21st to 29th October. Work is far more enjoyable and productive with such beautiful sights.
While not usually susceptible to the sway and spell of portends, serious doubts settled uncomfortably comfortably in my mind. The airline we chartered to take us to our destination was called SMAC, an irrelevant acronym for an airline perhaps, yet worryingly apt given our destination was the province of Aceh. Hampered by forces natural and [...]
Favourite cities and why Berlin: on Giesebrechtstraße, just off Kurfürstendamm. The cafe, newsagent’s, pub and cinema. Bookshop (note: singular) and restaurants. All lovely. I recently discovered that the this little street had quite a historical significance. The Nazi Party’s whorehouse was located 2 doors away from where I lived. There’s more of (in)famous haunts along [...]
Niccolò Machiavelli was born on the 3rd of May 1469. Speaking of memorable dates, the 500th anniversay of the death of Machiavelli’s “nemesis”, Savonarola, fell on the 23rd of May 1998. I was due in Firenze that morning but adverse weather conditions and the ever-unreliable Italian air traffic control meant the flight was diverted to [...]
Fleeing a psychotic French bitch-of-a-mother and a middle-aged paedophile, I claim refugee status on Legian beach. Breaking habits is infinitely more difficult than breaking waves, so it is with much excitement that I announce another, preferred kind of surfing, one that necessitates sand, sea and sun, those elements that the other kind of surfing deprives [...]
The cosy hills of Ubud are foresaken for the grime and infestation of Sanur. Two nights at a “home-stay” cost twenty dollars, the equivalent of a shot of Macallan at Post Bar in Singapore. Sure, for that price you have to combat pesky mosquitoes for ownership of your room – a task made difficult as [...]
When all else fails, there is always the edge of time, a place also called “the morning of the world”. The originary thaumaturgical topography of the inland Balinese have remained constant because of development. Pause before you fall in love: in the aftermath of the unsuccessful coup d’état, hundreds of thousands of people were killed [...]
A customer walks into a bookshop and asks “Can you tell me where the self-help section is?” To which the bookseller replies: “If I told you where it is, that would defeat the purpose”. The reason why I relate this unfunny tale is that I stumbled upon a model “Self-Help” section while in London and [...]
No amount of eccentricity can prepare for the surreal experience that is Nigeria. Recall the prologue to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, when we are introduced to Capt. Willard. For one, there is a debilitating sickness here, painless yet fatal, sprawling unchecked and anonymous; most here are susceptible to it. The medical term escapes me but it [...]
This website welcomes its latest contribution, entitled “Sequence of a life”; it’s all about this life’s narrative. Think of it as an internal audit, with an inventory of people and places. Will you read it ’til the end? One happy, unintended consequence of aforementioned audit is the partial re-discovery of Adrian leBlanc; now a journalist [...]
