Istanbul

I visited Istanbul with Mum and Dad in January of this year. Istanbul is a huge city (the population exceeds 11 million) and there is a lot to see. But "old Istanbul", which extends over a peninsula into the Bosphorus, is a good starting point for tourists. Two of the most important locations are Agia Sophia (known to the Turkish as Ayasofya) and Topkapi Palace. They are actually located right next to each other, save for a narrow laneway running between the two. We stayed at the Ayasofya Pension, which is on that laneway. It is an amazing location. I had a corner room in the original hotel building. Each morning I opened my curtains and was greeted by Agia Sophia's dome immediately before me. Being right next to the basilica, there was literally nothing obstructing the view. Postcard-pretty and picture-perfect are understatements.

Late on the afternoon we arrived, we visited the Grand Bazaar. This is the largest covered market in the world, with more than 4000 merchants. And that doesn't include the freelance con artists who prowl the labrynth of 58 streets that make up the marketplace. Nearly everything imaginable is on sale here, but the traditional Turkish goods and handcrafts - rugs, jewellery and leather goods - are overepresented.

Early the following day we visited Agia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), once the patriarchate seat of the Orthodox Church and the world's largest cathedral for more than 1000 years, and still, to this day, an architectural marvel because of its large and heavy dome. Inside, Agia Sophia is truly impressive, perhaps more so because one can better appreciate the scale of the dome. Agia Sophia was converted to a mosque many centuries ago, but became a non-denominational museum under the progressive and secular government of Ataturk. Now the decoration is a mixture of Christian and Islamic iconography. In From Russia With Love, Bond follows Tatiana Romanova here.

After lunch we visited Topkapi Palace, once the Istanbul residence of the Ottoman Sultans. The palace is beautiful, yet its collection of jewels and artifacts is equally of interest. The Topkapi Dagger is one such item, beautifully decorated with three large emeralds. The dagger was the subject of the 1964 heist/caper film (one of the first in that genre) Topkapi, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Peter Ustinov and Dassin's wife Melina Mercouri. Ustinov organises a team to break in to the palace, and steal the dagger. Part of the film was shot on location, however the heist scene itself employs some dramatic license. There is no ceiling skylight, as appears in the film, through which the thief is suspended by a wire to not trigger the palace's alarms. (Thirty years later, a very obvious homage to this scene turned up in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, even going so far as to recreate some shots). Topkapi is presently being remade as the sequel to the 1999 Pierce Brosnan film The Thomas Crown Affair. The Topkapi Affair will be directed by Paul Verhoeven; shooting commences in January 2008.

Dad began our second full day in Istanbul with a treat. Just near our hotel and Agia Sophia, we entered a small stone building and descended some distance to view the Basilica Cistern. As soon as we entered, I knew straight away that this location was used in the film From Russia With Love, through which Bond escapes from the Russian Embassy with the stolen Lekter decoding device. The Basilica Cistern is an incredible Byzantine construction, built during the reign of Justinian I in the 6th century, and amazingly, is one of hundreds of ancient cisterns beneath the modern city of Istanbul. This is the largest cistern, measuring 143 by 65 metres. One follows a modern wooden boardwalk through 336 columns (arranged 12 x 26), each nine metres high. Moving through the cistern, one has a feeling of tranquility and eeriness, in equal measure. Most of the columns are unmarked and simply decorated, but one exception is the Column of Tears which is quite elaborately decorated. It is not known why this one column is significant, but I feel the design of each tear is not dissimilar to the design of 1001 objects used to superstitiously ward off the evil eye. At the end of the boardwalk are two famous Medusa heads. They're odd positioning suggests they were not used for decoration, but merely stone blocks appropriated from somewhere else, relocated and reused here.

After a window-shopping sojourn from Taksim Square down İstiklal Avenue (a famous pedestrianised shopping street), we crossed the Bosphorus on a ferry to visit Maiden's Tower, aka Kiz Kulesi. This is a small lighthouse and fort located a short distance from the Asian side of the Bosphorus. During the Byzantine empire, Constantinople's wealth was primarily sourced from the taxes collected from ships that wish to pass to or from the Black Sea. A great chain crossed the Bosphorus, from the European side to Kis Kulezi, preventing ships from passing without stopping at this little island to pay the necessary tax. In the 1999 Bond film, The World Is Not Enough, Kis Kulezi appears as the villain's lair, fully fitted out with an underwater submarine base! Later that evening we stopped by at Galata Tower to take in the magnificient view.

On our last day in Istanbul, Dad and I visited two important religious sites. Despite the Ottoman Empire and Turkey being an Islamic state, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church is still located in Istanbul, a legacy of the 1000 year Byzantine empire. In crude terms, the Patriarchate is to Orthodox Christians what the Vatican is to Roman Catholics, although it isn't fair to compare the two beyond their significance. The only location that is open to visitors - most of whom are Greek Orthodox tourists - is the Church of St George, Agios Giorgios. Good luck trying to find a taxi driver to bring you here though... Some taxi drivers, like ours, pretend to not know about the Patriarchate, and it isn't well sign-posted.

The second location we visited that day is Chora Church. The significance of this Orthodox church is its beautiful frescoes. The church was never converted into a mosque, and for that reason, the frescoes are in excellent condition.

All of my Istanbul photos are on Flickr, and can be viewed in a slideshow.

Vienna

Continuing the tradition of touring European cities with Australian friends, I met Doug in Vienna just before Christmas last year. Doug is wonderful to travel with - we visited Madrid together in 2005 - so I was looking forward to spending some time with him as well as discovering somewhere new. Arriving the day before Doug, I took the opportunity to visit the Gasometer district where three bricked gasholders were renovated as the centrepiece of an urban renewal project to become a shopping centre, commercial offices, and residential apartments.

I like Austria. It's like Germany, but classier, I think. The architecture in the old part of Vienna is very grand. We stayed at the Hotel Regina, just around the corner from the Freud Museum. The museum is housed in Freud's apartment, occupied by the psychoanalyst and his family until they made a timely move to London shortly before WW2. There is a museum at Freud's house in London, which also contains most of his possessions, so the museum in Vienna offers recreations mixed with a few original items. There are also many photographs and displays charting his career and life.

Doug introduced me to the marvels of bus tours in Madrid - they are so good for covering a lot of ground very quickly - so I booked a similar trip for us in Vienna. The tour took in Schönbrunn Palace, which was the summer palace seat of the House of Habsburg. (The winter palace is Hofburg). I think it's marvellously extravagant that the family had a summer and winter palace in the same city. The tour of Schönbrunn was interesting at the time, but rather forgettable it seems, as I'm struggling to recall any detail almost a year later. As they say, once you've seen one palace...

We also toured the Vienna State Opera House. This was a wonderful tour, commencing with the grand entrance hall, taking in all the public areas, and continuing back stage. The Opera House is situated in the old town, now pedestrianised, and at the time of our visit, decorated with beautiful Christmas lights. Having heard much about Viennese coffee houses, I was determined to visit a traditional establishment. Our tour guide suggested Cafe Hawelka, where the cigarette smoke was thick, and the coffee strong.

I love the European tradition of a Christmas Market. It really feels like Christmas to me to wander around in the freezing cold, in the shadow of decorated trees, buying sweets, alcohol, pastries, coffee, and other little treats. Vienna's main Christmas Market is in the plaza in front of Rathaus (the town hall). But there were also smaller markets at Schönbrunn Palace, and in the heart of the old town.

On our last day in Vienna, we caught the subway to UNO-City, on an island in the Danube River. UNO-City is the campus of buildings that comprise the United Nation's operations in Vienna (along with New York, Geneva, and Nairobi. Nearby there is also a huge observation tower, the Donaturm, with a revolving restaurant. Doug and I enjoyed a leisurely lunch here, as we took in the sights from above. I had the Wiener Schnitzel, as it had to be done some time while in Vienna.

The last stop on our little tour of Vienna was Prater Park. This 19th century amusement park has a huge ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, as its centrepiece, and was a set-jetting destination for me. Vienna is the location for Carole Reed's The Third Man (1949), the story of Holly Martins' (Joseph Cotten) search for his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in post-war Vienna. When Martins eventually tracks down Lime, and discovers the truth about his pal's now-crooked ways, Lime's defence is delivered with a "greed is good" monologue while both men ride the Riesenrad. The amusement park also figures in Before Sunrise (1995), and the first Timothy Dalton Bond film The Living Daylights (1987). It is here that Saunders, Bond's MI6 contact in Vienna, is brutally murdered when (the rather hot) Necros rigs a sliding glass door to become a high-powered weapon.

All of my Vienna photographs are online at Flickr, and can be viewed in a slideshow.

Labor Wins

What a fantastic result.

Today's result more than makes up for the disaster that was the 2004 election, that followed the wake of lies that started with the Tampa. Howard's gang of fearmongers and war merchants deserved to be kicked out on their arse 3 years ago. Instead they won over the electorate on the lie that the economy is more important than an unjust war in which hundreds of thousands of people are dying. Not only were the Liberals returned, of course, but they won control of both houses. How little did we know at the time that that was the beginning of the end. Without full control they wouldn't have introduced WorkChoices. And without WorkChoices, they might have won today. I wonder if Honest John is ruminating on the advice of St Teresa: there are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

I dropped in to the Goodbye Party at a Holborn pub around 1pm, but still ringing with victory. The party was jointly organised by the London-based volunteers for Labor, the Greens and the Democrats. I looked around the bar tables, littered with empty Veuve Cliquot and Moet & Chandon bottles, and wanted to ask if there were any champagne socialists in the house... Everyone was in very high spirits, including, I noted, a staunchly right-wing friend of mine who braved the event, and later conceeded "they deserved to go".

Rome

My birthday treat to myself last year was a long weekend in Rome. Alas, four days is not enough to even scratch the surface, but I fell in love with the city, and managed to visit nine of my guidebook's top ten suggestions along the way. I stayed near the Piramide metro station, named for the stone pyramid nearby (slideshow). Rome's metro (slideshow) is laughably under-developed with only two lines, one of which kept closing early for extension works. The problem is, much as it was in Athens recently, that the construction works are chronically delayed by the necessary archaelogical surveys.

My first stop was the Colosseum (slideshow), a tourist trap to be sure, but one which more than adequately lived up to its hype. I recommend a tour guide to provide a political and historical context, otherwise, you'd just find yourself walking around a very big and very old relic. Nothing is signposted with explanatory text. The guide assisted us to imagine the 100,000 seat stadium filled to the brim with screaming peeps, watching the entertainment play out below. The performance platform was long ago consumed by a fire, for beneath the stage was a wooden labrynth of tunnels and cells to hold the fighters and animals. Amazingly, some of the animals were elevated to the arena using lifts. The arena in Gladiator is based on the Colosseum, although much larger than the real world stadium.

The tour continued across to Palatine Hill (slideshow), once the home of Emperors and Senators. Little is left standing, but the tour guide pointed out some amazing things that the Romans discovered and implemented here, such as heated flooring (achieved by circulating hot water through piping under the marble). The tour ended at The Forum which looks like it is deserving of a day tour in its own right. I love how the Romans branded everything with SPQR, for Senatum blah Rome, meaning For the Senate and People of Rome. It's like an ancient-world analog of the branding efforts of thousands of city councils today. SPQR is still used on contemporary manhole covers and other infrastructure paraphenalia.

On the Friday night I visited Muccassassina, which was recommended to me as the best gay nightclub in town. After a 40 minute wait in the bitter cold, well past the club's listed opening times, I was among the first admitted inside the empty venue. But as more people arrived I sensed something was very wrong. There were very very few male or female couples. Instead, I observed young and overtly preened gay men running around hand-in-hand with their girlfriends. I'd never seen anything like it. Fearing I'd arrived at the wrong place, I asked the bar staff over and over whether (i) this was Muccassassina, and (ii) is this really a gay club. Despite all and sundry answering yes to both questions, I was not convinced. Eventually someone explained to me that in Rome, people are very closeted, and afraid of being gay... And it all has to do with the old man in the white coat across the river.

I know that the Vatican City is technically its own independent state with its own police force etc, but the borders are muddled in Rome. As my experience at Muccassassina showed, it seems that its the Vatican that should be accused of boundary creep. I visited the Vatican Museums (slideshow) on Saturday morning, spending more than three hours in a queue just to get inside. And once inside, it was a race for the tour guide to hustle us through the buildings before the museums close early for the day, as they do on Saturday. A tour guide is essential, as even though it's a museum, very few items are named, let alone annotated with explanatory text. My favourite part of the Museums is the Gallery of Maps. Apparently the map of Venice is so detailed, and the city so unchanged, that my tour guide explained that all but two buildings on that map can still be found on the island city. The Raphael Rooms (slideshow), including the School of Athens, were exceptional, as was the Sistine Chapel. I observed the request to not photograph in the Chapel... But I was one of the few. The sound of camera shutters is constant, as is the tiresome and futile requests from the Chapel's guards: "No Photo".

The tour concluded with St Peter's Basilica (slideshow). I already knew it was the largest church in the world, yet I was still very impressed. Our tour guide was full of important facts. From base to the top of the dome, St Peter's is the height of a 40 storey building. On top of the main dome is a much smaller dome. If that dome were lowered to ground level, then the High Altar could actually fit inside the smaller dome. There is a latin frieze in gold leaf high up inside the church; each letter is seven feet high. Michaelangelo's Pietà is also here, behind bullet-proof glass. The sculpture is very beautiful and justifiably famous. Our tour guide explained that the sculpture was intended to be an anonymous work, as with other works of art inside St Peter's, until the vain artist broke into the church and hacked his name into the marble, along Mary's sash. My favourite feature in St Peter's are the handy brass markers down the centre aisle, that gauchly mark the size (measured from door to altar) of famous churches around the world. The idea is to demonstrate that St Peter's is the largest church.

There is a wall, known as the Passetto di Borgo, that links the Vatican with Castel Sant'Angelo (slideshow) outside the city walls. The wall's real purpose is to provide a hidden escape route for the pope to a location well outside the city, and from where he could be ferried to a safer location. The castle is very interesting in its own right. The site was originally chosen to be a mausoleum for Roman Emperor Hadrian, constructed between 135 and 139. Converted into a fortress into 401, the popes ordered its conversion into a castle in the 14th century. Apparently, in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, the prequel novel to The Da Vinci Code, Sant'Angelo is the location of the Hassassin's secret lair, and the last extant church of the Illuminati.

The most interesting place I visited in Rome is the little-known Basilica di San Clemente (slideshow), not far from the Colosseum. This 12th century church's frescoes and courtyard are particularly pretty, but the real interest is below ground. Like many old cities, modern Rome is built directly on the ruins of older buildings. The 12th century church one sees above ground is actually the second basilica, built directly above the first basilica, which you can visit. And beneath the first basilica are Roman ruins of houses and other buildings, which you can also visit. Beneath this level I could hear a channeled spring that continues to carry fresh water just as it did thousands of years ago! The Wikipedia article has lots of information.

During my trip I also visited the usual suspect of tourist sites including the Trevi Fountain (slideshow), the Spanish Steps (slideshow), and Piazza Navona (slideshow). Each has its own charms, but I especially liked Piazza Navona. Once the arena of a great stadium, it could be flooded to become a venue for sea battle games.

All of my Rome photographs are on Flickr and can be viewed in a slideshow.

Berlin

There are so many cities in Europe I wish to visit, that I sometimes find it difficult deciding where to go next. So it's helpful when an Australian friend visits Europe, because it gives me the perfect excuse to meet up with them somewhere new. My dear friend Carmel visited Greece and Germany in October 2006, and we met up in Berlin.

I arrived in Berlin on a Friday night, just in time to make it to the annual HustlaBall (it's funny how things work out), an annual gay dance party at the KitKatClub. This is a modern nightclub, named in honour of the Berlin venue that figures in the Kandar/Ebb musical Cabaret. The KitKatClub (since relocated) is a warehouse in Bessemerstrasse in Schönberg that looks like it was on the wrong side of the wall (it wasn't). I'd describe the interior design as Stalin-chic, but one gets the impression that there was actually no design intention. The KitKatClub looks like someone appropriated a rotting warehouse, installed a bar, and put up some lights. Of course, the design trick is to make it look like that. In fact, everything I saw in the club that night was oh-so-carefully constructed...

Saturday was spent catching up with some London friends for coffee, and exploring the city on my own. The one must-see on my itinerary was the Filmmuseum in the new(ish) Sony Centre (slideshow) on Potsdamerplatz. This is a wonderful museum, filled with a variety of props, equipment and displays that detail Germany's rich cinematic history. In the 1920s, Berlin was a film-making capital that rivalled Hollywood. In that decade, and the first few years of the next, Berlin produced wonderful films like Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, M, The Blue Angel, and Murder. Alfred Hitchcock got his first big break in Berlin, as did Joseph von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, and Marlene Dietrich (who is the subject of a significant size of the collection). The Filmmuseum also does not shy away from exploring the industry under Nazi rule. There is a significant section on Leni Riefenstahl, and her two films for the Nazis, The Triumph of the Will, and Olympia.

I also visited Checkpoint Charlie (slideshow). The museum here offers a wealth of information for visitors. It's really interesting, and yet it is also the worst tourist experience I have endured. The explanatory text is in six languages, for most of the exhibit items, making it hard to navigate and interpret the museum. And sometimes the text is attributed to the wrong item, or staggeringly out-of-date (eg one item's annotation was grossly out-of-date, referring to the wall that still divided the city). In fairness, I believe the museum was the pet project of one man, funded by himself, and subsequently by donation. The best part of the museum is the section detailing the variety of ways that people tried to escape from East to West. Just outside the museum is the American Zone cabin, and the relevant signage welcoming or alerting travellers according to their direction of travel. If it were not for the placement of that cabin, and a few other subtle markers such as stone markers along the ground marking the East-West division, it would be easy to forget that the city was once divided.

That the city was once divided by the wall, is a source of constant fascination for me. The U-bahn underground metro railway was largely constructed prior to the war, and after the wall was erected, trains would continue to weave back and forth under the imaginary marker above, passing bricked off tunnels, and forbidden to stop at what had become the network's ghost stations. Potsdamerplatz (slideshow), where the Sony Centre and filmmuseum is located, is a sprawling complex of new glass-and-steel buildings. Twenty years ago, this site looked like a wasteland, in the heart of Berlin, and largely had not changed since the destruction of the war. Likewise, the Brandenburg Gate(slideshow) which once stood isolated in its own wasteland setting, is now hemmed in by modern buildings with the usual cornucopia of coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels in tourist spots the world over. I feel the Brandenburg Gate should have been turned into a road roundabout, as one sees with the various gates and arches in London, Paris, and Madrid. Sadly, it seems, the opportunism of greedy developers pre-determined an alternate fate for this important cultural icon.

I spent most of Sunday with Carmel and Cathy exploring Berlin on foot. Cathy and Carmel have been the closes of friends for years (I feel I'm forbidden to detail the exact number). I'd heard so much about Cathy, and yet this was the first time we'd actually met. So it was a joy watching them interact, especially as they've lived on opposite sides of the world for the last 30 years. Cathy had wonderful stories to tell of her experience of living in Germany in the 70s and 80s, especially as she used to regularly pass into the East to visit her husband's family. She used to pass through Checkpoint Charlie (Charlie, as in C, as in the third checkpoint) as that was the designated entry/exit point for foreign nationals. Amazingly, Cathy described the experience of driving on a special autobahn from West Germany, passing through East Germany to arrive at the political "island" of Berlin. A breakdown, it seems, was not an option.

With Carmel and Cathy I saw the restored Reichstag(slideshow), the Brandenburg Gate, the moving Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the construction site of the new American Embassy (right across the road from the memorial), the new British Embassy (built on the same site of the pre-war embassy), and the Hotel Adlon. This modern hotel, rebuilt in a similar style to the pre-eminent hotel of pre-War Germany, is where Michael Jackson dangled his baby a few years back!

All of my Berlin photographs can be viewed in a slideshow.

I Voted!

Once every few years, we're allowed to exercise the democratic poison pen. This lunchtime I trekked up to Australia House, the High Commission at the east end of Strand, to vote in Australia's 2007 Federal Election.

As the photo shows, special tents were erected outside Australia House to facilitate the security checks. Queueing fences snake around the south side of the building, as long queues are expected during the fourteen days that the polls are open. There are, on average, 250,000 Australians in the UK at any given time, mostly in London. In the 2004 election, about 20,500 Australians voted at Australia House.

Did you know, according to the AEC rules, it is illegal for political parties to hand out how-to-vote cards (anywhere in the world) at any time before election day, with the exception of the early polling facility at the High Commission in London.

St Pancras International Train Station

Last night I visited London's new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International. It's quite sensational.

The original trainshed was, at the time of its construction, the largest single-span in the world. Now restored, the trainshed is the focal point for the station's grand design.

My photos from St Pancras can be viewed in a slideshow.

Grupo Compay Segundo

The Grupo Compay Segundo, of Buena Vista Social Club fame, performing at the Hotel Nacional, Havana, Cuba.