Goodbye Brussels

“- We shouldn’t be afraid of leaving things behind, because what is really important always stays with us. Even when we don’t want to.
– So in the end we never leave anything or anybody behind?
– Yes.
– What a rotten deal”
(dialogue from the movie Mine Vaganti)

It’s always difficult to say goodbye and leave something behind, be it places, habits, jobs or people, especially people (or is it especially habits?) But when you leave all of them behind by moving to another country, it feels like a life ends and another life begins. I did this three times already and I am wondering how many new “lives” we get before the game is over. It reminds me of what one of my favorite Romanian writers (Dan Lungu) said “We have only one life, but many deaths.”

So, after three years and three months of living in Brussels it’s time to say goodbye to: French courses, slow Sunday mornings with pain au chocolat and Tribune de Bruxelles (accompanied in the first two years by a hefty French-Romanian dictionary), strolling in the Cinquantenaire park, complaining about the weather and the bureaucracy, cheap weekend trips in Europe, job, biking in the forest at Woluve, La Cambre and Tervuren, feeling a stranger, language and cultural barriers, feeling alone, consumerism at its peak, Leffe, Palm, Chimay Bleu, Westmalle Triple, Jupiler, the feeling that I made a difference in some people’s lives, changing, Carolle, new and old friends, isolation, self-discovery, love, good conversations, Uca, feeling lost, heartbreak, Carolle, courage, kundalini yoga, hiking and kayaking in the Ardennes, Couleur Cafe, new projects, unfinished projects, fantastic second hand shops, Jeu de Balle (the flea market), the pita with melting fta cheese, olives and dried tomatoes at Marche du Midi (still drooling), rekindling my passion for photography, discipline, decisions…(to be continued)

As for the photos, they were taken from the top of Parking 58, a 10-floor parking building in the center of Brussels, where I’ve been wanting to go ever since I arrived in Brussels. So on my last day here I wanted to check off that ever-growing list of places to see at least this one (and there are still so many things I would like to photograph in Brussels). I thought it was also a good way to say goodbye to Brussels through photos.

I would like to hear from you too. Have you lived in different countries? How would you describe it? How did it change you? How was it to say goodbye to a place? Does your perception of it change when you know you would leave?

The impossible lightness of being

Foggy night in Brussels

More black and white photos here

Autumn

More autumn photos here.

A pottery class

These photos were made during a pottery class I took together with my colleagues at Atelier Nikisan in Brussels. Veronique Bogaert who owns the Atelier has a very interesting life story, the kind that inspires you to take risks and the road less traveled. She left Belgium and a job in a bank, traveled and lived in Egypt, New Caledonia, New Zeeland, Australia, China and finally Japan, where she studied the art of pottery, learned Japanese and lived there for about 20 years.  (you can read more about it on her site).

As for pottery, it is such a relaxing activity! It’s wonderful play with the clay, let your hands and mind free to create. The results can be surprising. Although for all of us it was the first time we’ve ever tried it, some people really found a hidden talent and produced some (small) masterpieces.

More photos from the pottery class here.

Atelier Nikisan

Inspiration

I could say that photography was my first love. It started when I was around six and my grandfather gave me his old Russian film camera, a Zorki. Although now it’s broken and lies somewhere in the back of a drawer in my parents house, I remember it perfectly, like we remember every detail about our loves. When I started going to school I also enrolled in the photography club of the school. In spite of this early start and the fact that a camera has always accompanied me along the years, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I took photography more seriously.

Follow your dreams

It all started with this blog. It was just a small step, but often this is all it takes. Soon I found myself taking more and more steps on this new, unexpected road, which seemed like being built with each step I took. I bought a DSLR camera, I enrolled in a photography course, I learned more about blogging, I changed the look of my blog, I began writing more, I took a Photoshop course, I bought one more lens, I read books and blogs about photography and learned (and I am still learning) with growing enthusiasm, all this while working a full time job and doing other activities: learning French (because I’m living in Belgium), traveling, doing yoga and all the rest you have to do for a living. (You might want to read this other post I wrote about finding your passion or your true calling). Now I find myself musing – half scared, half confident – with the idea of doing this for a living.

Go against the current

It all started with a small step in a new direction. But this road is not always easy. There are moments when I feel I will never be good enough or that I should just drop it and stick to a safe job that pays the bills. In moments like this, it is so important to find support and recover the inner strength to keep going. I am lucky to have good friends who support me. I am also inspired and motivated by other people’s stories. I see that many people who are doing creative work are going through the same process. Lately I’ve been reading some articles and a book that inspired and motivated me, which I would like to share with you:

Keep on looking

- an interview with Mary Jo Bang, On Learning, Self-Discipline and Taking the Road Less Traveled from which I quote:
“If that desire is strong enough, and persistent enough, you do whatever you have to do to teach yourself how to cross over from being a reader to being a reader who is a writer. [...] The same was true of photography. It took me a long time to make the photographs I saw in my mind. [...] Over time, what was on the film and the photographic paper more and more resembled what I’d imagined when I looked into the viewfinder. And I saw how, if you steadily worked at something, what you don’t know gradually erodes and what you do know slowly grows and at some point you’ve gained a degree of mastery. What you know becomes what you are. You know photography and you are a photographer. You know writing and you are a writer.”

- a speech by Ira Glass on the importance of doing a lot of work when you want to be good at something (a writer in his case):

“…it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first years you are making stuff, what you are making isn’t so good. It’s not that great, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. And your taste is good enough, that you can tell that what you are making, is kind of disappointment to you, you know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point they quit. [...] the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you are going to finish one story. Because it’s only actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you are making will be as good as your ambitions.“

Find inspiration

- an article on how to deal with mistakes, by Brooke Snow, a photographer whose style and photography tips and honesty I really like: How being easier on ourselves has more rewards than we allow ourselves to know

- a post about Being a Beginner. by Gwen Bell, whose tough and authentic questions always make me think about what I really want and answer honestly (it’s more difficult than it sounds!):

“What can you quit right now? What scares you to learn? Can you start today?”

- The Artist’s Way : A Course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self by Julia Cameron, which points out the obstacles we are facing on the way of becoming an artist; many times these obstacles are created by ourselves, because it can be very scary to actually go for it and follow your dreams:

“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?” Yes… the same age you will be if you don’t.

- Allowing dreams by Susannah Conway, whose heartfelt online course Unravelling I have just followed.

“But today I realised that i’ve reached a place where i’ve let go of some expectations – of what my life should be looking like by now, of what i am capable of doing, of who i could be. I’m starting to embrace what is, and that includes giving my dreams more space to breathe.”

More inspiring quotes on my other blog.

For the love of photography: spending hours trying to capture the free falling of a leaf

Reflections

The Art of Flying

Biking in my favorite park in Brussels, to enjoy the last days probably of this sunny autumn proved to be a good opportunity to try the photographic technique called panning with some very unpredictable flying subjects. All it takes is a lot of patience, attention…and a bit of luck to capture the birds in flight.

For the ones interested in the technical details of this panning experiment:
- the first photo: aperture: f/6,7; shutter speed: 1/45 seconds; ISO 200; For this photo I used the shutter priority mode, but then I changed to manual mode, because there were many exposure failures.
- the second photo: aperture: f/5,6; shutter speed: 1/60 seconds; ISO 200.
- the third photo: aperture: f/8; shutter speed: 1/30 seconds; ISO 200. As you can see, the background motion blur is stronger than in the other photos due to longer exposure time, but the subject is less clear. The shutter speed was too slow or maybe my sync with the bird’s flight was not perfect.

Important: the focus mode was set on continuous focusing (AI Servo in my Canon 450D’s menu). The lens I used was the Canon 18-200 mm, f: 3,5-5,6.

1st of November: a prayer

…and poetry by Jim Morrison on the classical song “Adagio” by Albinioni:

Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
comes death on a stranger hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you’ve
brought to bed.
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven’s
claws…

Sunday feeling in Oostende

Odette Toulemonde, the protagonist of the Belgian movie with the same name, reminds me of Amelie Poulain.   Odette finds happiness in little things and in helping others; she levitates when she is happy (a sur-realistic touch which I find adorable). Her dream is ordinary, like her life as shop assistant. But in a world where people think that ”more” (money, houses, cars,  career,  appliances, clothes, exotic holidays, parties-socializing etc), means happier/better, I find it refreshing that her idea of happiness is to go on a trip to the Belgian seaside. However, the first time I got there one windy summer day and bathed in the cold and murky sea water, trying to ignore the sight of the big grey blocks of flats flanking the beach, I wondered why would this be anyone’s dream destination. But it’s like Belgium - at least this is how I discovered it while living here: it’s not love at first sight.  On the contrary, on first sight one might be deceived.

So I decided to give it one more chance and this Sunday I took a trip to Oostende, on the Belgian coast of the North Sea. It was the end of October and the weather was not exactly inviting. The sky was heavy with low, grey clouds, a fine drizzle was falling, making the air cold and wet, so that no jacket seemed warm enough. In spite of that, the train from Brussels to Oostende was packed and the seaside was full of people, as if it were a summer day. I think this is one of the valuable lessons I learned while living in Belgium: to ignore bad weather and to really cherish each sunny day. When I say to people I live in Belgium, their first reaction is, making a compassionate-sorry face: ‘It rains a lot, isn’t it?”. Indeed, the weather is quite bad here. Especially the summers are cold and rainy and the lack of light is the worst. In August everybody designs escape strategies, in order to make a stack of sun, heat and light, which has to last until the next escape. But as I said, here you don’t plan your life according to the weather, otherwise you would end up staying at home all the time. I believe people here learn since they were toddlers, carried by their parents on the back of the bike, through rain and wind, that bad weather is no excuse.

On that rainy October day in Oostende there were couples strolling on the beach, playing with a dog or flying kites, families on four-seat tandem bicycles, children building castles in the sand, elegantly-clad white-haired ladies, with an air from 1900, sitting in wheelchairs, pushed by equally distinguished old gentlemen, youngsters chatting and laughing loudly, as teenagers do, kids with skateboards and karts, outdoor terraces where people were having the traditional moules and frites lunch (mussels and fries, Belgian fries, mind you!). Everybody, from young to old, from sporty to romantic, was out. And me, photographing all this

All this fantastic material for black and white photography would be enough reason for me to like Oostende. But there is something more: the museum of the Belgian painter James Ensor, hosted in the house where he lived and painted for more than 30 years. His bizarre, unsettling, lonely, weird, different paintings with masks, carnivals, death, religious themes stayed in my mind for a long time.

That was Oostende for me. If you want to see the photos, take a look here. And if you haven’t visited already, I hope you will.

Magic and fairy tales

I love fairy tales! Although by now I have my doubts about happily ever after, that all it takes is to be a princess and that the biggest enemy of happiness is a wicked mother in law. Without any intention to be cynical I would tell Prince Charming about the impermanence of things as Buddhism teaches us or simpler, that “you live you learn, you love you learn, you loose you learn, you bleed you learn” as the song goes.

But the reason I started talking about fairy tales was the magic in them and magical places. Because yes, I believe that magic still exists in the world, and to feel it, our logic, left brain has to be silenced. I feel it especially when I’m in the nature. And some places really seem to be made for it. Like this place called “The Giant’s Tomb” (Le Tombeau de Geant), which is found near Botassart, a village in the Ardennes, in the southern part of Belgium. The legend says that when the legions of Roman emperor Cesar defeated the local Gaulish tribes, there was a giant who refused to be taken prisoner. He ran and ran but eventually the Roman warriors surrounded him. Refusing to surrender to its future as a slave and an attraction in the Roman circus, he jumped off a high rock in the river Semois below. The next day, the locals buried him under the hill which bears his name today.

The End

PS: If you would like to see more photos of Belgium, check out this album.

Autumn in Brussels

I’m just a beginner in Photoshop and I’m learning step by step all the marvellous things you can achieve in this programme…and trying not to overdo it. This is a Photoshop experiment with textures in order to achieve the look of an old postcard. There are many websites and books explaining this technique, but I found this tutorial on ACM Photography very useful.

The original photo was taken in Brussels on Avenue Tervuren, which is a great place for biking and photographing. If you would like to see more photos from Brussels, check out this album.

And if you would like to see another one of my Photoshop endeavors with multiple exposures, layers, brushes and borders, check out this post.

Street photography on Charles Bridge in Prague

Charles Bridge in Prague is one of the most crowded touristic places ever, the kind of places I usually avoid. Big crowds really put me off.  But on this summer trip to Prague I found myself spending almost two hours on Charles bridge observing the little universe there and doing the kind of photography I love the most: candid street photography. Actually it shares the first pace in my heart together with nature photography.

One good thing though about crowded places is that I can be incospicuous among the hundreds of other tourists with their cameras. Usually street photographers prefer the “golden” 50 mm lens, but I shoot with a zoom lens because it allows me to be even more incospicuous, as I am not drawing attention on myself by moving so much to frame or focus, and so I can capture people’s expressions or movements when they are not self-conscious or posing, like they usually are in front of the camera. I just sit on the side with my camera ready and I observe, waiting for – what Henri Cartier Bresson calls – the “decisive moment”. Of course, it is not only a matter of photographic skills, but a combination of chance and patience.

More photos from Prague here.

More street photography here.

In a (nut)shell

These photos were taken during a weekend trip on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria, at Tyulenovo and Krapetz. I was there with friends, we crossed the border from Romania  to Bulgaria at night and got lost driving on dark bumpy roads, trying to figure out the road signs written in Cyrillic characters. When we arrived to Tyulenovo it was almost 3 in the morning, you couldn’t see a thing, just the sea under a dim moon and some silhouettes of fishermen from the village throwing their nets. It was freezing cold, so we just put up the tents and tried to sleep. But my sleep was short because I woke up to take photos of  the sunrise (besides, it was an opportunity to try my newly acquired graduated ND filter). But it was well worth it! You can see why here.

The next day we went to Krapetz and the scenery that passed by unnoticed the night before now revealed itself. We drove through shabby villages, lethargic under the summer sun, where the only inhabitants seemed to be the dogs sleeping on the side of the road, we crossed over fields with dry sunflowers and dusty unpaved roads that ended suddenly with high rocky cliffs above the sea.

My first star trails photo…or how I spent 1.141 seconds of my life

It was almost midnight and my friends have all gone to bed, that is in their tents. It was a long day, we hiked into the wild scenery of Retezat mountains (Romania), up to around 2500 m altitude, through bouldery valleys, peaks draped in clouds, glacier lakes surrounded by bushes of brightly coloured mountain flowers, we met sheep herds and free horses, we had sudden changes of weather, puffy fog (or was it clouds?) rushing from the valleys below and obscuring the path behind us, sun suddenly piercing through the clouds, burning our faces, dark clouds coming over and a sudden deluge of rain. And then the rain would stop and we were picking up fallen branches in the wood to make fire.

There are small things that become enormous joys in situations like this: to change into dry socks and warm pants, to eat with hunger that comes after physical exercise, which makes simple food taste so delicious, like bread and cheese and smoked ham and tomatoes (I’m drooling , to have a tea with water from the brook heated over the fire and flavored with pine buds taken from the trees near our tents, improved with tzuica (hard Romanian alcohol), to talk and laugh around the fire with close friends. The simple things.

The fire around which we spent the evening was almost extinct. It was getting really cold and there was a lot of humidity in the air, on the grass and on my jacket. But I said to myself, ok, just one more photo. I’ve been wanting for a long time to try to capture star trails. In the city it’s impossible because of the pollution and the lights, but here it was perfect: there were no houses, no cars, no electricity. The stars were so bright and clear and seemed very close. I wish I knew more about astrology.

As it was the first time I did this kind of photo, I didn’t know the exact exposure and I didn’t realize it is so hard to focus the camera in darkness. So I set it on Bulb mode and I thought of an exposure time of 20 minutes. I pressed the remote and started the countdown. To sit in complete darkness and wait for 20 minutes might seem long, but all I had to do was to look up to the magnificent view of the starry sky and time passed. It was almost like a meditation.

Then I got restless, because of the cold, but also because I really wanted to see how the photo would come out. So I stopped the timer just before it reached 20 minutes (to be more exact: 1141 seconds). Then I got into the tent, trying not to wake up my tent-mate, and slipped like a worm inside the cocoon of my sleeping bag, being grateful for its warmth. I still had to wait for the camera to process and save the photo. I think it was about ten minutes more, which seemed like forever, as I was feeling warm and cozy and my eyes were closing. But then the camera finally finished processing it and I saw the photo. I felt happy, like after a job well done and then i fell asleep almost instantly.

More photos from the Retezat mountains here.

Brussels dream

They say you don’t have to go far away to find good subjects to photograph. Even a walk in the neighborhood provides many photographic opportunities. I think the key word is “walk”.

And this is what I did also when I moved to Brussels. I especially liked those 40 minutes of walking to work in the morning, regardless of the weather. Time just for myself. To observe, to discover, to remember locations to be photographed later. As it was October, I had a lot of that typical Belgian rain combined with the greyest skies I’ve ever seen and a pesky wind, that drove everybody cranky or depressed and left corpses of umbrellas with broken spokes and their skirts indecently unfurled, abandoned on sidewalks.

The amazing thing I discovered those first days is that I could take every day a different way to work (to be read: I often got lost). My neighborhood is a lovely quiet quarter with art-nouveau houses, but orientation there is so complicated, the streets have no logic, as in parallel and perpendicular. Yes, I can already hear some ironic voices saying that I have no sense of orientation, as they usually say about women.

But I think I also got lost on purpose, because, as I was walking on a street that I took the day before, something was catching my eye (should I say my photographic eye), a yellow wall on which a red ivy was climbing, highlighted by a ray of the morning sun, an oval window on whose seal was standing a small wooden sculpture and an orange pumpkin, a brick tower rising mysteriously from the morning fog, a brasserie that seemed friendly, through whose windows I had to peek, a gate with colourful frosted glass pane decorated in the typical art-nouveau style here with curled iron branches and leaves, near which an old rusted bike with flat tires was tied with an even more rustier chain, a three-storey house, really tall and narrow, in the style so common here and in the Netherlands, but this one stood out due to its enormous arched window on the second floor, with no curtains, which let the passers-by see a room like an antiquarian shop, with walls covered completely with bookshelves and a large armchair, which seemed the perfect place to read. And so on, walking and looking around I would end up in a totally unknown area, such as a deserted little street, with sleepy houses and a closed restaurant, which was called (how else?) Taciturne Wilhelm (Silent Wilhelm).

Some minutes later, when I would finish crossing my neighborhood and approach my work place, I would end up again in familiar territory, where it was impossible to get lost (at least physically): four lane streets with cars stuck in traffic, tall glass buildings filled with identical offices, aligned perfectly along the road, people in suits marching with fixed stares and headphones in their ears, until they were swallowed by one of those glass and steel monsters or a subway mouth, which was opening suddenly in the sidewalk. Then it would cross my mind (for Romanian readers: like in Cartarescu’s books) that everything that I described before was existing just in my imagination or in a dream. And then the following morning, I would try to find again the same way, the same houses, as if to convince myself that they were real.

After two weeks, I already knew that the houses with the doors and windows that I liked were in Square Ambiorix, that the brasserie was called “Dreams ” (not so surprising after all), that the wall with ivy belonged to a kinder garden and near that was the cheapest supermarket in the neighborhood. One could say that it takes so little time until “new” becomes “known”. And then my half hour of magic in the morning was gone…

If any of you who are reading this post are living in Brussels, I would like to know which is your favorite/special spot?

How about people leaving in other cities, do you have a favorite place in your home city that is not necessarily touristically famous, but it somehow feels like you discovered it? MYRCAC742W6C

Striped

The rhythm of Lisbon

When I got to Jardim da Estrela, where the OutJazz festival was supposed to take place, I was already dead tired.  It was one of those days that seems to be made especially to prove the relativity of time. One thing is for sure, that day had started very early, with a killer alarm clock at 4 in the morning, when I had to wake up to catch the plane leaving at 6 am from Brussels. Three hours later I was checking in at Travellers House in Lisbon (by the way, one of the best hostels I ever stayed in) and then hit the road: up and down the steep streets and stairways of the old quarter Alfama, as every little corner was so surprising and original that I couldn’t help myself going further and explore and photograph until I got completely lost and exhausted and hungry. Then, as it (almost) always happens to me on the first day in a new city, my instinct about a good and cheap place to eat fails me (lesson number one: don’t decide anything when you are hungry) and I end up eating an overpriced and – in the best case – nothing special meal. But on the second day it gets better, almost always.

Then I took the famous yellow tram to the other side of the city and I experienced the absolute must-do thing in Lisbon. Crammed together in a space a bit smaller than my small living room with about 50 people, sweating and holding on to whatever you can, while more people get on board and the tram totters up and down cobbled streets, making noises like it’s about to disintegrate and you just pray to be luckier than you were at lottery the whole last year in order to get a window seat, all this while trying to guess at which stop you’re supposed to get off. It’s a mess. And it’s wonderful!

So maybe it’s understandable why after all this, I almost fell asleep on a bench, in the cool shade of the trees in Jardim da Estrela. But then the music started and it was like energy was pumped through my veins instantly. I went in the search of the music and arrived in front of the summer pavilion where Cacique ’97 had just started playing, while more and more people gathered in front of the stage, moving to the afrobeat rhythms. After a while everybody was dancing in a frenzy (see photo). I mean, you couldn’t sit still on this music. Hot sun, hot rhythms, a crowd that was smiling and dancing and the good vibes and good mood spread around like a virus. I must confess that I had a hard time photographing because all I wanted to do was dance.. which I did in the end.

The band Cacique ’97 performing live at the OutJazz 2011 festival in Lisbon.

And surprizingly enough, that was not the end of the day! The hostel was organizing each night an event for the guests, and that night was dedicated to fado. On the way to the small bodega in Alfama where the fado concert was, we stopped in a couple of bars to taste different porto wines and liquors and I got to chat with the other travellers, found my way around British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand accents, tried my rusty French, Italian and Spanish (the wine helped ) and long after midnight, when all my foreign languages failed me, I crashed in my bunk bed at the hostel and only then this first seemingly endless day from my 6 day trip to Lisbon was finally over.

More photos from Lisbon: here.

What is your rhythm of traveling?

Flamenco

A flamenco performance in Sevilla at Museo del Baile Flamenco.

More photos of flamenco here.

Cadiz and the photo I didn’t take

There is something about traveling by myself, about solitary train rides, about days spent wandering in a foreign place in the sole company of my vague thoughts that gives me that blurred feeling between pleasant tiredness and melancholy, between mellowness and longing, between understanding and wondering, like looking at life through a lens out of focus. This is how I was feeling sitting in the empty train compartment on that day when I returned from Cadiz. I had sand in my hair, streaks of salt on my legs and lips burnt by the sea wind.

The train began to move slowly parallel to the sea, but nothing outside seemed to indicate motion. The calm sea and the sky almost melted into each other and disc of the sun hang in the middle, casting a copper light on the whole scene, framed by the train window. For a moment I had the strange feeling that I was watching a liquid planet and a distant star from the window of a spacecraft. I don’t know how long I sat there, waiting, with a growing feeling of anxiety, for a change of scenery to confirm the reality of movement and of getting to a destination.

At some point I had to escape the feeling of motionlessness, turned my head to the opposite window and the scene changed completely. The sun was no longer shining on the other side of the train tracks. A field was stretching all the way to the horizon, uninhabited, dark and somber and chaotic, covered with marshes, bushes, muddy ponds, weeds growing wildly, as if humanity had died and nature had taken over.

And then suddenly I saw it, just for a second: in the middle of this disheartening scenery there were the remains of a house from which the only thing still standing was the front wall, like a gateway, the white paint peeling, with a round top entrance and an old-fashioned three pointed arch, under which was written in fading letters DOLORES (pain, in Spanish). It seemed a bleak vision of life, and it would have made the perfect photograph, but it flashed before my eyes in the race of the train and disappeared, as if it had never existed, like those moments when you get a glimpse of understanding of… everything and then then it’s gone, leaving you dazed and confused, trying to remember something that you always knew.

I would have liked to draw this for you, but I’m afraid it would be like trying to draw an elephant inside a boa snake, and everybody would see just a hat, like it happened to the Little Prince.

Ok, you might say. So what?!

People got on the train at the next stop and the noise of concrete discussions, the laughter, loud cell phones and tickling ipads pulled me out of my dreamy-philosophic mood and my rational mind began to pour its poisoned questions, implying that maybe this kind of traveling is a bit superficial. After all, is this all I got from my one day trip to Cadiz?! I had no idea of historic facts, locally flavored stories or characters, names of squares, streets and cathedrals.

Cadiz was for me pretty topaz silver earrings, a feel of Morocco, empanada con autuno, “peace, love and ice cream” (if this was the essence of a religion, then I would be a believer, but no, it was the name of a terrace where I overdosed on chocolate ice cream with caramel), first time at the seaside this year, strong Sirocco wind wiping the beach, a bunch of locals playing funky bongo drums and guitars and a good book (but about that, later). That was all.

So why do we travel? This question will often pop up in my thoughts and my posts. The answers are numerous, depending on the type of traveling we do. To relax (or at least we expect to do so), to feel good, to feel special, to feel something / different, to have a break from routine, to tick a place off our “to travel” list, to put interesting pictures and status updates on facebook, to get a tan, to get wasted (usually in Amsterdam), to pick up, to meet up, because what else could you do on holidays?, of course, for photography and so on… and then come the hard-core answers: to find yourself, to loose yourself, to follow a dream, to face your fears, to look for peace of mind, to look for meaning, to run away, to fill a void inside, to feel alive or simply because staying in one place too long makes you restless or numb.

There was always the belief that traveling was not just seeing places, that it could change your life. This reminds me of the wonderful book “The Way of the world” by Nicolas Bouvier, who was a traveler or better said a wanderer his entire life: “A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon, you understand it is the journey that makes or unmakes you.”

But that was not the book I as reading that day, which I promised to speak of earlier. It was a book that accompanied me faithfully and truthfully on my trip, like good friends do, saying the right thing at the right time, making me smile and giving me comfort. It was “Le voyage de Hector. A la poursouite du temps qui passe” by Francois Lelord. And it goes like this, inviting you to turn your mind off once in a while:

“Pour bien remplir le present, il faut souvent faire le vide en soi. [...] pour apprecier un moment, il fallait le laisser vous remplir, ne pas se tracasser pour d’autres choses”

And I leave you with this thought and no photos this time.

I would like to hear also your thoughts on traveling.  Reasons, feelings, what do you gain out of it…

Geneva or why do all good things come to an end?

Let’s face it: stereotypes exist. And – to paraphrase an old comedy – they are well and alive and living in my apartment. But now I want to talk about national stereotypes, the kind that make the punch line of politically incorrect jokes, which we always laugh about; the kind that allow me to tease my German colleague “You ware so German!” and she laughs and understands that I’m talking about her inhumanly ordered and clean office, with files sorted alphabetically and by date and a to do list with deadlines respected like the ten commandments.

Lac de Geneve and Mont Blanc in the background

How about Switzerland? What does it come across your mind when you think of it? High precision watches, insanely expensive pens, richness, cleanness, high snowy peaks reflected in crystal clear lakes, so perfect as if computer generated, cows grazing happily on ever green pastures, political neutrality, Sound of Music etc. etc.  Everything I had to say about my short visit to Geneva would confirm these stereotypes. The sky was perfectly blue, Lac Leman in the middle of the city was perfectly clear, the city was perfectly clean and the shops were perfectly…expensive. But then there are little things and personal experiences that always escape stereotypes and that are the charm of traveling. Such as the relaxed way the Genevese were spending their evenings on the wooden dock of Bain de Paques, sipping wine, having a quiet conversation with friends or lovers, feeding the swans, bathing in the lake, or simply watching the sun draping in gold the beautiful art-nouveau houses on the other side of the lake and Mont Blanc in the background, as this beauty was filling everybody with calm and peace. One could imagine a good life there. Or maybe – as we were speaking of stereotypes – my chaotic Balkan nature would eventually get bored there.

And then there was the hike up the Saleve mountain, which actually was in France. And I remember clearly that – as I’m coming from a former communist Eastern European country, which had been recently accepted in the EU at that time – I couldn’t stop marveling each time I was traveling abroad how easy one could cross borders, on that occasion just walking down a street and from one minute to the other I was in another country, without passport control, without the fear and humiliation and all that used to be and fortunately passed.

And then there was this funny episode, which I have to note down for the book that I promised myself I would write one day: “The Book of Coincidences” (the funniest coincidence of all is that I found out recently that it was already written! I found it accidentally in a…supermarket). So what happened was that me and my friend lost the marked trail on the Saleve mountain and had no idea which way to go, and the first two people we met, who helped us find our way were two women from Romania, and not only that, but from the same city as me! I bet that if we had chatted longer we would have discovered common acquaintances, which would have confirmed the “6 degrees of separation” theory, or another way of saying that the world is small. Theory aside, we found again the track and we continued hiking up to reach a belvedere point where one could see the entire city of Geneva beautifully curled around the 70 km long former glacier lake.

And then there was flying. Yes, you heard me right! The first time ever for me paragliding, a 40 minutes flight from 1300 m high. I must admit that was shitless scared when the instructor with whom I was supposed to fly in tandem told me to run fast and there were just two meters of rock in front of me and then the void, and on top of us there was just a piece of wind inflated cloth (mind you) and he was laughing at my fear with his crazy laugh and a twinkle of something beautiful in his eyes, which was showing so clearly that he hasn’t spent the last 30 years of his life in an office, but looking for the good winds (am I the only one who finds this insanely attractive? ). And then I just shut my mind and ran and two second later the strong currents lifted us up and…I was flying. And I could see Geneve far down and behind me the snowy peaks of the Alps and the wind was blowing strongly in my face and I felt so light…Wooohooo!

And then there was the end, or at least what I chose to be the end of the story – that afternoon spent with my friend in Carouge, the artsy quarter of Geneva, with a lovely outdoors market, where I indulged in eating unhealthy, delicious, fried sausages and chips and pink cotton candy and later on had a light beer in a plastic glass, sitting in the warm sun and feeling mellow, while a group of around 20 people was playing covers of well known songs only with brass and woodwind instruments. The last song seemed so familiar and still I couldn’t figure out which was it until somebody in the audience sang the lyrics of the chorus “Flames to dust / Lovers to friends / Why do all things come to an end?” And then it struck me, the beauty of that fleeing moment, the realization that I was being happy for no reason and in the same time the melancholy of the things that pass without returning, adding something hard to define, but valuable to my luggage of immaterial items that I carry around on this Earth.

Why do all good things come to an end, can anybody please answer to that?

Vielas de Alfama

“Vielas de Alfama
Beijadas pelo luar
Quem me dera lá morar
Pra viver junto do fado”

I must say I don’t understand a word of this, but when I hear it sang by Mariza, with her unmistakeable rugged voice, who seems to give her everything in each song, it moves me beyond words. Here is Vielas de Alfama.

As for the photo, it was taken in Alfama, an old quarter of Lisbon (featured also in my previous post). Getting lost in its tangled alleys (vielas) is the best way to discover it and sometimes you are rewarded by coming across a view like this, which made me feel like entering into a watercolor painting.

Postcard from Lisbon

Old yellow trams crammed with people, crawling noisily on steep narrow streets in bohemian neighborhoods are an iconic image of Lisbon. But even when taking an iconic photo, it requires more effort than I thought: to find a good viepoint, to wait for the right light on the street, to wait for the tram to leave and the one from the opposite sense to intersect it in a good spot on the street (meaning no bright light – deep shadow), to wait that there are no people to obstruct the view (unless you want to spent a lot of time cloning them out in Photoshop) and so on.  All in all, I spent a couple of hours on that street, took around 100 photos, from which I chose this one. But I think it was worth it

Graffiti loving cat

This photo was taken in Alfama, the old Moorish quarter of Lisbon, a maze of narrow streets, squares, steep stairways and pitoresque little corners – such as this one – screaming to be photographed.

Summer of love

The photo on the left in this collage belongs to Robert Altman, one of my favorite photographers, whose book “The Sixties” I totally adore. And I guess you don’t have to be a hippie to like his amazing photos documenting the summer of love and the 1960s counterculture. There’s so much joy and simplicity in his captures of people dancing, singing, laughing, feeling the music, kissing, holding hands and each other, that it makes me smile every time I look at them. (maybe deep down I am a bit of a hippie after all

The photo on the right side, I took it in Lisbon at the OutJazz music festival. I love the effect live music has on people, that pure joy you can see on people’s faces, that loss of control and of yourself, letting your body flow with vibes and being one with the music. And that will always be the same, be it in the 1960s or 2060s (or at least I would like to think of the future that way).

And here is a song to accompany this post, which captures the same spirit you can see in Robert Altman’s photos: I got life, from the cult movie “Hair”.

Modern Cinderella: a story about a shoe and about what photography means to me

On that day I was out since morning to photograph the tulip park of Grand Bigard at the outskirts of Brussels (you can read about that and see the photos in my previous post). But it often happens that when you set a goal, what you find along, or better said around, the way there is more interesting than your actual target. This is true especially when it comes to photography. Little had I imagined that I would take other photographs than of flowers on that day. Around two in the afternoon, dehydrated, starving, with my blood sugar low and having back and belly pains because of my period – all in all in a quite miserable state – I was making my exit from the gardens of Grand Bigard, happy though about my “capture” of photographs. I still had ahead a long way to get home and I was crawling along the dusty road in the two o’clock sun, passed the train station, making my way to the tram station that was another kilometre down the road, just dreaming of the moment when I would crash on a chair in the tram that would take me home.

And just then I saw something glittering in a garden, behind a fence. It was a shoe, abandoned there. But what a shoe!! The moment I saw it, I knew I had to photograph it. I stuck my hand through a little hole in the wire fence, reaching for the shoe. Luckily there were no people on the street, to see me on my knees, with my hand through the fence, not that it would have mattered. I scratched myself while pulling the shoe out, my face bore marks from the wire fence, my jeans were of course dirty, but who cared?! I was kind of possessed, like usually when I have an idea for a photograph. Then I just had to find a proper location for the shoe. Lady Fantasy was kind to me and sent inspiration, so I walked back victoriously to the train station, all pains forgotten, walked some hundreds meters along the train tracks to find a good spot…and there you have the photo: Modern Cinderella.

PS: Some time after I took this photo and wrote the post, I read this book by Ken Robinson: “The Element: How finding your passion changes everything”, which calls this state – when you forget about yourself, but you feel more yourself than ever while doing something that you love – “being in your Element”; the Element being that point where what you enjoy to do and what you are good at come together.

But no metter how we call it, I believe it is so important to discover what is it that we really love to do. In my case, I always liked taking photos (like half of the planet I guess ) and sometimes people would tell me I have a good eye for it, but I never took it seriously, even as a hobby. That is until a couple of years ago, when I realized I couldn’t stay more than one year in a job (and trust me, I did a lot of different kinds of jobs, from translations to customer support), because I became so bored and utterly demotivated about what I was doing, that I had to quit. Again and again. Something had to change. My CV already looked like a multi-coloured patched blanket.

And then I started to ask myself what is it that I really like to do. I know, many would say a job is just a job, it pays the bills and assures the pension and that it is a luxury of the happy few to do what they love. But I don’t think so any more. It’s  question that must be asked. And once you start asking yourself questions, it’s like opening the gates of your mind and soul to the unknown. But you also find answers you hadn’t imagined before. Even though sometimes this way seems uncertain and scary, I’m happy that I asked myself that question. One thing that came out of it is that I started this blog, which I’m really happy about. And I enrolled in a photography course and I discovered that I love dancing and yoga and writing, among other things. And I know that, even if I will not make a career out of any of these activities, they will always stay with me, even after everything else will be gone, jobs, money, houses, relationships. It’s who I am.

How about you, what is it that you love to do? Have you found your “Element”? Have you always known what it was or have you discovered it later in life? Are you making a living out of it? I hope to hear from you.

Floralia exhibition at Grand Bigard castle, Belgium

I love nature, but the wild nature, untouched by humans. So I would say that parks and botanical gardens are not really my thing. But I couldn’t let the exhibition Floralia – held every year at the castle Grand Bigard, near Brussels – pass without taking my camera out. Great opportunity for macro photography of tulips, daffodils, lilies and other unkown (to me) species of flowers.

You can see more photos of flowers here.

Choose your way

Matrix

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes” (The Matrix)

PS: The photos were taken inside the Atomium, in Brussels.

When you’re gone…

The photo was taken at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. On that day in November when I was sightseeing through Berlin, it was so cold and damp that the last thing I thought of was a title for the photo. But it often happens that when I look at a photo later on, I associate it instantly with a song that gives the title and the message to the photo (well, according to my interpretation, at least). For the record, this one is a song by The Cranberries.

Actually this makes me think that one could give a photograph any interpretation. It resembles the Roschach inkblot test: you see in the inkblots what is in your mind, and ultimately it says something about yourself. To paraphrase that old saying: meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

I could have entitled this photo “Autumn” or “Rainy day in Berlin” or “Holocaust memorial”, which would have all been more descriptive and accurate titles, but then I think I wouldn’t have received the most comments ever on my blog (until now, at least) on this particular photo. I believe we all like to see a beautiful image, but what we appreciate the most is the images that we can relate with and resonate with us. We share the same human emotions that connect us, which find their expression in art, in any of its forms – a book or  movie, a photo or a painting, a theater play or a concert. I also believe that the more strong or painful, and important for that matter, these emotions are, the more difficult it is to express them directly. I like that about photography, the power to express emotions beyond words and to connect us.

What do you think about the interpretation of a photograph or of art in general?

What does this photo say to you?

Nightmare

Today’s post is inspired by the song “Empty Spaces” from the the album “The Wall” by Pink Floyd, one of my favorite bands. See the animation from the movie here.