In These Days ...

The season is turning here.  We've been choosing to use the heating at night, wearing boots outside because of the rain, warmer clothes because it's no longer Hot.  Sad that summer is probably over ...

Barbara flew in from Genova last week and we have been wandering.  Or to write that more accurately, we have been wandering and talking a lot.  Laughing too.  We had all kinds of possible plans but the days have simply unfolded instead.

Miss 10 has been spending time with us too.  They waved to me from the massive Ferris Wheel, outside of Central Station, yesterday ... as we made our way home from the city's Bollekesfeest.  The feest was disappointing in that to purchase anything you had to commit to a standing rugby scrum to reach counters.  I'm not really a rugby scrum kind of woman however I did manage to get us two sausages, and to find a small glass of Elixir d'Anvers for Barbara to taste.

I chose to wait until we reached Het Elfde Gebod (The Eleventh Commandment) for my glass of red wine. 

Today is another busy day here in the city and I shouldn't really be sitting here at all.  Just a hello from a very cool Antwerp.

Cairo ...

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time ...

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.

These frantic busy days ... they just keep coming at me.  I'm hoping to complete so much in the days ahead, allowing me to concentrate on one or two things instead of juggling 20.

So here I am, taking  a little time out, needing some peace of mind, I was searching for something beautiful to note down, then decided to share old photographs from other adventurous days.

Back in 2008 I found myself in Cairo, working with good people, meeting lovely Egytians, having one of those delicious adventures.

I wrote of arriving in Cairo: I felt an incredible overwhelming of the senses as the taxi flew through the (far too) long underground traffic tunnel taking me to downtown Cairo ... the driver completely ignoring the 50km speed limit, then calmly settling down to wait, windows open, when we were caught in the middle of the tunnel’s 3km length with carbon monoxide choking us.

I noticed that Cairo drivers talk to each other via their car horns ... a gentle reminder they are there, that they want to change lanes, and anything else that needs discussing out there on the road.

I hadn’t known what to expect ... perhaps Istanbul but the only similarity to Istanbul was only that it was so different to most of my everyday life.

Later, I read that Cairo has some 17 million people in the metropolitan area and is the sixteenth most populous metropolitan areas in the world ... a busy city.

It was full of people and pollution and when I looked round, from my 6th floor balcony, I could see this layer sand and desert on rooftops.

The first 48 hours was challenging in almost every way.  Challenging but oh so excellent to be out again.

Rob, the Scottish Guy Living in Ireland

A long long time ago, I met a lovely bloke online ... in a chatroom called Travel and we became friends.

He was one of many really good friends I made there.  There was Mary Lou and Marco, Diede and Eltje, Maddalena and so many others.  We're all still friends today but it was Rob, the Scottish guy who used to live in Australia that I wanted to write about here.

He and his wife moved back to this side of the world a few years ago, to Ireland of course, that lovely Scottish couple.  And we were once again on the same side of the world.

We wandered over to stay with them there in Oughterard back in 2011, it my first time driving in years.  Oh how I loved that!

And days unfolded with visits to stations of the cross up in the hills, tree-creatures, and we met highway robbers there too.

It was lovely. 

Today I remembered it all when I found the red rowboat photograph from Oughterard.

Colin Monteath, and the Poppies

Over years I have filled my journals with notes, quotes, and photographs too.  Some of those journals traveled from New Zealand with me, and many many new ones have been filled since I flew.

I love quotes and extracts.  They seem like small pieces of intense wisdom or pure beauty but I keep them all locked up in my journals.  So ... I've decided to go through my extensive, sometimes unexplored, photographic archives and merged some of these collected wisdoms, from others, with my images.

I met with Colin Monteath, author of today's quote, a couple of times during those years before leaving New Zealand.  And even then, I still didn't know quite how to describe him here.  Photographer, mountaineer, adventurer, Antartic expert, writer ... and probably so much more that I don't know about.

Anyway I found one of his books here in Antwerp, wrote to him full of laughter because it cost a lot more than he was selling them new but still, I was working at the time.  How could I resist.

I've never regretted buying that book.  I found the quote, the one on the photograph below, and feel it gives a good sense of the man himself.

As for the poppies.  That was me, crawling around on the edge of the church garden in Mesen, out on Flanders Fields, here in Belgium.  I had some time and really wanted a good poppy shot.

You have Been Invited to Italy!

I recently had the pleasure of spending a weekend in the company of Renovating Italy's creator, Lisa Chiodo and she wrote, I am sure Di Mackey and I were sisters in another life, we just clicked, it felt like I’d known her forever. She gave me the gift of deep belly laughs, understanding, and freedom to be myself, each one I will treasure forever.

I would have written these words about her had she not beaten me to it in her generous post about attending the A New Way Of Seeing workshop.  It's been rare that anyone could make me laugh so hard that I almost collapsed in the street.  She has a gift for laughter that works with her beautiful attitude to life, and there's a deep wisdom too.

Meeting her, after having only read of her life via her beautiful website, Renovating Italy, was more than I could have imagined in so many ways.  She is the loveliest person and I'm sure, based on her website, that her family are just as she paints them.

Lisa and her family have put an invitation out into the world and I can't recommend it highly enough.  They are opening their Italian home to all of us and they have bookings available for 2015. 

Who knows, maybe I'll see you there.