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EDITOR’S LETTER
S
omeone once said that if the world is a book, those who don’t travel have only
read the first page. That’s a sentiment we subscribe to here at Open Skies, where we aim to bring you the best of
the world — the best writers, designers, photographers and artists. And as with the rest of the inflight experience, quality is everything. Of course, for us mere mortals, the wonder of flight is that it is possible at all. For others, flight is a physics equation, albeit one that brings them closer to the heavens. One such man is Mike Mullane, an astronaut who has spent — in total — almost two weeks in space. In In The Shadow of the Space Shuttle, his daughter Laura recounts what is was like to have a parent ride a rocket ship into the sky. Closer to Earth, Chuck Thompson wonders if the era of the expatriate is over — with smart-phones, Skype and Doritos now a global phenomenon, has the expatriate experience lost much of its lustre? You will, hopefully, have noticed a literary theme to this month’s issue, unsurprisingly, given March sees the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature taking place in Dubai from March 8 to 12. We take a look at the current state of Arab literature, and our literary theme continues as we trace Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps through Paris.
We are also proud of our cover – a specially commissioned piece by the Iranian artist, Reza Abedini. His work is striking, thoughtful and original, all the things we hope to be each issue. Emirates has been flying people to some of the world’s most exciting places for more than a quarter of a century. We aim to celebrate these places in every issue. Travel is still exciting, discovery will never grow old, and if the world is a book, then it is one with an infinite amount of pages. Enjoy the ride.
CONOR@OPENSKIESMAGAZINE.COM
Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact The Editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, ďŹ nancial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.
PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Telephone: (+971 4) 282 4060 Fax:(+971 4) 282 4436 Email: emirates@motivate.ae
84,649 COPIES
Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai, UAE
20
Promoting Sustainable Forestry
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid Al Tayer GROUP EDITOR & MANAGING PARTNER Ian Fairservice GROUP SENIOR EDITOR (JOB +PIOTPO Ĺ&#x; gina@motivate.ae SENIOR EDITOR .BSL &WBOT Ĺ&#x; NBSLF!NPUJWBUF BF EDITOR $POPS 1VSDFMM Ĺ&#x; DPOPS!NPUJWBUF BF SENIOR ART DIRECTOR 5JB 4FJGFSU Ĺ&#x; UJB!NPUJWBUF BF CHIEF SUB EDITOR *BJO 4NJUI Ĺ&#x; JBJOT!NPUJWBUF BF GENERAL MANAGER PRODUCTION & CIRCULATION S Sasidharan PRODUCTION MANAGER C Sudhakar GENERAL MANAGER, GROUP SALES "OUIPOZ .JMOF Ĺ&#x; BOUIPOZ!NPUJWBUF BF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Nicola Hudson nicola@motivate.ae SENIOR ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Jaya Balakrishnan jaya@motivate ae; DEPUTY ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Murali Narayanan ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Shruti Srivastava EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS FOR EMIRATES: Editor: Siobhan Bardet Arabic Editor: Hatem Omar Deputy Editor: Stephanie Byrne Website Ĺ&#x; emirates.com. CONTRIBUTORS: Jason Rezaian, Stefanie Posavec, Fabienne Dupuis, Richard Luck, Neil Andrew, Wael-Al Sayegh, Gemma Correll, Phil Oh, Pedro Kok, Nour Samaha, James Montague, Chuck Thompson, Laura Mullane, Mark Tungate, Pico Iyer, Mark Twain, Greg Girard, Baldovino Barani, Holly Suan Gray, Nick Rice, Axis Maps, Victor Besa, Farooq Saliq, Vikram Gawde, Andrea Gruneberg & Louise Browne COVER ILLUSTRATION by Reza Abedini MASTHEAD DESIGN CZ 2VJOU Ĺ&#x; XXX RVJOUEVCBJ DPN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES AUSTRALIA Okeeffe Media; Tel +61 89 381 7425, Fax +61 89 382 4850, okeeffekev@bigpond.com.au CHINA/HONG KONG Emphasis Media Limited; Tel +85 22 516 1048, Fax +85 22 561 3349, advertising@emphasis.net CYPRUS Epistle Communications & Media; Tel +35 72 246 6555, Fax +35 72 276 9999, nasreenk@epistlemedia.com FRANCE/SWITZERLAND Intermedia Europe Ltd; Tel +33 15 534 9550, Fax +33 15 534 9549, administration@intermedia.europe.com GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH, Phone: 0049 8151 550 8959, Fax: 0049 8151 550 9180 w.jaeger@imv-media.com INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 281 5538/39/40, Fax +91 22 283 9619, ravi@mediastar.co.in ITALY IMM Italia; Tel +39 023 653 4433, Fax +39 029 998 1376, lucia.colucci@fastwebnet.it JAPAN Skynet Media Inc.; Tel/Fax +81 43 278 6977, skynetmedia@y2.dion.ne.jp TURKEY Media Ltd; Tel +90 212 275 8433, Fax +90 212 275 9228, mediamarketingtr@medialtd.com.tr UK Spafax Inflight Media; Tel +44 207 906 2001, Fax +44 207 906 2022, nhopkins@spafax.com USA Redwood Custom Communications Inc.; Tel 212-473-5679 x 313 , Fax 212-260-3509, brigitte.baron@redwoodcc.com
CONTENTS
TEHRAN AND ITS TRAFFIC ARE EXPLAINED BY JASON REZAIAN (P29)… FIND THE BEST COFFEE SHOPS IN NEW YORK VIA TWITTER (P33)… WE TAKE A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH WITH ERIC NEWBY (P35)… WE ALSO MAP DAMASCUS AND DISCOVER A VIBRANT SOCIAL SCENE (P36)… GET THE PERFECT SOUNDTRACK FOR 30,000FT COURTESY OF DUBAI'S DJ SOLO
(P42)… MICHAEL PALIN LETS US IN ON HIS TRAVEL SECRETS (P49)… WHILE WE GET A STREET-EYE VIEW OF MELBOURNE’S FINEST FASHIONISTAS
(P50)… SALUTE ONE OF SAO PAULO’S MOST UNDERSTATED PIECES OF ARCHITECTURE (P53)… A BEIRUT BOOK STORE WITH A DIFFERENCE IS GIVEN THE ONCE OVER BY NOUR SAMAHA (P54)… ENGAGE IN SOME RETAIL THERAPY ON THE STREETS OF BANGKOK (P56)… JAMES MONTAGUE LOOKS AT THE CURRENT STATE OF ARAB LITERATURE (P62)… PULITZER PRIZE NOMINEE LAURA MULLANE HEADS TO THE STARS AND BACK (OR AT LEAST HER FATHER DOES) (P70)… WHILE MARK TUNGATE GOES IN SEARCH OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S PARIS (P78)… CHUCK THOMPSON CHARTS
THE DEMISE OF THE EXPATRIATE (P86)… PICO IYER TRIES TO UNRAVEL THE MYSTERY OF MAURITIUS (P96)…WE LIST A FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE
TRAVEL BOOKS (P106)… AND THE LEGENDARY MARK TWAIN TAKES US ON A TOUR OF EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST (P116)… WHILE GREG GIRARD CELEBRATES 1,000 YEARS OF HANOI (P124)…
22
CONTRIBUTORS
WAEL AL�SAYEGH: An Edinburgh-born Emirati poet and essayist, Wael is author of three books of contemporary poetry and writes in both English and Arabic. He is currently translating the motivational works of BAFTA winning writer Geoff Thompson into classical Arabic.
GEMMA CORRELL: A freelance illustrator originally from England, Gemma’s work has been described as “the perfect combination of ugly and cute” and her influences range from overheard conversations to books and music. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany, with her trusty sidekick Mr Pickles the Pug, where she enjoys drinking coffee and buying kitschy ornaments from flea markets.
JASON REZAIAN: An American journalist based in Tehran. Jason has written for numerous publications including TIME, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate and Global Post. He is also the writer narrator of a feature length documentary on Iran called A World Between.
LAURA MULLANE: A freelance writer whose work has been published in The Washington Post, Laura co-authored God Sleeps in Rwanda, the memoir of Joseph Sebarenzi, a genocide survivor and former speaker of Rwanda’s parliament. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
MARK TUNGATE: A British journalist and author who moved to Paris for a year – 10 years ago, Mark has written articles about media, travel and popular culture that have appeared in The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and CNN Traveller.
CHUCK THOMPSON: Author of the comic travel memoirs Smile When You’re Lying and To Hellholes and Back, Chuck is currently editorial director for Hong Kong-based CNNGo.com. His writing and photography have appeared in numerous publications including Outside, Men’s Journal, Maxim and The Los Angeles Times. His book on the American Deep South will be published in 2012.
24
CHLOÉ BOUTIQUES
© 2011 chloé. all rights reserved.
BOULEVARD AT JUMEIRAH EMIRATES TOWERS THE DUBAI MALL DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES WWW.CHLOE.COM
Mediterranean Sea, 1940s. "Gamma" men in training. The diver emerging from the water is wearing a Panerai compass on his wrist.
HISTORY ALWAYS LEAVES A TRACE. LUMINOR SUBMERSIBLE Automatic mechanical movement OP III calibre, COSC certified. Water-resistance 300 metres. Unidirectional rotating bezel. Steel case 44 mm Ø. Steel adjustable buckle.
+971 4 307 4653
www.panerai.com
Available exclusively at Panerai boutiques and select authorized watch specialists. UAE: Dubai, Panerai Boutique, Dubai Mall, Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, Wafi City, Mall of the Emirates, Emirates Towers - Abu Dhabi, Al Manara Jewellery, Hamdan Street - Abu Dhabi Mall - KSA: Riyadh, Panerai Boutique, Mohamed Bin Abdul Aziz Street, Platinum Sands - BAHRAIN: Manama, Asia Jewellers, Sheraton Complex - IRAN: Tehran, Sarman Co. - KUWAIT: Morad Yousuf Behbehani, Salhiya Complex, Marina Mall - QATAR: Doha, Panerai Boutique, Villagio Mall, Ali Bin Ali Watches & Jewellery, Al Sadd Street, Royal Plaza - JORDAN: Amman, Abu Shakra Trading, Abdoun Mall, Gardens Showroom - LEBANON: Beirut, Panerai Boutique, Beirut Souks, Weygand St, Wadih Mrad, Dbayeh Highway, Quantum Tower, Achrafieh - EGYPT: Giza, Felopateer Palace, First Mall, Cairo, Felopateer Palace, Four Seasons Hotel, Beyman - OMAN: Muscat, Oman Jewellery - MOROCCO: Casablanca, Mystere Montre,12 Avenue Hain Harrouda, Residence Yasmine II, Marrakech, Riad Mogador Boulevard Mohammed VI
INTRO ×Þ º
33 º GY QTM YGGVU ØÛ º FCOCUEWU OCRRGF ÚÕ º VTGGV GGRGT
B OOT Y
HE BEST WE TRAWL T K’S FLEA OF BANGKO AND REET STALLS T S , S T E K R A M RING STORES TO B BOUTIQUE EST BACK THE B AINS BAHT BARG
P56
OUR MAN IN TEHRAN AFTER NEARLY 60 YEARS OF IMPOSSIBLY CHEAP PETROL, IRAN IS ONE OF THE LEAST ENERGY-CONSCIOUS PLACES ON EARTH.
A
JASON REZAIAN WONDERS IF TEHRAN CAN EVER GIVE UP ITS LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CAR
nyone who has spent time in Tehran quickly realises that traffic is a colossal problem for Iran’s capital. Not only does the gridlock often make it impossible to move around the city, car exhausts are the main reason Tehran’s air is amongst the world’s most polluted. An ever rising population of cars and motorbikes flood the streets of the city centre, creating an almost lawless chaos. Witnessing cars that have missed a turn-off reversing down the motorway, for example, is a regular occurrence. For more than four decades the vast majority of cars on Tehran’s roads have been Peykans, a domestically produced version of the 1967 Hillman Hunter. Production was stopped in 2005 as the cars were considered hazardous petrol guzzlers. In recent years Peugeot and Korean car maker Kia have been manufacturing cars inside Iran, and there are an increasing number of them jockeying for position in the avenues and alleys
of Tehran. Oblivious to traffic rules and content to risk life and limb each time they get behind the wheel, Iranian drivers have some of the highest death rates in the world. A big part of the problem is the longstanding unofficial policy of Iran’s leadership to use cheap petrol as a symbol of national pride. Coupled with restrictions on what citizens are allowed to do for fun, driving aimlessly has long been a national pastime. What has resulted from the nearly 60 years of impossibly cheap gasoline is perhaps the least energy-conscious society on earth. The situation has become so bad of late that Tehran has had to declare public holidays in consecutive weeks due to the high toxicity in the air. Although the situation is bleak, and it will require a change in habits on the part of Iranian drivers, there are signs that this is happening, albeit reluctantly. In recent years seatbelt laws have been passed and, crucially, are being enforced. The majority of Iranian drivers now follow these laws as they don’t want to pay the
Jason Rezaian is a writer based in Tehran. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/iransolo
fine. Drivers have already been restricted from key commercial zones of the city, only being allowed to drive in these areas on odd or even days, depending on the last digit of their licence plate. Those limitations were extended to the entire city late last year. Furthermore, an end to the subsidies that have kept petrol prices so low is expected to be lifted in the coming months, which will force many drivers to be more conservative in their car use. One positive result of the traffic problem is the expansion of Tehran’s bus services and the public’s willingness to adapt to it. Tehran now claims to have more bus stops than any other Asian city. Tehran’s metro has also proven to be an essential component of urban living. Clean and cheap (a one-way ticket costs less than $1), guests to Tehran are consistently impressed by the metro experience. Together, Tehran’s buses and metro have had a big effect on reducing traffic, and those accustomed to using it are amazed that anyone is still willing to sit in a car, especially during rush hour.
29
GRAPH
S
tefanie Posavec took the first chapters of some
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Anthony Burgess, 1962
modern classics and mapped out their authors’ writing styles based on the number of words they used, the length of the sentences and the number of sentences contained in each chapter. The result is a fascinating mix of literature and data analysis. www.itsbeenreal.co.uk
INTERPRETATION SMALL CLUSTERS OF LINES ARE AN INDICATION OF SHORT SENTENCES:
A LOOSE DRAWING WITH LONGER LINES INDICATES A CHAPTER WITH MANY
INTRUDER IN THE DUST
LONG SENTENCES:
William Faulkner, 1948
A DRAWING THAT MOVES CONSISTENTLY AROUND THE SAME AREA MEANS THAT ALL THE SENTENCES HAVE A SIMILAR WORD COUNT:
30
BELOVED
A BRAVE NEW WORLD
Toni Morrison, 1987
Aldous Huxley, 1932
BRIGHTON ROCK
THE GREAT GATSBY
Graham Greene, 1938
F Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
31
TWITTER PITCH
New York
Cafes
RBC NYC RBC NYC is the place to geek out over coffee. We use multiple roasters, seasonal coffees and feature a Slayer espresso machine. www.twitter.com/rbcnyc
cafe grumpy Innovative coffee shop roasts its own beans and offers seasonal single-origin coffee selections brewed by the cup and delicious espresso drinks. www.twitter.com/cafegrumpy
Every month we profile a number of venues in a different city. The catch? The venues must be on Twitter and must tell us in their own words
Buttercup Bake shop Buttercup Bake Shop is the perfect
what makes them so special. This month we kick off with New York's coffee shops. If you
place for old-fashioned, home-made
want to get involved, follow us at: www.twitter.com/openskiesmag
banana pudding. And we deliver!
goodies from red velvet cupcakes to www.twitter.com/buttercupNY
33
M A R Q U I S E BY PA S PA L E Y Ê " Ê / Ê , / - Ê Ê Ê 1 Ê Ê Ê Ê /
/ - Ê " / Ê Ê Ê 1 Ê Ê Ê U Ê 1 Ê Ê ä { ® Ê Î Î Ên Ç { x Ê U Ê 1 Ê Ê Ê ä Ó ® Ê È { { Ê£ { Ç x Ê Ê Ê * - * 9° "
BOOKED ROOM
NO.416
THE GLADSTONE TORONTO
ERIC NEWBY A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH
A
classic of its genre, Eric Newby’s book manages to combine traditional British understatement, exquisite comic timing and a narrative that takes in the wilds of Nuristan. Newby, who was working as a fashion assistant in London at the time, only had four days of mountaineering experience before he tackled one of Afghanistan’s highest peaks, which adds a layer of absurdity to the narrative. The joy of Newby’s writing lies in the dialogue between him and his travelling companion Hugh Carless, a Foreign Service official, who was as clueless as Newby when it came to climbing. Newby’s descriptions of the passing scenery and nomads are wonderful — he captures the area’s stunning beauty without resorting to travel brochure clichés and
INTERNET SPEED: 24MB, free PILLOW THREAD COUNT: 300 PILLOWS: Four TV CHANNELS: 65 IPOD DOCK: None. Alarm clock with
MP3 player ROOM SERVICE: None COMPLIMENTARY SNACKS: Freshly
brewed coffee TOILETRY BRAND: Honey Pie DAILY NEWSPAPER: None, Globe &
Mail in downstairs bar MAGAZINES: Design Lines,
Where, Walrus
paints a realistic picture of the
EXTRAS: Travel iron and board,
hardships they face. The fact that he never reached his goal does not diminish the narrative — if anything it encapsulates the
hairdryer, safe, earplugs
there are enough amenities to satisfy a business traveller looking for a change of pace. The hotel’s simplicity — from the locally produced toiletries to the alert staff
VIEW: 2/5
— sets it apart from other, cluttered hotels in the market. While the trendier-than-thou vibe might not
RATE: $165 per night
be to everyone's taste, the rooms
www.gladstonehotel.com
have facilities that match even the best chain hotels.
BUSINESS CENTRE: None
farcical, yet endearing, nature of his journey. Picador, 1937
Set in the centre of Toronto’s cultural district, the Gladstone at first looks to be a typical boutique hotel. Art exhibitions? Check. Cool downstairs bar? Check. Artistdesigned rooms? Check. Yet the hotel manages to rise above the boutique rabble. The room designs are thought out — managing to combine form and function, while
35
STORE MAPPED MAGAZINES / BOOKS / COFFEE
IBRAHIM
BEIRUT R
O ST
EL
D
DI B
IN
E AD L KA
KAH
E AL M AL
SHOUKRY
ATH T
6TH MAY (SITA
1. 2. 3. 4.
3. Beit Akbik Al Mamlouka Al Fares Elissar Beit7. Akbik Four Season’s
T
AY YAR)
EL
6. Hanabi
KR
HOTELS
RESTAURANTS �. Naranj
AL AB B
BA
world, but it can still teach us some new tricks. WWW.HG2.COM
2. Al Fares
AS ST
OU
AB
17TH APRIL ST
in Syria’s ever-changing capital. It may be one of the oldest cities in the
HOTELS 1. Al Mamlouka
E
KHALED IB
S
AL HANDASA AV
FAN S
D
YE FA
N MA
R OU
wave of contemporary venues — and accompanying style — has shaken things up of late. Fabienne Dupuis from Hg2 heads to Damascus to find out what venues are creating a buzz
36
H MA
A BAR
LM
K
T
N AF
W
e thought we knew it all; donkeys shuffling alongside honking cars, the exhilarating smell of spice hanging in the air, folkloric music twanging in the distance and decadent dinners wowed by bellydancers between courses. But while clichés still flavour Syria, a new
HANAN
OM
E AR
OU
S AR T H
AN IB
BEIRUT
OT H M
PAPERCUP DAMASCUS
RESTAURANTS 4. Four Seasons 5. Narinj
6. Hanabi
8. Downtown 7.Café Elissar
8. Downton Café &
AL
KH
OU
RI
ST
TWITTER PITCH
FA R
ES
A KATHEEB LANE
6TH TISHREE N ST
MMED
ANWA
T R KAMEL S
NM
AVE K FAISAL EL MALE
ASS
AOU
DA
L TH
T
FI ST
AM SD HIM IDE
S
SA HS T
AIR PO RT MO R TO
SOUTHERN BYPAS
AAL AL BAIT ST
EN
T
US
Q
AS
SC
AL
IR AH
TA ST
SB
SA
ST
HOU
QIS
IBN
AS
R KE
AL G
MA
Y WA
& Snack
IM ST
DA
S
AL MOUSTAQU AL AMIN ST
BN WALID A VE
THAURAH ST
A QA
RD
UR W A IB
US
AD AVE
A SC
B A G HD
HA
E AV EL
LA
B
AV E
MOHA
BARS/CLUBS
BARS/CLUBS 9. The 9.Dome The
Dome 10. Z Bar GALLERIES 10. The Z Bar 13. Art House Gallery 14. Rafia Gallery 11. After 7 12. Marmar or Zodiaq
CULTURE/EVENTS C 11. After 7 13. Art
12. Marmar House Gallery 14. Rafia House 15. Al Kouri GalleryGallery 16. Mustafa Ali Gallery 15. Al Kouri 16. Mustapha Ali’s Gallery
37
STORE MAPPED PAPERCUP DAMASCUS
BEIRUT
MAGAZINES / BOOKS / COFFEE
HOTELS 1 AL MAMLOUKA
2
AL FARES
3
BEIT AKBIK
4
FOUR SEASONS
The first boutique hotel in
Wonderful traditional interiors
New to Syria’s hotel scene, the
With 297 rooms over 13 floors,
Damascus, Al Mamlouka is
of wood, silk, marble and
property is situated off Straight
the Four Seasons was the first
one of the region’s best.
metal set this hotel apart. The
Street and offers eight charming
major chain to champion the
Contemporary and vintage
location is great too — just
rooms that combined traditional
city’s new-found status as an
design results in a distinctly
beside the Omayad Mosque. A
Syrian style with modern-day
emerging business and leisure
new-age Syrian style. Housed in a
heavy antique door keeps the
creature comforts. It has a
destination. Despite the arrival
17th century mansion with 16th
thronging crowds at bay. An
wonderful roof terrace with views
of many more global brands, this
century archways.
idyllic respite from the city.
of the city.
is still the luxe leader.
RESTAURANTS 5 NARANJ
6
HANABI
7
ELISSAR
8
DOWNTOWN CAFÉ
Catapulting the Damascus
Seen as a fairly abstract concept
A classic never dies, and such
Downtown Cafe is the place for
food scene headfirst into the
until a few years ago, this stylish
is the case at Elissar. Built in
bright young things to hang out.
21st century, Naranj offers a
Japanese eatery has converted
1840, restored in the 1990s, the
Minimalist lines combined with
mouthwatering menu that
many since opening with
restaurant retains its grandeur
an Italian-inspired menu give the
mixes continental Europe with
lipsmackingly good sushi to
without being outdated; inside is
place an international feel, while
the Middle East. The space is
champion a new wave of cuisine
dim lighting and a fountain, with
excellent cups of coffee attract
split into a veranda and a rather
in the city and clean, modern
tables flanked by the cream of
the on-the-way-to-work crowd.
majestic courtyard.
interiors to boot.
the Damascan crop.
Packed virtually all day.
BARS/CLUBS 9 THE DOME
10 Z BAR
11 AFTER 7
12 MARMAR
The Dome has set a new
Set on the roof of the Omayad
Perfectly balanced between
Nestled at the bottom of a long,
precedent for partying like a
Hotel, this stylish watering hole
being cool and having an
winding lane, Marmar retains
rock star. Exclusive, decadent
offers lashings of modern-day
attitude, it’s hardly surprising
its position as the place to go
and glamorous with inspiring
style with an oversized terrace
that After 7 reigns supreme on
for local live music. Expect big
interiors: a large dining room
flanked by white Chesterfields.
Damascus’ club scene. Expect
crowds, ear-splitting volume and
set in a converted Turkish bath,
It is here that razor-thin social
an eclectic playlist, a lengthy
a dark, sweaty atmosphere. The
flanked by a long bar to while
types can sip on cocktails in true
cocktail list and a mixed bag of
perfect place to let your hair
away the small hours.
superstar style.
revellers propping up the bar.
down away from the glitterati.
GALLERIES 13 ART HOUSE GALLERY
38
14 RAFIA GALLERY
15 AL KOURI GALLERY
16 MUSTAFA ALI GALLERY
Set inside a 16th century
The recently-opened Rafia
Although it’s been around for
Hidden among a maze of tiny
building, the gallery comprises
Gallery is the contemporary
years, Al Kouri Gallery is as
streets, the workshop at Mustafa
an exhibition space and
art gallery Damascus has
relevant now as it was back when
Ali Gallery is an open space in
accommodation in avant-garde
been waiting for. Centrally
it opened. Inside visitors will
which young artists can come
surroundings. Artists, musicians
located, its small but brightly-lit
find one of the country’s best
to work, exhibit or sell their
and sculptors all exhibit their
space exhibits renowned and
modern art collections exhibited
wares. Fostering creativity, it is
work, while an in-house concert
upcoming local talent that has
in carefully considered disarray.
bohemian, creative and very,
hall draws the crowds.
culture vultures flocking.
A must-see for art fans.
very cool.
FLICK CELLULOID DISSECTED
8IBU NPWJF BSF ZPV XPSLJOH PO OPX
Even Better thAn the real Thing RICHARD LUCK WONDERS WHY REMAKES OF OLD FILMS ARE SO POPULAR
H
ollywood’s never been slow to adapt the big books of the day. But why don’t best-sellers always make for blockbusters? And does fidelity to the text always guarantee great films? When he picked up his honorary Oscar in 1999, Fiddler On The Roof director Norman Jewison begged Hollywood to find more original stories to tell. Naturally Hollywood paid no attention and continued to do what it’d been doing for ages — namely, claiming to be an ideasbased industry while basing most of its films on whatever happened to appear on the New York Times best-sellers list. 40
The big studios have been in the novel-adapting industry almost as long as they’ve been in the film-making industry. This year will see any number of books reshaped for the screen. Upcoming pictures that have undergone the process include Never Let Me Go, a fraught Keira Knightley picture based on the novel by Remains Of The Day scribe Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau, the latest in a long line of science-fiction adventures adapted from the idiosyncratic tales of Philip K Dick. Since they’re both plot-powered forms, it’s not that surprising that a parasitic relationship has developed between films and book. Consider the subtleties of a
favourite novel, however, and it’s amazing to think anyone would dream of turning so complex and fulfilling a work into something as obvious as a Hollywood film. Of course, the studios are wellequipped to overcome the obstacles in the adaptation process. Take, for example, The Adjustment Bureau — if it’s a good film, the chances are it’ll be because it will have next to nothing to do with the source story. Philip K Dick’s stories are brilliantly brain-frying affairs that don’t lend themselves to adaptation. Take, for example his best known work Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? — that it’s a bizarre story about people buying artificial animals as a sign of status will no doubt come as a shock to fans of Ridley Scott’s
" SFNBLF PG )BNMFU TFU ZFBST JO UIF GVUVSF #VSU 3FZOPMET IBT BMSFBEZ TJHOFE VQ
reimagining, the awesome yet unrelated Blade Runner. Likewise, when Paul Verhoeven deigned to transfer Dick’s We Can Remember It For Your Wholesale, he stripped the story of everything — even its title — and built the Arnold Schwarzenegger juggernaut Total Recall upon its bare bones. Not that Hollywood is always
story, it'd be better suited to episodic TV. But no doubt feeling bulletproof on the back of 300’s success, Snyder set out to cram 424 pages of graphic novel into three hours and wound up with a picture as beautiful as it was boring. So, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. No, it’s not easy, this adaptation business. What works for one is a
(PP MVD E L
would really help the film, and it did. Not that I wasn’t worrying what he thought of my writing every moment he was there!� As you have to admire Garland’s gambit, so you must also congratulate those writers who realise the limitations of the book they’re hired to rework. The transformation of Robert Ludlum’s lumbering novels into the lean and exciting Jason Bourne series
unsubtle. On the contrary, some adaptations are incredibly faithful to the original text. Such was the case with Watchmen, Zach
recipe for disaster for another. Take the aforementioned Never Let Me Go, which was adapted by Alex
Snyder’s epic take on Alan Moore’s era-defining graphic novel. Truth be told, it was actually a little bit
Garland. A hit novelist before he turned to screenwriting, Garland took the brave step of inviting
too faithful. Asked why he thought the book was unadaptable, Terry
author Kazuo Ishiguro on set. “My writer friends thought I must
far from certain art. Indeed, such is the process’ potential to create havoc, maybe it’s time the business
Gilliam — a huge fan of Moore’s tome — said that it was such a dense
be suicidal,� says the man behind the The Beach. “But I thought it
found some of those original stories Mr Jewison talked about in 1999.
is a fine example of adaptation at its most brutal. Of course, it could have gone very wrong. Yep, turning best-sellers into blockbusters is a
41
SKYPOD DJ SOLO
DUBAI
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
WWW.MIXCLOUD.COM/DJSOLO/SKYPOD-MIX
MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON — ANTIQUITY An LA-based arranger, composer and classicallytrained viola player, Miguel has received praise recently for his work Suite for Ma Dukes, which celebrates the life of late hip hop producer J Dilla as part of his Timeless concert series.
LETHERETTE — DANCE BRACE Perhaps best known for their remixes for artists such as Bibio, Letherette strike out here on their wickedly diverse self-titled EP, with a J Dilla-esque production style. Organs and chopped up soul samples ride over a crunchy hip hop beat.
COMPUTER JAY — DISTANCE Already a modern classic amongst beat heads, this is an intergalactic bass excursion over stomping drums. A haunting melody accompanied by bizarre vocals. 42
GIANNI ROSSI — DEATH BY 69 Analog synths build and build over a hip hop style drum break and funky bassline, before finally giving way to a ghoulish break.
HIDDEN ORCHESTRA — FOOTSTEPS This new jazz outfit are similar to Cinematic Orchestra. The core four-piece band build around the drummer, and add nature samples to create a warm, organic sound.
MARCUS BELGRAVE — SPACE ODYSSEY The Detroit jazz legend here with perhaps his finest work. Bizarre modulated sounds give way to background horns and a rolling bassline.
ANENON — CHIMERA This is taken from a split release by Anenon and fellow producer Asura. Each track evolves and takes you on a journey, leaving you attempting to anticipate what will come next. More LA gold.
GONJASUFI — ANCESTORS This track sums up the theme of time and travel perfectly, as Gonjasufi drawls over a beat produced by Gaslamp Killer into the next world, taking you to a place with no name.
TEEBS — ARTHUR’S BIRDS Teebs is known for creating unidentifiable, yet familiar landscapes. Compressed synths drop in and out on this downtempo composition, JAMIE VEX’D — RADIANT INDUSTRY A filthy bassline shakes a lazy drum break to
allowing the percussion to gently punch through, allowing the entire piece to breathe.
within an inch of its existence, while atmospheric noises build around you. Awesome stuff. 43
JUMEIR AH ZABEEL SAR AY, THE PALM JUMEIR AH, DUBAI. NOW OPEN
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LOCAL VOICES
CULTURAL CHALLENGES,
LITERARY SOLUTIONS WAEL AL-SAYEGH WONDERS IF WESTERN WRITING MORES CAN BE TRANSFERRED TO THE EMIRATI LITERARY SCENE
W
hen most Emiratis are introduced to an Emirati writer, we tend to assume that they work for a newspaper, or contribute to one through a column. Other forms of writing, such as poetry and novels, are viewed to be the result of a weekend endeavour rather than the product of a full-time profession. But why is this so? For a group of people who have storytelling so embedded in their tradition and heritage, one would have expected to find a writer in every household.
ILLUSTRATION: VESNA PESIC
Sadly, this is far from the case. From a very early age we are raised by our parents and community in the tradition of what inter-cultural intelligence
and avoiding shame is such that, if left unchecked, it can surpass what is morally and legally right. Societies that are guided by this principle tend to demand accountability to the group rather than the individual. In other words, one’s honour is directly linked to family, tribe, social background, ethnic origin and political and religious grouping. In such environments information is generally shared with caution, as it must fall in line with the mores of the group that may be affected. Answers to simple questions such as “What do you personally think?” can cause a degree of discomfort. An immediate answer
specialists today call a strong sense of “honour and shame”. The
might be given out of politeness, but should not be considered in any way final, because the major
importance of maintaining honour
stakeholders — the tribe, the 45
political and religious groups – are not involved. It is clear, therefore,
nurtured, it does not produce bold and creative writers. There is a
members of the elite. Social mavericks and rebels – who are
that if such cultural factors are significant in what an individual
very high price to pay for spilling the nakhaj, for daring to shed light on topics that have for years been
prepared to risk everything they hold dear for the sake of writing what they truly feel needs to be
left in the dark. Memory runs deep in the Arab world and the wrath of
written – are also a source of inspiration, however rare they are.
1,000 angry tribes is not the safest pet to keep under the writing desk. The writers who can, and do, get away with saying things more bluntly are those with social and
Having said that, the UAE, with its open-minded policies embracing the global economy, has also opened its doors to change. Its people, especially the young, recognise that if they are to
feels comfortable in expressing in private conversation, then those involved in public writing, especially in today’s digital world, face far greater implications. The result of this is that although our traditional way of ordering the world produces a balanced society where long-term relationships are
political clout. These include
A BRIEF HISTORY OF FLIGHT 250BC
1913
1925
1927
Icarus attempts to escape
The first airliner in the
The first inflight movie
Charles Lindbergh
Crete by means of two wings
world — the Benoist XIV
was shown on a Deutsche
performs the first non-stop
made of wax and feathers.
— takes off on New Year’s
Lufthansa flight. The single-
solo flight across the Atlan-
Unfortunately, he flies too
Eve 1913. It flies a number
reel short was silent —
tic. He travels 3,600 miles
close to the sun, the wax
of routes throughout
perfect for the extremely
in the Spirit of St Louis
melts, and he falls to his
Florida, but only man-
noisy airliners. It also helped
from New York to Paris. It
death into the sea. Not an
ages to survive for a few
take passengers’ minds of
took him 33 hours and he
encouraging beginning to
months before going bust.
the brutal turbulence the
survived on five sandwiches
the aviation industry.
A return ticket cost $5.
early planes suffered.
and two canteens of water.
46
LOCAL VOICES
effectively contribute to discussion and literature on the world stage,
With each group given the relative freedom to express its art, music,
to world-class authors. We find ourselves face-to-face with
then a far more robust individual worldview needs to be nurtured,
literature, religion and philosophy, the pressure for Emiratis to
not necessarily to replace the traditional, but to promote their
examine their own cultural identity has never been greater. This influx has been described
writers from other cultures who have already passed through the stages of development we are only
good points while negating the bad. The massive and rapid influx of expat workers into the country to provide the necessary manpower and know-how to help build the nation has produced one of the world’s most multicultural cities.
1930
by some Emirati conservatives as a “cultural nightmare”, but in terms of literature, it’s an Emirati dream come true. Events such as the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature expose local writers
1936
now experiencing. The UAE is ready to nurture the seeds of home-grown writing. The question we have to ask is: how willing are we to swap the traditional gown of being perceived as a writer with the prickly cloth of actually being one?
1976
2011
Ellen Church becomes
American Airlines issues
The Concorde makes its
Centuries of aviation
the first female flight at-
the first Air Travel Card,
debut — flying from
progress reach a zenith with
tendant when she boards a
which allows users to “buy
London to New York in 3.5
the launch of this magazine.
Boeing Air Transport flight.
now and pay later” at a
hours, twice the speed of
OK, we may be exaggerating
The first ‘stewardesses’ were
15 per cent discount — a
sound. The plane is dis-
slightly (only just) but we
actually trained nurses, a
precursor to the modern
continued in 2003 due to
are confident that you will
marketing ploy aimed at
credit card, making travel
rising costs — and making
enjoy this tome as much
making new passengers feel
more affordable and far
the Concorde pilot a rarer
as you will the rest of the
safer while onboard.
more tempting.
breed than US Astronauts.
onboard entertainment.
47
INTERVIEW
MY TRAVELLED LIFE
Michael Palin, 60, is a broadcaster, writer and actor
ON TRAVEL
ON TRAVEL LITERATURE
The amount of travel I do depends on what
I do read other travel books — Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar was a big influence. As was
I am doing. Last year I was away for about a
Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which was wonderful and shows you can be comic
month in total. This year it will be about three
in these types of books. Bruce Chatwin is another one — he gets the essence of the places he
months, as I am filming a new series for the
goes to spot on.
BBC. I still love travelling, it makes you appreciate home, which, for me, is London.
ON WRITING I learnt to write in my own voice and not to copy other writers. I was careful not to spend
ON INDIA
too much time describing sunsets for example as there is no way I could do that as well as
I have been travelling seriously with work
someone like Bruce Chatwin. I prefer to focus on people and their idiosyncracies when I travel.
for more than 20 years now, so most of the places I want to visit, I have done so. There are still places I want to go and places I want to go back to. I was in India last year and have been
4,:$"54
there six or seven times. I love the country, there is always something new to enjoy.
ON WORKING It might be nice to relax somewhere for six weeks, but I have a low tolerance for lying on the beach. Travelling with the BBC is not a bad way to experience places. I get to record the things I do and what I see, so I don’t look back and wonder what happened, as it’s all there on film or in print.
49
STREET PEEP • ER MELBOURNE
WWW.STREETPEEPER.COM
MIA �O BUYER Pants from Comme
UNKNOWN
des Garcons
UNKNOWN
(FAT, +61396623332).
Vintage everything.
HOSHIKA, TATSUYOSHI DESIGNER &, COMPOSER Both jackets from ESS Laboratory (+61394956112, both jeans from Comme
50
des Garcons (FAT,
UNKNOWN
+61396623332). Her bag
UNKNOWN
from Christian Paul.
Vintage Everything.
TILLY ANDY
��, SHOP WORKER
��, DESIGNER
Cardigan from Stella
Jacket from Yohji Yamamoto
McCartney (Cactus Jam,
(Left, +61394199292),
+61396540798), vest from
tanktop from American
Marc Jacobs (Flinders Way,
Apparel (+61395296852),
+61396543331), skirt and
trousers from Dior Homme
shoes from Kinki Gerlinki
(Assin, +61396540158).
(+61396500565)
KATE ��, SHOP WORKER
PRISCILLA ��, STUDENT
Vintage coat. Sweater and
Jumpsuit and shoes from
trousers from Alpha 60
H&M. Bag from American
(+61395102626).
Apparel (+61395296852).
51
PLACE RINO LEVI ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS
1979
PAULISTA AVENUE, Sﾃグ PAULO
IMAGE: PEDRO KOK//WWW.PEDROKOK.COM.BR
FIESP-CIESP-SESI BUILDING
53
STORE PAPERCUP
BEIRUT
MAGAZINES / BOOKS / COFFEE
Y
ou would be forgiven for thinking that one of Lebanon’s
most unique stores is trying to hide away from the public. Located on a back street in the quiet neighbourhood of Mar Mikhael, Papercup has gained a reputation for being the go-to spot for books on design, photography and architecture. Inconspicuous from the outside, the store (plus coffee shop) maintains a simple feel throughout. Books and magazines cover the walls, and the room is broken up by some small well-placed tables. The store – which opened in June 2009 – is the brainchild of Rania Naufal, who wanted to focus on content she felt the Lebanese market had been missing. “When I moved back here [in 2003] I missed a place like this, which can be found in many other cities around the world,” she explained. “At the same time, it was important to find the right balance between niche and accessible. “I felt there was the need for a change, and I had been thinking about it for such a long time, it was either go for it or leave Lebanon completely,” she said. With a lack of coherent market research on the issue, she took the plunge. “People thought I was insane,” she laughed. “They said I was crazy for opening in the middle of nowhere, for opening an
54
WORDS: NOUR SAMAHA
arts-centred bookstore; that it would never work in Lebanon.” But a year and a half since its launch, few can argue against its success. Many in Mar Mikhael credit Papercup with catapulting the neighbourhood from a quiet, familyoriented district to Beirut’s ‘next big thing’. Design stores, architectural offices, themed-bars and avantgarde clothing boutiques have all opened in the past year. “People say that they want to open stores ‘like Papercup’,” Rania said, bashfully. “I don’t feel like I’ve invented something, but maybe I’ve unleashed something.” The clientele range from industry professionals to tourists who just want to come and browse. “People come to buy, come to drink coffee and read, some even come to conduct meetings here,” said Rania. whose shelves currently hold approximately 1,500 books. The sections include art, photography, fashion, design, graphic novels and children’s books. And if it can’t be found, it can be ordered. “With certain publishers I know there is a standard of quality, the only problem is that I have to restrict myself otherwise I’ll end up just ordering for my personal collection!” Papercup, Agopian Building, Pharoah Street, Mar Mikhael, Beirut.Tel: 9611-443083, www.papercupstore.com
55
1
BOOTY BANGKOK
WE TRAWL THE THAI CAPITAL'S MARKETS, MEGA-MALLS AND BOUTIQUES
2
3
Miniature tuk-tuk, $3.
Siang Pure oil, $6.
The Suan Lum Night
Made from chopped
This concoction will
Bazaar Map, $5.
up soft drink cans,
apparently remedy
Nancy Chandler's
this mini tuk-tuk
dizzines and insect
maps are a delight,
pays homage to
bites.Suan Lum Night
and the best way to
Bangkok's iconic
Bazaar, Sathorn Road.
navigate the market.
form of transport.
Suan Lum Night Bazaar,
Covered Market,
Sathorn Road.
Sukhumvit, Soi 13.
3
1
2
4
4
5
6
7
Chocolate Brown
101 Thai Forms, $9.
Elephant Soap, $5.
Tiger Face Lamp, $11.
Notebook, $6.
A record of all things
Jasmine-scented
Handmade lamp-
A locally-made note-
Thai that are fading
soap in the shape of
shade perfect for
book that combines
from memory, from
Thailand's favourite
(big) kids who want
nice design with
pop guns to coconut
animal. King Power,
to bring a slice of
thick matt paper.
crisps.Page One Books,
Suvarnabhumi Airport.
Thailand back home.
King Power,
Central World Plaza.
Suan Lum Night Bazaar,
Suvarnabhumi Airport.
Sathorn Road.
7
6
5
3 Th u
W ed
Tu e
2
1
CALENDAR
i Fr
4 t Sa
5
LITERATURE FEST The annual celebration of all things literary takes place in Dubai. www.eaif l.com
6
n Su
7
on M
8
e Tu
9
ed W
10
u Th
11
Fri
12
Sat
Tue
15
Wed
16
Thu
17 18
Fri
Sat Sun
Mon
Tue We d
Th u
Sa t
M on
Su n
e Tu
28
27
26
GLASGOW COMEDY Four hundred shows in 25 days across the city. glasgowcomedy festival.com
19
20 21
22
www.dolomitiskijazz.com
14
Mon
march
DOLOMITE SKI JAZZ Italy’s coolest music festival is back for another year.
13
Sun
Fr i
PERTH WRITERS FESTIVAL Nearly one million people visit this event yearly — a must for book lovers. www.perthfestival.com.au
HOLI FESTIVAL The annual festival of colours’ takes place across India. www.holifestival.org ART DUBAI The art fair returns for its fifth edition, bringing more than 75 galleries from across the world for the four-day event. www.artdubai.ae
23
24
25 THE HONG KONG SEVENS Rugby action and fun galore. www.hksevens.com
29
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30
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59
31
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GREG G HE HIDDEN CAPTURES T HANOI, ONE BEAUTY OF YEARS ON. THOUSAND
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T N E PRES
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FURFECT?
GING N A H C E TH
F O E C A F
B A R A RE U T A R E T LI
N THE O S I D L R ARY WO NITIES ALLOW R E T I L B U THE ARA EATIVE OPPORT MONTAGUE , N O I T A N S R OF STAG NOLOGY AND C TIAL? BY JAME S E D A C N H E AFTER D T CAN NEW TEC EALISE ITS POTE RISE. BURE TO FINALLY R THE GEN
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63
Even Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz worked as a civil servant while he wrote
O
nce damned by some as the treatise of a traitor, it now reads like a prophecy — a warning of the trappings of absolute power and the corruption of revolutionary zeal. When Alaa al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building hit the shelves in 2002, the intertwining story of the residents of a rundown building in downtown Cairo was a runaway hit, becoming a worldwide smash in Arabic whilst spawning a film and a TV series. More importantly, it got a rare platform and an international audience – it was translated into close to a dozen languages. But the story of Aswany’s novel is almost as revealing as the book’s plot; a thinly veiled metaphor for the cultural and political stagnation of Egypt since
64
the 1952 revolution. It almost didn’t make it thanks to a mixture of money, censorship and indifference. “One [Egyptian publisher] told me, ‘It is a good novel but I am going to lose my job if I publish it,’” Aswany recalled in a 2006 interview. Even after the book had been published, he kept working as a dentist at his surgery in the same building he had based his novel on. It wasn’t until his novel caught the imaginations of readers outside of Egypt that his life began to change. “Before HarperCollins, what I got from The Yacoubian Building I considered as covering the price of the cigarettes and coffee I bought while I was writing it,” he said. That novelists struggle to make ends meet isn’t surprising — that problem bedevils writers from Khartoum to London. But the fact that Aswany
couldn’t make a living from his writing until it reached a wider audience highlighted one of the major difficulties inherent in Arab literature. Even Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, whose masterful Cairo Trilogy is perhaps the best, and best-known, collection of Arab fiction outside the Middle East, worked as a civil servant whilst he wrote. But since 2002, the game has changed, and not just on the streets of Cairo. The advent of a major international literary prize for Arabic novels, the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, and this month’s Emirates Festival of Literature in Dubai means that Arab literature now has a platform that it has never enjoyed before. “Arabic fiction, particularly the novel, has achieved greater technical maturity,” explained Professor Yasir Suleiman, founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge University. “That new voices from different regions of the Arab world, both men and, most notably, women, have entered the Arab literary scene indicates a growing recognition that the novel is on its way to becoming a major literary genre on par with poetry.” The gilded, earnest corridors of institutions such as Cambridge University have, in the past, been the sole entry point for Arab literature to reach a wider
66
audience. But now Professor Suleiman believes it is the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the
region’s capitals, this month’s Emirates Airline Festival of Literature will be a fascinating place to take the
‘Arab Booker’ that is opening doors for Arab writers to achieve the international audience they deserve.
pulse of the Middle East’s literary scene. The festival has brought together a collection of renowned Western and Arab writers to run
Set up in 2007 by the Booker Prize Foundation in London, it chooses the best in Arabic fiction, awarding $50,000 to the winner and guaranteeing an English translation of the book. The first two prizes were won by Egyptians — Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher and Azazel by Youssef Ziedan — while Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles by Saudi writer Abdo Khal won the third. Khal’s book will shortly be released in English, but there will be one market where his books won’t be read — in his native Saudi Arabia. The issue of censorship is the elephant in the room for Arab literature, a
EGYPT WRITES, IRAQ READS AND LEBANON PUBLISHES point brought into sharp relief by the spontaneous street-level protests across the Middle East by people demanding the kind of freedom that would allow them to read whatever they want. “Censorship is always damaging to the full flowering of the various forms of cultural production; I am talking here about institutional censorship which often leads to self-censorship,” agrees Professor Suleiman, before adding a caveat. “I would contend that censorship can be beneficial in an odd and counterintuitive kind of way, in that it can sharpen the ingenuity of the writer in trying to get round the censor. This has actually led to some of the most exquisite titles we have seen in the last two decades in different regions of the Arab world.” Given the facts on the ground, and the new feeling of political awakening on the streets of some of the
workshops, give lectures or read passages from their works; everything from a talk by Kamal Abdel Malek on Arab travel literature to the BBC’s Gavin Esler presenting a lecture on the prescience of George Orwell. According to Tunisian poet Ines Abbasi, who will be appearing at the festival, the issue of censorship will loom large. “The [actions] of some Arab rulers killed freedom of speech for everybody – and of poets first – so they stopped being examples and leaders for people,” she explained when asked of the difficulties in getting her work read in the past. “I believe that there are many intellectual and cultivated people in Arabic cities from the Atlantic to the Gulf... a festival of literature can be held in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sana’a, Tunis, Beirut or Cairo.” In many respects, the festival is taking place as the game is changing. Who knows what the political and cultural make up of countries like Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq will be in 12 months time? Traditionally the three countries have been the intellectual beating heart of the Arab world. As the popular Arab maxim points out: “Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, Iraq reads”. Egypt thanks to its history of incubating Arab ideas and writing, Iraq for its high levels of literacy and Lebanon for his historic publishing freedoms. Can the white heat of revolution finally unlock the latent Arab talent that has been criminally undertapped so far? There has certainly never been more of an interest in the culture of the Middle East from the international community, nor outlets for its works. “There has been a significant expansion of Arab literature outside the Middle East,” agrees Professor Suleiman. “Arabic literature is translated into many more languages than was the case in the past... there is
greater demand than two decades ago for Arabic literary works in university courses in the West. However, there are obstacles that face the spread of Arabic literature in the West. Some people refer to ‘prejudice’. This might be a factor, but the greater factor in my estimation is the translation norms that exist in host societies.” The statistics reflect this. Arabic is the official language of 22 countries and is spoken by five per cent of the world’s population, but fewer than 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic since the 9th century. That’s less than the average yearly output for Spanish books translated into English, according to the Arab Human Development Report. The lack of new Arabic writers is another factor. Pick up a copy of Anchor Books’ Anthology of Modern Arabic Fiction, a book that features short stories and excerpts from 79 Arab writers. The sole Emirati writer on the list is Muhammad Al Murr, who is described as the best-known writer from the UAE. The book also turns up another startling fact: the average age of the 79 living writers (10 have died) featured is 67. And this is a book of ‘modern’ fiction. So where are the young writers? And why aren’t they being published? According to Fadhil Al Azzawi, the renowned Iraqi poet and author, the publishing market in the region is “below zero”. “Most of the Arab publishing houses are publishing houses in name only. Instead of paying authors in advance, as is customary in the west, they usually ask the author to pay the publishing costs upfront.” The Egyptian novelist, Ahmed Alaidy told the Guardian that he believed that younger Arab novelists would find their own way around the decrepit publishing system. “Facebook pages are being created and publishers such as Malamih have published books
from blogs.” There will be more to come. Over the past months, the power of Arab fiction and poetry has been highlighted. Verses of To the Tyrants of the World , by the early 20th century Tunisian poet Abul-Qasim Al-Shabi, were chanted on the streets of Tunis and have become something of an anthem in Egypt, too. Copies of Aswany’s early novel, the banned The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, are being swapped and eagerly devoured in Egypt. The novelist has even become a prominent figure in the protests. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the winds have changed, as much culturally as politically. But according to a recent study, an Arab cultural renaissance is already in full swing. A 2010 Ipsos survey found that the UAE now has the most well-read population in the Middle East. 54.2 per cent of those surveyed said they read books regularly, as opposed to just 10.6 per cent of Egyptians. The cannon of Gulf literature is small, but a huge injection of money into the region’s cultural fabric – the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature being a case in point — means that the “Golden Triangle” of Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq is likely to be challenged in the future. “This would nominate these [oil and gasrich Gulf] countries, known for their big investments in culture and education, to become the new cultural leaders in the region,” the survey concluded. Revolution and oil-funded hyper-capitalism might seem unusual bedfellows, but both might be needed to build on the legacy of Mahfouz and Aswany. “I am optimistic by nature,” says Professor Suleiman. “I think Arabs do a lot of self-flagellation in their acts of cultural stock-taking. I prefer to light candles rather than to curse the dark. Yes there is darkness in the Arab literary scene, but there is also light and there are promising shoots.”
James Montague writes for CNN, is an associate editor of Delayed Gratification and author of When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone (Mainstream)
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the
LONG SHADOW of the SPACE SHUTTLE Growing up as an astronaut’s daughter By Laura Ann Mullane 70
STORIES
I
walk into the apartment parking lot on a sweltering July afternoon in east central Florida. There I see a large bus with the NASA
logo on it. I’m in Cape Canaveral for a family vacation that happens to coincide with a space shuttle launch. Lift-off is scheduled in a few days, and I know without asking
that the families of the astronauts
ferry my father into space three
are staying at the apartment block too, and that the bus will take the family to watch the launch. The
separate times, I might as well be a teenager again. All of a sudden I can feel the fatigue from the sleepless
thought of it makes my stomach sink back against my spine and a
nights and early mornings. I can feel my dry throat and the nerves
wave of nausea roll up to my throat. Although it has been 20 years
that tangled my stomach. All of a sudden, it is once again my father who will ride a plume of smoke and
since I’ve been the one boarding that bus to go watch the shuttle
fire into outer space.
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When I was seven years old, my father, Mike Mullane, was selected to be an astronaut. It was 1978 and NASA had just announced the beginning of a new space programme: the space shuttle
It’s hard to describe the feeling of waiting to watch a person you love about to blast-off into space. — a reusable orbiter that would
the bus with my mother, brother and sister, joining the other families. As we drove, the June sky turned pink and the marshlands that lined the road tried to shrug off the thick haze that had settled on them overnight. The roads were lined with the parked cars and beach chairs of spectators who had camped out
be used to launch satellites and conduct research and, ultimately,
overnight to witness the launch. Many cheered as we passed. American flags flew from car
help construct and supply the International Space Station. They needed astronauts and put out the call for applicants. My father, who was 33, had spent his career in the
antennas. Our bus bypassed the traffic and was waved through security checkpoints. All of it made me feel for a moment like a celebrity. Of course, I wasn’t. No
US Air Force flying in the backseat of fighter jets. He had dreamt of flying in space since he saw the dot of light that was Sputnik arc across the sky as a young boy. So when NASA announced that it was accepting applications, he submitted his and held his breath. When he was selected, I was too young to realise what this career change meant. To me, it was just another move (as the daughter of a military officer, I was used to moving a lot), this time to Houston, Texas, where NASA was headquartered.
one knew who I was. No one even knew who my dad was. Astronauts had long lost the celebrity status they enjoyed during the early years of the space programme and the moon landings. The star of this show was the space shuttle itself. We were all just props. This was the second time we’d made the drive. The day before, the launch had been scrubbed at 20 minutes to lift-off because of a mechanical problem. This day, we all tried to keep our optimism in check, but still the bus vibrated with
Although my father was an
the same excitement and anxiety
astronaut in name beginning in 1978, his first trip on the space shuttle didn’t come until six years
of a busload of children on the first day of school. Once we arrived at the space centre, we were taken to the
later, when I was 13. I was old enough to know his new job meant more than a cross-country move.
launch director’s office on the top floor of the Launch Control Centre. A wall of windows looked
It was the 12th shuttle mission and the first flight of the orbiter
out onto the launch pad three miles away. We waited there
Discovery. The NASA bus picked us up at the condominium in the pre-dawn hours to drive us to Kennedy Space Center. I boarded
and listened to the drone of the countdown play over speakers. At nine minutes to lift off, we were escorted down a hall
and up steps to the roof of the building, from which we would watch the launch. Nine minutes had never taken so long. I stood with my arms locked through my mother’s, who was practically shaking. It’s hard to describe the feeling of waiting to watch a person you love about to blast-off into space. First, there’s the sheer, unadulterated excitement of witnessing an event that feels larger than life itself. The shuttle, even from three miles away, loomed over everything, dwarfing the landscape around it. Vapours swirled at its base. On the roof, speakers amplified the countdown, which echoed between the buildings. You sensed that something big was about to happen, something that couldn’t be contained, that didn’t subscribe to the laws of the universe. But in addition to the excitement, there’s a paralysing fear. I wasn’t fully aware of this at the age of 13, when mortality was still abstract and death seemed like something that happened to other people. I didn’t worry that my dad would be killed on the shuttle mission, even though my father had told us repeatedly about the dangers. Strapping oneself to the equivalent of a bomb and being catapulted to a place with no atmosphere was a risky proposition. Still, I didn’t believe that anything bad would happen to him — not on a conscious level. But on a subconscious one, I was terrified. It’s what had kept me up the night before the launch, pulling me into the bathroom with
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dry heaves that brought tears to my eyes. It’s what made me now hold onto my mom’s arm so tightly that she had to say, “Laura, honey, you’re hurting me.” It’s what made me sometimes imagine a future without my father, with whom I would swim and hike and stare up at the stars. My father, who would bring home flowers for my mom and chocolates for my brother, sister and me. This was the man I might lose forever. The countdown continued. Less than one minute to lift-off. Things were happening quickly now. The announcer ticked off the status of systems and the passing seconds in quick succession. He’s really going, I thought. This is really happening. The final countdown: “T minus 10, nine, eight — we have a go for main engine start — seven, six, five — we have main engine start…” A slight rumbling. Smoke billowed at the bottom of the orbiter. He’s really going. He’s really going. But then, nothing. Four seconds to lift off and the engines shut down. “We have a cut off,” the announcer said. “We have an abort by the onboard computers.” I looked at my mother and then at the rest of the people on the roof—
to hear what the announcer was
the other families and a handful of NASA brass and other astronauts.
saying over the loudspeaker. I just stood there — at a complete loss of
Everyone was staring in disbelief. “What happened?” I asked my mom. “I don’t know.” A loud boom
what to make of everything that was happening. The fact was, I didn’t know. No one did. Even my
rumbled across the distance. What was it? An explosion?
dad sitting in the cockpit didn’t know. The computers had sensed
No, the shuttle was still there. It was just the sound from the initial main engine start finally reaching
a problem and shut down the engines. It wasn’t until later that we learnt about the fire on the
us. My mom and sister broke
launch pad, how my father and
always expected. I didn’t know then that coming home safely wasn’t a foregone
down crying. My brother strained
the other astronauts had sat for a
conclusion. A year and a half later
few terrifying seconds while they wondered whether their rocket would explode. All I knew was that I wouldn’t see my fatner fly into space that day. It would be two more months and more sleepless nights before I would once again stand on the roof with my family and squeeze my mom’s arm and hold my breath until the I heard the words, “We have lift-off,” boom across the loudspeakers. I would feel the ground shake and hear the deafening roar that rattled my chest, and I would watch the shuttle rise past the tower dragging its fire behind it. The shuttle Discovery would carry my father into space and bring him home safely again — just as I’d
— as my dad trained for another mission — the shuttle Challenger would begin its ascent into space,
Today, my father is 65 and an author. He no longer flies, instead
only to be ripped apart when it exploded 73 seconds after lift-off.
mountains. He often says he would never believe he flew in space if he didn’t have the pictures to prove it — the memories seem so distant. I
The shuttle carried family friends, including Judy Resnik, who had flown with my father on Discovery. It also carried the fathers of several of my high school classmates, one of whom was in my year. We had mutual friends but I didn’t know her beyond that. After her father’s funeral and her return to school, I would avert my eyes when I would pass her in the hallway. Every time I would see her I was reminded that I got to go home after school and eat dinner with my dad. I was reminded that my father would see me graduate from high school and college and eventually marry and have children. Her father never would. How could we possibly live in a world that was so unfair? Our fathers took the exact same risks, yet mine survived and hers didn’t. It was an unbearably painful awakening for a 15-yearold girl — this realisation that death is random and heartache is delivered with no regard for logic.
sating his ambition by climbing
know how he feels. I, too, look back on those years in disbelief. My dad joined NASA
He could abandon his desire to fly no more than a racehorse could abandon its desire to run. when I was seven and left when I was 19 after his third shuttle mission. My formative years was spent in the shadow of the space shuttle. Yet when people ask me what it was like to grow up as the daughter of an astronaut, I never know what to say. It was amazing and terrifying. But mostly, it was just my childhood. As I near 40, I’m beginning to understand how my dad’s career shaped me. It’s only now that I’ve realised how rare that focus is. I was raised by a man who knew from an early age what he wanted to be. That is what makes my upbringing unique: not that my
It also came with the awareness that my father would risk death again. He didn’t quit the shuttle programme after Challenger. In fact, he would fly again twice. I
father flew into space, but that he was able to achieve his dream. I wonder now what paths my
never wanted him to quit, nor did my mom or brother or sister. We all
defined my father? I don’t know. But I do know whatever they do, they can look up to the stars and
knew flying was in his blood. He could abandon his desire to fly no more than a racehorse could abandon its desire to run. It was the essence of who he was. Yet each time, I stood on that roof wondering if I’d see my father again.
childrens’ lives will take. Will they have the same ambition that
know nothing is out of reach. Laura Ann Mullane is a writer who lives in northern New Mexico. She is co-author of God Sleeps in Rwanda: A Journey of Transformation. Her father, Mike Mullane, is author of the memoir Riding Rockets.
Following in the footsteps of the legendary writer — who died 50 years ago this year — is a popular pastime for devotees. But even casual visitors to Paris can’t avoid bumping into Hemingway’s ghost. Long-term resident Mark Tungate goes in search of Papa’s Paris
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H
emingway came to Paris for the exchange rate, the bohemian crowd and the booze. While in America prohibition had turned drinking into a crime, Paris was one long party, bookended by aperitifs and champagne. “Exchange is a wonderful thing,” wrote the young Ernest in a column for the Toronto Star. “Red wine is sixty centimes a bottle and beer is forty centimes a glass.” He observed that he and his wife Hadley were able to eat “an excellent meal” for the equivalent of fifty cents each. The article is headlined Living in Paris on $1,000 a year. And yet in A Moveable Feast, his wonderful memoir of Paris in the
1920s, Hemingway insists that he was often poor. He describes loitering by the Seine or in the Luxembourg Gardens in order to avoid the cooking aromas drifting from restaurants. Even his first address was a poor one: a cramped apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, just off the “wonderful narrow crowded market street” of rue Mouffetard. There is a plaque outside the building now, just as there is outside another building around the corner, in rue Descartes. Hemingway rented a tiny office here “in the hotel where [the poet Paul] Verlaine died”. Rue Mouffetard is an ideal first stop for Hemingway hunters. Leave the metro at Place Monge, where the aromas snaking from under the striped
awnings of the market stalls would have set the author’s stomach rumbling. A left turn brings you into rue Mouffetard, which is still pleasingly narrow and cobbled, although rather too conscious of its place on the tourist map. It is lined with souvenir shops, crêperies and cheap restaurants
IMAGE: PAUL BIRIS
serving “Spécialités Libanaises”. But next door to Hemingway’s former home is a delightful bookshop called Les Alizés. “Naturally, we’re a magnet for Hemingway fans,” confirms its proprietor, Christine Dubosson, indicating a shelf crammed with Hemingway titles in French and English. Hemingway noted that rue Mouffetard emptied into a “cesspool” called the Café des Amateurs in the Place de la Contrescarpe. The café no longer exists, and the comfortable Café Delmas in the same location is by no means noisome. It has pleasantly scuffed floorboards, leatherupholstered club chairs, burgundy wallpaper, laconic waiters and tiny cups of overpriced coffee. It is, in other words, utterly Parisian. After a jolt of caffeine, explore
The Closerie des Lilas, at the far end of boulevard du Montparnasse, was an intellectual haunt long before the young writer took a seat here to scratch out some of his best stories. Since opening in 1874, the café had served Zola, Cézanne and Lenin, among others. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hemingway was an admirer of Cézanne’s paintings, whose deceptive simplicity he hoped to imitate in his writing. He came here during the second half of his Paris stint, when he was living above a sawmill in the nearby rue Notre Dame des Champs (at number 113, to be exact). The café’s green-shaded terrace still lends it a bucolic air; in the 1920s it must have seemed positively rural. Hemingway liked it not just because it was convenient, but also because it was a brisk walk from the more fashionable Montparnasse bars, such
the cramped medieval streets with their evocative names: rue de l’Arbalète (Street of the
as the La Rotonde, Le Select and Le Dôme. Although he occasionally dropped in to those places to catch up with gossip and friends — notably the artist Jules Pascin — he needed the calm of the Lilas to work.
Crossbow), rue de Pot de Fer (Street of the Iron Cauldron) and
Today, its softly lit piano bar, urbane service and daunting menu – expect to pay more than 20 euros for a main course – make it more of a
rue de l’Epée de Bois (Street of the Wooden Sword). You’ll need to
treat than an everyday haunt. To walk off lunch, cut through the Luxembourg Gardens, where the author spent many hours strolling and thinking. And there is indeed something
work up an appetite, because it’s almost lunchtime.
meditative about its well-tended gravel paths and watchful statues.
HEMINGWAY: A LIFE LESS ORDINARY If your aim is true, you should emerge at rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lived at number 27 with her partner Alice B Toklas. A writer and art collector (Picasso painted her portrait), Stein invited Hemingway to her Saturday evening salons and taught him much about modern art. She coined
Hemingway is a global
Americans in Paris and
brand. His rugged persona
Spain, captured the spirit of
the phrase “The Lost Generation” to describe those who had survived the First World War. Having developed her own experimental – some might say eccentric – writing style, she had a strong influence on Hemingway’s work. Inevitably, given the size of the egos involved, they later fell out. This would be an excellent moment to make your way to Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore and lending library run by Hemingway’s friend Sylvia Beach, at 12 rue de l’Odéon. Unfortunately, it closed in 1941. The good news is that another bookstore of the same name opened 10 years later.
and sharply defined universe
“The Lost Generation” when
— good food and drink, war
it was published in 1924.
and passion — are as easy
Hemingway remained a
to grasp as his diamond-
reporter at heart. A Farewell
clear writing. His colourful,
to Arms was inspired by his
restless life has proved so
experiences in Italy, while For
inspiring that restaurateurs
Whom the Bell Tolls captures
and hoteliers the world over
the Spanish Civil War, which
delight in informing tourists
he covered as a journalist.
that ‘Papa’ Hemingway ate,
He wrote with great relish
stayed or lived ‘here’.
of bars, bullfighting, boxing,
Born in a Chicago suburb,
fishing and big game hunt-
Ernest Miller Hemingway
ing. His world embraced
began his career as a
France, Spain, Italy, Key West,
reporter on the Kansas City
Cuba and Africa. The Old
Star. In 1918 — at the age of
Man and the Sea won a
18 — he left for the Italian
Pulitzer Prize in 1952; two
front to serve as a volunteer
years later Hemingway won
ambulance driver for the
the Nobel Prize for
You can experience its tattered charm at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, overlooking the Seine.
Red Cross. For much of the
Literature. It was only
1920s he lived in Paris, where
when his health began to
he honed the stripped-down
deteriorate that he sank into
Nearby, take a break at the Place Saint Michel, where Hemingway
writing style that was to
depression. No longer able
make him famous. His first
to satisfy his lust for life, he
drank St James rum and lusted after a young French woman while trying to write in an unnamed café.
novel, The Sun Also Rises,
shot himself with a 12-gauge
about a group of young
shotgun on July 2, 1961.
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IMAGE: RICHARD GILLANDERS
TYPE DESIGN BY: JAKOB NYLUND
When Hemingway felt flush, he would go for dinner at a buzzing brasserie called Michaud’s in Saint Germain. The well-preserved space is now occupied by an equally lively establishment called Le Comptoir des Saints Pères. Expect a well-off, fashionable crowd. After dining, the classic Hemingway nightlife option would have been the Dingo Bar, at 10 rue Delambre, where he first met Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway paints a teasing portrait of his fellow Lost Generation author in A Moveable Feast. Sadly, this important literary landmark is now an Italian restaurant. For a more authentic Hemingway experience, take the metro to Opéra and seek out Harry’s New York Bar, at 5 rue Daunou. Barely changed since its opening in 1911, it features white-coated barmen, dark wood, walls decorated with faded university pennants, and the reassuring rattle of the cocktail shaker. Finally, it is a short walk from here to the Ritz, in Place Vendôme. Legend has it that Hemingway “liberated” the hotel’s bar when he arrived in Paris with the allied troops in 1944. (He took the concept of the “embedded” journalist rather too far and recruited a band of resistance fighters on the outskirts of the city.) He was certainly a regular customer – and today this cosy, unexpectedly gentlemanly enclave is called The Bar Hemingway. Take a seat, crack open one of the great man’s novels, and enjoy.
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THE DISAPPEARING EXPAT Think Skype and iPods make life abroad better? You don’t know what you’re missing By Chuck Thompson
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W
e rioted for Doritos.I
don’t say this proudly. It was just something all of us had to do. This was Japan, 1991. There were 12 of us living in an obscure burg called Kojima, a blandas-tofu bedroom community unofficially known as the parking lot of southern Honshu. We were foreign English teachers — mostly Americans, with a few scattered Brits and the usual landless drifters the ESL trade attracts — but our real job was surviving the loneliness and want of 20th century rural Japan. Believe me, no matter how much you think you like sushi, no matter how healthy you think dried seaweed flakes are, you really don’t want to see them on your plate everyday. Rumours of the Dorito miracle began trickling into the faculty office around lunchtime. Some sort of “American Day” promotion going on at Happy Town, Kojima’s ironically named shopping complex. When Shanghai Bob brought confirmation to me he spoke nervously, like a guy telling you about the tunnel he’s been digging beneath his cell for 88
the past nine years. “I got word from Glasser,” Shanghai Bob half-whispered. “He’s calling the display ‘smallish’. Twenty bags, 30 tops. No one else has discovered it yet.” “Can we get there before the others find out?” I asked, casting a wary eye at my comrades, just then curiously slinking out of the room. “Only if we skip our one o’ clock classes.” By the time Bob and I reached Happy Town, of course, the carefully arranged groceryaisle display featuring the exotic American snack treat had been decimated. You think Target the day after Thanksgiving is a knife fight? At Happy Town, the entire foreign staff of our school was staging a minor insurrection around the Doritos pyramid, scrambling for the last of the hallowed yellow bags, issuing ultimatums and elbowing each other like NBA power forwards, while a dozen bewildered Japanese housewives looked on in mute awe. Within minutes, Kojima’s expat brigade had made off with every known tortilla chip in the prefecture. Whatever local appetites might have been stimulated for this prized American delicacy would have to wait a year or two for
the next shipment to arrive. Japan is where I learned to be an expat. Aside from a few unique details — sumo Saturdays, the incomprehensibly repulsive dough ball known as “manju” which tastes like decomposing toenail clippings encased in vulcanized halibut flesh — the experience was typical of life abroad. Which is to say, a hard, hungry, pathological existence out of which one scratches and claws for a few dramatic rewards; a world in which minor disappointments are elevated to Greek tragedy and meagre fortunes (“Doritos in Kojima? Are we dreaming?”) assume levels of heroic conquest. Whether it’s goggle-eyed Americans explaining the words “Peace Corps” to warlords in Uzbekistan, wary Germans sizing up hand-scrawled signs outside of dentist offices in Africa or eager Aussies lying to their Argentine hosts that theirs is indeed perfectly correct and
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acceptable English pronunciation, it is upon the twin anvils of privation and isolation that for centuries the expat experience has been forged. Or so I’ve always believed. Having left the expat milieu behind in the mid-90s, I’ve continued to assume that, like the sun, stars and Ichiro dribbling out 200 infield hits a year, the trials of residency abroad had remained a reliable constant in an ever-shifting world. This notion began crumbling for me a couple of years ago, when I went to work in an office in Hong Kong. Initially, the team of expats I was working with appeared to be a familiar lot — youngish Brits, Yanks, Aussies, Canucks, Filipinos, Singaporeans and a few unidentifiable others. After a few months, however, I began to realise that a fundamental shift in the expat universe had
occurred during my years away; a change that makes the modern avatars of international adventurism profoundly different than the ones I’d slogged alongside
The level of assimilation expats around the world enjoy today was unthinkable 20 years ago in the 80s and 90s. In a book called Smile When You’re Lying, I wrote, “All expat life is limbo. Lurking behind every discussion, the Return Home, whether it’s one or two or 10 years away, provides the fundamental tension to every moment you live abroad.” The expats I was drinking beer with in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, however, never talked about going home. Ever. They didn’t avoid the subject
of home merely because they were content where they were — though most seemed to be that — but because, even as foreigners, they had become an integral part of the places in which they lived. This was startling to me. The level of assimilation expats around the world enjoy today — and not only in Brit-influenced Hong Kong — would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. Three fundamental changes appear to account for the disruption in the tectonics of expat citizenry. The first is obvious, though no less important for it. As it has everything else, the Internet has dramatically altered the rules of the overseas game. By this I don’t simply mean a reliance on the comforting immediacy of daily Skype chats with the peeps back in Leeds or the ability to conduct
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seamless bank transactions with the home branch in Topeka. Far more revolutionary is that the Internet has eliminated the primary horror that once damaged so many lives abroad. I speak, of course, of the extended separation from beloved organisations bearing such manly
from his apartment in Sheung Wan. And with the familiar drawl of Jon Miller providing the play-
appellations as Cornhuskers,
by-play, to boot. In addition to round-the-clock hometown connectivity (“Uncle Paul finally had that boil lanced – send pics!”), the flattened world economy has mostly eliminated the need for Doritos riots. Not only
The flattened world economy has mostly eliminated the need for Doritos riots
can the resourceful expat find pretty much any chip or pizza topping anywhere in the world — from personal experience I’m including the Congo in
Cottagers and Magpies. In Japan in the 1980s and 90s, I used to watch month-old VHS tapes of Los Angeles Lakers games kindly shipped to me by sympathetic friends back home. Today in Hong Kong, I sometimes sit next to a California native and rabid San Francisco Giants fan who not only didn’t miss an inning of the team’s God-appointed World Series triumph in 2010, but who, thanks to Slingbox and MLB.com, followed the entire season live
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this claim — but he can choose between synthetic ranch, roasted chipotle, creamy spinach, spicy habañero, rosemary and basil, toasted camel droppings and yak butter flavourings. In other words, the market for canned tortillas we expats in Kojima single-handedly kept alive in 1991 has pretty much collapsed. More significant than either of these two developments, however, is that the exhausted world seems finally to have given in to, or at least gotten used to, the flood of expats that began spreading
across the globe en masse in the post-colonial era. Once an exotic creature at which benighted locals could not shout “Hello!” at often enough, the expatriate nowadays is a common enough specimen in most countries that he or she can pedal a bicycle to local markets or country schoolrooms without inciting more than one or two shrieks from disbelieving rubes among the hoi polloi. The most astonishing evidence of the growing international status of the foreign resident comes from Japan, perhaps the most defiantly homogenous society on earth. According to David Askew, associate professor of law at Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, in 1965 a mere one in 250 marriages in Japan were between couples of mixed ethnicity. By the mid-2000s, the number of mixed-race marriages had surged to one in 15 nationwide, and one in 10 in Tokyo. Between 1987 and 2004, more than half a million children were born in Japan with at least one foreign parent. You don’t need to be John
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Blackthorne to read the writing on the scroll. If the world can’t count on Japan to keep its foreign population at arm’s length, it’s pointless to expect anyone else to do so. One can easily argue in favour of these developments—life is plainly less troublesome for today’s expats — but before the experience of living among strangers in strange lands disappears for good, I think it’s worth pointing out the dimmer side of all this progress. Whether in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Mumbai or Cape Town, it’s nice being accepted by the crowd — I hated being poked and prodded everywhere I went in rural Japan 20 years ago — but to me there seems little point in leaving one place for another if, just like back home, you end up with the same old TV, same old food, same old blasé neighbours.
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Some of the baggage that comes with human migration, of course, will always remain. In the midst of my worried ruminations on the passing of yet another touchstone of the international travel experience, I met an American in Tokyo who spent 20 minutes
Nothing spoils and expat's day like running into a tourist from his or her home country
lambasting the poor attitudes of linguistically challenged
“Why do these people even bother coming here?” the American wondered aloud, adopting the unmistakably uppity air of the besieged local. “If they don’t like it, stay home.” For a second, I nodded in Old Asia Hand empathy. Then I realised he might just as easily have been describing me, circa 1991. Or, for that matter, 2011. The malcontent who, for all the appreciation of instant video chatting, smart phoning and on-demand Doritos snarfing, still recognises the value of cultural isolation, and who understands that the scars it leaves
foreigners who had yet to master the Tokyo subway system and who complained incessantly
behind are almost always worth the trouble it takes to earn them.
about the peculiarities of
Chuck Thompson is the author of Smile When You Are Lying and To Hellholes and Back. He currently lives in Hong Kong and his latest book about the American Deep South will be released in 2012.
Japanese cuisine. Nothing spoils an expat’s day like running into a tourist from his home country.
LAND OF THE
LOST
IMAGES: JANA VUJTKOVA
PICO IYER REVELS IN THE COMPLICATIONS OF LIFE IN MAURITIUS, A PLACE WHERE NOTHING IS CERTAIN
I
was walking, almost alone it seemed, with
two lion-cubs through a wilderness evocative of Africa. The feral creatures were trotting along beside me, completely free, turning round every now and then to snap, or whipping their heads back if I touched them too close to their necks. “You’ve got to be vigilant,” whispered their young Zimbabwean manager, Ben. Three other visitors also kept their distance as we walked for an hour through the wild. Not many minutes later, a cheetah was running his rough tongue up and down my palm, again and again, three others languidly stretched out beside him, and an electrified fence five feet away from us. “You see that?” said Ben suddenly. “I took my mind off him for a second and he bit me!” Indeed. And yet it’s the prospect of a bite that gives a pretty face its life and character; it’s the edge in any seeming paradise that brings it out of the domain of fantasy and into a place you can touch and interact with. I’ve seen the most gorgeous beaches of my life in the Gulf of Thailand, but both Sri Lanka and Cuba (and Mauritius sometimes seems to be the love-child of the two) deepen their beauties with the power 99
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of social complication. Bali becomes interesting to me only when you recall that it has been the site of mass slaughter and people “running amok.” So travelling across Mauritius felt at many moments like that memorable walk with the eightmonth-old cubs, brought over from Africa, who were as engagingly photogenic and as domestic seeming as their names, Kimba and Kiara. I knew things could turn at any moment. As you drive around the small country roads of Mauritius, under billowing cottoncandy clouds and over rolling grassy hills, you see Ali Coiffeur give way to Chan Tek Keng Store (“So delicious, so Mauritius”), and then a scrappy shack offering “Samoussa” and “Gateaux.” The Trinidad of the Indian Ocean, in fact, takes its name from a Dutch prince, has a capital city (Port Louis) that was rechristened by the British after a French monarch, and features a population that is mostly of Indian Hindu descent, though nearly every town has some Chinese as well. The billboards
along the island’s single highway offer slogans in French, with additional sentences in English. As soon as you land in Mauritius — a friendly dodo is stamped into your passport in a town called Plaisance — you catch glimpses of the blue-green waters and palmy beaches that must have captured every newcomer who sailed in. The sharp green hills that rise up between the empty white-sand strips and over the high sugarcane fields make you wonder if you’ve arrived in Rio, though shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. Vivid cardinals dart down onto your table to pick at papayas, and mynahs sing from the trees. The faces are Indian, but the voices sound like Catherine Deneuve after a spell in Jamaica, and the Creole they utter is a melange of several different tongues. So Mauritius quickly becomes much more interesting and textured than its parasailing options and massage oils. It first appeared on Europe’s map in 1507 through the Portuguese,
“A PLACE FULL OF GODS IS LIKELY TO HAVE DEMONS, TOO”
but they soon moved on from an uninhabited place that the Arabs had called the “Isle of Desolation.” The Dutch landed in 1598, after three of their ships were blown offcourse by a cyclone, to find birds so tame you could catch them (hence the end of the poor, too-trusting dodo) and turtles so aged they could carry ten men on their backs, it was said. The Dutch brought in slaves, Javanese deer and sugarcane, but they too were driven away — by cyclones — in the early 18th century, so the French came in, followed by pirates. When the British took over in 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars, they allowed the locals to retain their land, their language and their legal code, with the result that green British road-signs now point to Flic-a-Flac and Domaine de l’Etoile. They also brought in Indians and Chinese to replace the slaves. Mauritius gained independence in 1968 but it has never quite decided who or what it is. The brochures proudly tell you that it’s the home of seggae music, the fusion of sega and reggae, and in the upmarket hotels you can hear sitars and tablas accompanied by rhythm guitars.
But the headlines tell you that in 1999 the island was paralysed by four days of rioting after the Creole inventor of seggae, Kaya, an outspoken champion of Creole rights, was found dead in his prison cell, perhaps the victim of Hindu policemen. A statue of Queen Victoria stands near the thriving street market in Port Louis, but on one bus-stand someone has scribbled, in black, “NO RACISM.” I had expected, when I arrived last winter, to find myself surrounded by hedge-fund managers from London and investment bankers from Hong Kong. Yet landing just after a cyclone hit the global economy, I found myself in a luxury resort made for people unaccustomed to luxury. Brawny Russians sauntered through the gardens, taking pictures of their platinum-card companions under every tree. A pair of slightly dotty, imperial Brits swam silently through a pool with snorkels on. Hip Indian couples from London circled the Business Centre computers at dawn — and, in an entire week on the island, for the first time in my life I heard not a single American or Japanese voice.
“THIS IS A PLACE WHERE NOTHING IS UNMIXED”
You can walk with the lions in Mauritius or stroll along the ocean floor; you can kayak or waterski or pad around colonial houses such as Eureka. You can eat bat curry and visit the small museum in Port Louis that shows off the island’s most famous possession, the Mauritius “Blue Penny” stamp. Yet at the same time you’re advised not to walk around Port Louis after dark, and at some of the most lyrical beaches, told not to swim. Mauritius seemed to me a place where nothing, delightfully, is certain or unmixed. And if its sights are often just its faces, its most remarkable events seem to be its skies. Never have I been to a place with heavens so large that they seem to be made for triptyches. Over and over in Turtle Bay, I’d look to the left and see a grey-black sky angry with storm clouds. To the right was the depthless blue calm of a sunlit day in midsummer. Three, four times a day the skies broke and the water came down in torrents, stopping as abruptly as it had begun. To walk down the beach was to step from April to November. And then into April again. Mauritians will point out to you with excitement their gleaming new high-rises saying HSBC, Accenture, Ernst and Young, and the callcentres and “Cyber City” that are beginning to loom over the “Hare Krishna Land” centre and the Birla Institute of Technology. Yet for a typical visitor from the city, its most stunning sight may be its botanical gardens, You can see cashew nut trees and Cuba royal palms and 35 kinds of mango there.
You can eat lotus-seeds, smell cashews in the raw, watch 200-yearold turtles and African carp. There are 80 kinds of palm, nutmeg plants, torch ginger and Bodhi trees. “Mauritius is the Garden of Eden,” announced Premanand Parmessur, a spirited, irresistible character who likes to entertain visitors around the elephant-foot palms. “But the only difference is, there are no snakes. No dangerous animals at all. Nothing poisonous.” Then, inevitably, he cited Mark Twain’s report on the island: “you gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.” That sounds, out of context, like a sparkling endorsement from one of the least impressionable satirists around. But what is often left out in Mauritian accounts is that Twain was not recording his own observations there, but, rather, those of the local boosters who told him that Mauritius was the greatest place around (for those who had never been off the island). Just as I was thinking all this, the palm trees began shuddering so violently that it sounded like rain, and then indeed the rain crashed down again, so violently that I had to wade through water up to my ankles just to get back to my room. Cyclones sweep through Mauritius every summer, The Garden of Eden, I recalled, is the place you leave — only to be confronted, so the old books say, by the Flood. Pico Iyer is a British writer who has written for The New York Times, National Geographic and Time among others. He has also written 11 books, his most recent, The Open Road, is out now on Vintage Departures.
A Few Miles Travelled A SELECTION OF OUR FAVOURITE TRAVEL LITERATURE
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T
ravel writing often gets a bad rap; with images of sozzled scribes lazily typing away, nervously eyeing the locals. Yet the genre has a number of classics;
each rooted very much in a place, some written by locals, some written by visitors; all enthralling. The books illustrate the bravery and creativity of these writers who travelled to deserts, mountain ranges and cities, each coming back with something new. One of bravest was Freya Stark, whose A Winter in Arabia is a must for anyone interested in the Middle East. We had no space for it here, but that shouldn’t stop you from hunting down a copy. As for the rest, read, and enjoy.
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HONG KONG — Jan Morris A portrait of a city between two goliaths — caught in the dying days of the British Empire and about to
den, through both World Wars and up to the late ‘80s. Morris is a master of observation and her take on the
be swallowed up by China, Morris captures Hong Kong brilliantly. Her prose radiates an almost kinetic
city — particularly in the early years — is fascinating. She is fond of the place, but never sentimental, and
energy, reminiscent of the city itself, and her research her clear-eyed prose is wonderful. Morris, of course, and detail bring the place to life. She tracks the has written many books, but this is one of her finest. Vintage Departures, 1985 origins of the city, when it was an opium smuggling
MAXIMUM CITY — Suketu Mehta If ever a book captured the soul of a city, then Mehta’s tome on Mumbai does. Maximum City is a riveting look at the chaos, noise, people and sprawl that makes up Mumbai. Mehta writes beautifully, interspersing personal accounts of his childhood with
a place as diverse as Mumbai in one book, but after reading it, one is filled with an urgent need to visit the place to see what Mehta has seen; surely the point of a book like this. Although Maximum City is rooted in one place, it’s as fluid and engaging as any travel
stories about fame, power, crime, poverty, money and book of the past decade. love. Of course, it’s impossible to fully encapsulate
Vintage, 2004
VIDEO NIGHT IN KATHMANDU — Pico Iyer A striking portrait of the juxtaposition between East and West, Iyer brought a fresh eye to Asia, travelling
Iyer’s eye for detail illuminates both the mundane and the unusual. While this book is very much a
everywhere from Nepal to Bali and describing the influence of Western culture on these (once) exotic
product of its time (these days Asia exports as much culture as it imports) its intelligence and
places. Iyer’s book — published in 1988 — is prophetic, and was one of the first treatises on globalisation’s influence on the region. The writing is wonderful, and
humour make it indispensable nearly a quarter of a century on. A writer of great wit and compassion. Vintage Departures, 1988.
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THE ROAD TO OXIANA — Robert Byron Robert Byron’s classic is regarded as the first example of great travel writing. Covering Byron’s
on the architecture he encounters around descriptions of the more ridiculous characters he
ten-month journey to Persia and Afghanistan in the early 1930s, the book is acerbic, eccentric
meets on his journey. For all his barbs, Byron has a deep love for Persia, and especially Afghanistan, and
and intelligent. Byron pulls no punches and it is his candour and wit that set this book apart from contemporary travel journals. He weaves treatises
his beautiful, sparse writing captures both countries wonderfully. A true classic. Vintage, 1937
TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY — John Steinbeck Although known primarily for fiction (his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize), Steinbeck wrote non-fiction all his life. Travels with Charley is part travelogue, part treatise on what he saw as a disappearing America. He journeys from Maine to California with his dog Charley and records a country on the brink of the 1960s. His writing is as elegant and
punchy as ever and is rooted in a sense of place; you get a feel for the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between the men he meets and the land they live in. While Steinbeck was at the height of his fame he was also aware he was dying, and wanted to see America one last time. Poignant and engaging. Penguin, 1962
A (not so )
INNOCENT ABROAD MARK TWAIN’S EPIC VOYAGE
I
n 1867 Mark Twain set sail on the Quaker City for a months-long expedition to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Twain uses biting satire, both to highlight the pomposity of his travelling
companions and the absurd claims of the travelogues of the time. Originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles for The Alta California (which paid the $2,000 cost of the trip), the book was released in 1869 and remains one of the best-selling travel books of all time.
FRANCE We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France. What a bewitching land it is! — What a garden! Surely the leagues of bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their grasses trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped and measured and their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners. Surely the long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the beautiful landscape like the squares of a checker-board are set with line and plummet, and their uniform height determined with a spirit level.
Surely the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-paned and sand-papered every day. How else are these marvels of symmetry, cleanliness and order attained? It is wonderful. There are no unsightly stone walls, and never a fence of any kind. There is no dirt, no decay, no rubbish anywhere — nothing that even hints at untidiness — nothing that ever suggests neglect. All is orderly and beautiful — every thing is charming to the eye. We have seen every thing and tomorrow we go to Versailles. We shall see Paris only for a little while as we come back to take up our line of march for the ship, and so I may as well bid the beautiful
city a regretful farewell. We shall travel many thousands of miles after we leave here, and visit many great cities, but we shall see none so enchanting as this. I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sincerely proud to be able to make — and glad, as well, that my comrades cordially endorse it, to wit; by far the handsomest women we have seen in France were born and reared in America. I feel, now, like a man who has redeemed a failing reputation and shed lustre upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single just deed done at the eleventh hour. Let the curtain fall, to slow music.
All is orderly and beautiful —
EVERY THING IS charming to the eye
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MILAN We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house. They were going to put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we objected. Each of us had an Italian farm on his back. We could have felt affluent if we had been officially surveyed and fenced in. We chose to have three bath-tubs, and large ones — tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real estate, and brought it with them. After we were stripped and had taken the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity that has embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of Italy and France — there was no soap. I called. A woman answered, and I barely had time to throw myself against the door — she would have been in, in another second. I said: “Beware woman! Go away from here — go away, now, or it will be the worse for you. I am an unprotected male, but I will preserve my honor at the peril of my life!” These words must have frightened her for she scurried away very fast. Dan’s voice rose on the air “Oh bring some soap, why don’t you!” The reply was Italian. Dan resumed: “Soap, you know — soap. That is what I want — soap. S-o-a-p, soap; s-op-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap. Hurry up! I don’t know how you Irish spell it, but I want it. Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it. I’m freezing.” I heard the doctor say, impressively: “Dan, how often have we told
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The English know how to travel comfortably, and they carry
SOAP WITH THEM you that these foreigners can not understand English? Why will you not depend on us? Why will you not tell us what you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country? It would save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance causes us. I will address this person in his mother tongue: ‘Here, cospetto! Corpo di Bacco! Sacramento! Solferino! — Soap, you son of a gun!’ Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose your ignorant vulgarity.” Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at
once, but there was good reason for it. There was not such an article about the establishment. It is my belief that there never had been. They had to send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got it, so they said. We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same things occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have divined the reason for this state of things at last. The English know how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other foreigners do not use the article.
VENICE What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is! Narrow streets, vast
seen, in these old churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate
solemn past, and looking upon the scenes and mingling with the
gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,
sepulchre ornamentation such as we never dreamt of before. We
peoples of a remote antiquity. We have been in a half-waking sort of
and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the restaurant, you must call
have stood in the dim religious light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed drifting back, back, back, into the
dream all the time. I do not know how else to describe the feeling. A part of our being has remained still in the nineteenth century while another part of it has seemed in
a gondola. It must be a paradise for cripples, for verily a man has no use for legs here. For a day or two the place looked like an overflowed Arkansas town, because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming in and out of the alleys and byways, that I could not get rid of the impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet, and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water mark on the houses and the streets full of mud and rubbish. Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice. We have
some unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.
NARROW STREETS,
vast gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries
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CONSTANTINOPLE When I think about how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath; for years and years I have promised myself that I would yet enjoy one. Many and many a time, in fancy, I have lain in the marble bath, and breathed the slumberous fragrance of Eastern spices that filled the air; then passed through a weird and complicated system of pulling and hauling, and drenching and scrubbing, by a gang... who loomed vast and vaguely through the steaming mists, like demons; then rested for a while on a divan fit for a King; then passed through another complex ordeal, and each one more fearful than the first; and, finally, swathed in soft fabrics, been conveyed to a princely saloon and laid on a bed of eider down, where eunuchs, gorgeous of costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed, or contentedly gazed at the rich hangings of the apartment, the soft carpets, the sumptuous furniture, the pictures, and drank delicious coffee, smoked the soothing narghili, and dropped, at the last, into tranquil repose, lulled by sensuous odors from unseen censers, by the gentle influence of the narghili’s
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Persian tobacco, and by the music of fountains that counterfeited the pattering of summer rain. That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books of travel. It was a poor, miserable imposture. The reality is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden. They received me in a great court, paved with marble slabs; around it were broad galleries, one above another, carpeted with seedy matting, railed with unpainted balustrades, and furnished with huge rickety chairs, cushioned with rusty old mattresses, indented with
impressions left by the forms of nine successive generations of men who had reposed upon them. The place was vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human horses. The cadaverous, half-nude varlets that served in the establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of romance, nothing of Oriental splendour. They shed no entrancing odours — just the contrary. Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually suggested one glaring, unsentimental fact — they wanted what they term in California “a square meal.”
For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the
TURKISH BATH
BEIRUT
EGYPT
The rest of us had nothing to do but look at the beautiful city of Beirut, with its bright, new houses nestled among a wilderness of green shrubbery spread abroad over an upland that sloped gently down to the sea; and also at the mountains of Lebanon that environ it; and likewise to bathe in the transparent blue water that rolled its billows about the ship (we did not know there were sharks there.) We also had to range up and down the town and look at the costumes. These are picturesque and fanciful, but no so varied as Constantinople and Smyrna. A young gentleman (I believe he was a Greek) volunteered to show us around the city, and said it would afford him great pleasure, because he was studying English and wanted practice in that language. When we had finished the rounds, however, he called for renumeraton — said he hoped the gentlemen would give him a few piastres (equivalent to a few five cent pieces). We did so. The Consul was surprised when he heard it, and said he knew the young fellow’s family very well, and that they were an old and highly respectable family and worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Some people, so situated, would have been ashamed of the berth he had with us and his manner of crawling into it.
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The Sphynx: a hundred and twentyfive feet long, sixty feet high, and a hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember rightly — carved out of one solid block of stone harder than any iron. The block must have been as large as the Fifth Avenue Hotel before the usual waste (by the necessities of sculpture) of a fourth or a half of the original mass was begun. I only set down these figures and these remarks to suggest the prodigious labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so faultlessly, must have cost. This species of stone is so hard that figures cut in it remain sharp and unmarred after exposure to the weather for two or three thousand years. Now did it take a hundred
years of patient toil to carve the Sphynx? It seems probable. We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother of civilization — which taught Greece her letters, and through Greece Rome, and through Rome the world. We were glad to have seen that land which had an enlightened religion with future eternal rewards and punishment in it, while even Israel’s religion contained no promise of a hereafter. We were glad to have seen that land which had glass three thousand years before England had it, and could paint upon it as none of us could paint now; that land which knew, three thousand years ago, well nigh all of science and surgery which
We were glad to have seen that land which had glass
THREE THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE England had it
EPILOGUE
science has discovered lately; which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries and necessities of an advanced civilization which we have gradually contrived and accumulated in modern times and claimed as things that were new under the sun; that paper untold centuries before we dreamt of it — and waterfalls before our women thought of them; that had a perfect system of common schools so long before we boasted of our achievements in that direction that it seems forever and forever ago; that so embalmed the dead that flesh was made almost immortal — which we can not do; that built temples which mock at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded little prodigies of architecture; that old land that knew all which we know now, perchance and more; that walked in the broad highway of civilization in the gray dawn of creation, ages and ages before we were born; that left the impress of exalted Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx to confound all, who,
Wherever we went in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation,
a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris
and, I suppose I may add, created a famine. None of us had ever been any
they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them
where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance to the natural instincts that were in us, and trammelled
in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, because we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them. And yet we took kindly to the manners and
ourselves with no ceremonies, no conventionalities. We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans — Americans! When we found that a good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere, that had lately been at war with somebody, we pitied the ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance. Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud of it. The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the
might seek to persuade the world
wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we
that imperial Egypt, in the days of her high renown, had groped in darkness.
looked out for expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of
customs, and to the fashions of the various peoples we visited. The grand pilgrimage is over. Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory to it, I am able to say in kindness. I bear no malice toward any individual that was connected with it, either as passenger or officer. Things I did not like yesterday I like very well today, now that I am at home, and always I shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves me, without ever saying a malicious word. The expedition accomplished all that its programme promised and we ought to be satisfied with the management of the matter, certainly. Bye-bye!
The Innocents Abroad is published by Penguin
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INTERRUPTED
Vietnam’s capital is 1,000 years old and as enchanting as ever. Greg Girard captures Hanoi’s hidden charms
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A family altar in the backyard of a home in the old city (left). This was only discovered after knocking on the door of someone’s house and asking to get up to their second floor balcony to photograph a street scene. The elderly gentleman who let me into his home asked if we’d like to see more of the house and, showing us his backyard, revealed this altar. A barber’s chair in an open-fronted shop (below). Scenes like this are not uncommon, although they are becoming rarer.
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This dense low-rise neighbourhood is near Hanoi’s main railway station, and throughout the day locomotives pull freight cars and passenger carriages past kitchens, bedrooms and small shops that line the tracks. As Hanoi modernises, one has to wonder how long these homes and shops, built alongside an active railway line in the centre of the city, will last.
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Getting onto balconies in private homes is always a challenge, and in this case it took a couple of tries before the occupants relented and let me photograph the view from their balcony. Part of the home had been converted into a workshop, and so as I photographed this scene, a room full of young women was sewing plastic awnings in the room behind me.
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ALL IMAGES: GREG GIRARD//WWW.GREGGIRARD.COM
A view of raised train tracks curving through the centre of the city. The building where we took this photo is owned by a family with a bakery business on the ground floor, and it took several visits before the bakery staff called a family member. Happily they agreed to allow us access to their rooftop, revealing a view of the raised tracks curving through the city. Hanoi Calling is out now on Thames & Hudson
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IMAGE: BALDOVINO BARANI; WWW.BALDOVINOBARANI.COM; STYLING BY HOLLY SUAN GRAY; WWW.HOLLYSUANGRAY.COM
STYLE • MAPPED
LADDER ST, HONG KONG, July 21st, 2009 2:30pm
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BRIEFING N ERV E CEN T RE
IES: E OF THE SK THE SCIENC S TES KEEPS IT HOW EMIRA RNE FLEET AIRBO
P140
CA R D ART
P RTISTS SCOO REGIONAL A S IN SKYWARD TOP PRIZES ISTS FUTURE ART N COMPETITIO
P138
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EMIRATES NEWS
ARTISTIC REWARDS THE FIRST THREE WINNERS OF THE ANNUAL
from the sky to the earth, the rain of love and
Skywards Future Artists competition have
peace for people all around the world.”
the great pleasure of seeing their creations
Fellow-Iranian sculptor Amir Vafaei
on the highly valued personal membership
won the Silver brief to create a piece that
cards carried by Skywards members around
encapsulated sophistication and intelligence.
the world.
The Tehran-based artist’s work was inspired
Launched in 2010, when Emirates
by Turkman carpet motifs. He said the
re-branded Skywards — the global frequent
competition was a great opportunity to
flyer programme — Skywards Future Artists
showcase his work internationally. “I am
offers an unparalleled platform for emerging
pleased that my work has gained the viewer’s
artists to showcase their art on a global scale.
attention and it’s an honour to demonstrate
The competition not only offers support and recognition to budding artists, it also
my work through this exhibition.” The Gold category was won by the
invites Skywards members to actively
Baghdad-born artist, Nedim Kufi.
participate themselves. Members can submit
Specialising in multimedia art, he created
their own works of art or nominate friends
a computer-generated image of scattered,
and family to take part. Members continue
shining bones, to capture the qualities of the
being involved in the entire process, with the
card: luxury, elite and precious.
ability to vote on the winning selection. The prizes for the Blue, Silver and Gold
Kufi, who has exhibited in both the Tate Modern and Bonhams in London said the
membership cards that represent each
award brought him “one step closer to my
tier of Skywards membership allow the
dream of creating Rummana in a public
winners to gain a worldwide audience for
space. Thank you to all the Skywards
their work. They also receive the opportunity
members who voted for me.”
to display their work at one of the leading
The winners follow in the footsteps of
contemporary art fairs in the region, Art
artists such as Damien Hirst, Simone
Dubai, as well as $5,000 in prize money.
Cenedese and Christopher Ries, whose
This year’s winners were vetted by six art
works adorned the first series of cards. If
experts from around the world who chose
you would like to partcipate in the next
50 entries from the thousands that were
Skywards Future Artists competition,
submitted. These were then broken down
please visit: www.ourfutureartists.com.
into a short-list which was voted on by thousands of Skywards members worldwide. Iranian sculptor Kambiz Sabri created a futuristic design for the Blue card, a fascinating piece that featured enlarged rain drops encased in a transparent cube. Sabri explained his vision: “Rain is a blue message
138
“ THE PRIZE GIVES ARTISTS A GLOBAL PLATFORM FOR THEIR WORK”
EMIRATES NEWS
8,000
S ER OF BAG THE NUMB D�IN BE CHECKE N A C T A H T IONAL INTERNAT I A B U D T A � TERMINAL AIRPORT’S
EVERY HOUR
NERVE CENTRE CHECK LOOKING TO MOST FIRST-TIME VISITORS LIKE
glitch in Cape Town or a passenger problem
President Network Control, explains how
a high-tech set from a film, the Emirates
in Paris, the NCC is there 24 hours a day.
his team stay focused.
Network Control Centre (NCC) is a real-life
Opposite the screens and running the
example of state- of-the-art technology
length of the room are vast windows
of the equipment is to help us be precisely
in action. Serving as a nerve centre for
offering an impressive panoramic view
that,” he explains. The central screen shows
the entire Emirates Airline operation,
of the airport. With 1,162 flights per week
a patchwork of aeroplane icons moving
the importance of the NCC cannot be
from Dubai International Airport alone,
across a map of the world as their course
exaggerated. Everything that happens across
the logistics of such an operation is mind
is updated every few minutes. “Globally,
111 destinations in 66 countries is observed
boggling. Sweeping his arm across the
this is how we stand at the moment, with
and recorded. Whether it’s a technical
wall of screens, Gareth Williams, Vice
around 80 planes up in the air”, Williams
140
“Being situationally aware is key and a lot
EMIRATES NEWS
continues. “We are a working example of
medical diversion, and what we are good at
an operations management environment
here is getting a group of experts together
and logistically this could be applied to any
very quickly to discuss the problem at
network and it’s all happening live.”
hand, evaluate the options and roll out the
Now in its fourth incarnation, the centre has a back up facility in place for
recovery plan.” Connectivity is the crucial tenet of the
contingencies such as an evacuation.
business, and the NCC team helps to ensure
Overseeing the operations of the 151
that Emirates keeps flying day and night,
aircraft in service, the team at work in the
365 days a year. .
NCC is trained to expect the unexpected. From weather disruptions to volcano eruptions, planning is vital and devising strategic, time efficient solutions and resolution is paramount to maintaining Emirates’ schedule integrity at all times. “There may be [a warning] or it may just
“BEING AWARE SITUATIONALLY IS KEY FOR WHAT WE DO HERE ”
happen. It could be a weather issue or a
AD
141
EMIRATES NEWS
THE GREEN MILE IN A WORLD OF EVER-INCREASING ABUNDANCE
attractive design as well as their 100 per
when it comes to the sheer volume
cent recyclable benefits has seen them
of products on the global market, it is
establish a permanent exhibition in the
increasingly incumbent on the consumer
Museum of Modern Art in New York City. With polystyrene and plastic disposable
to buy responsibly. For those who are mindful of reducing their carbon footprint,
coffee cups being another ubiquitous
there is a growing choice available.
environmental blight, brother and sister
The market for eco-friendly products is
team Abigail and Jamie Forsyth decided
growing and a number of innovative and
to take responsibility and create an eco-
environmentally conscious companies are
friendly alternative for the customers of
catering for consumers who want to know
their local sandwich shop.
where their money is going and how their
Their KeepCup reusable cup was born when Abigail found herself appalled at the
purchases are made.
idea of giving her young daughter milk
One such business is enviro-cap, an Australian company utilising a method
in a disposable cup. After two years of
of combining shredded post-consumer
development the KeepCup now boasts a
plastic bottles with natural cotton to make
global demographic of customers prepared
baseball caps. Another company
AIR�
AIRCRAFT ENTERING DAY FLEETS TO E
combating the proliferation of plastic bottles is the more established Swiss company SIGG. For more than 100 years SIGG has specialised in reusable aluminium water bottles. Their
to make thoughtful changes to
OR ARE 70% MIE NT IC F F -E L FUE RE E W Y E THAN TH S AGO R A E Y 0 4
their daily habits in aid of the environment. WWW.KEEPCUP.COM
THE GLOBAL AVERAGE FOR AIRCRAFT OCCUPANCY IS AROUND ��%, COMPARED TO ��% FOR CARS AND �����% FOR TRAINS
76% 438 WWW.ENVIRO.AERO
THE AMOUNT � IN THOUSANDS OF TONNES � OF FUEL SAVED ANNUALLY PER MINUTE OF SINGLE�ENGINE TAXIING
WWW.ENVIRO.AERO
WWW.ENVIRO-CAP.COM WWW.SIGG.COM
EMIR ATES ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES & VOLUNTARY CARBON OFF-SETTING
ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WWW.EMIRATES.COM/AE/ENGLISH/ABOUT/EMVIRONMENT/EMVIRONMENT.ASPX LOW EMISSION FLEET WWW.EMIRATES.COM/AE/ENGLISH/ABOUT/EMVIRONMENT/EMIRATES_A���.ASPX RECYCLING ��� TONNES OF WASTE IS RECYCLED EACH MONTH FROM OUR AIRCRAFT IN DUBAI WASTE MANAGEMENT
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THESE PRINCIPLES AT WWW.HEROESOFTHEUAE.AE
VOLUNTARY C OFF-SETTING
WE BELIEVE THAT WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR REDUCING OUR EMISSIONS, NOT OUR CUSTOMERS
CARBONZERO FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.CARBONZERO.CO.NZ/INDEX.ASP 142
CABIN L BE CREW WIL P IF HEL HAPPY TO D YOU NEE
EMIRATES NEWS
E C N A T S I S S A G THE COMPLETIN FORMS
TO US CUSTOMS & IMMIGRATION FORMS WHETHER YOU’RE TRAVELLING TO, OR THROUGH, the United States today,
free as possible. The Cabin Crew will offer you two forms when you
this simple guide to completing the US customs and immigration
are nearing your destination. We provide some simple guidelines
forms will help to ensure that your journey is as smooth and hassle
below, so you can correctly complete the forms.
CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM
IMMIGRATION FORM
All passengers arriving into the US need to complete a CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM. If you are travelling as a family this should be completed by one member only. The form must be completed in English, in capital letters, and must be signed where indicated.
The IMMIGRATION FORM I-94 (Arrival/Departure Record) should be completed if you are a nonUS citizen in possession of a valid US visa and your final destination is the US or if you are in transit to a country outside the US. A separate form must be completed for each person, including children travelling on their parents’ passport. The form includes a Departure Record which must be kept safe and given to your airline when you leave the US. If you hold a US or Canadian passport, US Alien Resident Visa (Green Card), US Immigrant Visa or a valid ESTA (right), you are not required to complete an immigration form.
144
EMIRATES NEWS
ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR
THIS MAY BE REVOKED OR
TRAVEL AUTHORISATION (ESTA)
WILL EXPIRE ALONG WITH
IF YOU ARE AN INTERNATIONAL
YOUR PASSPORT.
TRAVELLER WISHING TO ENTER
APPLY ONLINE AT WWW.CBP.GOV/ESTA
THE UNITED STATES UNDER THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME, YOU
NATIONALITIES ELIGIBLE FOR
MUST APPLY FOR ELECTRONIC
THE VISA WAIVER*:
AUTHORISATION �ESTA� UP
ANDORRA, AUSTRALIA,
TO �� HOURS PRIOR TO YOUR
AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRUNEI,
DEPARTURE.
CZECH REPUBLIC, DENMARK, ESTONIA, FINLAND, FRANCE,
ESTA FACTS:
GERMANY, HUNGARY, ICELAND,
CHILDREN AND
IRELAND, ITALY, JAPAN, LATVIA,
INFANTS REQUIRE AN
LIECHTENSTEIN, LITHUANIA,
INDIVIDUAL ESTA.
LUXEMBURG, MALTA, MONACO,
THE ONLINE ESTA SYSTEM
THE NETHERLANDS, NEW
WILL INFORM YOU WHETHER
ZEALAND, NORWAY, PORTUGAL,
YOUR APPLICATION
SAN MARINO, SINGAPORE,
HAS BEEN AUTHORISED,
SLOVAKIA, SLOVENIA, SOUTH
NOT AUTHORISED OR IF
KOREA, SPAIN, SWEDEN,
AUTHORISATION
SWITZERLAND AND THE
IS PENDING.
UNITED KINGDOM**.
A SUCCESSFUL ESTA
* SUBJECT TO CHANGE
APPLICATION IS VALID
** ONLY BRITISH CITIZENS QUALIFY UNDER
FOR TWO YEARS, HOWEVER
THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME.
THE SIZE, IN FOOTBALL PITCHES, OF EMIRATES’ SEVEN AIR�CONDITIONED ENGINEERING HANGERS:
17 192
AD THE NUMBER OF AIRCRAFT CURRENTLY ON ORDER BY EMIRATES�
202
THE AMOUNT OF BEEF TENDERLOIN IN TONNES USED ANNUALLY BY EMIRATES:
145
ROUTE MAP
146
147
ROUTE MAP
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EMIRATES NEWS
irhal.pdf
2/17/11
5:35:03 PM
What are holidays without queues? Lisbon: One of 85 cities featured on www.irhal.com
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www.irhal.com for the outbound traveler from the Middle East 149
THE FLEET
OUR FLEET S ��� CONTAIN ADE UP PLANES, M SENGER OF ��� PAS ND � PLANES A ANES. CARGO PL
For more information: www.emirates.com/english/f lying/our_f leet/our_f leet.aspx
FLEET GUIDE
Airbus A330-200 Number of Aircraft: 27 Capacity: 237-278 Range: 12,200km Length: 58.8m Wingspan: 60.3m
Airbus A340-300 Number of Aircraft: 8 Capacity: 267 Range: 13,350km Length: 63.6m Wingspan: 60.3m
Airbus A340-500 Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 258 Range: 16,050km Length: 67.9m Wingspan: 63.4m
Airbus A380-800 Number of Aircraft: 15 Capacity: 489-517 Range: 15,000km Length: 72.7m Wingspan: 79.8m 152
Boeing 777-200 Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 274-346 Range: 9,649km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 60.9m
Boeing 777-200LR Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 266 Range: 17,446km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m
Boeing 777-300 Number of Aircraft: 12 Capacity: 364 Range: 11,029km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 60.9m
Boeing 777-300ER Number of Aircraft: 53 Capacity: 354-442 Range: 14,594km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 64.8m 153
EMIRATES NEWS
BEFORE YOUR JOURNEY CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR BEFORE TRAVELLING IF YOU HAVE ANY MEDICAL CONCERNS ABOUT MAKING A LONG JOURNEY, OR IF YOU SUFFER FROM A RESPIRATORY OR
IN THE AIR
CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITION. PLAN FOR THE DESTINATION � WILL
TO HELP YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR DESTINATION
for your holiday or be effective at achieving
YOU NEED ANY VACCINATIONS OR
feeling relaxed and refreshed, Emirates has
your goals on a business trip, these simple tips
SPECIAL MEDICATIONS?
developed this collection of helpful travel tips.
will help you to enjoy your journey and time
GET A GOOD NIGHTS REST BEFORE
Regardless of whether you need to rejuvenate
on board with Emirates today.
THE FLIGHT. EAT LIGHTLY AND SENSIBLY.
SMART TRAVELLER
AT THE AIRPORT ALLOW YOURSELF PLENTY OF TIME FOR CHECK�IN.
DRINK PLENTY OF WATER
TRAVEL LIGHTLY
AVOID CARRYING HEAVY BAGS THROUGH THE AIRPORT AND ONTO THE FLIGHT AS THIS CAN PLACE THE BODY UNDER CONSIDERABLE STRESS.
REHYDRATE WITH WATER OR JUICES FREQUENTLY.
CARRY ONLY THE ESSENTIAL ITEMS THAT YOU WILL
ONCE THROUGH TO DEPARTURES TRY
DRINK TEA AND COFFEE IN MODERATION.
NEED DURING YOUR FLIGHT.
AND RELAX AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
DURING THE FLIGHT
MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE
SUCKING AND SWALLOWING WILL HELP
KEEP MOVING
EQUALISE YOUR EAR PRESSURE DURING ASCENT AND DESCENT. BABIES AND YOUNG PASSENGERS
LOOSEN CLOTHING, REMOVE JACKET AND AVOID
EXERCISE YOUR LOWER LEGS AND CALF MUSCLES.
MAY SUFFER MORE ACUTELY WITH
ANYTHING PRESSING AGAINST YOUR BODY.
THIS ENCOURAGES BLOOD FLOW.
POPPING EARS, THEREFORE CONSIDER PROVIDING A DUMMY. GET AS COMFORTABLE AS POSSIBLE WHEN RESTING AND TURN FREQUENTLY.
WEAR GLASSES
USE SKIN MOISTURISER
AVOID SLEEPING FOR LONG PERIODS IN THE SAME POSITION.
WHEN YOU ARRIVE CABIN AIR IS DRIER THAN NORMAL THEREFORE
APPLY A GOOD QUALITY MOISTURISER TO ENSURE
TRY SOME LIGHT EXERCISE OR READ IF
SWAP YOUR CONTACT LENSES FOR GLASSES.
YOUR SKIN DOESN’T DRY OUT.
YOU CAN’T SLEEP AFTER ARRIVAL.
154
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