haunted

uniquely andean behaviour

i recall the evening chaos in medellin

losing my orientation in a place completely alien helped me find my inner peace. or maybe it was the hospitality and motherly altruism of people that i hadn't felt for a while. i prefer not to know.

breakfast in gdańsk

essentials

ruba’i khayyama (рубаи хайяма) is potentially the sexiest date night wine ever made. and the avicenna balsam.

uzbekistan, 2022

10 hour train ride to austria to see a taxidermy platypus

my happy meal menu looks like this

copenhagen, august 022

it’s only appropriate to arrive in finland with a hangover after having drunk in a tallinn bar alone the previous night.

helsinki, september 022

pinot noir grapes in schaffhausen, october 2021

how the lyonnaise park

gumbaz synagogue, samarkand. call the rabbi if you want to get in, his number was written on the door. otherwise it’s locked.

back in tashkent - 15 june 2022

it was around 5 am. i woke up in the filthy bed of a night train with a hangover from a cheap uzbek chardonnay, somewhere about a hundred kilometers south from tashkent, in the same compartment with three other guys, one of whom i did not know. i could see the vast, serene uzbek steppe from the train’s window. i had got on the train at 1 am in bukhara, en route to tashkent to catch my flight back to istanbul. i vaguely remember having a small talk with the stranger at night, who had been on the train since urgench. an hour after i woke up, the train personnel was yelling around to queue people up for the toilets that i did not even dare to use.

the train arrived just around 8 am and it was already 35 degrees outside. we were in the southern train station of tashkent and our goal was to reach the wyndham grand downtown, where we could have a cup of genuine coffee and a decent breakfast. the closest metro station was more than three kilometres away, which felt much longer due to the heat and sleep deprivation. we walked through the industrial outskirts of tashkent. having taken the metro during rush hour, we reached the hotel in one and a half hours. i was looking forward to leaving this gloomy former soviet city.

i was feeling like i deserved a beer upon the succesful completion of a journey. instead, afraid of being judged by the people i was traveling with, i got some eggs and coffee. just because i was not feeling like talking to anybody, everybody had to start a conversation with me. the hotel’s manager, a turkish guy, started to blabber about the problems he was having with his son to me. meanwhile, i was preoccupied with how to deal with my relationship problems even though it was already damaged beyond repair. i was disconcerted by the fact that i was worrying about inherently meaningless first-world problems in a luxury hotel in a poor country.

we left the hotel for our flight back home. it was already 42 degrees outside in the afternoon. i watched the busy tashkent streets for the last time in the front seat of a taxi. i liked uzbekistan, mainly because it made me feel as far as possible from home and my own reality by being very alien and by being home to lots of really nice people, who deserve more.

prologue

i am going to try to write some words and share some photos of the places i have been to. i will not share itineraries or travel advice, just some stuff that i found interesting, observations, general thoughts and what various places made me feel.