Antwerp with the Australian

What do you do with a London-based Aussie who arrives here in Antwerp, laden down by bottles of New Zealand red wine?
Invite her to stay, but of course.

So it was that Clare, an old Istanbul friend, landed in Belgium Friday night. So we've test-driven the Kiwi reds and found them more than adequate ... (it has been SO LONG since I enjoyed good New Zealand wine).

We spent Saturday wandering in Antwerpen ... and I realised again how much I love the way that each guest gives a new view of this city I live in. The photos will prove it. We photographed cockroaches as big as my hand and all kinds of other fascinating subjects .. via graffitti.

We ate waffles and explored the so-called Foreigners Market ... due to the fact that most stall owners are of foreign origin. We sampled the multitude of free olives and feta cheeses at the Moroccan stall and then sampled some more when we arrived at the French-speaking cheese guy's stall, buying a strong-tasting Brie that went so well with the wine this evening.

And Clare was lucky enough to experience that very special customer service I've only experienced in Belgium so far ... the 3 seconds to make yourself and your order clear or the salesperson moves on to the customer behind you. ;)

A bow to tradition saw us resting in my favourite pub, Elfde Gebod - The Eleventh Commandment, evoking a spiritual moment by combining the drinking of alcohol in a place religiously named.

There is always the risk of falling into the space between you and home

Paraplu: a device consisting of a circular fabric canopy on a folding metal fram supported by a central rod, used as protection against rain.

And so it is that the ordinary umbrella is transformed into something more luscious in Nederlands.

The trams are running badly today ... changes created by deviations near Centraal Station as they lay new rails or roads, and rainy day notwithstanding I needed to pick up Gert's proof of illness papers at the doctor's whose offices fall into the cityscape between operational tram routes.

The walk wasn't so bad ... spring rain is wet but the wind wasn't cold and I had my enormous black papaplu. And without rain I wouldn't have noticed that the the stunning homes over in Zurenborg were built using materials that look good in the rain ... an inspired move on the part of the architects as rain is rumoured to be something Antwerpen does well sometimes.

I have had an extreme 24 hours ... feeling the seperation created by distance as people I love struggled back in New Zealand. Long phone calls home, a stiff neck and a headache today but that wasn't the sum total of experience. I lived another extreme too; that of the Belgian family gathered together for birthday celebrations.

Reassured about New Zealand, there was a party we were meant to attend and there I was enveloped by a feeling of family that I hadn't felt in a while.

It was a relief in a way, that other extreme where we only risked a slow death by food. Jan's barbeque food was heavenly, endless prawns, ribs and chicken pieces were washed down with Spanish champagne ... before main course, red wine and desserts.

Other grand news from the city of spring rain and grey clouds ... one of my favourite Australians flies in tonight. She's an old friend from my Istanbul days, so we'll go wandering some, photos to follow.

There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence.
Memory dies unless it's given a use.
Or as Athos might have said:
If one no longer has land but has the memory of land,
then one can make a map.

Anne Michaels
Fugitive Pieces

Annelies, Benny and Hone Heke

Annelies wandered by my blog the other day and I popped over to visit her at Hone Heke.com, curious about the name of the site.

The name Hone Heke comes from New Zealand so I asked why a Belgian was using it ...

Annelies expained, 'suffice it to say that during a wonderful holiday in New Zealand a couple of years ago, we were totally charmed by this famous Maori warrior who kept cutting down the flagpoles of the English colonists' and she directed me to her official explanation: Hone Heke, Maori warrior chief New Zealand (1807-1850). Hone Heke was one of the first chiefs to sign the British Government's Waitangi Treaty with the Maori people in 1840.

But when the commercial operations of settlers began to threaten Maori trade and land ownership, Heke led several battles against the British, famously chopping down their flagpoles at Russell, North Island. He never lost a battle and neither side was able to claim absolute victory. Heke escaped penalty as his adversaries did not want to provoke tension in the region.'

Many New Zealanders, Maori and non-Maori alike, see him as a political champion of his people.

She also has a hilarious post that goes someway to capturing the delights of European customer 'service'.

The Brutal Reality High Altitude Climbing

The Telegraph published an interesting article by climber Stephen Venables, the first Briton to ascend Everest without oxygen.

It is very hard to explain to non-climbers the paradox of high-altitude climbing. It involves great discomfort and danger but is also an intensely exhilarating, joyful experience. Knowing that things can go horribly wrong reinforces the sense that, morally, as well as physically, you are entering a different world - a world with different rules.

Thanks Martin.

New Zealand advertising at its finest

Mark has a New Zealand sense of humour ... like mine, and like so many other New Zealanders.

Curious, then pop over and watch the 'Telecon' ... I mean 'Telecom' advertisement .

Trust me ... it's delicious but listen carefully if you're not a Kiwi, there's a wee bit of an accent involved.

Miracle walks ...

Andrea talks of miracle walks over on her blog. She wrote: These are walks you take with no particular destination, in search of beauty, goodness, a little surprise. The amazing thing about them is that just by declaring them a "miracle walk" you always find something special along the way.

In the mood that I've been in these last few days ... that coming-and-going-dark-mood-of-grouchiness since cancelling my flight home ... I held serious doubts about the possibility of this miracle walkthing here in Antwerpen.

I had to go out to Gert's doctor ... paperwork to say he has to stay home some more and while I was out there strangers spoke to me, surprising me with their small kindnesses and I saw one or two beautiful things just because I was looking.

I stopped at a bakery on the way home, giving my order in Nederlands ... asking for een wit brood niet gescheiden en 4 pistolets... mmmm, the 4 pistolets were clear, she pretended not to notice me asking for one white bread not divorced. 'Niet gesneden' for next time.

Anyway ... perhaps it's all about looking beyond the surface of people and place and realising that miracle walks are always a possibility.

Imagine if we'd known ...

I was laughing from the kitchen last night, and said something like 'Imagine if you had said to me back in Istanbul, 'I love you, come live with me and be my love ... although it will mean giving up your job and leaving this exciting city you live in.

And you won't be able to work again until my government is finished with you, and you'll be expected to learn Dutch but don't worry, you can stay home and fill in your spare hours with whatever you like, when not ordering various expensive papers from your country ... and re-ordering them with extra bits that need stamped and translated (again) later.

Oh, and Belgians are notoriously difficult to befriend so it might be a couple of years before you develop a circle of friends like you had in New Zealand and here in Istanbul. And you will have to give up that free trip home if my immigration system can't process you in time because you won't have earned enough to get back to Europe.'

And suddenly we weren't laughing anymore.

18 Times the Legal Alcohol Limit

Yahoo was running this story ... Lithuanian police were so astonished by a breath test that registered 18 times the legal alcohol limit, they thought their device must be broken.
It wasn't.

Police said Tuesday 41-year-old Vidmantas Sungaila registered 7.27 grams per liter of alcohol in his blood repeatedly on different devices after he was pulled over Saturday for driving his truck down the center of a two-lane highway 60 miles from the capital, Vilnius.

Medical experts say anything above 3.5 grams per liter of alcohol in the blood is lethal for most people.

Marla Ruzicka, the movie

I've mentioned Marla Ruzicka more than once on this site and linked to an interesting 'Marla' article over in Rolling Stone magazine.

The Washington Post recently wrote : "A year ago tomorrow, in Baghdad, a young woman from California was killed by a suicide bomb. Marla Ruzicka was working to get aid to Iraqi civilians harmed by U.S. military operations when her car and that of her colleague Faiz Ali Salim was destroyed on the now-infamous airport road.

Marla's legacy lives on in the countless people continuing her work and in the families she tried so hard to assist. Her help to victims of war should also be enshrined in our policies if we as a country are to be, as Marla put it, "just a little bit better."

The Telegraph is now reporting that the movie rights to her story have been bought by Paramount, who beat off bids from rival studios after the producer Marc Platt, whose previous credits include Philadelphia and Legally Blonde, impressed the Ruzicka family with his enthusiasm for the project.

Project Censored

An interesting site: Project Censored is a media research group out of Sonoma State University which tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country's major national news media.

Kevin Sites

I'm never sure what impresses me more when I read Kevin Sites ... whether it's his endurance, his way of connecting with people, his courage, I don't know but something he wrote struck home with me today.

He's in Nepal being driven through rain heavy enough to dent a car ... the car is a 1971 pre-Nissan thing called a Gista.

Here's an extract from his piece titled 'Nepal: I am a Dog' : When I was traveling in Africa or even the Middle East, the country changes weren't as abrupt to me as they have been in the last six weeks. Like a slow-dissolve connecting the disparate sequences of a continuous story that spans too much geographic territory, I see the roads before me blend from one to the other — riding the river beds of eastern Afghanistan in a humvee, through the lowlands of northern Colombia packed in a local taxi, winding through the hillsides of Haiti in my fixer's beat up Datsun and now to this moment in Nepal.

There is a duality at work here that is hard for me to comprehend. I'm amazed by the these geographic disjunctions in my journey, the shock of sensory overload, the new smells, terrain, and lives that wash over me on these drives.

Simultaneously, I'm lulled by the comfort of it all, the fact that there is too much to understand. Instead of an observer, for this moment, I am a dog with my head out the window, the rush of air creating a comforting buzz that silences the need to know more — at least for now.

Pulitzer Lessons

An interesting article from Poynter online .

Lessons Learned from Pulitzers 2006:About the Craft, About the Organization. Four Washington Post staffers discuss what their prize-winning work taught them about journalism -- and the place where they work.

Loneliness

When I first moved to Belgium, it was summer and Gert and I had all the time in the world. We also had a delusion based on research ... that moving countries was a 12 week process in terms of documentation ... maybe 3 months; a long holiday but I had enough money, I could learn the language, find my way around Antwerpen, make the most of this little hiccup in life.

That was July 2005 and I'm only now on the downhill side of the 'process'. There's a good chance I'll be operational and ready for business as soon as the Belgians return from their long summer break in September ... there's a chance, nothing definate but a very good chance.

But I wanted to write about loneliness ...

I've never had any problems finding friends. I've always felt lucky that good people found me and pulled me into their lives, or allowed me to arrive in my own ways.

Belgium has been something else.
For the first time in my life I've suffered from real-life loneliness.

I couldn't work legally and so didn't make those daily connections with new people, building a social group that began with my colleagues.

I had to learn that political receptions are superb places for people-watching, that the language of body is an international language that goes beyond the limits of speech and that most Belgians are very fluent in English but there was also the fact that while people did seem to connect while I was out with them, there was never an 'afterwards'.

I struggled with it. I had never experienced any kind of unlooked for isolation before ... Istanbul friends used to tease me that I knew more people than them, even though they had lived their whole lives in the city, and back in New Zealand no one's a stranger for long.

And so it was that my blog came to life. I created a 'job' and began to write everyday ... just to see if I could. My money ran out as the process of 'immigrant trying to arrive' dragged on. I ran for a while, damaged my knee, stopped while it healed.

Time passed and as the leaves began to reappear on the trees outside my window, I began to wonder if I hadn't had a need for loneliness at this point in my life ... that although it was difficult, I did need to work out what I wanted to do with my life and perhaps more importantly, to begin to get a taste of what is possible when I don't have the distraction of family or friends sharing my life with me ... just for a while.

Lately I've been reading a new blog. Superhero Journal fascinates me to the point where reading it is how I reward myself for achieving my goals for the day.

I was just reading her post titled 'The lonelies' and it made me realise again, just how much I needed to be lonely to get on with pursuing the very thing that has always made me most happy ... this writing-photography thing.

Andrea was advised to "consider that loneliness is just part of the deal right now. Sometimes you need loneliness to grow creatively".

So here I am, still alive, still in Belgium, still unemployable but on the other side of the lonelies. Winter was a long and a cold one but I'm ready to start something new ... so let's see what happens.

Ahhh those Belgian Rules ...

For those who had any doubts about Belgian immigration policy ... who harboured any doubts about my increasing frustrations ... who wondered why a New Zealander might take 7 long months to get a regularisation, based on living with a Belgian ... pop over to the American who is leaving her Brussel's-based partner to his international career after receiving her deportation notice 5 days ago.

I liked the truth of her last sentence ... Immigration is not an issue -- it's lives.

Ms Baker writes ...

I enjoy the Desperately Wandering blog and often discover new and interesting things when I wander there. Ms Baker's most recent post , titled 'I Am Not A Colour Coded Kuwaiti' presents an interesting point of view.

An extract: It is a democracy when we recognize that the viewpoint in opposition to our own is just as valid and significant for what it represents in terms of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and it’s ability to generate thoughtful, positive forces for change and the evolution of society. And being a true democracy does not need to mean we surrender who we are ...

Blue Eyes

I found this site in Andrea's Superhero Journal .

Blueeyes Magazine is an online documentary photography magazine devoted to publishing new long-term project work. It is a labor of love created by a dedicated group of people who believe in the power of still photography. The magazine was created in 2003 in response to declining editorial space for documentary images, following in the footsteps of the now defunct Untitled Magazine to publish pictures that support and celebrate passionate and personal photography.

Born from a group of friends who studied together at the Missouri School of Journalism, becoming deeply influenced by photographers like Eugene Richards, Gilles Perres, Larry Towell, and Luc Delahaye, the magazine exists to give a home to projects that examine social, political, and environmental issues around the world.

On a more complex level, Blueeyes is a movement against negative trends in photojournalism that have limited the freedom, self-expression, and evolution of documentary photography as a young medium of mass communication. The magazine strives to publish longer, more personal, and more intricate bodies of work, in direct contrast to the traditional models of the newspaper photo story or the over-simplified, stereotypical coverage of broadcast journalism outlets. While many publications, both in print and online, are happy to regurgitate the same pictures from the same photographers ad nauseam, we are trying to champion unpublished and unheralded work from mainly younger photographers. All of this is in a simple effort to understand our selves and our world more clearly.

A Slice of My Day

Gert's still not moving far from the couch, as he's suffering from Meuniere Syndrome, an inner ear problem that leaves him with almost constant motion-sickness.

I've told him he's very lucky to have his own cheap immigrant labour in-house and meeting most of his needs with minimal (or inaudible) complaint. I have to be careful, too much laughter isn't nice for him, fortunately outrunning him is incredibly simple should I be overcome by the uncharitable demon who makes me mock on occasion.

I woke in tatters, on my feet and running for the phone before my eyes were open. I knew New Zealand was calling ... somehow. It was Jessie, pretending she hadn't realised it was Sunday morning in my world. She runs 10 hours ahead back home in these days.

Although I couldn't see the little 'lie-dimple' that appears on her chin when she's going for an outrageous untruth with an innocent face, there are things that a mother just knows about any child of hers.

Being woken didn't matter, I loved talking with her and the run took me back to the days of her babyhood, when I leapt out of bed and ran when she cried, and leapt out of bed and ran if she slept late.

Me ... neurotic back then?
Maybe.

The New Zealand Alpine Club

The New Zealand Alpine Club recently ran a Creative Writing competition. I'm enjoying reading my way through the entries ... it's a taste of home I guess.

Anyway, just in case anyone else is curious, you can find them here .

The online magazine is full in interesting things ... like Paul Clarke's downloadable pdf titled Mountains of New Zealand. In it, he answers questions like 'how many mountains are there in New Zealand?'

The criteria was that those mountains counted must reach an altitude of 1400 metres or higher and that they are at least 300 metres above the lowest saddle between them and the adjacent 'mountain'.

There are at least 856 mountains in New Zealand; 35 in the North Island and 821 in the South Island.

What can I say ... the South Island always does it better. ;)

Istanbul

Istanbul ... once you adjust to the long summer days, warm nights spent on rooftops overlooking the Marmara Sea ... once you recover from first impact Istanbul, you find you enjoy the Istanbul chaos that changes your life.

At first you just watch, amazed by the mess as it explodes all around you, you can't stop it, you're a foreigner, so you watch and you learn.

The shower might be a trickle or the water may go off altogether, or the power; the oven might not work but it's okay, you can cook on the stovetop and later, when your belly adjusts, you eat doner sandwiches, borek, and iskender kebap from kind cafe strangers.

But slowly, as you learn to bend with the city, she will reward you with things never dreamt of.

Once I left New Zealand with 30 dollars in my bag, racing a snowstorm to Istanbul airport... 23 hours in the air ... endless hours and a cold sweat whenever the smallprint travel insurance details worried my mind.

I made it... picked up the cat from the vet's, bought extra water and food, I cleaned, I climbed into bed 8 hours after arriving ... a white world outside.

I climbed into bed almost dead from that tiredness you get when you fly round the world without sleeping and the neighbour started lifting his floor tiles with a drill. His choice of 'snowed-in entertainment' incompatible with his jetlagged Yeni Zelanda neighbour's plan to lie comatose for a few days.

2 metres of snow, and I watched it for days, wishing I could have spent longer in my New Zealand summer where everything was so simple after Istanbul.

Another flight back, this time my old home was gone, my new home was yet to be found. People-promises broken ...

But Istanbul kept her promises ... she was still heaving with people who shouted their way into my quietest moments ... the call to prayer never faltering, going out over the cosmopolitan heads that provide one of one hundred contrasts.

City of scents ... the spices, the fruit wagons, the simit sellers with their sesame sales, diesel-belching buses competing for space in the race that takes place on Istanbul's roads.. yellow taxis. The smell of decay washed away on the Bosphorous; the smell of money when you walk in Nisantasi; the smell of the poor, of the labourers, of the refuse ... the smell.

I adored Istanbul.