler of his elbow, “I feel so weak, I don’t think I can even stand.”
I sat in another chair opposite my friend and watched as Doña Eugenia rubbed alcohol over his arms and legs before wrapping him in a blanket. On her way out, she offered me some food, but I declined, not having much stomach for any of the contents of her kitchen.
We waited in silence in the blue room for Casey to reset himself as he drifted in and out of sleep as one of the dogs watched us from under the table in the corner. It had been about four hours since he swallowed the poison.
“Do you think you’d ever do something like this?” he asked me finally.
“Of course not. Never. No way. Absolutely never. I think you’re brave, but you’re also out of your mind.”
Casey fell asleep again, and when he woke up I asked him, “Hey, what if after all of this you are still thinking of Mel? What then?”
He was a little drowsy. “Hell, I don’t know.”
“Are we to put you on the rack? Thumbscrews?”
He laughed. “Yeah. That’s so Catholic.” Then, “why do we feel the need to do these things to ourselves anyhow? Why do we make ourselves suffer?”
Doña Eugenia returned into the room to perform one final massage on Casey before sending him home. She had him stand in front of the altar as she passed the ritual egg around his body, chanting prayers and excerpts from the Bible in a hissed whisper. She blew hard over him from head to toe, then lay him on the floor to rub more alcohol into his abdomen, kneading his chest and stomach and insisting that there was still a little something left inside him.
I cowered in the corner, afraid for Casey that there might be more. The curandera rolled her patient onto his front and then onto his back, kneeling over his squirming form while pummeling and pounding his torso. She was part-vicious and uncompromisingly ruthless, part-maternal and indestructible. Casey groaned and yelled and held his hands to his face.
Through the window, I saw an elderly woman from the village arrive in Doña Eugenia’s courtyard, her next patient, I presumed. She seated herself quietly on one of the plastic seats by the door, all the while gently rubbing her knee.
Suddenly Casey sat bolt upright, bringing his hands to his mouth.
“Just one more,” he said, pushing Doña Eugenia to the side and jumping to his feet. “This is the last one, I swear,” and he shot from the altar room back out towards the field, the table dog in hot pursuit.

Article: dogen, dharma and discipline

Fri, 4 Dec 2009 16:17:17 +0100

Published in National Geographic Traveler
December 2009

THE WAKE-UP BELL RINGS AT 3:20AM and within minutes I’ve shot up, changed out of my pyjamas, rolled up my futon, folded my sheets and am standing outside the bedroom ready for inspection. After a cursory assessment by a stern-faced monk I am asked to take off the tiny silver ring I’m wearing on my right hand: “No adornments, please.”

At 3:30am, I’m desperately trying not to fall behind. Padding blearily at the back of a line slicing through a succession of maze-like corridors in single file, I’m doing my best to keep step with the person in front of me while not tripping over my robes or losing the standard-issue footwear on a stair.

Ten minutes later I’m sitting upright and crossed-legged on a round, black cushion on top of a wooden platform. I’m facing the wall, a dark wooden panel, my eyes half-closed, heart beating from the early-morning workout and the sheer effort of just keeping up. I hear the footsteps behind me of a man brandishing a long wooden ‘awakening’ stick, and I know I am to stay completely still for the next 30 minutes. A bell rings three times somewhere in the distance, and I break out in a rash of goose bumps before the room is plunged into silence. All I have to do now is breathe. And not move an inch.

It may sound like boarding school or boot camp, but in fact I’m embedded and motionless among the dark wooden beams and latticed paper panels of the visitors’ dojo in Japan’s oldest Sōtō Zen temple.

In a world when the term ‘Zen’ has been adopted to evoke anything vaguely associated with a chilled-out state of new-age relaxation and ease, it might come as a shock to learn that the regime for trainee priests here at Eiheiji, Japan’s first and oldest Sōtō Zen centre, is closer to Fort Benning than a weekend spa retreat. “Eiheiji is severe,” writes one matter-of-fact Buddhist blogger; “Eiheiji is undiluted Zen.”

Japan has no shortage of Zen temples for the inquisitive visitor looking for quiet day’s contemplation: there are over 15,000 from the Sōtō school alone, with another 6,000 pertaining to the Rinzai sect. Their sheer numbers can almost be desensitizing in cultural clusters like Kyoto and Kamakura where many of the Zen temples, though excellently preserved, have been all but emptied of their original function, and now stand stoically as hoards of tourists pass through their gates brandishing cameras and small change for luck offerings. As a Zen practitioner myself, I was a little put out by the feeling that as a tourist in Japan, I would only be skimming the surface of these incredible, sacred institutions.

Having developed a critical case of sightseers fatigue after days spent binge-gawping at the best and most impressive of Kyoto’s Zen temples (I knew I’d had enough when I found myself yawning at the famed rock garden in Ryonaji and finally completely dishonored myself by falling asleep on the steps of Sanjusangendo, the sacred temple of the 1,000 Buddhas), I decided I needed something more to really engage with Japan’s Zen tradition: I needed to get away from the tourist trail and visit a working temple to see the monks’ practice first hand. A place where I could sit, eat and walk in the company of monks, and where I wouldn’t be allowed to fall asleep on the temple steps.

Eiheiji was the perfect choice, and I discovered through my own Zen teacher back in Europe that they were open to taking visitors, by arrangement. Flung far from the crowds of Kyoto and Tokyo, there’s more to this temple than picture-perfect manicured gardens and photo-op statues of the Buddha: to adherents of Sōtō Zen (myself included), the temple is the very source of the practice, established by the founder of the Sōtō school, Eihei Dōgen Zenji, in 1244. Think the Vatican or Mecca, and you’ll get some idea of its significance. It shares the status of international headquarters of Sōtō Zen with Sojiji, another more modern temple on the outskirts of Tokyo, but what sets Eiheiji apart even from its administerial twin is the fact that it is Master Dōgen’s original temple. Its been standing here on the exact spot of its foundation among the forested mountains of the Fukui prefecture – known for their harsh winters and heavy snowfall - for 800 years, and though the buildings have been reconstructed over time, life inside the temple for its 200-or-so trainee priests follows more or less the same strict rules and rhythms that were laid out by the master in the 13th century.

Given Eiheiji’s reputation for severity, it was with a dash of trepidation that I entered through its gates the previous day. Just hours earlier I’d been traipsing under the myriad electric cables that weave a tangled awning over Tokyo’s streets, illuminated by epileptic neon signs and incandescent hoardings. I had shouldered through the throngs of Tokyo Central station, dragging a wheelie bag, clutching maps, rail passes and guide books, before boarding a Shikansen (bullet train) to the town of Fukui.

From there it was a short jaunt on the quaint one-carriage Echizen railway manned by a uniformed driver and hostess in white gloves that personally greeted every passenger on the train and wished them a pleasant journey. The tiny train ran through rural villages and miniature-backyard paddy fields as far as Eiheiji-guchi station from where I made the final leg of the voyage to the temple gates by bus.

The silence at Eiheiji - punctuated as it is by the sound of running water and framed by the stately cryptomeria cedars towering overhead - is almost unnerving after so much movement. There’s a sign written in Japanese characters at the temple’s Dragon Gate to give visitors and trainees pause for thought: “The tradition here is strict: no one, however wealthy, important or wise, may enter through this gate who is not wholehearted in the pursuit of truth.” I try to absorb the importance of this statement, a stamp of sincerity that is impressed upon all acolytes when starting their training, stripped as they are of every material possession, save the exact amount of money needed to cover their funeral fees should they die whilst in training.

Life here is definitely no cakewalk: “Never in my life had I encountered such severity,” attests Kaoru Nonomura, a salaryman who opted to spend one year training in Eiheiji and subsequently recorded his memoirs in the Japanese bestseller, ‘Eat Sleep Sit’. In his book, Nonomura outlines the various penuries imposed on the monks: sleep deprivation, manual labour, clobberings, harsh reprimands and malnutrition, recalling some kind of grim barracks procedure. The similarities are rife: the trainees are given a hard physical and psychic initiation in order to break their egos and instill a disciplined, communal spirit. The difference is, of course, that the monks are not training for combat; they are learning the principles of practice of Sōtō Zen that will qualify them to lead enlightened, compassionate and spiritually resonant lives.

The good news is that as a visitor you are by no means obliged to undergo a beating for the privilege of staying the night. In 24 hours you’ll meditate, eat, take a traditional bath, witness the ceremony and be sent on your way the next morning, having barely dipped your toes into the disciplinary mire. But the reason to go to Eiheiji is that it’s a rare chance to get a taste of the real methods of Sōtō Zen where the purest tenets of Dōgen’s teachings can still be seen first hand.

“There are three positions when you are in a Zen temple,” Jun Ichi tells me as we kneel on the tatami mats in my otherwise empty room, “sitting, standing and walking.” We must always definitely be doing one of the three, and when moving around, the hands, instead of being thrust into the pockets or swinging by one’s side, are to be held at chest level, with the right hand eclipsing the left fist in a position called shasshu. “And please,” he adds, glancing at his watch, “do not move from your room until I come to get you.”

Jun Ichi has been at Eiheiji for over a year now. He’s one of the only monks here that appears to speak English, and I really appreciate the chance to talk with him as most other trainees that I encounter in the corridors freeze into a deep bow with their eyes firmly fixed to the floor as visitors pass by. There’s no room here for idle chit-chat.

Because of his English skills, Jun Ichi has been assigned the job of taking care of visitors at the temple, although instances of Westerners coming here are very few. Work at a Sōtō Zen temple is considered of paramount importance to the practice, and novice monks are famously given hours of hard chores to execute in order to help them along the road to enlightenment. One of the most dreaded jobs for newcomers is the cleaning of the corridors, where the doubled-over monks run up and down at speed, brandishing large cloths that polish the floors to a gleaming finish that doesn’t leave so much as a speck of dirt after a temple tour taken in white socks. It’s a wholehearted, complete way of working that chimes with Dōgen’s directions for a life where practice and illumination are one and the same thing.

I study Jun Ichi carefully for signs of duress or fatigue from the infamous Eiheiji tribulations, but he gives off nothing more than an air of light and cheery politeness, coupled with a concern that my demanding visitors’ schedule of eating, bathing, sitting, and touring (with a little sleeping thrown in for good measure) be executed to the letter. His devotion to the precise punctuality of each of these activities comes over as a touching show of hospitality, especially his patience with my clumsy ignorance of most of the standard rules, procedures and etiquette. He’ll politely whisper ‘gassho’ (bow) when a temple elder of whom I am entirely unaware passes by, or when I’m about to storm into the toilets with complete disregard for the statue of Ususama, the bathroom god, standing outside.

Back in the dusky visitors’ Dojo, a bell rings twice to signal the end of zazen, the morning meditation, and I realize that I’ve lost both of my legs. The most fundamental part of Zen practice, zazen, or ‘just sitting’, involves solely sitting on a zafu (cushion), facing the wall with the back straight and legs folded in full- or half-lotus position. This straightforward undertaking of awareness and concentration on the present moment is at the heart of Zen practice.

Dōgen wrote tomes about the simple act of sitting, which he called “the gateway of truth to total liberation.” In the Fukanzazengi, an important text outlining the instructions for practicing zazen, he gives the following advice: “Do not think good or bad. Do not administer pros and cons. Cease all the movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.”

The only designs I have at this very moment is to regain use of my legs and keep up with the monks who are almost leaping from their cushions and readying for another fast procession to the ceremonial hall. An onslaught of pins and needles follows me as I get to my feet, grappling to keep my balance and have faith that my legs will carry me in the single file that quickly builds back up to the speed of a bullet train moving through the labyrinthine corridors and endless stairwells of the temple complex.

It’s 4:30am and already the morning ceremony is underway.

Eiheiji’s 200 monks are kneeling in perfectly aligned rows on either side of the altar in the Hatto, the ceremonial hall. They’re chanting the Heart Sutra, one of the oldest and most fundamental texts in Buddhism, before moving onto other key sutras and a long list of the names of the patriarchs that have directly transmitted the dharma - Buddha’s teachings - over the last 2,500 years. The sound of the monks’ deep incantations accompanied by a drum beat and the occasional bell is absolutely mesmerizing, and I try and join in with my own alto croaks as I am ushered to also kneel in the visitors section of the hall.

Ceremonies in Zen temples last for hours, and take up the best part of the morning. As all sensation slowly departs again from my kneeling legs, I watch as the monks get up and perform prostrations, towards the altar, and towards the middle of the room. Two other monks appear from the back of the hall and race between the rows, holding aloft a lacquered tray containing a number of sutra books. As they run through the lines, each monk reaches out and picks up a book with timing so precise, it gives the impression of an impeccably choreographed routine. I gasp at the fluidity of it all – not a single dropped book – and almost want to applaud when the monks distributing the sutra books reach the end of the rows and come to a sudden, smooth stop, holding the trays up high and slowly turning around with a dancers’ control and grace.

At 8:30, it’s finally time for breakfast. My disappointment at not being able to sit with the monks and eat their traditional morning meal of plain brown rice porridge in a precise ceremony involving the oryoki (the special monks’ bowl set) quickly dissipates when, kneeling upon a tatami mat in a private room in front of a low lacquered table, I am presented with a tray of at least a dozen small dishes and bowls containing morsels of food of every shape and colour imaginable.

Jun Ichi chants the meal sutra (“We regard greed as the obstacle to freedom of the mind; we regard this meal as medicine to sustain our life…”) before I begin to tentatively poke a chopstick at the foodstuffs in front of me. Though it’s not the trainee monks’ daily gruel, this is shojin-ryori, traditional temple food that has developed within the Zen tradition since monks returning from China introduced it to Japan in the 13th century. No animal products are used in the preparation of shojin-ryori, and neither are any strong herbs and spices, garlic being a particular temple no-no.

Some elements of the meal are familiar, such as a chunk of sautéed tofu, a green bean, a slice of melon and a bowl of miso soup; however, scanning the remainder of the collection of edibles in front of me, I’m at pains to recognize the white jelly-like lump or the extremely thick and sticky soup-like dish. I later learn that the former is called goma-dofu and is in fact a lump of smoked starch flavoured with white sesame, while the latter is chawan-mushi, steamed yam with vegetables.

Jun Ichi has tiny dents in his lower lip and ear lobes where I presume studs and earrings once lay embedded. I ask him about his life before coming to Eheiji and he tells me he was a hairdresser, first in Tokyo, and then in New York. Which was where he learnt English. The initial formality of his role as temple host has broken down somewhat over the 24 hours that I’ve been here, and he slowly – if not completely willingly – began to cave in to my excessive and I’m sure inappropriately personal questioning.

As my time to leave approaches, I start to get brave with my inquiries: I ask him if he’s married to which he shyly replies no. Does he ever think about getting married? “Yes, of course!” To a nun? He laughs heartily. No, not to a nun; definitely not.

The question of marriage for Zen priests in Japan is a normal one, the management of temples being very much a family affair, with priesthood typically passed down from father to son. Sons of priests become ordained as monks - usually in their early twenties - go to train at a monastery for up to three years, and return home to take over the family business.

It turns out that Jun Ichi, in his early thirties, is older than most of the novices who come here straight after finishing school or university. Whereas most Zen temples that have travelled from the east and settled in the west tend to be centres for people with a spiritual calling who practice Zen in spite of other obligations in their lives, in Japan, donning the straw sandals and knocking on the doors of an institution like Eiheiji is considered a shrewd investment in the future, much like learning the skill of hairdressing. This is the way that Jun Ichi explains to me his journey from the glitzy salons of the city to the quiet, disciplined confines of this training school.

“My uncle has a temple in the north of the country, and he has no children,” he tells me, making no mention of any spiritual incentives per se. “One day he will need somebody to take over from him.” A career move; it was that simple.

The visitors schedule sets the time of departure at 10am and you get the feeling that lingering any longer will not be appreciated. As Jun Ichi walks me to the temple gate I awkwardly present him with the traditional gift I had been advised to give monks at the temple. As no one had actually said what that gift should be, I spent hours sweating over what one gives a Japanese monk who has forsaken all worldly goods. The internet counseled some perplexing and temple un-friendly national gifts like frozen steak, cufflinks and imported scotch, and in the end I decided on a tin of traditional English toffee.

We go through the gift-giving motions of refusal and insistence before he finally takes the box from me and a cab pulls up. We wish each other luck and goodbyes, knowing we’ll never meet again. My cab pulls away and the giant cedars recede into the distance as tiredness suddenly sets in along with that peculiar feeling of having lived a month in the space of a day. I can only take my hat off to Jun Ichi and his 200 colleagues for whom a year here might even feel like half a century.

Article: NEW FACE OF MERCADO SANTURCE IN SAN JUAN, P.R.

Thu, 3 Dec 2009 18:08:16 +0100

Published in The New York Times
November 15th 2009

“BUSINESS isn’t what it used to be,” Ramón Tellado Rosa said from behind a pile of bananas at his stall at the Mercado Santurce in the Campo Alegre district of San Juan, P.R. — for decades the place where Sanjuaneros have come for fresh produce.

Mr. Tellado Rosa, 86, blames the fall-off in business on a transformation the area has seen of late, as myriad bars and restaurants have gradually cropped up around the market’s plaza. Now the plaza — La Placita, as it’s known — along with the surrounding area, has been undergoing a fresh wave of popularity as it is rediscovered by a new generation of young professionals...

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Article: BRINGING FUNNY BACK - INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE

Wed, 9 Sep 2009 01:47:13 +0200

Published in Esquire
September 2009

“I was going to wear those same boots today; I’m glad I decided against it...” I’m sitting opposite Justin Timberlake and he’s looking down at my current prized footwear, a brown, high-heeled All Saints number. It’s either a joke or a compliment, or a combination of the two, but in any case it’s made me blush a bit and broken the ice of our first meeting.

Just minutes before, I’d been sat in a waiting room on a sunny May morning on New York’s lower west side, experiencing butterflies of the first-date variety. I’d been waiting for over an hour, re-applying lip gloss with obsessive compulsion and repeatedly baring my teeth to my pocket mirror to examine and re-examine the territory for any rogue pieces of breakfast.

A little existentialist angst began to creep up on me as the wall clock jerked out one minute after the next, and I started to examine my split ends. Was I waiting for Godot, or for Justin Timberlake? Where was this guy? Who was he? Did he even exist? Would I be waiting forever?

Justin Timberlake could be late because he’s, well, Justin Timberlake; an A-lister with bells on. He’s the unlikely case of a teeny bopper remodeled into pop royalty; the kid from Memphis who went from bad shirts on the Mickey Mouse Club, to fame and adoration with boy-band N’Sync, to a solo career which has seen him collaborate with the likes of Timbaland, T.I., Will.i.am, 50 Cent and T-Pain as well as the mighty Madonna.

What to expect? An arrogant, conceited young diva? A disappointingly dull Tennessee hick? An inveterate nutter with a Peter Pan complex? A dashingly handsome young pop star who would sweep me off my feet and make me forget all my questions as I turn to jelly under the heat of his gaze?

None of the above. Meeting the golden-boy of pop, I’m washed over by a feeling of reuniting with the likes of an old college buddy. His legs are crossed at the ankle and thrust under his chair in a pose that recalls a geeky schoolboy lost in a math equation as he considers what he’s about to say.

“I love to disarm people through laughter,” he says, sitting forward in earnest, tucking his hand, palms facing down, under his thighs. “I would say making people laugh trumps everything. It shows everyone that we’re kind of on the same level, and I enjoy that experience. My favourite entertainers are the ones that can make me laugh, like the Rat Pack, and Elvis.”

His comedy skills were something he first began to discover when he was on tour. “I just enjoyed talking to the audience. I found that people really wanted to hear about what happened to me that day. I would just tell a story about their hometown or what happened to me in their hometown that day. I’d be like, “I went down to this bar…” and people’d be like “Yeeeaaayyyyyy! The bar!” – that type of thing. Basically what you’re doing is through those things is you’re just connecting people, and that’s an amazing thing.”

It’s been three days since he hosted his third Saturday Night Live show and he’s still reeling: “I didn’t really sleep the whole week,” he says of the ‘hellacious’ schedule of preparing one of the live shows. (I am impressed by his use of the word ‘hellacious’ and make a note to look it up when I get home.)

“Every once in a while I have moments where I really put myself through the ringer, You’re filming a digital short, you’re putting together a monologue, you’re putting together the sketches; and I actually had a moment where I thought to myself, ‘Have I pushed myself too far? Am I being too ambitious?’”

Ambitious is not the word: when he’s not chirping out a tune or performing comedy skits, Timberlake is expanding his brand with multiple side-projects including a fashion line (William Rast), a record company (Tennman records), and two restaurants in New York. He’s also producing a show on MTV, has acted in a few movies, is a big sports fan (including golf and basketball) and has set up a couple of charitable foundations. Put that in the frame with 6 Grammys, 1 Emmy, two multi-platinum albums and you’ve got a gob-smacking portfolio of over-achievement that you feel tired just contemplating.

So what is it that really rocks his boat? Is it making people laugh, making them dance, or reducing them to screams of a sexual-hysterical frenzy? At mention of the latter, Timberlake automatically ejects a sheepish knee-jerk vindication: “The third one is too embarrassing to answer. I don’t know that I make them do that. Though there’s nothing wrong with excitement; I’ve been there before. I think young people are impressionable and excitable.”

The JT effect is palpable, and not just with young people. In the run up to my meeting with him, I was amazed at the number of females I knew that came out of the woodwork to inundate me with burning questions to pass on to Justin. “Ask him how things are going with Jessica Biel,” urged the OK readers among them, while the tireless conspiracists were stuck on the decade-old banality of whether he had or hadn’t popped Britney’s cherry. My younger female acquaintances put in autograph requests, while older girlfriends who should know better barely contained their excitement in demanding the details of how much time I’d have with him, what we were going to talk about, and most importantly of course, what I was going to wear.

He can turn a shy eye, but he can’t deny the adulation from his fan base. He admits, “There really isn’t a drug that meets the feeling of being able to do that, of being able to excite people.” Indeed, a decade and a half in pop has left a veritable trail of wet knickers and tear-stained pillows in its wake, but what’s impressive to Timberlake’s peers and elders is the way in which he’s managed to reshape his cutesy boy band origins into a respected music, and now comedy, career.

In December 2006, Timberlake teamed up with Saturday Night Live comedian Andy Samberg and transformed himself into a parody Casanova-style R&B loverman for the comedy skit, ‘Dick in a Box’. The video scored tens of thousands of views on the internet and even won an Emmy for its music and lyrics, as You Tube adherents the world over were startled by the implication that the singing, dancing Timberlake actually had a bit of a sense of humour on him too.

“That was the first time that I was able to do something to make people laugh that was equally as big as, for instance, my last album,” Justin recalls. “I want to show people that I’m (affects an English accent here) ‘not a nut-ta’; to say, ‘I invest in this just as much as you do, but I don’t believe all of it.’

“I have to say this too,” he continues after a brief moment of reflection, “I think Americans have finally learned what irony means. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the last eight years, of what’s happened to our country, but I think now more than ever Americans are willing to laugh at themselves.”

The run up to the 2008 US elections saw Justin Timberlake flexing his comic skills for a more hefty social issue: that of political change. He and his girlfriend Jessica Biel campaigned together in Nevada in October, speaking at a campus rally and filming infomercials for Barack Obama. He says of their unprecedented involvement in politics: “It was the first time we’d ever really done anything together, but we just believed in it and we thought it was for an amazing cause.”

He had been reluctant to involve himself at first: “I kind of sat back because I’ve never really endorsed a politician. I come from the mid-south and grew up with values like, ‘What do I know about politics?’ But I think this election was about young people realizing they had a voice and I knew that if I were part of the process, then somebody would talk about it.

“I met President Obama before he started running for the democratic election. It was probably one of the coolest meet-and-greets that I was ever a part of, the most un-politician-y handshake I’ve ever gotten from a politician. I was just really impressed with him,” says Timberlake of the Commander in Chief, with whom he recently shared a cover page entitled ‘How To Be A Man’ along with George Clooney in the US edition of Esquire.

“I didn’t know that you guys were doing that! I was very flattered!” he says of the three-part binding that allowed readers to interchange features of the men’s faces. “I used Barack Obama’s brow, my nose and Clooney’s chin and I thought, ‘Wow, this is an ugly human being!’ But that was good company to be part of.”

Like George Clooney, Timberlake has recently made a foray into the world of celebrity endorsments. Last year, he signed on with Parfums Givenchy to become the face of their new men’s fragrance, ‘Play’. The company had never before used a male celebrity to head up a campaign and as far as they were concerned hiring Justin Timberlake (the exact figure hasn’t been disclosed, but he don’t come cheap) was the ultimate gamble in times of recession and contracting budgets. Alain Lorenzo, Parfums Givenchy’s CEO, was ostensibly excited by his gambit: “He’s also someone who takes risks,” he said of Timberlake, “and he’s one of the only young performers out there who gets up on stage in a three-piece suit; I like that.”

I start to wonder whether Timberlake’s actual motivation for taking the Givenchy gig was anything more than an astute business move; start him talking about it, and his tone shifts gears into an ambiguous mixture of denial (“Our first conversation was actually hilarious because I said, ‘I don’t even wear cologne; it’s kind of hard for me to be gung-ho about doing some support of fragrance.’”) and contractual scripted jargon (“I think fragrance is more like an accessory than a statement of who you are.”)

You get the sense that he’s not entirely comfortable with the position of being a celebrity endorser, a face stamped onto a product, and I wonder whether his state of denial (“I wasn’t so much interested in doing an endorsement, you know, being a pitch man for a fragrance – that’s not really my style.”) has to do with a fear of undermining his hard-won kudos.

But wait – what is Justin Timberlake actually afraid of? “My biggest fear is that I’m really not afraid of anything,” he answers, in the style of someone expertly skimming the question for a job interview. “I feel good about my life, but I don’t feel that winning a Grammy for instance is going to make me a better person.” So what is it that drives him then? What’s the source of his enormous success, his halo of achievement? Unparalleled drive and seething ambition? Excellent management and the exponential curve of cumulative success? A guardian angel?

Justin’s response is remarkably simple: “I feel like to be successful, in life as well as in a career, I think that it’s not a bad thing to expect good things to happen.”

Is that it? Positive thinking, plain and simple? It might seem a little tenuous to anyone who’s not Justin Timberlake or the author of a self-improvement book. But he is persistent: “After you have something in your grasp, to expect for it to be a good thing is not a bad thing.”

He makes it sound so easy.

Article: CRUISING THE BOSPHORUS

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:15:22 +0200

Published in National Geographic Traveler
June 2009

CAPTAIN MEHMET CLIMBS UP ON DECK and hands me a beer. It’s a wind-down moment: he’s just steered our schooner through the precarious currents around the promonitory of Akıntı Burnu, and now he’s leaving the plain sailing up to to one of his numerous more youthful crew. Although the evening waters are relatively calm on this summer evening, the apparent serenity of the tide can be dangerously deceiving: currents around this particular stretch of water can reach up to five knots in the worst conditions, and are legendary among sea dogs in the area.

For my part, I feel like a latter-day Cleopatra, propped up by my elbows on a mass of cushions provided by one of Mehmet’s boys to protect my delicate rump from the hard wood of the deck. Soothed by the bottle of cold beer, I am being steered like a queen, feet-first, along one of the world’s most hotly-contested waterways; the Bosphorus.

This 34 kilometre channel, sparkling azure when the sun’s shining and a dark foreboding grey under overcast skies, connects the centre of Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara to the south with the Black Sea and Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Georgia to the north. Streaming past the palaces and mosques of Old Constantinople, it cleaves modern Istanbul in two, a natural continental divide separating Europe and Asia.

It’s 7pm and the light is beginning to fade. Istanbul’s archaic pandemonium is behind us, the Bosphorus stretches generously ahead. We are sailing close to the European shore and I can see fishing rods in sillhouette against the darkeneing sky as men stand solitary or gather in groups of three, four and five to watch their lines with unwavering composure. Fishing is the strait’s oldest tradition and was for centuries the sole livelihood of Greek, Turkish and even Albanian villages that lined the shore from Constantinople to the Black Sea. Today it’s the favourite passtime of scores of Turks who spend their mornings, afternoons and evenings routinely casting baited lines into the water below.

I’m jolted out of my regal repose by the sight of a levithian hunk of steel coursing towards with the stern severity of an unstoppable funeral march. I spin round to see the captain and his young crew relatively nonplussed by the sight of the bohemoth oil tanker that just rounded the headland and appeared to be smack in the middle of our course. One of the 5,000 oil tankers annually that make the journey to and from the oil fields of the Black Sea, it’s hardly a rare sight; still, we darken in the shadow of its giant hull and rock madly on its wake.

The captain is unpeturbed. He’s been navigating the strait for years. For him, it’s a companion, an adversary and a kindred spirit. He knows each cape, bay and peninsula by heart; every erratic swirl and eddy is inscribed in his extensive mental log. Aparently, I’m in safe hands.

“The Bosphorus has two main currents,” he tells me, miming the movements with his hands. “There’s a surface current that flows from the Black Sea towards the city, and a deeper one underneath that moves in the other direction”. The lower one is so strong that legend tells of fishermen who used to put down their nets to harness its power to propel them against the force of the surface current.

I met the equable captain quite by chance, walking to Arnavutköy from the neighbouring village of Kuruçeşme. He was sat on the rear deck of his schooner drinking tea under a giant ‘for rent’ sign. On the boat next to him, two men were struggling to attach a satellite dish to the vessel’s sterm pulpit while a third was signalling to them from inside the cabin as to the clarity of the signal as a football game buzzed into life on his TV screen. Mehmet noticed my amusement at the farcical sight and smilingly lowered a gangplank for me to board his boat. Within minutes we had sealed a plan for an evening’s cruise along the strait.

Mehmet’s sailer is one of dozens moored along sections of the stunning 7km stretch of coast road that runs from the village of Kuruçeşme all the way up to Emirgan on the European shore of the Bosphorus. Vessels of all shapes and classes bob shoulder to shoulder, indifferent to their vast social differences. Decrepit fishing boats loaded with swathes of orange netting partially submerged in seawater puddles on their wooden floors and invigorated by a coat of spring paint nestle next to grandeoise fibreglass yachts whose shining white sterns bob and bounce off the cut-off tyres tied with thick rope to the concrete walkway.

It’s ironic that I am sat at one of the most romantic tables along the Bosphorus and my date for the evening is an A5 spiral bound notebook. Nonetheless, I’m having the time of my life. The restaurant, Körfez is one of Istanbul’s best kept secrets; a restaurant nestled into a bay between the villages of Kanlıca and Anadolu Hisarı on the Asian shore, and a favourite among the city’s well-heeled fish lovers. Diners are ferried across to this remote location by way of a private shuttle that runs from the castle of Rumeli Hisarı on the European side, sailing under the stars and the giant metal underbelly of the second Bosphorus bridge. The whole experience is indisputably spellbinding, a must-do for any visitor to Istanbul.

Waiters with large mezze trays balanced on one shoulder weave their way through a sea of brass-buttoned blazers and designer dresses with calamari, shrimp and scallop starters to offer their clientele. When asked what they recommend for a main dish, the answer is instantaneous: “the sea bass.” And so follows a flurry of action as the entire fish encrusted in a shell of sea salt is brought to the side of your table and set alight before being hammered from its casing and served on your plate. It’s a lot of fish for me and my notebook, but I’ll willingly attest to the fact that its among the best I’ve ever tasted.

This is the life, I think. It’s not hard to see why the Bosphorus is popular with so many Istanbullus looking for a break from the city. In fact, these shores that run the entire length of the strait are all considered part of Istanbul, and are easily accessible from the centre of town by car or ferry. And still, it’s far enough away to afford some greenery, silence, good food and stunning views of the variety that I’m contemplating from my waterside seat in Körfez. This particular restaurant may be catering for the high-end crowd, but between here and the Black Sea there is something for every pocket: from $10 Sunday family outings to the far-flung Genoese castle at Anadolu Kavağı, or a $1,000 night on the tiles for a gaggle of heiresses at one of the notorious Bosphorus super-clubs. One of which happens to be my next stop.

The spectacle of a giant crystal chandelier hanging over my head in the open night sky momentarily distracts my attention from my hard-fought mission to the bar. Armed with only my bare elbows, I’m pushing my way through the thick crowd of jetset revellers clutching flamboyant cocktails and displaying for the world to see how Istanbul’s upper crust really live it up. Caravaggio himself would marvel at the composition of the richly-loaded fruit plates adorning the private tables to the side of the club, while anyone who believes Turkey is a country blanketed by conservatism will have their eyes opened by the scantily clad young girls shaking their well-toned booty in skimpy D&G dresses.

This is Reina, waterside nightclub extraordinaire, home to no less than ten outdoor restaurants and a large central dance floor, and domain of Istanbul’s glitterati; the rich, famous and fabulous make this extraordinary Bosphorus nightspot their summer haunt. Getting in is not easy; near-impossible for single men unaccompanied by women, and a crapshoot for anybody arriving without a reservation or the bling factor of their own private yacht.

In contrast to the rustic quaintness of its fishing villages, the Bosphorus is also no stranger to shows of extravagance. In fact, its shores have been colonized by bling for centuries now. In the later days of the Ottoman Empire, pashas, viziers and wealthy families living inside the cramped conditions of the rapidly growing and condensing Istanbul looked to the Bosphorus for relief. One by one, houses, mansions and palaces began to go up along the shoreline that had previously been the domain of a handful of fishing villages. And so was born the yalı, the seaside mansion that is the architectural progeny of the Bosphorus. Typically a multi-storey house made from finely worked wood built at the water’s edge, this structural tradition flourished along the waterway from the end of the 17th century onwards. More than 620 yalıs were built over the years on the Bosphorus shore, and many still survive today, having been renovated into restaurants, pricey boutique hotels and homes for the city’s elite.

And then there are the ornate palaces, reminders of the final vestiges of the Ottoman Empire: Dolmabahçe, the last residence of the Sultans, built near the mouth of the Bosphorus in a flamboyant French style; the baroque Beylerbeyi, an erstwhile guest-house for esteemed visitors of the state; the compact Küçüksu, originally a summer house for the Sultans; all are jaw-dropping in their unrestrained opulence. All three are open to visitors, who shuffle in tour groups around its decaying interiors in plastic-covered feet with a kind of reverent silence you feel is kept in check for fear of waking the dead.

If Beverly Hills moved to the Bosphorus, it’d be thrilled to settle in Bebek. One of Istanbul’s more upscale neighbourhoods, Bebek is a hotbed for ladies who lunch, professionals who coffee, and yuppies who aperitif. Home to posh specialist bakeries, delicatessens and a pint-sized branch of the local swanky department store Beymen, Bebek can also boast what is widely recognized as The Best Starbucks in Istanbul, Turkey, and possibly even the world. The coffee shop’s reputation is entirely based on the strength of its stunning view across the waters of the Bosphorus, and I’ve sat there for hours myself, nursing a mocha frapp and staring riveted at the tankers criss-crossing the strait as streams of excited high-school kids chattering in Turkish flowed around me at a steady rate.

Arriving at Bebek on Captain Mehmet’s schooner just after sunset, I disembark and cross the little park to see the lights coming on inside Lucca, the hippest after-work destination for the more affluent local office force. The sound of popping corks marks the beginning of a night’s session, and the bar is fast filling with suited yuppie-types getting ready to decompress after a day behind the desk.

At that same moment, something completely different occurs: the fluorescent tubes of the waterside Bebek Mosque just across the road buzz into life. The ear-splitting sound of the muezzin’s stentorian call to prayer siphoned through tinny loudspeakers temporarily drowns out Lucca’s jazzy lounge soundtrack. For the devout, this is Maghrib Adhan, the twilight call to prayer that brings scores of men, likely local shop assistants and waiters from the surrounding cafes and restaurants, filing inside the mosque and prostrating themselves in unison over their prayer mats in the direction of Mecca.

As a city, Istanbul has an incredible propensity for the snapshot; a passing instant that contains all the divergent elements of society, belief and culture in one single pitch. This evening in Bebek is one of them.

Less than one kilometre downstream in Arnavutköy, the vibe is a little different. The lights are coming on one by one in Abracadabra, a quirky seedbed of experimental cooking set over the four floors of a burgundy-coloured yalı overlooking the Bosphorus. “We’re here for the people who are tired of the chic, expensive, pretentious places,” owner and chef Dilara Erbay tells me from behind several hanging garlands of garlic and chilli peppers. Her hair is wrapped in a blue scarf and her skin covered in a thin film of moisture, a mixture of steam from the boiling pots and her own perspiration as she rushes around the kitchen of this cosy eatery whose open cooking spaces and pine trimmings have all the intimacy of a domestic dining room. “My husband and I wanted to create a homely, artistic and joyful venue,” she explains, “just like our home.”

Weekend dinner times and Sunday brunch see Abracadabra fill out with clientele come to feast on Dilara’s distinctive creative recipes; singular dishes like mihlama, a black sea region fondue, or deep fried snails in a hot shrimp sauce. The favourite is the ‘1’ börek, a pastry made with pastrami and dried fruit and served with a rosehip sauce, washed down with a tamarind-flavoured drink that can be fortified with a shot or two of vodka.

Dilara moved Abracadabra from Beyoğlu in the centre of Istanbul to Arnavutköy about a year ago, and hasn’t looked back. Business is booming, despite the financial crisis, and the this creaky 100-year-old yalı that was once home to an Armenian family is the perfect setting for her inventive and wholesome cuisine. For confirmation, you need look no further than the charming scene just out of the window: outside, by a small white lighthouse on the tip of Arnavutköy’s promonitory, a group of boys are throwing themselves into the water. One by one, they let the burly current sweep them upstream, where they hoist themselves up dripping onto the cement jetty and repeat the process tirelessly with ebullient shouts and screams.

Across the Bosphorus in tiny Kanlıca on the Asian shore, the pace of life slows down by yet another few notches: a smudge on the map, the village consists of a small ferry landing flanked by two wooden cafes at the water’s edge and a square containing a miniature mosque built by Ottoman wunder-architect Sinan in the 16th century. It’s just past lunchtime, and a couple of old men in flatcaps are sitting watchfully on a bench at the waters’ edge, their fishing rods bobbing in the Bosphorus while they smoke and exchange the odd word. I ask one of them about the day’s catch and he cheerfully shakes his head: “We lost a sea bass earlier this afternoon,” he tells me. “Now it’s quiet. There’ll probably be nothing till evening.” Nonetheless, he returns dutifully to the vigil of his line.

To Istanbullus, Kanlıca is a place synonymous with one thing: yoghurt. Heading straight for the wooden cafe perched right next to the boat dock of this tiny village, I beeline for a table by the window for maximum float-on-water effect. The tall, white-shirted waiter brings me the menu, a dog-eared one-pager cataloguing variations on size and sweetness of yoghurt and the odd side dish to accompany. I order a medium sized option with extra sugar and a karışık tost, a hot cheese and pepperoni sandwich that’s more ubiquitous on the streets of Istanbul than even the time-honoured kebab. My passion for this most unsophisticated local snack is one of my best-kept secrets.

Here I meet Elif, a teaching assistant at the city’s Bilgi university who flees to Kanlıca at the first opportunity for a little respite from the urban mayhem. “Here you can enjoy a lifestyle that doesn’t suffer from over-commercialisation,” she says. Gesturing towards the European shore in the direction of Bebek and the nightclub Reina, she adds, “The European side became the easy part of the lifestyle package for modern yuppies because it’s so close to the modern residential and business districts.” She has a point. Istanbul’s European side is where the action is. With the exception of a couple of historical and commercial neighbourhoods like Üsküdar and Kadıköy, the Asian half of this bi-continental metropolitan sprawl is far more suburban in character. And at the edge of the Bosphorus it’s positively serene.

Looking at the ferry timetable, I see that the next public boat to service this little outpost isn’t due for another hour and a half, so I decide to walk down the coast towards Anadolu Hisarı, an early Ottoman castle about a kilometre down the coast from here. It was built in 1390, in the days when this land was still under Byzantine rule, and the domes of Christianity had not yet been replaced by the soaring minarets of Islam. The Ottomans had repeatedly failed to take the well-protected Constantinople, and the construction of two castles at either side of the Bosphorus’ narrowest point was part of their subsequently successful strategy to control trade in and out of the city, thus creating a commercial seige and weakening the Byzantines into eventual defeat.

The remains of the castle at Anadolu Hisarı are scant, but a walk around its tumbledown ramparts, and a stroll around its quiet harbour, stopping in at the small fish restaurant and continuing on to Küçüksu Palace, a few hundred metres downstream, is a lofty and reflective afternoon’s activity.

It’s now completely dark as Captain Mehmet’s wooden boat creaks into position at its mooring spot and his lively crew jump up and secure ropes and fenders for another night docked outside the village of Kuruçeşme. The village lights have blinked into life, winking tungsten sentinels heralding the advent of another evening along the strait.

The sea air blows onto the shore and ignites orange the coals on the tiny makeshift barbequeues grilling the day’s catch, which is to be served up in crusty bread rolls as balık ekmek. It’s a wildly popular snack that Istanbullus associate with the sea air and the squawking seagulls of their home, and I buy one, despite not being in the least bit hungry. It’s a symbolic act.

Somewhere in the distance are the glittering explosions of a firework display, most likely marking a wedding. To my far right, the fairy-lit Boğaziçi Köprüsü, the 36-year-old Bosphorus suspension bridge, sweeps for 1,500 metres into the darkness, connecting with the fronting Asian shore whose undulating obsidian landscape is layered over the lime-infused charcoal of a darkening full-moon night. The peace in the air is tangible and it’s hard to believe we’re only a 20 minute ride along the coast road back to the traffic-saturated chaos of Taksim Square and the tourist throngs in Sultanahmet.

What contrasts. I think of Mercan Dede, a local musician here and Sufi aficionado whom I spoke to some time ago about his love of the Bosphorus. He told me “Istanbul is where the angel and the devil walk hand in hand.” Tonight, on the inky waters of the heaving strait, giddy with the swell of the water and a stomach over-full with fish, I think I know what he means.

Article: 10 ESCAPADAS DE LUJO PARA BOSILLAS EN CRISIS

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:46:17 +0200

Published in Esquire
May 2009

The winter of financial discontent is upon us. Purse-strings are tightening the world over as businesses go to the wall and bank accounts drain, leaving most of us to contemplate a bleaker, more demure economic future. That Reventón Lamborghini V-12 might now be off the wish list, but let’s do ourselves a favour and let holidays be the last to go. It’s the god-given right of every human being to take time out and hang somewhere fabulous for at least two weeks of the year, and there’s no reason why our current state of destitution should keep us at home. A fortnight at the Georges V in Paris is no longer a viable option, but fear not: necessity is the mother of invention and since we’re all poor as church mice, we’ve been forced to get creative with our holiday plans, embracing low-season budget travel, the frugally resourceful principles of eco-tourism and good old kayak.com. So here are our top ten holiday hotspots that’ll deliver every ounce of fabulousness without breaking the bank.

(All flight prices are quoted from Mexico City)

Be fabulous on a shoestring: South Beach, Miami

It’s not all fake breasts, pet Chihuahuas and rollerblades. Miami is fast becoming the new celebrity destination a la mode, with trendsetters like Lyndsay Lohan, P-Diddy and, um… Paris Hilton making frequent appearances in the revamped South Beach strip. Check out Gianni Versace’s mansion on Ocean Drive or spend the evening people watching on Lincoln Road from the prime vantage points at Sushi Samba or the Crudo Bar at the newly-opened Meat Market restaurant. Sunday morning brunches are a must at the infamously hip Nikki Beach, while at least one cocktail by the pool at the Sagamore Hotel is requisite fabulous behaviour. Head for the outlets at Sawgrass Mills for some bargain labels and, finally, find the perfect patch of sand along the 5km beach for some much needed relaxation.

Sushi Samba – www.sushisamba.com; Meat Market – www.meatmarketmiami.com; Nikki Beach – www.nikkibeach.com/miami; Sagamore Hotel – www.sagamorehotel.com; Sawgrass Mills – www.sawgrassmills.com. Flights from $225 with Mexicana.

Save your pennies: The South Beach Group of boutique hotels offer a 50% discount off some of their rooms if booked for between the beginning of May and the end of September. Go to www.southbeachgroup.com

Peace out, right on your doorstep: San Francsico, Nayarit

Eschew the bonds of capitalism with a week on the beach at San Francisco (aka San Pancho) in Nayarit, a peaceful fishing village a short drive up the coast from the over-developed horrors of Puerto Vallarta. Enlightened progressivism is the order of the day and the buzzword sustainability in this seaside resort that was ironically pushed to the forefront by Luis Echeverria in the 1970s. Boasting non-profit shops, artists co-ops, a Montessori school and copious solar panels, this seaside destination is more right-on than a hemp-clad vegan on a bicycle. Get back to yourself at the El Estar Yoga Centre, swim with bottle-nosed dolphins, consort with whales or even go bungee jumping. Nights at the Cielo Rojo guesthouse start at $95, or you can up the stakes for a night at the Casa Obelisco starting at $200 per night. Razors and deodorant are optional, and don’t forget your Birkenstocks.

El Estar Yoga Center – www.el-estar.org; Cielo Rojo – www.hotelcielorojo.com; Casa Obelisco – www.casaobelisco.com. Flights from $190 with Mexicana.

Tighten your belt, comrade: Cuba

The only Caribbean destination to have seen a rise in tourism in the past year, Cuba continues to enchant visitors with its unique cultural melee, a world of music, dance, colonial architecture and Cadillacs, where the clocks stopped in 1959. Habana, the country’s swinging capital is the place to start -head to Casa de la Música in the centre of the city to rip up the dance floor or to the Bodeguita del Medio for a nostalgic Cuba Libre- but be sure to venture out beyond the city to pamper yourself in a top-notch all-inclusive resort like the Iberostar at Varadero, bask in the lush greenery of Viñales, or check out the quaint old-school town of Trinidad. Casas particulares are the best option for the budget traveler in Cuba, with the added advantage of getting to know a local family and helping them out with the daily cost of living. Rooms usually have their own bathrooms and cost around $30 a night.

Casa de la Música - +53 7 204 0447; Bodeguita del Medio - +53 7 867-1374/5. Flights to Habana from Cancun from $230 with Cubana de Aviación.

Practice your accent: The two-tier price system in Cuba means that visitors to the country pay much higher prices for things than locals. Now, if you can pass for a Cuban…

Rumble in the jungle: Kapawi, Ecuador

What better way to get away from it all than bid farewell to civilization and journey into the heart of darkness in Ecuadorial Amazon, a rainforest community inhabited exclusively by the native Achuar tribes who are bent on preserving their natural habitat. The Kapawi Lodge is a 19-room eco-hotel built on wooden stilts around the shore of a lagoon whose ensuite bathrooms have hot water siphoned from solar-heated bags. The place is so remote, it’s only accessible by air (add on another $280), but there are some cheaper overland options for getting to the nearest town, Shell. Once you’re there, your meals and activities, which include birdwatching, hikes through the rainforest and visits to an Achuar community, are all included in the price.

Kapawi Lodge – www.kapawi.com. Flights to Quito from $400 with Aeromexico and LAN Airlines.

Save your pennies, save the planet: Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

Proclaimed as the birthplace of eco-tourism, luscious Costa Rica is one place where you can get back to nature without having to break out the AmEx. Flights to San Jose are pricey considering the short distance from Mexico, but once in Costa Rica, you can get by with your wallet tightly stifled. Head down to Puerto Viejo on the country’s southern Caribbean shore, a rugged beach town that’s garnered a bit of a reputation as a vibrant party village with a strong new age flavor. The 5-hour bus ride to the coast is less that $10, and once there you’ll find all levels of beachfront accommodation, from $50 bungalows at La Costa de Papito, to $300 tree houses at the breathtaking Tree House Lodge. The trick is to go during the rainy ‘Green Season’ (May-June, Sept-Oct) when the prices hit their lowest bottom; just remember to pack your poncho.

Tree House Lodge: www.costaricatreehouse.com; Costa de Papito: www.lacostadepapito.com. Flights from $450 with American Airlines.

Travelling out of the box: The best and most adventurous way to get from San Jose to Puerto Viejo is undoubtedly by river raft: for less than $100 you can travel down a 30km stretch of the rushing Pacuare River, and be transported back to San Jose or Puerto Viejo for free. Check out www.exploradoresoutdoors.com for details.

Desert island chic: Bocas del Toro, Panama

With the likes of the Pitt-Jolies and Mel Gibson seen recently scouting Real Estate around Panama, paradise spots like the gorgeous Bocas del Toro are becoming increasingly popular. But celebrity surges don’t mean that you have to have an A-list bank account to visit here: bare-bones hostels by the waterfront on one of the islands in this flashy Caribbean hideaway can go as low as $30 a night for a double room (see Yellow Jack’s Hostal on Bastimientos). The mid-range choices are also pretty good with places like the Buccaneer resort on Carenero has cabañas for $55 per night, while $100 a night at the cutting-edge jungle lodge-cum-butterfly farm at La Loma will also cover your meals and a few activities, or for around the same price get a cabin on the water in a fabulous aqua-lodge like Eclypse de Mar.

La Loma – www.thejunglelodge.com; Eclipse de mar – www.eclypsedemar.com; Yellow Jack’s Hostal – www.yellow-jack.com; The Buccaneer Resort – www.bocasbuccaneer.com. Flights from $540 with American Airlines.

From Indie Rock to Beervana: Portland

Known affectionately by aficionados as ‘Beervana’, Portland is the beer capital of the United States, with more breweries than any other city in the world. Go in July for American Beer Month and even sleep at a brewery: the quirky Kennedy School Hotel, or check into the ultra-hip and arty Ace Hotel. Home of a burgeoning alternative music scene and located slap between the Pacific Coast and the Columbia River Gorge, Portland was also voted America’s Greenest City by Popular Science Magazine last year, with many local restaurants like Beast, Paley’s Place and Nostrana serving up food cooked with fresh, organic, locally harvested ingredients. With wine tours and exhilarating day trips into the mountains or down to the sea (check out the stunning Cannon Beach), Portland has to be one of America’s best secret city break destinations.

Kennedy School Hotel – www.kennedyschool.com; Ace Hotel – www.acehotel.com; Paley’s Place - www.paleysplace.net; Nostrana – www.nostrana.com; Beast – www.beastpdx.com. Flights from $350 with American Airlines.

Forget the tax: Oregon is a tax-free state, so shop till you drop and watch your savings pile up. Check out the Portland Perks package at www.travelportland.com for details on how to get a free $75 shopping voucher with your hotel room, until the end of May.

Jazz up without the budget blues: New Orleans

Having hauled itself out of post-Katrina devastation, New Orleans has got its groove back. The restaurants, bars and jazz clubs in the old French Quarter are hopping once more, while the revamped Warehouse and Arts District is abuzz with museums and galleries. Bed down at the trendy Loft 523 with rooms from $165 per night, or look out for great deals at the charming, old-world International House hotel that can go for as little as $90. Eat gourmet Cajun for a modest price at the Cochon restaurant, and party till you drop to the strains of jazz, blues and salsa on Frenchmen Street. Head to the quaint French Market for souvenirs, or to Chartres Street for some more kooky antiques.

Cochon – www.cochonrestaurant.com; Loft 523 – www.loft523.com; International House Hotel – www.ihhotel.com; French Market – www.frenchmarket.org. Flights from $386 with American Airlines.

Reggaeton, Barbequeues and Block Parties: shake your Perreo in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Without a doubt the coolest old colonial capital of the Caribbean, San Juan is also now very affordable thanks to a clutch of cheap hotels in the centre of the old city. The Da House Hotel and Caleta Guest House both offers rooms starting at $80 a night and are the best budget alternatives to the town’s prize lodgings at the elegant El Convento. Head for SOFO (south of Fortaleza) for top-notch cuisine and lively nightlife; trendy Aguaviva is great for ceviche, while the Blend bar is a hot after-dinner venue, though if you want some authentic Reggaeton, head out of the centre to Club Flow. Join the locals at La Bombonera or La Mallorca, and spend the day working off your hangover with a visit to the Spanish castle el Morro, or Juan Ponce de Leon’s Casa Blanca. Day trips out to the El Yunque rainforest, the Aricebo Space Observatory or the Balneario de Luquillo beach are easily done.

Da House Hotel & Caleta Guest House – www.dahousehotelpr.com; El Convento – www.elconvento.com; Aguaviva – www.oofrestaurants.com; Blend - +1 787 977 7777; La Bombonera + 1 787 722 0658; La Mallorca +1 787 724 4607. Flights from $407 with American Airlines

Leather for less: the Coach factory outlet store on Calle Cristo has a great stock of handbags, belts and wallets at cut prices: a guaranteed discount treasure trove for the lady in your life.

Retreat; run; hide: nobody will ever know you’re there: Holbox

A place so secluded that a lot of people don’t even know where it is. Holbox, quiet eco-island, three hours driving and ferry ride from Cancun is a remote little island community where people walk barefoot along the sandy village streets that don’t see vehicles any larger than a golf car putter past. The Xaloc Resort has spacious cabañas set around a swimming pool starting at $95 including breakfast, and they’ll also organize any activities from dolphin-spotting boat rides to fishing trips and excursions to the islands 100% undeveloped virgin beach, Mosquito Point. Hail the sunset with beachfront cocktails at the Hotel Mawimbi before heading into town for delicious grilled fish at La Parilla de Juan, or a specially local Pizza Langosta at its namesake restaurant.

Xaloc Resort - www.holbox-xalocresort.com; Hotel Mawimbi – www.mawimbi.net. Flights to Cancun from $200 with Mexicana.

Pay for your stay the old-fashioned way: life on Holbox is so basic that there are no ATMs on the island, and many places that don’t take credit cards, so come prepared with enough cash for your stay.

Article: Monster Jibes

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:26:00 +0200

Published in Esquire
June 2009

ITS A SCORCHING HOT DAY in Rio de Janeiro and I’m crouching down in the roasting bowels of il mostro, a Volvo Open 70 monohull bathed in the red and black insignia of its sponsor, Puma. A state-of-the-art racing yacht and one of the world’s fastest, it leaves me a little perplexed as to how, if it’s so damn cutting-edge, it does not have an ultra-modern A/C system to boot?

The answer, I’m soon to discover, is that this is no pansy pleasure boat. Its sole purpose in this world is to race - and win – the Volvo Round-the-World Ocean Race. The contest is a 60,000km slog around the globe from Alicante to St Petersburg - the long way round - in a three-yearly event that’s hailed by sailing enthusiasts as the Everest of the sport. Any considerations for the comfort of its innards or conveniences for its crew come a very distant second to il mostro’s one goal: speed. In the words of Matias Wolff, Puma’s Latin America marketing manager, “It’s not people sipping champagne on deck; this is extreme.”

Extremely hot, for starters. Sweat is running in rivulets down my forehead and back as I’m given a tour of the spartan carbon-fiber interior of the boat that is home to a crew of 11 men for the 9-month period of the race. Lurching around the low-ceilinged space, I’m frankly astounded by the thought that anyone could spend more than five minutes in this murky inferno.

Even just calmly floating on the glassy waters of the Baía de Guanabara, I’m getting some idea of the intensity of the crew’s experience. Inside the stuffy cabin, their beds, upon which they sleep a maximum of four hours at any given time, are nothing but aluminium frames attached to the wall like shelving with stretched elastic nets for comfort. Less than a metre away are the blinking screens, knobs and dials of the navigation station and a nearby two-hob gas stove, while the front cabin, used for stowing sails, contains one tiny cubicle with a curtain for a door that is the ship’s ‘head’, or toilet, as we landlubbers call it.

And that is quite basically it. Maintaining a low overall weight is of the essence in long-haul ocean racing, and every tiny detail of the boat is designed with lightness in mind. Which means that air conditioning units, personal possessions, fresh food, and even a coat of paint to brighten the place up a bit are stoically foregone in favour of greater performance and speed at sea.

il mostro’s Brazillian pad is the Marina da Gloria in Rio de Janeiro which it shares with the six other racing boats competing in the Volvo race, all of whom arrived here a week ago after a gruelling 41-day journey from Qingao in China that turned out to be one of the longest legs in the race’s history.

The setting couldn’t be more perfect: Rio’s dramatic undulating landscape and vast Guanabara Bay are the ideal location for the In-Port races that take place during the stopovers and give the public a taste of what the boats are capable of.

The city is the 6th on a list of 11 exotic stops on the course of the race which have so far included South Africa’s Cape Town, Kochi in India and Singapore. Every place the boats dock the sailors are treated as visiting kings, despite cutting an unlikely royal ensemble. Puma’s crew arrived in Rio on 30th March grizzled, weathered and unshaven, only to face an ecstatic flourish of waiting press, fans and family members. The sail had been arduous to say the least, long and stormy, resulting in a broken boom. The crew hadn’t washed for 7 weeks (a bathroom on board would, after all, be an unnecessary luxury), and had each lost an average of 7kg after getting by on an exclusive diet of freeze-dried sustenance, the rations of which had to be cut a few days before the end of the sail.

I’m handed an example of the on-board nourishment, a 32g packet of rather aptly named ‘Gu’; a sickly-sweet strawberry and banana-flavoured energy paste weighing in at around 100 calories. But man cannot survive on Gu alone – if he did he’d need to eat it in gargantuan quantities; every crew member has to ingest between 6,000 and 7,000 calories per day to compensate for the massive physical strain of ocean racing. Each four-hour shift requires constant trimming of the sails and grinding of the winches as well as the energy-draining effort of bracing one’s body against the force of the movement of the boat, a process that continues even while the crew are asleep.

These guys are hard; hard to their bonkers cores. Reading about their experiences before I actually met them, I imagined a band of 11 titan barbarians approximately resembling the cast of the movie ‘300’. So you can imagine my suprise upon boarding il mostro on the day of the Pro Am races in Rio to find that in addition to being world-class sailors and colossi of endurance, they were also an extremely affable, lovable bunch; courteous and gentlemanly; staunch and robust; practical and down-to-earth. These, I absent-mindedly mused, while drifting into a cheesy, soft-focus reverie inspired by the sight of tanned muscular arms hauling ropes around deck, these are real men.

The sound of a pistol firing brings me back down to earth. It’s five minutes to the beginning of the race and the boats need to get to the starting line. Today’s heat is a friendly – a Pro Am event when the professionals invite amateur sailors aboard to help them navigate the course up and down the Baía de Guanabara from the Rio-Niteroi bridge to the Pao de Azucar and back.

Despite the congenial nature of the day’s racing, the spirit of competition is nonetheless rife, as the boats begin to jostle around the starter line for the best kick-off position. Every second counts in such a short race, and getting off to a good start is an essential part of forging ahead for the rest of the heat.

“Four-thirty!”

Will Oxley, the ship’s navigator for the In-Port races, counts down the minutes and seconds to the starter horn. He’s clutching a computerised portable navigator the size of a small laptop and reading the prepared course from its cracked digital screen. The gadget is the 21st century alternative to sitting below deck with maps, charts and a pair of compasses, and is one of an ensemble of on-board technologies that have transformed ocean racing’s erstwhile periods of mysterious absence out at sea to something resembling a spectator sport.

It is the sole charge of one of the eleven crew members on each of the competing boats to be entirely responsible for the team’s media output. Puma’s guy is sailor-cum-media whizzkid Rick Deppe, who spends his days on the high seas photographing and filming his fellow crew members as well as posting blog entries on the team’s website. il mostro can be followed on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, by RSS feeds and podcast, as well as through a rather impressive 3D real-time race simulator on the Volvo Ocean Race website. Top-notch satellite technology means the racers can not only beam their position directly to the watching world, but they in turn can also be reached by email, whatever the weather. Never was this technology put to such good use as when the Puma boat’s bowman Michi Mueller received the first jpegs of his newborn child as the team were hurtling through the waters of the South Pacific, passing somewhere near Fiji. A very rare feast of cigars and rum reportedly ensued.

“Three-fifty!”

The ship’s skipper, 47-year-old Rhode Islander Ken Read, is poised at the helm. Graceful and debonair with an impish twinkle in his eye, in appearance at least he’s the antithesis of the ruddy sea-dog. Ken hand-picked his crew, whom he frequently refers to as his ‘children’, from six different countries worldwide, and much like a father, he considers the men’s physical and psychological wellbeing his top priority.

Conditions at sea can get pretty bad after all: I’m regaled by tales of the infamous ‘Fireman’s hose’, the nautical phenomenon of extremely high water pressure created by boats lunging into oncoming waves so fast that instead of sailing over them, they actually tunnel through them. The force of the water hitting the decks at these times is roughly equated with that of a fireman’s hose, and can sweep an unharnessed sailor from his feet and into the water at the drop of a hat. In fact, 32-year-old Dutch sailor Hans Horrevoets was killed in similar conditions in 2006 as he was swept off the ABN Amro 2 boat in the Atlantic Ocean, a tragedy that lurks at the back of Ken and all the other skippers’ minds as they work to end the race with their crew entirely intact.

Then there are the psychological pitfalls. Ken talks of the peaks and valleys of moods and morale aboard il mostro during the longer stretches spent at sea: “When you see a high or a low, you have to confront it head-on,” he explains. “If you let bad feelings linger, they’ll spread through the crew like wildfire.” Like a school councillor, the captain has to keep a very watchful eye on the humours of his crew in this extremely compact living space, and ensure a sense of harmony to sail his boat on an emotionally even keel.

“Two-thirty!”

From a distance, the Volvo Open 70s appear to glide effortlessly through the water as if carried by an unseen mist, so what I’m not prepared for are the terrifyingly loud creaks and thuds il mostro makes as her sails are raised and ropes are hauled and tightened. The sheer power of the vessel is manifest as the gentle breeze in the bay fills her sheets and the giant black puma bellows outward with a sound equivalent to the crack of a hundred whips. Looking up, I’m dizzy from the sheer height of the mast – 30 metres in total, with a special rigging system to eliminate as much extra weight as possible. To give you some idea, il mostro is approximately 10,000kg lighter than the current America’s Cup-class vessels. However, the most important and impressive feature of this generation of Volvo Open 70 boats is hidden from view and lies below the surface of the water. Spoken of in hushed and reverent tones by sailors worldwide, the canting keel is the key to il mostro’s lightning speed: with the ability to swing to an angle of 40 degrees on the windward side of the boat, it allows the vessel a great deal more stability at high speeds.

“One-ten!”

The crew are at their stations, apparently oblivious to the harsh beating of the sun on their shoulders. Antiguan hunk Shannon Falcone applies a little white sunscreen on his lips before readying himself at the winch grinder next to muscular Joe Fanelli, also known as Joe-rilla for his larger-than-life stature. The winch grinder’s sleek black surface has been embellished with a few pieces of tape upon which is hand-written the sombre warning ‘DON’T SLEEP’. Ken laughs, “I put that there for Erle, to keep him alert.” Kiwi Erle Williams is the boat’s 51-year-old driver and trimmer. A former winner of the Whitbread Round-the-World Race, he is one of many sailing heavyweights aboard il mostro which can count among its crew a slew of Olympic gold medalists as well as Volvo, Whitbread and America’s Cup winners. Here I know I am in the presence of sailing royalty.

A heightened sense of anticipation is running laps around the boat until finally the gun sounds and we’re off. There’s a general hive of activity on deck, with ropes of different colours and sizes being pulled, spun, tied and tightened. I decide to observe the scene from a safe distance at the stern of the boat from behind the captain, far from the hazards of swinging booms and fast-moving lines.

Ken calls out the command to jibe and turns the boat’s angle so quickly that the foresail switches sides with vehement thunder and the boom swings across the deck, narrowly missing the tops of the quick-witted sailors’ heads by about 5cm. Almost ripping off the satellite hub in my enthusiasm to hang the hell on, I can only begin to imagine the potential of the steed when really put to the test in ocean conditions.

The next jibe is even more hair-raising: bowman Jerry Kirby calls me from my comfort zone at the back and directs me to the bows, as that’s where we need the weight in order to move faster through the water. Picking my way through the tapestry of coiled lines and folded sails on deck, I make it to the front just in time for Ken’s next jibe call. The boat tilts violently from its right side to its left as I throw myself to the ground in a most un-sailorlike way, and feel the ferocious woosh of the foresail whip over me as it changes sides. I rise shakily from the beating seconds later only to find the rest of the crew calm as Hindu cows, strapping ropes into place and squinting silently at the horizon.

For sailors accustomed to 12-metre ocean waves, today’s calm waters at the Baía de Guanabara are a picnic. But for this landlubber, with her hulking camera and notebook, they are enough to induce mild sensations of abject fear followed by exhilerating surges of euphoria produced by the skill and minute accuracy involved in sailing such a gargantuan vessel.

While zig-zagging our way across the bay, we casually pass the other boats with such butt-clenching closeness as to make it a marvel that these racers don’t collide with eachother the whole time. At one point, Ericsson 3 is cutting a perpendicular path across our course and as we both lunge forward towards what seems like an inevitable common crash site, we appear to be engaged in some nautical game of chicken. My visual-spatial capacities are screaming that we will at best clip them at the stern, at worst finish our lives in a disaster of jagged carbon fiber and wrangled sails. Not even the lilting keels can save us now.

Meanwhile, Jerry Kirby calmly surveys the same scene from the bowsprit, and with seconds to spare calls to Ken. “It’s OK,” he shouts, “we’ll make it.” Containing my inner mix of incredulousness and fear with a monk’s self-possessedness, I can only watch as Ericsson 3 comes surging towards us, whooshing ahead of our bow with a magnificent fluster of sails, and we in turn cross its path within centimetres of its stern, missing the several-million-dollar baby by a very well calculated hair’s breadth. Just as I was mentally reviewing the smallprint of my health insurance.

il mostro rounds the marker at the end of the course and performs a swift 180º turn to retrace its criss-cross course back down the bay. Around an hour later, we sail over the finish line and come in fourth. If the result is a disappointment for Ken and the crew, they don’t show it: their performance in the overall race so far has been outstanding. It’s Puma’s first time to enter a boat in the Volvo Ocean Race, an undertaking that is costing the company somewhere in the region of $35 million Euros in equipment, logistics and marketing, and it seems to be paying off.

When the brand initially approached Ken to skipper the boat, the first question they asked was “can you win this race?” Ken jokingly recounts that he lied and said yes, and yet his superb team pick and unfailing mastership of the boat have landed Puma overall second place in the race so far, with a fighting chance of coming in first when the boats finish their final leg into St Petersburg in June.

But, as they tell you at primary school, it’s not the winning that counts. To even finish the race is a undeniable achievement, and it’s clear on the faces of the guys in the Puma team that despite the tough conditions, extreme endurance and absence from their families, they are living their lives’ dreams. Ken got his first taste of the round-the-world race in 2006, and has been hooked ever since. He recalls: “We hit a terrible storm in the Atlantic, and I thought to myself, ‘Is there any normal sailing in this race?’”

Normal? Firemen’s hoses and 12-metre waves? A broken boom and a cut-ration diet of Gu? 9 months at sea in storms, winds and blazing sun? Normal? Apparently not, Cap’n.

IMAGES: Memorial Day Weekend 2009, Miami Beach

Thu, 28 May 2009 04:58:45 +0200

If you go down to the beach today, get ready for a big surprise: the Memorial Day holiday on South Beach sees the annual invasion of hundreds of thousands of hip hop aficionados from all over the world who hit the streets for the biggest rap party in the country.

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ARTICLE: An a-z of the swine flu epidemic in mexico city from an armchair perspective

Tue, 5 May 2009 21:14:40 +0200

An inexpert mull over a bunch of random alphabeticised phenomena that have occurred since the outbreak of Swine Flu in Mexico City.

Apocalyptic doom scenarios and conspiracy theories
(available for discussion with any of the city’s taxi drivers, who , let’s face it, invented most of them)
-The world’s gonna end! We’re all gonna die! We’re all gonna die! The world’s gonna end!
-The government here in Mexico is covering up a whole bunch of stuff, including hiding the true figures of the amount of dead and infected, which most likely stretches into the thousands.
-The flu was actually an attempt to assassinate President Barak Obama during his recent visit to Mexico City, during which he shook hands with the director of the Anthropology Museum who died from Swine Flu days later.
-This wave of the flu is just one of several that will evolve to be increasingly aggressive and lethal, eventually killing us all in one even bigger epidemic in November.
-It’s all a ruse by the government to display their dexterity in handling crises.*

*My favourite so far.

Bootleg Tamiflu
Unlike just about every other drug available to buy with a nod and a wink over the counter from your friendly pharmacist, Tamiflu cannot be purchased in Mexico without a prescription. Probably because there’s only a million or so doses to go around a population of 110 million (compare that with the UK which has stockpiled enough treatments for half its population), and because the sick here frequently prefer self-diagnosis and self-treatment to visiting a hospital. But like all drugs in Latin America, if there’s a demand, they will make it onto the streets by hook or by crook. The latest offer I had was from a friend of a friend of a friend coming back from a holiday in Guatemala with a small consignment of about 4 packs of the anti-viral. Hardly Pablo Escobar, is he?

Compulsive news checking
As if the internet’s siren draw wasn’t enough of a distraction during peacetime, the hyperbolic high-drama ‘journalism’ of news companies vying for readership in times of so-called crisis has the rather effective consequence of keeping our attention glued to the screen. Website stories branch off from one another with such graceful ease that it’s hard not to jump from one story to the next video, to a photo gallery and to a blog. It’s the well-crafted melee of scientific fact, expert opinion and political analysis that excel in distracting us from pressing tasks and lunging us into the dark forest of fear and paranoia.

Domestic Bliss?
Since Friday 24th April, we’ve all been warned by the government to stay at home as much as possible and to only leave the house under pain of necessity. Initially, the prospect of a few relaxing days off work was rather appealing given the warm summer weather and the Mexican penchant for taking it easy. But once restaurants, cafes, bars and shops began to close down, our homes took on a darker, more penal hue. We were no longer indoors by choice but by obligation. Families were suddenly flung together in the confines of their houses and apartments and forced to face up to the often grim reality of kinship, while most couples I know, rather than lolling in a pool of romantic rapture, have reported an upsurge in stress-induced squabbles and arguments over heavyweight subject matter like which movie to watch next.

Economy
Screwed. The businesses that will hopefully be re-opening at the end of this week will have been closed for a fortnight, which for some will deal a fatal financial blow. The mayor of Mexico City has estimated that the city has been losing $88 million per day since the start of the crisis, and businesses have reported a slump of 80%. One of the worse hit industries will be tourism, which brings an annual $14 billion into Mexico’s national coffers. In a climate of global recession and with the peso already weak against the dollar, things ain’t looking up.

Friends
Potentially hazardous carriers of Swine Flu, friends were to be avoided at all costs during the first few days of news of the outbreak. As time wore on and we all realized we were fine and not in fact dying of the deadly scourge set to wipe out humanity in one fail sneeze, things began to get more intimate. My first venture into the outside world was a trip to a girlfriend’s house for lunch four days into the lockdown and we ate pasta and complained how bored we were. Another friend came round to my place the next day, and another, and another, and before I realized it we were a drunken party, united under siege and happily sharing our trusted saliva on the tip of a Turkish water pipe. On reflection perhaps not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but during a tipsy, six-person game of scrabble with Monty Python animating the background, it seemed like a great idea and a thumbed nose to the authorities that had tried so hard to isolate us from one another.

God
Apparently not protecting worshippers from Swine Flu. All masses in Mexico City have been cancelled or re-located to open-air spots like outside the massive Basilica de Guadalupe in the north of the city. Oh ye of little faith…

Hypochondria
Inevitable: sniff, sniff; is that a runny nose? I wake up and feel a tickle somewhere in the back of my sinus. Is that a pain when I swallow? Is that an ache in my joints? I sneeze. Oh my god I just sneezed. Call the hospital, call the undertakers, call the priest; it’s the beginning of the end. Or is it? A bleary cup of coffee and a vitamin drink later and sanity is returning. Morning respiratory hiccoughs are par for the course for residents of Mexico City. It is, after all, one of the most polluted places in the world. A breath of fresh air here is inextricably laced with frightening levels of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. The fact is that I feel like this every morning; I’m just never that aware of it unless there’s a killer epidemic on my doorstep.

Information (and lack thereof)
Never a global trailblazer in bureaucratic efficiency, the Mexican authorities excelled even their own standards in their erratic response to the swine flu crisis. Official death counts have peaked and troughed with all the stomach-turning turbulence of a roller-coaster ride, from 7 to 158 and back down again, depending on which organization you choose to believe, while details of victims and how they might have contracted the disease have remained flimsy, as has information about the behaviour of the virus itself, and indeed any sense of how this is all going to pan out in the future.

Jitters
Easy to succumb to, important to keep away from. It is my profound belief that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, and since the start of the outbreak, humanity appears to have divided into two sections: freaked-out harbingers of extinction with far too high a backlog of Hollywood doomsday imagery to kick start their already fear-ridden minds, and the other lot, the ultra-pragmatic, ultra-denialists who think that anything more than a raised eyebrow in the direction of a possible global pandemic is an act of extreme over-reaction and alarmist nonsense. Already, people have begun leaving Mexico City in their droves, heading for outlying towns and villages, the United States, Europe, usually under the influence of mothers and fathers scared to their wits’ end by the black armband-rhetoric of international news stations, while others refuse to so much as cover their mouths in an orgy. Could it be that a sense of balance is the first thing to go in national crisis.

Kissing
In breaking with national tradition, all Mexicans have been warned off kissing and shaking hands when meeting people. By all accounts, it’s been by far the hardest habit to break. Chance encounters with acquaintances on the street have become a minefield of etiquette. They start at a rather awkward distance from which I’ve embarrassed myself several times by crying “air kiss dahhh-ling!” in too-loud Ab-Fab alto if I sensed the other party was cruising for a peck on the cheek. Greeting comportment also depends heavily on alcohol intake: stiff handshakes at the beginning of the night soon meld into hearty embraces and juicy kisses after a few jars of plonk.

Lassitude
Bored, bored, bored. What’s on TV? Don’t care. How about a game of chess? Nah. Fancy making a dent in that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read? Can’t be bummed. And how about that rapidly growing pile of work? Tomorrow. It appears that tedium breeds ennui breeds lethargy, and indeed what initially seemed to be an opportunity-laden home sabbatical soon became dreary house arrest. Bored with everything being closed. Bored with bad news. Bored with the general negative mental state. Bored by the prospect of another hour spent in my own company. Bored of complaining about being bored.

Metro
The one place even the cynics and pragmatists are steering well clear of. Taxis in Mexico City are relatively affordable, and the gloved, masked taxi drivers offer a service free of the sardine-tin scenario of most metro trains. Plus there’s the additional perk of thrashing through some key conspiracy theories with your driver (see A).

Narco-wars
What the hell happened to them? One minute there’s a raging border conflict with news of cartel killings pasted over the front cover of every broadsheet and tabloid, and the next they’ve been elbowed out of the spotlight in favour of some sickly piggie winkles. How fickle the press… Though if there are any cartel bosses reading this, my top tip of the day is that the world’s drug of choice appears to have changed from Polvo Blanco to Tamiflu, so you could consider adjusting your supply lines accordingly (see B)

Out of Office
With most offices in the city shut down last week, the majority of my friends, acquaintances and colleagues have been ‘working from home’. This has meant a huge increase in Facebook activity as well as larger telephone bills. (See L and C)

Parklife
With restaurants, cafes, bars, clubs, concert venues, small businesses, cinemas, stadiums, gyms, offices and schools all closed, the one remaining recourse for public interaction appears to be the trusty old park. Mexico City’s green areas have taken on a whole new dimension with the new fear of public gatherings in enclosed spaces, as well as providing exercise junkies with a back-to-basics alternative for the treadmill. Parque Mexico, my local, has transformed into some kind of utopian architecture model: scores of ardent joggers run laps of the park, while dogs bark, run, pee and sniff each others’ butts in age-old fashion; children ride bikes, teens play football, lovers kiss in the shade of the giant trees and bohemian students on benches bury their noses deep in library copies of Hegel.

Quake
As if the panic, hype and sequestration of the Swine Flu weren’t enough, at around 11am on Monday morning, the city was treated to a series of 5.7 tremors that ripped through its infrastructure, forcing masses of residents out onto the streets. It appears that Mexico City has incurred a wrath in our Maker so mighty as to compare with the Ten Plagues of Egypt back in the 1600BC. We are now scanning the skies for clouds of locust.

Resignation
An inescapable part of the lifecycle of any sentient being: the eventual resignation to one’s fate and mortality. Ahhh, quit worrying! If we die, we die, and that’s it. Now, what’s for lunch…?

Superama
The supermarket two blocks from my gaf that seems to be doing pretty damn well from the closure of restaurants and the air of siege mentality in general, as shoppers are turning up in droves to fill their trolleys with everything from long life milk to bottles of tequila. In fact, if appearances are anything to go by, alcohol sales are going through the roof. It seems Chilangos are unanimous in the conviction that only the steady administration of ethanol into the system will get us through this. So we don the masks at Superama, let the security guy at the door spooge our hands with antiseptic gel, and we go forward into the only enjoyable commercial activity that remains open to us: food shopping. On one occasion I back into a masked man by the meat counter, who, after careful inspection of his eyes and hair reveals himself to be my editor. We both laugh though the gauze of our masks at the ridiculousness of it all, before casting a guileful eye into each other’s baskets to check there isn’t something we might have forgotten.

Tapabocas
Literally ‘cover-mouths’ or masks, they’re the new craze sweeping Mexico City. Available in a variety of shapes and designs, from the blue surgical kind that scrunch up small around the mouth, or expand to cover half your face, to the white work-shop models with the thin aluminum strip across the nose that’s meant to be molded to your face for a better fit. My own personal mask comes from the home of public hygiene: Japan. I got a bad hit of flu there during a trip last winter and actually purchased a batch in line with local protocol regarding spreading one’s germs in public. My tapaboca differs from its Mexican cousins in its streamlined Akira-type design as well as its integral behind-the-ears attachment and not via a piece of elastic that goes all the way around the back of the head and thus ruining any chance of a good hairstyle.

USA
The H1N1 virus looks like it’s spreading from second world bogs like Mexico (where it’s OK if a few people die) to first world civilizations like the USA and Europe (where it’s certainly not OK if people die, or are even inconvenienced for a few days – unless, of course, they’re originally from second-world bogs like Mexico.) The US has always had an uncomfortable relationship with Mexico in many ways, what with border issues, illegal immigrants, spring break Cancun invasions and that whole drug war thing. Add lethal swine flu to the list of delicate diplomatic subjects and Mexicans holidaying in the US might as well start wearing bells.

Vaccines
Nope. Not for at least another 6 months. By which time, as the taxi drivers warn us, the virus will have mutated beyond recognition. So lay down that tiny flame of naïve hope, will you, and accept the plain and simple fact that we’re all gonna die! (See A)

Where’d everybody go?
May 1st 2009. Mayday, you know the drill: it’s when mobs of disgruntled lefties traditionally take to the streets in earnest to protest exploitation of the working class and to make a fresh call for the socialist revolution. Then police in riot gear make their habitual entrance and start blasting the demonstrators with hoses and batons, and the whole spectacle is pasted together on celluloid for the evening news viewing pleasure of the bourgeoisie. But this year was different: the streets of Mexico City have never been so empty. May 1st was like a ghost town and being out and about felt like trudging through the set of some strange post-apocalyptic stage set. People kept mentioning ’28 Days Later’ and ‘I am Legend’, and it didn’t feel too far from that. You could hear the birds sing; it was actually quite beautiful. So where the hell has everyone gone? Well, as it turns out a lot of people have skipped town for the outlying hotspots just a few hours drive from the city centre. Valle del Bravo, Cuernavaca, even Acapulco. All playgrounds of the affluent, and word is that these places are rammed with visitors congregating in enclosed spaces, kissing, holding hands and breathing over one another, sans facemasks. Is that really a good plan, guys?

Xenophobia
It’s official: the world now hates Mexico, and they’ve no reason to hide the fact any more. France has all but put forward a motion to nuke the country off the face of the planet, while most of South America refuses to even fly here any more. China is quarantining Mexicans and anyone who’s had anything to do with Mexico ever. And as if Mexicans in the US didn’t cop enough crap already, they’re now going to be dealing with people treating them like lepers for at least the next year.

Yuk it up
As Lao Tzu probably once said, the most effective strategy in the face of fear is to belittle one’s opponent by way of a good old larf at its expense, and indeed Chilangos have been pumping out the jokes with the proficiency of court jesters. Tapabocas have been painted with all manner of amusing mouth shapes while rib-ticklingly mirthful online references to hamaggedon, parmageddon and the aporkalypse have been dealt in every direction. For my part, I spent a good hour trying to come up with a pun to do with flying pigs in the past tense in which I could fashion into a sentence involving ‘pig flu’, with little success.

Zeitgeist (‘The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time’)
What, at the end of the day, will we be able to glean from all of this? Is our over-comfortable world really lapsing into absurd paranoia at the prospect of a jolt to the social order from a phenomenon that is beyond our control? Or are the powers that be in fact dealing with this incredibly well by identifying a possibly lethal pandemic at an early stage and nipping it in the bud before it reaches the dizzying homicidal heights of the 1918 Spanish Flu? Indeed, two weeks of shutdown in Mexico City appear to have contained the virus, for the time being at least. With technology, hindsight, and a good sprinkling of irony, it seems that we might be able to transform this and other potential global catastrophes into a risible, and maybe even educational, storm in a teacup.

IMAGES: Swine flu outbreak brings mexico city to a standstill

Sat, 2 May 2009 21:39:17 +0200

Restaurants, cafes, bars and small businesses have shut down in Mexico City in an effort to contain the outbreak of the H1N1 virus so far believed to have infected hundreds of people. Some establishments remain open for take-outs and deliveries, although business is painfully slow. On the streets in the city centre, some residents can be seen trying hold on to a semblance of normal life as masked taxi drivers hawk for customers and parents take their children out for fresh air and exercise.

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images: Mayday Mexico City

Sat, 2 May 2009 21:34:43 +0200

The streets of Mexico City, usually alive with protestors and demonstrators on the Mayday public holiday, were deathly quiet this year, after the government ordained all non-essential businesses be closed for five days in a move to contain the outbreak of Swine Flu in the city.

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IMAGES: Volvo Ocean Racing

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:20:24 +0200

Images from aboard the Puma boat at the Pro-Am race around the Baía de Guanabara in Rio de Janeiro on 5th April 2009.

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IMAGES: Rio de Janeiro

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:59:14 +0200

Images from Rio de Janeiro

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IMAGES: Japan

Sun, 8 Mar 2009 03:15:50 +0100

Images from a trip to Japan in January 2009.

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IMAGES: istanbul part 2 - november 2008

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:10:58 +0100

More images from 15 walking tours of the city.

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IMAGES: istanbul part 1 - november 2008

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:08:33 +0100

Black and white images from 15 walking tours of the city.

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IMAGES: dia de muertos

Mon, 3 Nov 2008 21:06:33 +0100

Images from the two-day celebration that commemorated the dead in Mexico.

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IMAGES: los 400 Pueblos

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:36:48 +0200

Villagers from Veracruz have been protesting land rights in Mexico City since 1992. In 2002, they decided to get naked.

Camping out in the temporary tents and shacks that surround the nearby Monumento a la Madre, the protestors take to the streets twice a day for two hours at a time to make their cause heard.

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ARTICLE: Uncle toma’s cabin

Wed, 1 Oct 2008 22:45:11 +0200

Published in Esquire
October 2008

Under a railway bridge in Serbia’s capital Belgrade is one of the worst slums of Eastern Europe. Here, hundreds of Romany people live destitute in a vicious cycle of poverty. Theirs is a dismal tale of displacement and exclusion, similar to that of many of their ethnic counterparts all over the continent. However, just across the river, inside the precarious shelter of an unassuming rickety shack are Toma Jovanović and the Blek Panters, a boisterous Gypsy orchestra that keep Serbia’s Gypsy spirit ablaze. Vanessa Able travels to the heart of the Balkan beats and tries in vain to keep a cool, professional head.

“Emocijaaaaaa!”
Toma Jovanović’s gusto sets your hair on end. He’s asking for emotion, demanding it, jumping to his feet and throwing his arms in the air. He breaks out an ecstatic cry, closes his eyes and shakes his shoulders as the as the guitars, accordions, double bass, violins and drums work themselves and the crowd into a rhythmic crescendo around him.

“The moon is no more;
The sun is no more;
You are no more; I am no more;
There is nothing more - joooooooojjj……”

The late night clientele of Toma’s club surround him and the musicians, dancing on the tables, draped across one another in a tableau of mutual buttressing, wiping their eyes, and joining in on the sustained wail ‘joooojjjjj’. Glasses of caustic plum brandy fly into the air to fuel this orgy of string, brass and impassioned vocals.

“… We have been covered by the darkness of war…
The darkness has covered us, jjjjoooooooojjjjjjj…”

These are the Balkans at their musical best: these are the Black Panthers, (or Blek Panters - their local phonetic moniker). They are a family of Gypsy musicians headed up by the gregarious Toma Jovanović who regale this tiny ramshackle venue in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, every night of the week.
Actually, ‘ramshackle’ is an understatement. The notorious club is nothing more than a wooden splav (a cabin on the water) floating precariously upon a handful of oil drums off the banks of the river Sava. Tethered off a deserted quay at the end of a small island, the venue is only accessible via a rickety Indiana Jones-style rope bridge whose frequent ruptures provide an exercise in concentrated and coordinated movement on the way in, and a Herculean test of dexterity under the influence of alcohol on the way out.
In a city undergoing substantial economic contraction, then expansion and change over the last two decades, the waterborne Blek Panters has remained steadfast, holding out as one of the most popular spots for locals and prominent names from celebrities to sportsmen and politicians. Belgrade’s late night party-goers make pilgrimage in their scores to this much-loved spot to indulge in the fervent frenzy of one of the city’s most famous Gypsy music acts.

The Blek Panters club, however, is one of very few success stories to arise from Belgrade’s otherwise blighted Roma community. Just across the water, literally a five-minute boat ride away, is the other, darker reality of the Serbian Roma.
A ghetto in every sense of the word, the ‘Gazela’ encampment, a settlement of temporary cardboard and corrugated steel housing sits next to a rubbish dump under the city’s main railway bridge. The standard of living here is shocking, almost unbelievable for a European country. The streets are unpaved and muddy, rife with abandoned cars stripped down to their framework, stray dogs and barefoot children, some barely old enough to walk, wading through the cruddy lakes that form after heavy rain.
Just metres away from the city’s lavish Hyatt Hotel and the newly developed shopping malls of New Belgrade, Gazela is one of hundreds of settlements in Serbia where communities of Roma live below the poverty line, without even the most basic of amenities or utilities.
Unemployment is rife among this population that is regarded with suspicion and heavy racial prejudice by the country’s ethnic Serbs, and those Roma who are in work are generally employed as unskilled labourers, be they garbage collectors or street sweepers. Some residents of Gazela eke out their living by fine-combing the adjacent rubbish dump for any kind of recyclable materials like glass bottles or tin cans.
The cycle of poverty is hard to break: there are an estimated 450,000 Roma living in Serbia, a number that has swelled in recent years due to the displacements of war, as tens of thousands of Roma refugees came to Serbia primarily to escape persecution in Kosovo. There has also been a huge influx of Roma into Serbia from other former Yugoslav states following the war, as well as the thousands that have been forcibly extradited back to their country of origin after seeking asylum in other EU states.

I arrange to meet Toma early one night before the Blek Panters open, and he invites me to eat with himself and his entourage which included a blonde, blue-eyed promoter from Belgium (“Also a good gypsy boy,” he assures me), and a stalwart of Serbian national folk music, the much revered Zorica Marković. We sit around a table replete with grilled meat, and the rakija, a local plum brandy brew, soon begins to flow.
Toma is enthusiastic, engaging and unquestionably lovable, but to actually interview him is a losing battle. Each time he starts a sentence his attention is distracted by one of the musicians tuning up in the background, who he’ll instruct to play a tune, launching the room into spirited ditty after hearty song in preparation for the night ahead. Toma gets up from his seat, opens his arms and lets rip his signature battle cry:
“EMOCIJA!!”
Emotion. There is certainly enough of that. Every five minutes or so, after ensuring that I have sufficient rakija in my glass, Toma embraces me, as does the Belgian promoter, and indeed anyone else within hugging distance.
“Where is this magazine you’re writing for?” he asks, and upon my reply there follows a unanimous raising of glasses and an ebullient round of “VIVA MÉXICO!”
I tell Toma that Goran Bregović just played at the Central Theatre in Mexico City with his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, and that the audience loved the show so much they were dancing in the aisles.
Although not a Roma himself, Bosnian-born Bregović has been responsible for the largest dissemination of Yugoslav Roma music around the world, most famously in his soundtracks for Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s films, including the Palm d’Or winning ‘Time of the Gypsies’ and ‘Underground’. The former has since been transformed into a so-called Gypsy-punk opera in Paris, featuring music by Kusturica’s own band No Smoking, who will be coming to perform in Mexico from 17-19th October in Guadalajara, Mazatlan and Culiacan.
“Bregović is a king!” proclaims Toma, and there proceeds another enthused toast. “But when you saw him play, did he look into your eyes? Did he?” I answer to the negative, if only because the venue was dark and somewhat large for such intimate eye contact.
“When someone is singing you have to look into their eyes, and they in yours. That’s when you know if they are lying or telling the truth.”
Among the other musicians at Blek Panters is the expressive Bronson on double bass, the swarthy Darko on violin and ladies’ man Staniša on accordion. Bespactacled Sloba taps away at the keyboards and Kubanac (‘the Cuban’) shakes the maracas while the corpulent Toma slams his fist down on a table sending all of its glasses and bottles two inches into the air.
I marvel at how the splav has managed to stay afloat all these years.
Then Toma, the simultaneously grey-haired and boyish eye of the hurricane, rouses the revellers to raise the roof with the first strains of the iconic Djelem Djelem, the Gypsy anthem that commemorates the hundreds of thousands of Roma killed by the Nazis during the Porrajmos or Holocaust of the second world war. Tears abound as the crowd joins him in a mournful lament.

“I once had a great family,
The Black Legions murdered them;
Come with me Roma from all the world,
For the Roma roads have opened,
Now is the time, rise up Roma now,
We will rise high if we act,
O Roma, O fellow Roma…”

Serbs have a natural and deeply emotional affinity with Gypsy music and the poetic heart-wrenching lyrics that infuse its melodies, but outside of the bars and clubs and away from the sentimental embraces, there is still a great deal of antagonism and mistrust directed towards the Roma.
Still, attitudes in Serbia are mild compared with countries like a Italy where the High Court recently ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Romany citizens on the grounds that “all Gypsies are thieves.”
However, their fate is relatively low on the list of daily concerns for the average Serbian citizen in a time when the country is still struggling to pull itself out the financial and political rut that followed in the wake of years of war and Slobodan Milošević’s years in power.
“Empathy towards the Roma is very undeveloped in Serbia,” says Roma rights activist Nataša Kočić-Rakocević, a Roma woman married to a Serb in a rare mixed-race union. She is well aware of the personal and professional challenges of integration for the Roma populace, and is personally concentrating her energies on schooling initiatives for Gypsy children in the country: “People have yet to understand the connection between good education and people eventually becoming less of a burden on the state.”
One big drawback for children from poorer communities is that their parents are unable to send them to pre-school, which is where most Serbian children go to learn to read and write. This means that when un-pre-schooled Roma children enter primary school at the age of 7, many of them are illiterate and are impeded from the outset in relation to their peers.
As a result, as many as half of all enrolled Roma children drop out of school by the age of 11, and very few make it to secondary level, while the number of Roma attending universities or tertiary institutions is negligible.
There is also the problem that very few teachers in Serbia’s state-run schools are trained to teach classes of mixed ethnicity and are ill-equipped to deal with learning difficulties of the underprivileged children. And in the spirit of encouraging children to excel in the areas of their natural talents, Roma kids in schools are often rushed into the music room rather than into the science lab.
“There is a general preconception that music is all Roma are good for,” Ms. Kočić explains. “I think this seriously detracts from giving them a good academic education.”
Toma Jovanović may or may not agree with Nataša here: music has been the bread and butter of his family for generations, and is what sets them apart from the horrifying fate of other Roma in the country, a staggering 40% of whom live either under or just above the poverty line.
Back on the splav, one of the uncles of the family is watching the spectacle of punters pushing 500 dinar bills between the strings of violins and into the notches of the brass instruments from over his beer in the corner. I tell him, “this place is hopping: you must be making a fortune.”
He shrugs. “We do OK,” he says, “but there’s a lot of mouths to feed. There are 80 of us in all.”
I look over and Staniša puts down his accordion briefly to take a call on his iPhone. This may be a creaky old shack that could sink into the Sava at any minute, but it’s a acres away from the third-world glut that is the Gazela slum just across the river.

Somewhere around midnight, the rakija begins to kick in, and by 1am on the splav, I have lost all sense of my professional purpose.
Caught up in the fireworks of the moment I’ve ditched my notebook somewhere among the crowd. I’ve cracked the lens on my camera after falling from a rickety chair in an attempt to focus on a fast moving fiddle. Something’s given: I am now no longer the avid journalist here to cover Toma and the boys, but a willing victim falling prey to the dizzy swing of the night’s proceedings.
As the atmosphere grows hotter, so do the hormones, and before long I am taking refuge behind the bar to hide from the lusty advances of one of the younger musicians who, in the heat of the moment, has put down his instrument and decided to pursue a more seductive line of entertainment. The barman’s name is lost to me through the fog of plum brandy, but he refills my glass several times with all the zeal of an anxious host.
At around 2am I too am up on the table, wedged between a couple of scantily clad girls in their early twenties. They tell me they have come down from the north of the country for a weekends’ carousing in Belgrade. We bond through the haze of the plucky brass cadence and are soon waving our hands above our heads in what feels like unison worthy of the Spice Girls.
How it actually looks, of course, is a different matter altogether.
An hour later, drunken hunger pangs drive me to the little section at the back of the club that serves as its kitchen, where I sit with Toma, who’s taking a break, and mauling a large plate of čevapčiči, a traditional Serbian grilled kebab that’s perfect for late-night munchies of this variety.
Toma is ebullient, high on his performance and the ardour of the crowd. He repeatedly showers praise upon the lady cook, upon Mexico, upon the Gypsy soul, before getting up to continue the show. The room slowly begins to spin around my head…
Just before dawn I’m outside of my front door, desperately trying to focus on the impossible task of inserting the key into the lock in the right direction. Ten minutes later I’m inside, pondering over how it was that I even got home, and intensely troubled by the feeling that there is something very important I was supposed to have done, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it is.

The next morning it comes back, not as a flood of memories per se, but more of a slow and painful series of drips somewhere behind the eyes. I look through the images on my camera and see nothing but vague blurs. I curse the rakija-induced nausea as I pick up my notebook and attempt in vain to decipher ten pages of scribble, suspecting that it might all have been some kind of elaborate ruse.
Absolutely nothing is legible to me bar one little verse, a mantra that Aca, the blonde Belgian Gypsy had bid me take down word for word, and made me promise to learn by heart.
Work a tad, steal a tad/To every authority take off your hat/Don’t give a fuck about the business of others/And never be fearful of hunger.
The rest is scrawl.

ARTICLE: Elections in Serbia

Fri, 9 May 2008 23:12:55 +0200

Published in Guardian Weekly
Friday May 9th 2008

As Serbia prepares to go to the polls on Sunday, a new generation of voters will be choosing between the nationalist Radical Party and a variety of democratic factions. Vanessa Able asks some of the country's younger voters which way they will go.

"SUPPORT SERBIA", "EXPAND FURTHER", "KOSOVO IS SERBIA", "TOWARDS A EUROPEAN SERBIA"; campaign banners in the streets of Belgrade scream a medley of messages to an electorate facing its third election in four months this Sunday, while politicians from the 22 competing parties hit the hustings.

On the streets, youngsters volunteering to canvass for various political factions are a common sight; one lap of the main street leaves the pockets of Belgrade's shoppers brimming with a multitude of campaign leaflets voicing a variety of strategies to pull Serbia out of the moral rut following Kosovo's declaration of independence in March.

Adrea Siminov, 23, launched herself into political activism following the assassination of the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. She was still in high school at the time: "I was so angry. I didn't see how anyone had the right to do that, to me, to my family, and to my future children."

Today Siminov works at the headquarters of Liberal Democratic Party candidate, Cedomir Jovanovic. The LDP only holds about 7% of Serbia's vote. Their liberal pro-reform and pro-Europe policies are considered by many Serbs to be unrealistically progressive for a country in Serbia's position, and Jovanovic himself is often branded "unpatriotic" and "treacherous" for these same reasons.

However, inside the LDP offices, the atmosphere in the run up to elections is electric; a phalanx of twenty-somethings throw themselves into the task of answering phones and planning various campaign strategies.

The average age in the office is noticeably young; this is Serbia's first generation to grow up with no memory of communism. They were raised against a background of genocide, war and Nato bombs; they were barely teenagers when their president was deposed in a dramatic revolution, and had only made it to university when their reformist prime minister was assassinated outside parliament.

A picture of the murdered Zoran Djindjic hangs on the wall of the LDP office, a reminder to its junior workers of the fragility of democracy, in a country whose support for nationalist and hard-right factions is growing by the day. It’s as a reaction to this trend that students like Siminov choose to spend their free time engaged in political campaigning rather than sitting in cafes or going to bars.

Boris Jovanovic, 24, is another volunteer at the LDP headquarters who recalls a childhood fraught with political milestones. He remembers riding his father's back to a rally in the city centre in 1990, having two whole months off school at the age of 12 when the streets of Belgrade were swamped with protesters. He was just 16 when he witnessed first-hand the October 5 Revolution, the storming of parliament, and the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic.

But it was the death of Milosevic that finally pushed him into politics: "A couple of days after Milosevic died, I saw on TV that they were holding a minute's silence for him in parliament. I couldn't believe it. I was shocked and for the first time I really asked myself how much further this was all going to go."

Hanging on another wall is a map of Serbia with each polling region marked in different colours. Kosovo has been left in dark grey. Jovanovic good-naturedly jokes: "It's just that we haven't found anyone willing to take on that region yet."

Not all young people share Jovanovic's disgruntlement with nationalism, however. Vladimir Djukanovic, 29, is an outspoken supporter of the right-wing Radical Party (SRS), led by Tomislav Nikolic in the absence of party president, Vojslav Seselj, who is currently defending himself against charges of war crimes in the Hague.

In a climate of swelling patriotic sentiment in Serbia, following Kosovo's declaration of independence, some predict that the nationalist and (some say) isolationist sentiment of the SRS will secure them election victory.

"Serbia can only enter the EU in its entirety," Djukanovic says, explaining his party's line on joining Europe. “No one should be shifting our borders. Until the EU recognises that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia, we have no business with them.”

Djukanovic, who is currently working at Radikal's media centre in the run up to elections, believes the youth of Serbia is deeply split along nationalist and democratic lines, and he criticises what he considers the demonisation of nationalist aspirations at home and abroad.

"Nationalism is a positive phenomenon; it's not a bad thing. A nationalist is simply someone who loves his own country. How would an Englishman feel if Yorkshire declared independence tomorrow?"

Thousands of people joined marches in February spearheaded by right-wing groups in the country that culminated in a violent storming the US embassy and the death of a young protestor, 20-year-old Zoran Vujovic.

Vujovic has since become the poster boy for Serbia's most notorious and outspoken clero-nationalist group Obraz, a name that roughly translates as "honour”.

In his office in a decaying Communist tenement in New Belgrade, Mladen Obradovic, 28, secretary general of Obraz, is staunchly against co-operation with Europe. A poster of purported war criminal Ratko Mladic hangs ceremoniously on the office wall, while a pile of cuttings sit on Obradovic's desk: recent newspaper reports of Obraz's public actions, including the most recent intervention and forced closing of a show of Albanian artwork in Belgrade.

Obradovic explains, "A large number of young people are turning towards nationalism and orthodox beliefs, and that's the main reason why there are so many young people in Obraz." He claims that the average age of members is 20, and seems fairly nonplussed by media portrayals of the group as Neo-Nazis.

"We don't hate anyone, but we are conscious of the fact that we have to separate our friends from our enemies. Our enemies are everyone who is against the Serbian people: from Albanian terrorists, Nato and the EU, Ustashe; to drug addicts, homosexuals, NGOs... They all work by destroying the traditional roots of Serbian people."

"Right now the values in Serbia are all wrong,” Says 18-year-old Alexandra Miletic, who now volunteers as an activist for a local NGO to promote political awareness in young people in Serbia. "There are some kids in our school who stick pictures of the war criminals to the inside cover of their books. People like Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadjic and Legija (who is in jail for organising the assassination of Zoran Djindjic) are like national heroes."

Miletic, and her friend Petar Vragovic, also 18, are still in secondary school, and spent their Easter holiday working with the youth initiative on a street campaign, calling for youth awareness in the coming elections. They live in the suburb of Zemun, an area dominated by the Radical Party, whose party headquarters is a mere four blocks from their school.

The pair are going to the polling station for the first time next week and they are certain which box they're going to tick. But as self-declared liberals looking towards a future in Europe, Miletic and Vragovic consider themselves a minority among their peers. Vragovic has even received threats over YouTube after he was involved with a youth initiative video campaign.

"It’s really not easy for kids these days," says a voice from an older generation. Former Olympic rower Djordje Visatski has secured his future, for the time being at least, by opening a successful physiotherapy clinic in Belgrade. He outlines that the main problem facing students and graduates today is the lack of a framework within which to succeed. "Now it's all about who you know and how much money you have.

"I sometimes think we might have been better off under Milosevic," Visatski says. Why? "Because at least then we had hope in an alternative. We knew that eventually he'd die or be deposed, and we hoped that when that happened we'd be able to live in a straightforward democracy. But I really feel like that hope is fading daily."

ARTICLE: Kurdistan - an imaginary Country?

Thu, 1 May 2008 23:03:26 +0200

Published in Life & Style
May 2008

I was, so word had it, the First Tourist in Iraqi Kurdistan. It was 2005 -barely a year after the capture of Saddam- and the gruesome horrors of the post-war insurgency were in full swing in cities like Baghdad and Mosul. The Kurdish region to the north was excluded from the troubles, but in the minds of prospective travellers was, for all intents and purposes, the same country.

To say it was not exactly a popular holiday destination would be a gross understatement.

So as the only ostensible person in the world willing to visit Iraqi Kurdistan of my own accord, it wasn’t long before I was summoned to the office of Ibrahim Hassan, a government official with the Kurdish Democratic Party.

I guessed I’d be in for a grilling, but it was instead a very pleasant tea-and-cakes kind of affair: if Ibrahim was in any way suspicious or wary of my presence in his country, he hid his reservations perfectly behind a big hospitable smile. He appeared thrilled at the prospect of someone other than a journalist, NGO worker, or private security guard taking interest in northern Iraq, and he did nothing to hide his delight.

“Welcome,” he beamed, greeting me with all the courtesy reserved for a high-ranking official. “You’ll find this region is a very beautiful place, with plenty to do and see,” he continued, and went on to recite a long list of tourist must-dos. I listened intently from over the rim of my teacup, but gradually my attention was drawn from Ibrahim towards a map on the wall just behind him. I squinted hard at its snaky red lines, but couldn’t make out the territory.

Sensing my curiosity, Ibrahim asked if I’d like to take a closer look.

“This,” he proudly explained, “is Kurdistan”. I approached the map, and tried to make sense of it, but all of the place names were written in Arabic script. Still, I recognised the rough outline of the region. I was shocked to see that ‘Kurdistan’ covered not only the north of Iraq, where we currently were, but also spilled over into a large part of Turkey, about one-fifth of the country, to be precise. Ibrahim clocked my surprise and laughed, “This is the ideal map, you see.”

Kurdistan, a name uttered in tentative whispers by the 31 million Kurds that inhabit its hypothetical territory, is spread across northern Iraq, western Iran, southeast Turkey and northeast Syria.

It’s not a real country by any means, and the Kurds’ attempts to make it so over the last century have only ended in crisis and bloodshed. In Turkey alone, more than 30,000 people have died in over two decades of violence between the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, and government forces.

In Iraq, however, things are looking up for the Kurds. The Iraqi Kurdish region is enjoying its hard-won autonomy in a post-Saddam world, and as the picture of a unified Iraq begins to crack, Iraq’s Kurds are slowly edging away from Baghdad and towards complete independence.

“I’ve had e-mails from Baghdad about you,” said the British consular official, eyeing me suspiciously. “You’re the infamous girl backpacker hitchhiking around Iraq.”

Of course, he was exaggerating. First off, I didn’t even own a backpack; secondly, I had a driver; and thirdly we were far from the suicide bombs and televised beheadings of the Arab insurgencies in Iraq proper. Both he and I were safely embedded in the bar of the faux-Sheraton hotel in Erbil, north of a green line that separated Iraqi Kurdistan from the carnage in the rest of the country.

The official nonetheless continued his reprimand: “Tell me, did you hear about the Japanese backpacker who was kidnapped and killed near Baghdad a few weeks ago?”

I nodded with the deference of a schoolgirl in the midst of a good telling-off, which exasperated my countryman even further. “So what the hell are you doing here then?”

It was hard to explain. Like a moth to a flame, I had been drawn to this region, which for me was most interesting place in the world. I was under the wing of a journalist friend who had been living in Erbil for two years, who had told me stories about Iraqi Kurdistan, and convinced me to make a trip with him. He told me the Kurds were probably the nicest people he’d ever met, and after a year of travelling around the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iraq and Syria, I have to say that I couldn’t agree with him more.

Back in January 2005, when I first came to Erbil, the rest of Iraq was hell. Its first democratic elections were about to take place, and everybody was wary of a low turnout, or nervous that they would be marred by violence. Coalition forces had only recently brokered a ceasefire with the army of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and were currently fighting in Mosul, where an al Qaeda cell headed by the vicious militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was running a campaign of terror.

But north of the Green Line that marked the start of the Kurdish autonomous region, you wouldn’t even know there was a war on. Westerners like myself walked the streets freely, drank tea in the local coffee shops, spoke to whoever they liked, and bought kebabs from the kiosk on the corner whose owner always flashed me a wry smile whenever I walked by.

People were fleeing Iraq by the thousand, and yet in the quiet Kurdish north, traffic was in fact moving the other way across the border. University professor Hachem Khaled was an immigrant who fled into Iraqi Kurdistan from Iran, where he was facing persecution for his Kurdish-related political activities. He knew that Iraqi Kurdistan was the only safe place for him and his family.

Hachem moved with his wife and three daughters to a small Christian enclave near Erbil called Ainkawa, and soon found work teaching at a private university. A gregarious and hospitable family, they settled quickly into their new lives in Iraq; I met them one night when they invited myself and my journo friend to a dinner that turned out to be more like a Roman banquet.

The moment we arrived at their house, I was ushered straight into the kitchen to watch Hachem’s wife making ‘küfte’, a kind of dumpling made with ground meat, bulgur and lots of spices. Delighted to have a captive audience, she and her daughters patiently taught me the names of every food item in their pantry, before the girls steered me into their bedroom and presented me with a showcase of the few things they had been able to salvage from Iran.

It was mostly a collection of dog-eared photo albums containing images of friends and relatives back home; portraits from weddings and holiday pictures of the family posed outside various monuments and parks around the country. There were even a couple of portraits of handsome smiling young men scattered among the collection that reduced the girls to hysterical giggles and cross-accusations of secret crushes. But by the end of the last album, I could see the youngest girl, Shala, had tears in her eyes.

“She misses her home,” her elder sister explained, in a conspiratorial whisper. “We all do. We just want to go back.” The inexorable nostalgia of memories of home had triumphed in their hearts over the safety of their new lives, though I’m not sure that was something they would readily admit to their father.

One year later, back in the UK, I met another family of Kurdish refugees living in the seaside town of Portsmouth who were less sentimental about their homeland. Eva and Lorin Sulaiman are Syrian Kurdish teenagers who staged a startling escape from Syria with their mother in 2002. They were fleeing from a system that had imprisoned both of their parents and their brother for their activism with Yekiti, a political movement campaigning for the rights of Kurds in the country.

The girls had not seen their father since 1993, when he was arrested for putting up posters, and their mother, Amina Ibrahim, eventually released after five years in prison, claimed that she was tortured while in police custody. Today she is a shadow of her former self; her daughters tell me that the stress of their experiences have caused her to have ‘mental problems’, and for the entire time I stayed at the Sulaimans’ house talking to the girls, their mother sat and stared blankly at the television, which was tuned to the Kurdish satellite channel, Roj TV.

“We had to sell everything to be able to leave Syria,” Lorin told me. They had secured their escape through an ‘agent’ who smuggled them across the border to Turkey (these traffickers usually charge between $3,000 and $12,000 for their services). Once in Istanbul, the family were sneaked on to a series of trucks -unbeknownst to the drivers- and transported all the way over to the UK.

Four years on, the girls were at school, speaking fluent English, and fiercely fighting deportation. I asked Eva what she would do, should she ever be forced back into Syria. She shook her head. “That would never happen,” she said. “I would slit my wrists first.”

The main source of woe for most of Syria’s 1.1 million Kurds is an issue of citizenship that dates back to 1962 and a census that was taken as part of a process of Arabisation of the country. Following the official count, 120,000 Kurds were stripped of their Syrian nationality, on the professed grounds that they were not born on national soil. This means that today there are approximately 300,000 ‘stateless’ Kurds that nonetheless claim to have been living in Syria for generations.

These people are labelled ‘ajanib’, (‘foreigners’), and have limited rights of travel and employment. But there is a sub-stratum of ajanib who carries the infelicitous branding of ‘maktoumeen’, literally ‘invisible’ people with no status, official ID or passport. They number about 75,000, and for them school, work, travel, and even marriage are made difficult by governmental red tape.

The Secret Police have a tight hold over ordinary Syrians, if not in practice, then certainly in their psyches: almost everyone, even foreigners in the country, are reluctant to speak about controversial issues, and will always look both ways and lower their voices when saying something even half-incriminating.

The issue of Kurds in the country is one of the top-ranking touchy subjects, and so it was with the co-ordinated secrecy of an undercover operation that I was whisked to an interview by a rather nervous fixer/driver team, from the centre of Damascus to the Kurdish suburb of Wadi al-Masharia. Once there, I was literally bundled from the car and into the house of a young man who called himself Khaled.

He wouldn’t tell me his real name in case even the walls of his own house had eyes and ears: five days earlier, Khaled had come home after over a year in prison. He had been one of hundreds of demonstrating Kurds charged with an array of offences including the quite severe allegation of ‘Attempting to Sever Part of the Syrian Territory to Annex it to a Foreign State’, as well as an accusation of trying to build an ‘Israeli-style’ wall, a reference to a temporary barricade that was erected in Wadi al-Masharia.

What he’d actually done was take part in a series of protests back in 2004 that swept the country following a skirmish at a football match during which Syrian forces opened fire on Kurdish civilians in a flare-up of tensions that left more than 30 people dead.

Only in his mid-twenties, Khaled was thin and clearly neglected: his skin was pale and sallow, his eyes dark and concentrated, his expression severe. He nervously chain smoked his way through our interview, at intervals drawing his hand up to touch a large sore on his upper lip. “It’s the change in weather that’s done this,” he explained, with reference to the lesion. “It was very hot and humid inside the castle.”

The ‘castle’ Khaled was referring to was Adra, a prison an hour or so outside of Damascus. He told me that his first month of incarceration involved solitary confinement and torture, and for the rest of his time in prison he shared a cell with 15 other detainees.

He rubbed his head and showed me a bump there. He said it was where he had been struck when he and some other prisoners had once embarked upon a hunger strike. He had also lost feeling in several of his toes, again from beatings. Some people, he said, were given electric shocks; some were made to stand, being dashed with water, for periods of up to 48 hours. Some were denied sleep, some insulted verbally. The verbal invectives, he assured me, were the worst form of degradation. “They would insult us and our women,” he said. “Sometimes this was the hardest to take.”

Human rights volunteers and American lawyers had come to Khaled’s rescue, but they couldn’t help him. His trial lasted 45 days and took place in Syria’s Supreme State Security Court, which had been criticised by Amnesty International for falling short of international standards by only allowing the accused restricted access to legal representation and for not allowing appeals.

He was supposed to have served at least another year of his sentence, but on March 31st 2005, Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad granted an amnesty to Khaled and 300 other Kurdish prisoners, after pressure from various human rights groups. He came back to a hero’s welcome in his neighbourhood, carried to his front door on the shoulders of jubilant neighbours who threw him possibly the biggest street party Wadi al-Masharia had ever seen.

Over in Istanbul, however, trouble was also brewing: “My girlfriend not call me in four weeks,” Ahmed complained to me over a coffee one day. Widening his eyes to affect his best puppy dog look, he dropped the bomb: “I think she has other boyfriend.”

Like many of the Kurds who wait tables in Istanbul’s tourist centre Sultanahmet, my friend 27-year-old Ahmed was a romeo. Originally from the town of Mardin in Turkey’s problematic southeast, where unemployment is as high as 60% in some areas, Ahmet had come to Istanbul at the age of 14 to wait tables at his uncle’s restaurant and send his earnings back home to his mother and brothers and sisters.

Away from the support of his family unit, and at the mercy of a truncated education and diminutive pay check, Ahmed would often become despondent and entertain romantic dreams of leaving Turkey to live in Spain, Germany, Sweden; anywhere but the crumbling streets of the Istanbul neighbourhood where he shared a two-bedroom apartment with three distant cousins.

The only thing that seemed to take his mind off his predicament was the incessant stream of holidaying western girls that passed through his restaurant, who he charmed with the skill of Casanova himself. But like every great lover, he was also susceptible to heartbreak.

The girl in question this time was a German student called Natascha who came to Turkey two months previous with a troupe of promiscuous young fräuleins on the rampage for some Turkish delight. She and Ahmed had hooked up, enjoyed a whirlwind romance that lasted all of three days, and said goodbye as she fled back to Germany leaving him with nothing but her email address scribbled on a piece of paper.

“Maybe it has something to do with your fiancée,” I suggested, intimating that someone may have let it slip to her that Ahmed was in fact weeks from being married to another girl back home. The disbelieving look he shot back at me solidified my conviction that if he and Natascha had any kind of future together, the task ahead of them would be herculean, culturally speaking.

The term ‘culture shock’ barely begins to describe the experience of actually staying with a Kurdish family in the southeast of Turkey. For the unprepared, the torrent of hospitality can be overwhelming, and for the one week that I stayed in Nusaybin at the house of a widow called Gül Aydin, I barely spent a moment alone.

Our days basically consisted of two elements: visiting or being visited. Either Gül’s enormous brood would crash over her two-room house in waves with toddlers and babies in tow, or Gül would pull on her full-length black abaya, now only really worn in public by older women in the region, and myself and march down the street to the house of the next relative or friend, myself and her two youngest teenage children trotting behind her.

And not only did we spend our days together, we were inseparable at night too. The summer heat made sleeping indoors hellish, so every day at dusk the flat roof was prepared with an intricate system of mats and windshields that made for effectively segregated male/female sleeping quarters. At night I found myself staring up at the stars, safely wedged between Gül, shrouded in a sheet, her daughter Zeynep, and any other relative or grandchild that was too exhausted from talking to make the journey home.

Nusaybin is a majority Kurdish town in the east of Turkey, and like other towns in the area, including the regional capital, Diyarbakir, standards of living and general infrastructure are a far cry from the westernised cosmopolitan centres of Istanbul and Ankara. Education also leaves a lot to be desired: a town like Nusaybin, with a population of around 100,000 people, had only two high schools, meaning that most children, especially girls, don’t get to finish a formal education. Gül was of a generation that was so poorly educated, she had never even been taught to speak Turkish, so the only people she could communicate with were other Kurds who spoke her dialect.

Ironically, in the eyes of the Turkish authorities, this is tantamount to a misdeed: many Kurds in positions of authority have been prosecuted for their public use of the Kurdish language, most famously Leyla Zana, the Kurdish MP who sparked a national controversy after speaking a sentence in Kurdish during her parliamentary inauguration, an altercation which eventually lead to her arrest on charges of membership of a terrorist organisation, for which she served 10 years in prison.

Kurds lost many rights to their own cultural identity when Turkey became a secular republic in 1923. The smallest suggestion of ethnic divergence was outlawed, as every citizen was labelled ethnically ‘Turkish’ on government-issued IDs. The Kurdish language, the use of Kurdish letters, and indeed any claims to Kurdish identity were made illegal.

Although Gül had been living in Nusaybin for over 20 years, she often spoke wistfully about her village, which I expressed an interest in visiting. No sooner had the words escaped my mouth than there was a veritable rumpus on the street as her son Abdul pulled up in a car flanked by half a dozen delighted children running in the wake of its dust cloud. He’d called in a few favours for the use of the vehicle, and soon we were driving the arid road towards the little sandy coloured fortress village.

It was a village like hundreds of others in the region, standing half-empty, bearing the scars of years of warfare between the Turkish army and the PKK in the rubble of its outer walls, its population diminished by two-thirds since 1984, as most of the village’s residents were forced to leave when the fighting became too intense. The climb to the top was tough in the midday heat; we passed chickens, goats and cats, but didn’t see one human being. From a vantage point at the crest of the hill, Abdul narrated the view.

“That was my childhood home,” he said without a hint of nostalgia, pointing at a dilapidated building with half of its front wall in ruins, a large hole driven through the masonry. “That’s where a missile hit us during the fighting.”

A few more turns in the maze-like sandy alleys, and we came upon the house of some distant relatives. We were greeted like prodigal children (I figured they probably didn’t get too many visitors, due to the devilishly sweaty ascent) and served tea and freshly baked flat bread. Sitting on the floor with the family, I noticed an camouflage jacket hanging on the wall of the main room, with the tip of a machine gun peering out from under one of the sleeves. My questions about the weapon were quickly deflected and a fresh pot of tea was put to brew.

What I actually went on to discover was that many Kurdish families in the region were armed and funded by the Turkish authorities to work as ‘village guards’, in order to protect the villages from the influence of the PKK. The effects of this notorious system, however, have been far-reaching: Kurds persuaded to side with the Turkish military were soon pitted against their fellow villagers, which resulted in a great amount of social fission as Kurds fought other Kurds, often their own clansmen. It’s the village guard system that is also making it very difficult for the villages to repopulate, as the guards have inevitably come to control a lot of territory that they are now reluctant to let go of.

After my first visit to Iraqi Kurdistan in January 2005, I spent more than a year writing from Turkey as a correspondent for an Erbil-based newspaper called the Hewler Globe. The publication was a landmark in that it was the first English-language weekly to go to press that could proudly wear its Kurdishness on its sleeve. Even though it was based in Iraq, the paper’s editor, Jawad Qadir, envisaged it as a pan-regional publication: the voice of the hypothetical Kurdistan that made Kurdish voices intelligible to an international readership.

Jawad wanted stories about Kurds in the region, but not just the weary tales of injustice that permeated so much of the other Kurdish press; instead, we looked for success stories, affirmative features about Kurds rehabilitating their culture in Turkey: the opening of Kurdish language schools, the launch of Kurdish celebrity magazines, reports on Kurdish filmmakers, authors and poets, and coverage of the annual coming-of-spring festival, Newroz, when Kurds revel in their favourite leisure pastime, roadside picnicking, while small fires are lit over the rural landscapes to celebrate the advent of a new year.

I tried to approach Kurdish culture from a more positive angle because it would be wrong to suggest that all 31 million Kurds spread over Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria are separatists with the sole aim of partitioning their territories to a united Kurdistan. Pragmatic Kurds in Turkey, who far outnumber the few hundred militant PKK, are campaigning, not for independence, but for a rewritten constitution that reflects the country’s multi-ethnic population.

The paper still hits the stands every Wednesday, under the more nationalist new epithet, the Kurdish Globe. Leafing through their online version, it’s not hard to see how much the Iraqi Kurdish region has changed in the last few years: the paper’s pages are now filled with business stories on the booming local economy; and as international investors contend for a piece of the oil pie, Iraqi Kurdistan’s prospects are growing by the day.

And what of tourism? Back in 2005, Erbil airport was a half-built military runway; entry into the country was only possible by land, through the north from Turkey, and at the mercy of ill-humoured Turkish border guards. Today, Erbil boasts a fully-fledged international airport with regular flights to Athens, Vienna, Amman and even Riga, while government websites assure potential visitors that this is indeed “an ideal destination for those seeking unspoiled mountain scenery and ancient archeological (sic) sites off the beaten track.”

Sound tempting? Well, as the country’s titular First Tourist, I’d like to think I might have started a trend.