Impaling in the 15th century:
Impaling in the 21st century:
No wonder this method of barbecuing pork is popular in Transylvania.
Poor pigs. :-( After seeing this photo, I think I will become vegetarian for a week or so.
(Thanks to Johann Stan for the photo!)
Photographed in Venice:
“Tourists, you bring litter!”
But apart from that, Venice was rather welcoming and I spent a very interesting, if cold, February weekend in this unique city. I can however understand the frustration of people who just want to live, study and work there, with millions of visitors clogging up the waterways, alleys and restaurants, driving up prices.
Tourists, there are a thousand other beautiful places in Italy to visit. Give Venetians a break!
I don’t call my blog a “travel blog” for several reasons:
My blog is not only about travel, but about politics, history, books and about other serious, silly and random stuff. Some of it you find interesting, some of it you find curious, some of it makes you hate me and unsubscribe. Because my blog is like me, a person with many different interests. I am not a brand or a product or a company, I am a human being.
Or, if you don’t already know what you want to say, you could just shut up.
I don’t want to be grouped together with most other travel bloggers who are going from sight to sight, from beach to beach, take a photo of a sunset here and a cup of coffee there. Seriously, what’s so special about coffee mugs that people fly halfway around the world to bring back photos of them? Probably, they never leave the hotel or resort, don’t meet anyone interesting, let alone experience any real adventures.
And that photo isn’t even straight.
You know these kind of bloggers: Everything is “the greatest”, “the most adventurous”, “the most beautiful”, “perfect”, “breathtaking”, “amazing”, bla, bla, and everything “needs to be on your bucket list”. By the way, a bucket list is for people who are about to die or for people who don’t know how to enjoy life. Lists are for going to the supermarket, not for leading your life.
With at least 11 stunning and breathtaking clichés, that you have already read on 11 of the world’s most extraordinary travel blogs.
These bloggers travel to wherever they get invited by hotels or tourism associations, and of course they have to write positively. I, on the other hand, I go where I want to go, and I am interested in looking behind the glamour of travel. I don’t shy away from conflicts, tensions, poverty, lies, environmental destruction and the complexity of life. And I write about that. If it offends some people – as it often has – I don’t mind, because I am not a paid PR blogger.
I have to throw up (my hands in despair) when I read the umpteenth blog which praises the old cars and the music of Cuba, the beaches in Dubai, or the pyramids and camels in Egypt, without mentioning that these countries are authoritarian, oppressive or even dictatorships where people get imprisoned, and sometimes executed, for trying to exercise basic human rights.
When I read praise about Thailand, for example,
I can’t help but point out:
Having lived in Malta or Sicily, I can’t help but write about the thousands of refugees being washed ashore, dead and alive. Living in Romania, I can’t help but write about the discrimination/segregation of the Roma. Traveling through Eastern Europe, I can’t ignore the falsification of history that is prevalent in many people’s minds.
While it is sad that most travel bloggers know nothing about history and politics and probably aren’t interested, as long as they get paid for swimming in a pool and taking photos of their drinks, the most shocking surprise is their lack of geographical knowledge. Or how else would you explain that they constantly “discover” “surprising” “hidden spots” and “secret destinations”, when every 8-year old knows these places from school or the documentary channel?
I don’t even know which examples to pick because the internet is full with this most annoying fad. The “10 wonderfully secret tourist destinations” include Tasmania (it’s one of Australia’s states!) and the Pyrénées (a 500-km long mountain chain between France and Spain, you can see them from space or from Barcelona, that’s how secret they are). These “19 secret travel destinations you never knew existed” include Machu Picchu (!!). If you are the only person in the world who doesn’t know Machu Picchu, go on Facebook and check your friends’ profile images. Yes, the ruins in the hilly jungle.
How can the capital city of a European Union country be “hidden”??
Isn’t it insulting to readers if an author refers to places like these as ones “you never knew existed”? The people who put together “Europe’s best hidden gems” don’t ever seem to have read a book about Europe either, let alone been there. Lugano, Cinque Terre, Trieste, Santorini and Kotor as “unknown destinations”? Hm, I wonder how all the cruise ships with thousands of tourists find some of these places, then. Every day.
Because I currently live in Eastern Europe, I don’t want you to miss the “20 hidden gems in Eastern Europe”. The list includes capital cities like Bucharest, Tallinn, Riga and Budapest. My Romanian readers will be surprised that Brasov “has numerous Black Sea resorts”.
I couldn’t help but comment:
This “secret”, “hidden” and “unknown” mania is getting so out of hand that I bet you can find New York, Paris and Berlin on some of these lists. If you want to read about a genuinely hidden spot, check this out. But that requires a ride on a boat and a bit of walking, for you can’t even fly to that island.
I have now come across someone who seriously claimed Sevilla as an “undiscovered gem” and “one of the most underrated destinations” in Andalusia. I had to point it out to him:
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Please, please don’t ever lump me together with people who write terrible stuff like that!
So, if you have been wondering why my blog never appears in some “Top 50 Travel Blogs” list, why I never get invited to anywhere, why I can’t even return to some places where I have already been arrested, why my blog is banned in some countries, you now know why.
If you have been wondering why I don’t write very often, why my articles are sometimes years behind my travels, it’s because I need time to prepare my journeys, to read, to think, to write, to research. Keep in mind that I don’t travel to show off or to tell others about it. I travel to satisfy my intellectual curiosity, to experience other places, to get confronted with new ideas. Some of these ideas I will share on my blog, mainly to motivate you to explore the world yourself. But most of the time, I prefer to simply live my life instead of writing about living it.
Lastly, if you have been wondering why I don’t have many friends, you may understand that a bit better now. – No, I cannot be silent when people spread bullshit.
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In the interest of naming and shaming proper sourcing, if you click on any of the photos in this article, you will get to the original website/blog.
Now that I have ranted a bit, I am asking you, my esteemed readers, to nominate your favorite travel blogs in the comments below and to tell me why you like them. I am thinking of putting together a list (oh, the irony) of the best travel blogs and – this will cause lots of enemies – of the worst travel blogs. Obviously, don’t nominate me. You are free to nominate yourself, but please add an explanation. What I am looking for is original, thoughtful or thought-provoking writing by people who care about people in other countries and who regard travel as an intellectual journey, not as a list to tick off. I won’t consider the quality of the photos or the design, only the text. – Thank you for your comments!
Recycling in Germany:
Recycling in Romania:
One is Michael the Brave, at one time the Prince of Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldova, and the first Romanian ruler to rule over these three principalities together, albeit only for half a year. The other one used to play football.
One was assassinated. The other one gets paid for having his image put up, preventing people from using their windows.
One hardly anyone would recognize. The other one you already knew.
Kids, if you want to become famous, don’t go into politics or war.
(Photographed in Cluj, Romania.)
I don’t know why I go for historical fiction or alternative history again and again, when I should know by now that I’ll be annoyed or disappointed.
In Young Philby, Robert Littell tries to flesh out the early life of British spy Kim Philby who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union, where he defected to in 1963. Obviously, that involves some guesswork and some creative liberty, which is fine for a novel. Littell tries something different by writing each chapter from the perspective of a different person. At first confusing, this trick actually caught my interest. It may have worked to make the book more interesting, but I will never find out, for I stopped reading after about a third, when the amount and severity of historical inaccuracies became too much to bear.
When Kim Philby is in Vienna, he joins an underground group of left-wing students and workers, many of whom have escaped Germany. Littell lets some of these characters speak about Nazi Germany as if the problem was solved if Hitler was killed, when people in 1933 actually knew much better than most people know today that the problem was not one person, but a society in which a large number of citizens were racist, anti-Semitic, nationalistic, militaristic, anti-democratic and so on. Littell transfers the simplified explanation of events which took root after the Nuremberg Trials back to the 1930s.
The book had already lost all credibility, but I finally closed it for good when Litzi Friedmann, who in reality was a rather well-informed and active young woman, is quoted as saying “[Hitler] controls the important strings. He had a plurality in the Bundestag until he expelled the Socialist and Communist deputies, at which point he had an outright majority.”
The Bundestag?? That conversation took place in 1934, and the Bundestag did not become Germany’s parliament until 1949. The parliament in the Weimar Republic and during the time of the book’s plot was called Reichstag. If an author can’t even get that right, then he can write children’s stories or poetry for what it’s worth, but please no historical fiction.
The best book about Kim Philby is probably still the one by Phillip Knightley.
Either way, it doesn’t spell good news for law enforcement or the emergency services in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
At the train station in Cluj-Napoca, Romania:
– First class or second class?
– What’s the difference?
– Well…
To be fair, this was not one of the operational trains. It had just been parked at the train station, waiting to be sold for scrap metal because Romania already has too many trains anyway, comfortably and reliably whizzing from each town to each other town every hour.
Remember when your grandmother told you about her time with the Suffragettes, the women campaigning for voting rights in early 20th-century Britain?
But they did not only pass out pamphlets, give speeches and sit around knitting and drinking tea. No, some of these early feminists resorted to more radical methods. Terrorism, we would call it today. They smashed shop windows, cut telephone lines, burned down houses and vandalized public parks, golf courses and cricket grounds. They smashed artifacts at the British Museum and attacked paintings in the National Gallery with axes. They even built and detonated bombs.
These ladies were some really tough chicks. Respect!
Links:
There are spy stories which have become better by being turned into movies (Ian Fleming’s James Bond being the prime example) and there are those whose writers never should have given permission for their stories to be put on the screen. Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 is the latest example in a list which is longer than that of failed espionage plots during the Cold War.
I haven’t read John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and I am not a particular fan of Mr le Carré anyway, but the film adaptation is horrible. Well, I could have guessed that much from watching the trailer.
You fell asleep, too? The two-hour film is worse. Much worse! Pretentious acting, annoying soundtrack, no coherent storytelling, no real suspense, no drama, none of the characters allows any emotional connection to be built up.
The film is trying to be something like a period drama with old-fashioned suits, old cars, creaking wooden floors in dusty offices. But isn’t the book set in 1973? It is! Weren’t the 1970s colorful, exciting, fun- and action-filled times? They were! Throughout the whole film, I had the impression that the film crew had accidentally booked a 1950s set instead of the 1970s set.
“When are we going to get a new office?” – “I already applied for one in 1962.”
If you want a good spy movie set in the 1970s, go for Argo or Munich. Much better films, better actors, better storytelling, better editing, better soundtrack and above all, true stories.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy tries to be a very serious, thoughtful, mature, dark spy movie, but it tries too much and fails miserably. Even watching something as silly as True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger is a better use of your time. Reading a good spy novel, by Eric Ambler for example, is even better, of course.
The Happy Hermit 