The Deceit of Angels

“Turkish people are ugly, cant dress well, cant sing, cant speak properly, are conservative, religious and make lousy coffee. Welcome to Istanbul!” - Hazal Another overdue piece, I actually visited Istanbul Nov 17th - 27th but due to my computer dying for a couple of months, this got put on hold. Nonetheless, details of my exploits in Istanbul to visit the student ex-Lifer regular who reappeared after a year of almost complete absence with 'So when exactly are you coming to visit me?' have finally arrived. I assumed my flight couldn't be as entertaining as the last time I flew alone. And I was right! Most of my experiences involved saying Turkish words so that nobody could understand them (kof-tay? Kerf-ter? Eh) and sitting next to an elderly Turkish man who sounded angry at being offered a paper in Turkish, demanding the English paper. He was grumpy at me too, for every tiny inconvenience. Until he twigged I was English. Then I became his best friend, constantly in...

So I was halfway through writing this when I lost all my work. This means more of it is coming from memory than ever before, though I'm sure most of it is written down still as notes meaning most of it will still be around. It was only about a month ago that myself and my partner in crime took to the skies once again in our exploration of Eastern Europe. The quaint medieval town of Tallinn, Estonia, and the glorious capital of our tree loving neighbours in Helsinki, Finland. There are photo's to complement the trip, but for the most part I've strived to avoid repeating myself here. The flight outwards and already minor chaos ensued; Alex is becoming a master of packing things badly. The baggage allowance was 20kg, and so how much does Alex weigh in at? 19.9kg, to my measly 11.7kgs. I still don't know why he needed 30+ shirts for a 7 day trip, but there you have it. He was also intending to be the photographer for the journey, but impressively for a man with so much l...

Took me bloody long enough to finish writing it, but here it is in all its glory. The sequel to both an "Englishman and a Frenchman walk into a bar" and "Three Kinds of Moisturiser But All Kinds of Mischief," I give you "Spunk of a Sea Slug and Wait...Do Those Look Like Caves To You?" The flight over there – a 17 hour ordeal in all – was the first time I flew alone, and also the first time I had an interconnecting flight. Despite nervousness at both these aspects, it went about as well as could be expected. The first leg saw me with the only seat on the plane with a vacant spot adjacent. Hello nap city, even if I did have a burly man with a cockney accent screaming loudly at the screen as he watched a bad romantic drama on the aisle opposite. The second leg, however, was slightly more problematic. One man lit up a smoke in the middle of the plane and then argued with the staff until they told him to put it out or be arrested when they landed, but that...

So much in the same vein as to what I did with my trip to Paris with Basel comes this documentation of my travels. I am as yet undecided how to tackle it as there are certainly some notes that won't appear on this public space for both personal reasons and request from my partner in crime, the Mad Greek known as Alex. I'm not evil enough to divulge his secrets. Well...not all his secrets at any rate. What began as a “20 facts about NYC” quickly went out the window as most of them are not that factual and have little to do with NY. But I'm rambling. On the flight over we had the idea of getting ourselves a small bottle of whisky or something to tide us over for the flight. We both missed the part about “no outside alcohol,” which could have made the litre of vodka we stashed a little awkward. We ended up finishing the bottle 3 hours before we landed. And when I say we, I suspect it was mostly me as Alex had the vodka and my cup mysteriously re-filled itself despite us bei...

Unknown to Basel at the time of my visit I decided to write these observations. My intentions in travelling to a city I have failed to see for so long – last time I was there was before the Euro was introduced! - was not simply to do the tourist attractions, gorge myself on crepes and marvel at the Champs-Elysses. Alright, so I did eat a lot of crepes...and we did visit the Champs Elysses but that's not the point; I wanted to try and understand the mindset of the locals, see the sights most don't think to visit and this is a testament to what I learnt. There is a hefty Algerian presence in Paris, a fact which becomes far more noticeable as you head away from the city's centre. Algeria was a French colony and in the aftermath of the war many came to help rebuild, but when Algeria broke out into civil war they were soon granted independence from France and as such those in France already were granted citizenship, and many decided to stay. That is the last “factual” observ...

So something of an unusual rant this time, and it may seem strange but I was out last night and I noticed just how unpopular they had become. Obviously excluding men from the equation, I don't think I saw a single skirt or dress in the entire night; the trend for a simple top and jeans as acceptable nightwear has seemed to be subtly increasing to the point that either I'm hitting all the wrong spots (and need somewhere 'classier' perhaps) or they're becoming extinct. Thinking about it further, its not just nightwear that they've seen a decline but in general use; I sometimes get the impression more skirts are worn by blokes during christmas piss-ups and stag nights than any other time! It's getting to the stage that I'm having difficulty thinking of fashionable items worn outside of film premières, the retro-70s crowd, the stereotyped goth crowd, school girls and weddings, and I don't quite understand why to the modern eye they're seen in such a ...

I sometimes come up with rants in my mind. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I'm at least partly schizophrenic as it can often become quite heated arguing with myself. It turns out I can be pretty stubborn. During one particular “session” I began thinking I ought to write all this down somewhere for future reference, some sort of site or word file. Then I remembered I had a blog. Well actually I run three but two have valid purposes; this ones status as my ongoing novel seems under appreciated given its indefinite hiatus following the loss of all my notes. I'm blaming that and not the fact that I got lazy. So say hello to the new revitalised blog. Thats revitalised in content, I'm not changing the layout or anything. I'm still pretty lazy. I would like to think that this would be general ranting, and whilst I expect a fair amount of the books lore will come out – I managed to get a huge world in my head and most of it is still in there, so it seems natural I should write...