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EDITOR’S LETTER

S

omeone once said that if the world is a book, those who don’t travel have only

read the first page. That’s a sentiment we subscribe to here at Open Skies, where we aim to bring you the best of

the world — the best writers, designers, photographers and artists. And as with the rest of the inflight experience, quality is everything.

Of course, for us mere mortals, the wonder of flight is that it is possible at all. For others, flight is a physics equation, albeit one that brings them closer to the heavens. One such man is Mike Mullane, an astronaut who has spent — in total — almost two weeks in space. In In The Shadow of the Space Shuttle, his daughter Laura recounts what is was like to have a parent ride a rocket ship into the sky. Closer to Earth, Chuck Thompson wonders if the era of the expatriate is over — with smart-phones, Skype and Doritos now a global phenomenon, has the expatriate experience lost much of its lustre?

You will, hopefully, have noticed a literary theme to this month’s issue, unsurprisingly, given March sees the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature taking place in Dubai from March 8 to 12. We take a look at the current state of Arab literature, and our literary theme continues as we trace Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps through Paris.

We are also proud of our cover – a specially commissioned piece by the Iranian artist, Reza Abedini. His work is striking, thoughtful and original, all the things we hope to be each issue.

Emirates has been flying people to some of the world’s most exciting places for more than a quarter of a century. We aim to celebrate these places in every issue. Travel is still exciting, discovery will never grow old, and if the world is a book, then it is one with an infinite amount of pages. Enjoy the ride.

CONOR@OPENSKIESMAGAZINE.COM

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact The Editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, ďŹ nancial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Telephone: (+971 4) 282 4060 Fax:(+971 4) 282 4436 Email: emirates@motivate.ae

84,649 COPIES

Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai, UAE

20

Promoting Sustainable Forestry

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid Al Tayer GROUP EDITOR & MANAGING PARTNER Ian Fairservice GROUP SENIOR EDITOR (JOB +PIOTPO Ĺ&#x; gina@motivate.ae SENIOR EDITOR .BSL &WBOT Ĺ&#x; NBSLF!NPUJWBUF BF EDITOR $POPS 1VSDFMM Ĺ&#x; DPOPS!NPUJWBUF BF SENIOR ART DIRECTOR 5JB 4FJGFSU Ĺ&#x; UJB!NPUJWBUF BF CHIEF SUB EDITOR *BJO 4NJUI Ĺ&#x; JBJOT!NPUJWBUF BF GENERAL MANAGER PRODUCTION & CIRCULATION S Sasidharan PRODUCTION MANAGER C Sudhakar GENERAL MANAGER, GROUP SALES "OUIPOZ .JMOF Ĺ&#x; BOUIPOZ!NPUJWBUF BF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Nicola Hudson nicola@motivate.ae SENIOR ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Jaya Balakrishnan jaya@motivate ae; DEPUTY ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Murali Narayanan ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER Shruti Srivastava EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS FOR EMIRATES: Editor: Siobhan Bardet Arabic Editor: Hatem Omar Deputy Editor: Stephanie Byrne Website Ĺ&#x; emirates.com.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jason Rezaian, Stefanie Posavec, Fabienne Dupuis, Richard Luck, Neil Andrew, Wael-Al Sayegh, Gemma Correll, Phil Oh, Pedro Kok, Nour Samaha, James Montague, Chuck Thompson, Laura Mullane, Mark Tungate, Pico Iyer, Mark Twain, Greg Girard, Baldovino Barani, Holly Suan Gray, Nick Rice, Axis Maps, Victor Besa, Farooq Saliq, Vikram Gawde, Andrea Gruneberg & Louise Browne COVER ILLUSTRATION by Reza Abedini MASTHEAD DESIGN CZ 2VJOU Ĺ&#x; XXX RVJOUEVCBJ DPN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES AUSTRALIA Okeeffe Media; Tel +61 89 381 7425, Fax +61 89 382 4850, okeeffekev@bigpond.com.au CHINA/HONG KONG Emphasis Media Limited; Tel +85 22 516 1048, Fax +85 22 561 3349, advertising@emphasis.net CYPRUS Epistle Communications & Media; Tel +35 72 246 6555, Fax +35 72 276 9999, nasreenk@epistlemedia.com FRANCE/SWITZERLAND Intermedia Europe Ltd; Tel +33 15 534 9550, Fax +33 15 534 9549, administration@intermedia.europe.com GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH, Phone: 0049 8151 550 8959, Fax: 0049 8151 550 9180 w.jaeger@imv-media.com INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 281 5538/39/40, Fax +91 22 283 9619, ravi@mediastar.co.in ITALY IMM Italia; Tel +39 023 653 4433, Fax +39 029 998 1376, lucia.colucci@fastwebnet.it JAPAN Skynet Media Inc.; Tel/Fax +81 43 278 6977, skynetmedia@y2.dion.ne.jp TURKEY Media Ltd; Tel +90 212 275 8433, Fax +90 212 275 9228, mediamarketingtr@medialtd.com.tr UK Spafax Inflight Media; Tel +44 207 906 2001, Fax +44 207 906 2022, nhopkins@spafax.com USA Redwood Custom Communications Inc.; Tel 212-473-5679 x 313 , Fax 212-260-3509, brigitte.baron@redwoodcc.com

CONTENTS

TEHRAN AND ITS TRAFFIC ARE EXPLAINED BY JASON REZAIAN (P29)… FIND THE BEST COFFEE SHOPS IN NEW YORK VIA TWITTER (P33)… WE TAKE A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH WITH ERIC NEWBY (P35)… WE ALSO MAP DAMASCUS AND DISCOVER A VIBRANT SOCIAL SCENE (P36)… GET THE PERFECT SOUNDTRACK FOR 30,000FT COURTESY OF DUBAI'S DJ SOLO

(P42)… MICHAEL PALIN LETS US IN ON HIS TRAVEL SECRETS (P49)… WHILE WE GET A STREET-EYE VIEW OF MELBOURNE’S FINEST FASHIONISTAS

(P50)… SALUTE ONE OF SAO PAULO’S MOST UNDERSTATED PIECES OF ARCHITECTURE (P53)… A BEIRUT BOOK STORE WITH A DIFFERENCE IS GIVEN THE ONCE OVER BY NOUR SAMAHA (P54)… ENGAGE IN SOME RETAIL THERAPY ON THE STREETS OF BANGKOK (P56)… JAMES MONTAGUE LOOKS AT THE CURRENT STATE OF ARAB LITERATURE (P62)… PULITZER PRIZE NOMINEE LAURA MULLANE HEADS TO THE STARS AND BACK (OR AT LEAST HER FATHER DOES) (P70)… WHILE MARK TUNGATE GOES IN SEARCH OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S PARIS (P78)… CHUCK THOMPSON CHARTS

THE DEMISE OF THE EXPATRIATE (P86)… PICO IYER TRIES TO UNRAVEL THE MYSTERY OF MAURITIUS (P96)…WE LIST A FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE

TRAVEL BOOKS (P106)… AND THE LEGENDARY MARK TWAIN TAKES US ON A TOUR OF EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST (P116)… WHILE GREG GIRARD CELEBRATES 1,000 YEARS OF HANOI (P124)…

22

CONTRIBUTORS

WAEL AL�SAYEGH: An Edinburgh-born Emirati poet and essayist, Wael is author of three books of contemporary poetry and writes in both English and Arabic. He is currently translating the motivational works of BAFTA winning writer Geoff Thompson into classical Arabic.

GEMMA CORRELL: A freelance illustrator originally from England, Gemma’s work has been described as “the perfect combination of ugly and cute” and her influences range from overheard conversations to books and music. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany, with her trusty sidekick Mr Pickles the Pug, where she enjoys drinking coffee and buying kitschy ornaments from flea markets.

JASON REZAIAN: An American journalist based in Tehran. Jason has written for numerous publications including TIME, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate and Global Post. He is also the writer narrator of a feature length documentary on Iran called A World Between.

LAURA MULLANE: A freelance writer whose work has been published in The Washington Post, Laura co-authored God Sleeps in Rwanda, the memoir of Joseph Sebarenzi, a genocide survivor and former speaker of Rwanda’s parliament. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

MARK TUNGATE: A British journalist and author who moved to Paris for a year – 10 years ago, Mark has written articles about media, travel and popular culture that have appeared in The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and CNN Traveller.

CHUCK THOMPSON: Author of the comic travel memoirs Smile When You’re Lying and To Hellholes and Back, Chuck is currently editorial director for Hong Kong-based CNNGo.com. His writing and photography have appeared in numerous publications including Outside, Men’s Journal, Maxim and The Los Angeles Times. His book on the American Deep South will be published in 2012.

24

CHLOÉ BOUTIQUES

© 2011 chloé. all rights reserved.

BOULEVARD AT JUMEIRAH EMIRATES TOWERS THE DUBAI MALL DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES WWW.CHLOE.COM

Mediterranean Sea, 1940s. "Gamma" men in training.

The diver emerging from the water is wearing a Panerai compass on his wrist.

HISTORY ALWAYS LEAVES A TRACE. LUMINOR SUBMERSIBLE Automatic mechanical movement OP III calibre, COSC certified.

Water-resistance 300 metres.

Unidirectional rotating bezel.

Steel case 44 mm Ø.

Steel adjustable buckle.

+971 4 307 4653

www.panerai.com

Available exclusively at Panerai boutiques and select authorized watch specialists.

UAE: Dubai, Panerai Boutique, Dubai Mall, Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, Wafi City, Mall of the Emirates, Emirates Towers - Abu Dhabi, Al Manara Jewellery, Hamdan Street - Abu Dhabi Mall - KSA: Riyadh, Panerai Boutique, Mohamed Bin Abdul Aziz Street, Platinum Sands - BAHRAIN: Manama, Asia Jewellers, Sheraton Complex - IRAN: Tehran, Sarman Co. - KUWAIT: Morad Yousuf Behbehani, Salhiya Complex, Marina Mall - QATAR: Doha, Panerai Boutique, Villagio Mall, Ali Bin Ali Watches & Jewellery, Al Sadd Street, Royal Plaza - JORDAN: Amman, Abu Shakra Trading, Abdoun Mall, Gardens Showroom - LEBANON: Beirut, Panerai Boutique, Beirut Souks, Weygand St, Wadih Mrad, Dbayeh Highway, Quantum Tower, Achrafieh - EGYPT: Giza, Felopateer Palace, First Mall, Cairo, Felopateer Palace, Four Seasons Hotel, Beyman - OMAN: Muscat, Oman Jewellery - MOROCCO: Casablanca, Mystere Montre,12 Avenue Hain Harrouda, Residence Yasmine II, Marrakech, Riad Mogador Boulevard Mohammed VI

INTRO ×Þ º

33 º GY QTM YGGVU ØÛ º FCOCUEWU OCRRGF ÚÕ º VTGGV GGRGT

B OOT Y

HE BEST WE TRAWL T K’S FLEA OF BANGKO AND REET STALLS T S , S T E K R A M RING STORES TO B BOUTIQUE EST BACK THE B AINS BAHT BARG

P56

OUR MAN IN TEHRAN AFTER NEARLY 60 YEARS OF IMPOSSIBLY CHEAP PETROL, IRAN IS ONE OF THE LEAST ENERGY-CONSCIOUS PLACES ON EARTH.

A

JASON REZAIAN WONDERS IF TEHRAN CAN EVER GIVE UP ITS LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CAR

nyone who has spent time in Tehran quickly realises that traffic is a colossal problem for Iran’s capital. Not only does the gridlock often make it impossible to move around the city, car exhausts are the main reason Tehran’s air is amongst the world’s most polluted.

An ever rising population of cars and motorbikes flood the streets of the city centre, creating an almost lawless chaos. Witnessing cars that have missed a turn-off reversing down the motorway, for example, is a regular occurrence.

For more than four decades the vast majority of cars on Tehran’s roads have been Peykans, a domestically produced version of the 1967 Hillman Hunter.

Production was stopped in 2005 as the cars were considered hazardous petrol guzzlers.

In recent years Peugeot and Korean car maker Kia have been manufacturing cars inside Iran, and there are an increasing number of them jockeying for position in the avenues and alleys

of Tehran. Oblivious to traffic rules and content to risk life and limb each time they get behind the wheel, Iranian drivers have some of the highest death rates in the world.

A big part of the problem is the longstanding unofficial policy of Iran’s leadership to use cheap petrol as a symbol of national pride. Coupled with restrictions on what citizens are allowed to do for fun, driving aimlessly has long been a national pastime.

What has resulted from the nearly 60 years of impossibly cheap gasoline is perhaps the least energy-conscious society on earth.

The situation has become so bad of late that Tehran has had to declare public holidays in consecutive weeks due to the high toxicity in the air.

Although the situation is bleak, and it will require a change in habits on the part of Iranian drivers, there are signs that this is happening, albeit reluctantly.

In recent years seatbelt laws have been passed and, crucially, are being enforced. The majority of Iranian drivers now follow these laws as they don’t want to pay the

Jason Rezaian is a writer based in Tehran. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/iransolo

fine. Drivers have already been restricted from key commercial zones of the city, only being allowed to drive in these areas on odd or even days, depending on the last digit of their licence plate. Those limitations were extended to the entire city late last year.

Furthermore, an end to the subsidies that have kept petrol prices so low is expected to be lifted in the coming months, which will force many drivers to be more conservative in their car use.

One positive result of the traffic problem is the expansion of Tehran’s bus services and the public’s willingness to adapt to it.

Tehran now claims to have more bus stops than any other Asian city.

Tehran’s metro has also proven to be an essential component of urban living. Clean and cheap (a one-way ticket costs less than $1), guests to Tehran are consistently impressed by the metro experience.

Together, Tehran’s buses and metro have had a big effect on reducing traffic, and those accustomed to using it are amazed that anyone is still willing to sit in a car, especially during rush hour.

29

GRAPH

S

tefanie Posavec took the first chapters of some

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Anthony Burgess, 1962

modern classics and mapped out their authors’ writing styles based on the number of words they used, the length of the sentences and the number of sentences contained in each chapter. The result is a fascinating mix of literature and data analysis. www.itsbeenreal.co.uk

INTERPRETATION SMALL CLUSTERS OF LINES ARE AN INDICATION OF SHORT SENTENCES:

A LOOSE DRAWING WITH LONGER LINES INDICATES A CHAPTER WITH MANY

INTRUDER IN THE DUST

LONG SENTENCES:

William Faulkner, 1948

A DRAWING THAT MOVES CONSISTENTLY AROUND THE SAME AREA MEANS THAT ALL THE SENTENCES HAVE A SIMILAR WORD COUNT:

30

BELOVED

A BRAVE NEW WORLD

Toni Morrison, 1987

Aldous Huxley, 1932

BRIGHTON ROCK

THE GREAT GATSBY

Graham Greene, 1938

F Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

31

TWITTER PITCH

New York

Cafes

RBC NYC RBC NYC is the place to geek out over coffee. We use multiple roasters, seasonal coffees and feature a Slayer espresso machine. www.twitter.com/rbcnyc

cafe grumpy Innovative coffee shop roasts its own beans and offers seasonal single-origin coffee selections brewed by the cup and delicious espresso drinks. www.twitter.com/cafegrumpy

Every month we profile a number of venues in a different city. The catch? The venues must be on Twitter and must tell us in their own words

Buttercup Bake shop Buttercup Bake Shop is the perfect

what makes them so special. This month we kick off with New York's coffee shops. If you

place for old-fashioned, home-made

want to get involved, follow us at: www.twitter.com/openskiesmag

banana pudding. And we deliver!

goodies from red velvet cupcakes to www.twitter.com/buttercupNY

33

M A R Q U I S E BY PA S PA L E Y Ê " Ê / Ê , / - Ê Ê Ê 1 Ê Ê Ê Ê /

/ - Ê " / Ê Ê Ê 1 Ê Ê Ê U Ê 1 Ê Ê ­ ä { ® Ê Î Î Ên Ç { x Ê U Ê 1 Ê Ê Ê ­ ä Ó ® Ê È { { Ê£ { Ç x Ê Ê Ê * - * 9° "

BOOKED ROOM

NO.416

THE GLADSTONE TORONTO

ERIC NEWBY A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH

A

classic of its genre, Eric Newby’s book manages to combine traditional British understatement, exquisite comic timing and a narrative that takes in the wilds of Nuristan.

Newby, who was working as a fashion assistant in London at the time, only had four days of mountaineering experience before he tackled one of Afghanistan’s highest peaks, which adds a layer of absurdity to the narrative.

The joy of Newby’s writing lies in the dialogue between him and his travelling companion Hugh Carless, a Foreign Service official, who was as clueless as Newby when it came to climbing.

Newby’s descriptions of the passing scenery and nomads are wonderful — he captures the area’s stunning beauty without resorting to travel brochure clichés and

INTERNET SPEED: 24MB, free PILLOW THREAD COUNT: 300 PILLOWS: Four TV CHANNELS: 65 IPOD DOCK: None. Alarm clock with

MP3 player ROOM SERVICE: None COMPLIMENTARY SNACKS: Freshly

brewed coffee TOILETRY BRAND: Honey Pie DAILY NEWSPAPER: None, Globe &

Mail in downstairs bar MAGAZINES: Design Lines,

Where, Walrus

paints a realistic picture of the

EXTRAS: Travel iron and board,

hardships they face. The fact that he never reached his goal does not diminish the narrative — if anything it encapsulates the

hairdryer, safe, earplugs

there are enough amenities to satisfy a business traveller looking for a change of pace. The hotel’s simplicity — from the locally produced toiletries to the alert staff

VIEW: 2/5

— sets it apart from other, cluttered hotels in the market. While the trendier-than-thou vibe might not

RATE: $165 per night

be to everyone's taste, the rooms

www.gladstonehotel.com

have facilities that match even the best chain hotels.

BUSINESS CENTRE: None

farcical, yet endearing, nature of his journey. Picador, 1937

Set in the centre of Toronto’s cultural district, the Gladstone at first looks to be a typical boutique hotel. Art exhibitions? Check. Cool downstairs bar? Check. Artistdesigned rooms? Check. Yet the hotel manages to rise above the boutique rabble. The room designs are thought out — managing to combine form and function, while

35

STORE MAPPED MAGAZINES / BOOKS / COFFEE

IBRAHIM

BEIRUT R

O ST

EL

D

DI B

IN

E AD L KA

KAH

E AL M AL

SHOUKRY

ATH T

6TH MAY (SITA

1.

2.

3.

4.

3. Beit Akbik Al Mamlouka Al Fares Elissar Beit7. Akbik Four Season’s

T

AY YAR)

EL

6. Hanabi

KR

HOTELS

RESTAURANTS �. Naranj

AL AB B

BA

world, but it can still teach us some new tricks. WWW.HG2.COM

2. Al Fares

AS ST

OU

AB

17TH APRIL ST

in Syria’s ever-changing capital. It may be one of the oldest cities in the

HOTELS 1. Al Mamlouka

E

KHALED IB

S

AL HANDASA AV

FAN S

D

YE FA

N MA

R OU

wave of contemporary venues — and accompanying style — has shaken things up of late. Fabienne Dupuis from Hg2 heads to Damascus to find out what venues are creating a buzz

36

H MA

A BAR

LM

K

T

N AF

W

e thought we knew it all; donkeys shuffling alongside honking cars, the exhilarating smell of spice hanging in the air, folkloric music twanging in the distance and decadent dinners wowed by bellydancers between courses. But while clichés still flavour Syria, a new

HANAN

OM

E AR

OU

S AR T H

AN IB

BEIRUT

OT H M

PAPERCUP DAMASCUS

RESTAURANTS 4. Four Seasons 5. Narinj

6. Hanabi

8. Downtown 7.Café Elissar

8. Downton Café &

AL

KH

OU

RI

ST

TWITTER PITCH

FA R

ES

A KATHEEB LANE

6TH TISHREE N ST

MMED

ANWA

T R KAMEL S

NM

AVE K FAISAL EL MALE

ASS

AOU

DA

L TH

T

FI ST

AM SD HIM IDE

S

SA HS T

AIR PO RT MO R TO

SOUTHERN BYPAS

AAL AL BAIT ST

EN

T

US

Q

AS

SC

AL

IR AH

TA ST

SB

SA

ST

HOU

QIS

IBN

AS

R KE

AL G

MA

Y WA

& Snack

IM ST

DA

S

AL MOUSTAQU AL AMIN ST

BN WALID A VE

THAURAH ST

A QA

RD

UR W A IB

US

AD AVE

A SC

B A G HD

HA

E AV EL

LA

B

AV E

MOHA

BARS/CLUBS

BARS/CLUBS 9. The 9.Dome The

Dome 10. Z Bar GALLERIES 10. The Z Bar 13. Art House Gallery 14. Rafia Gallery 11.

After 7 12. Marmar or Zodiaq

CULTURE/EVENTS C 11.

After 7 13.

Art

12. Marmar House Gallery 14. Rafia House 15.

Al Kouri GalleryGallery 16. Mustafa Ali Gallery 15.

Al Kouri 16. Mustapha Ali’s Gallery

37

STORE MAPPED PAPERCUP DAMASCUS

BEIRUT

MAGAZINES / BOOKS / COFFEE

HOTELS 1 AL MAMLOUKA

2

AL FARES

3

BEIT AKBIK

4

FOUR SEASONS

The first boutique hotel in

Wonderful traditional interiors

New to Syria’s hotel scene, the

With 297 rooms over 13 floors,

Damascus, Al Mamlouka is

of wood, silk, marble and

property is situated off Straight

the Four Seasons was the first

one of the region’s best.

metal set this hotel apart. The

Street and offers eight charming

major chain to champion the

Contemporary and vintage

location is great too — just

rooms that combined traditional

city’s new-found status as an

design results in a distinctly

beside the Omayad Mosque. A

Syrian style with modern-day

emerging business and leisure

new-age Syrian style. Housed in a

heavy antique door keeps the

creature comforts. It has a

destination. Despite the arrival

17th century mansion with 16th

thronging crowds at bay. An

wonderful roof terrace with views

of many more global brands, this

century archways.

idyllic respite from the city.

of the city.

is still the luxe leader.

RESTAURANTS 5 NARANJ

6

HANABI

7

ELISSAR

8

DOWNTOWN CAFÉ

Catapulting the Damascus

Seen as a fairly abstract concept

A classic never dies, and such

Downtown Cafe is the place for

food scene headfirst into the

until a few years ago, this stylish

is the case at Elissar. Built in

bright young things to hang out.

21st century, Naranj offers a

Japanese eatery has converted

1840, restored in the 1990s, the

Minimalist lines combined with

mouthwatering menu that

many since opening with

restaurant retains its grandeur

an Italian-inspired menu give the

mixes continental Europe with

lipsmackingly good sushi to

without being outdated; inside is

place an international feel, while

the Middle East. The space is

champion a new wave of cuisine

dim lighting and a fountain, with

excellent cups of coffee attract

split into a veranda and a rather

in the city and clean, modern

tables flanked by the cream of

the on-the-way-to-work crowd.

majestic courtyard.

interiors to boot.

the Damascan crop.

Packed virtually all day.

BARS/CLUBS 9 THE DOME

10 Z BAR

11 AFTER 7

12 MARMAR

The Dome has set a new

Set on the roof of the Omayad

Perfectly balanced between

Nestled at the bottom of a long,

precedent for partying like a

Hotel, this stylish watering hole

being cool and having an

winding lane, Marmar retains

rock star. Exclusive, decadent

offers lashings of modern-day

attitude, it’s hardly surprising

its position as the place to go

and glamorous with inspiring

style with an oversized terrace

that After 7 reigns supreme on

for local live music. Expect big

interiors: a large dining room

flanked by white Chesterfields.

Damascus’ club scene. Expect

crowds, ear-splitting volume and

set in a converted Turkish bath,

It is here that razor-thin social

an eclectic playlist, a lengthy

a dark, sweaty atmosphere. The

flanked by a long bar to while

types can sip on cocktails in true

cocktail list and a mixed bag of

perfect place to let your hair

away the small hours.

superstar style.

revellers propping up the bar.

down away from the glitterati.

GALLERIES 13 ART HOUSE GALLERY

38

14 RAFIA GALLERY

15 AL KOURI GALLERY

16 MUSTAFA ALI GALLERY

Set inside a 16th century

The recently-opened Rafia

Although it’s been around for

Hidden among a maze of tiny

building, the gallery comprises

Gallery is the contemporary

years, Al Kouri Gallery is as

streets, the workshop at Mustafa

an exhibition space and

art gallery Damascus has

relevant now as it was back when

Ali Gallery is an open space in

accommodation in avant-garde

been waiting for. Centrally

it opened. Inside visitors will

which young artists can come

surroundings. Artists, musicians

located, its small but brightly-lit

find one of the country’s best

to work, exhibit or sell their

and sculptors all exhibit their

space exhibits renowned and

modern art collections exhibited

wares. Fostering creativity, it is

work, while an in-house concert

upcoming local talent that has

in carefully considered disarray.

bohemian, creative and very,

hall draws the crowds.

culture vultures flocking.

A must-see for art fans.

very cool.

FLICK CELLULOID DISSECTED

8IBU NPWJF BSF ZPV XPSLJOH PO OPX

Even Better thAn the real Thing RICHARD LUCK WONDERS WHY REMAKES OF OLD FILMS ARE SO POPULAR

H

ollywood’s never been slow to adapt the big books of the day. But why don’t best-sellers always make for blockbusters?

And does fidelity to the text always guarantee great films?

When he picked up his honorary Oscar in 1999, Fiddler On The Roof director Norman Jewison begged Hollywood to find more original stories to tell.

Naturally Hollywood paid no attention and continued to do what it’d been doing for ages — namely, claiming to be an ideasbased industry while basing most of its films on whatever happened to appear on the New York Times best-sellers list.

40

The big studios have been in the novel-adapting industry almost as long as they’ve been in the film-making industry. This year will see any number of books reshaped for the screen. Upcoming pictures that have undergone the process include Never Let Me Go, a fraught Keira Knightley picture based on the novel by Remains Of The Day scribe Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau, the latest in a long line of science-fiction adventures adapted from the idiosyncratic tales of Philip K Dick.

Since they’re both plot-powered forms, it’s not that surprising that a parasitic relationship has developed between films and book. Consider the subtleties of a

favourite novel, however, and it’s amazing to think anyone would dream of turning so complex and fulfilling a work into something as obvious as a Hollywood film.

Of course, the studios are wellequipped to overcome the obstacles in the adaptation process. Take, for example, The Adjustment Bureau — if it’s a good film, the chances are it’ll be because it will have next to nothing to do with the source story.

Philip K Dick’s stories are brilliantly brain-frying affairs that don’t lend themselves to adaptation. Take, for example his best known work Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

— that it’s a bizarre story about people buying artificial animals as a sign of status will no doubt come as a shock to fans of Ridley Scott’s

" SFNBLF PG )BNMFU TFU ZFBST JO UIF GVUVSF #VSU 3FZOPMET IBT BMSFBEZ TJHOFE VQ

reimagining, the awesome yet unrelated Blade Runner. Likewise, when Paul Verhoeven deigned to transfer Dick’s We Can Remember It For Your Wholesale, he stripped the story of everything — even its title — and built the Arnold Schwarzenegger juggernaut Total Recall upon its bare bones.

Not that Hollywood is always

story, it'd be better suited to episodic TV. But no doubt feeling bulletproof on the back of 300’s success, Snyder set out to cram 424 pages of graphic novel into three hours and wound up with a picture as beautiful as it was boring.

So, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

No, it’s not easy, this adaptation business. What works for one is a

(PP MVD E L

would really help the film, and it did. Not that I wasn’t worrying what he thought of my writing every moment he was there!�

As you have to admire Garland’s gambit, so you must also congratulate those writers who realise the limitations of the book they’re hired to rework. The transformation of Robert Ludlum’s lumbering novels into the lean and exciting Jason Bourne series

unsubtle. On the contrary, some adaptations are incredibly faithful to the original text. Such was the case with Watchmen, Zach

recipe for disaster for another. Take the aforementioned Never Let Me Go, which was adapted by Alex

Snyder’s epic take on Alan Moore’s era-defining graphic novel. Truth be told, it was actually a little bit

Garland. A hit novelist before he turned to screenwriting, Garland took the brave step of inviting

too faithful. Asked why he thought the book was unadaptable, Terry

author Kazuo Ishiguro on set. “My writer friends thought I must

far from certain art. Indeed, such is the process’ potential to create havoc, maybe it’s time the business

Gilliam — a huge fan of Moore’s tome — said that it was such a dense

be suicidal,� says the man behind the The Beach. “But I thought it

found some of those original stories Mr Jewison talked about in 1999.

is a fine example of adaptation at its most brutal. Of course, it could have gone very wrong. Yep, turning best-sellers into blockbusters is a

41

SKYPOD DJ SOLO

DUBAI

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

WWW.MIXCLOUD.COM/DJSOLO/SKYPOD-MIX

MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON — ANTIQUITY An LA-based arranger, composer and classicallytrained viola player, Miguel has received praise recently for his work Suite for Ma Dukes, which celebrates the life of late hip hop producer J Dilla as part of his Timeless concert series.

LETHERETTE — DANCE BRACE Perhaps best known for their remixes for artists such as Bibio, Letherette strike out here on their wickedly diverse self-titled EP, with a J Dilla-esque production style.

Organs and chopped up soul samples ride over a crunchy hip hop beat.

COMPUTER JAY — DISTANCE Already a modern classic amongst beat heads, this is an intergalactic bass excursion over stomping drums. A haunting melody accompanied by bizarre vocals.

42

GIANNI ROSSI — DEATH BY 69 Analog synths build and build over a hip hop style drum break and funky bassline, before finally giving way to a ghoulish break.

HIDDEN ORCHESTRA — FOOTSTEPS This new jazz outfit are similar to Cinematic Orchestra. The core four-piece band build around the drummer, and add nature samples to create a warm, organic sound.

MARCUS BELGRAVE — SPACE ODYSSEY The Detroit jazz legend here with perhaps his finest work. Bizarre modulated sounds give way to background horns and a rolling bassline.

ANENON — CHIMERA This is taken from a split release

by Anenon and fellow producer Asura. Each track evolves and takes you on a journey, leaving you attempting to anticipate what will come next. More LA gold.

GONJASUFI — ANCESTORS This track sums up the theme of time and travel perfectly, as Gonjasufi drawls over a beat produced by Gaslamp Killer into the next world, taking you to a place with no name.

TEEBS — ARTHUR’S BIRDS Teebs is known for creating unidentifiable, yet familiar landscapes. Compressed synths drop in and out on this downtempo composition, JAMIE VEX’D — RADIANT INDUSTRY A filthy bassline shakes a lazy drum break to

allowing the percussion to gently punch through, allowing the entire piece to breathe.

within an inch of its existence, while atmospheric noises build around you. Awesome stuff.

43

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LOCAL VOICES

CULTURAL CHALLENGES,

LITERARY SOLUTIONS WAEL AL-SAYEGH WONDERS IF WESTERN WRITING MORES CAN BE TRANSFERRED TO THE EMIRATI LITERARY SCENE

W

hen most Emiratis are introduced to an Emirati writer, we tend to assume that they work for a newspaper, or contribute to one through a column. Other forms of writing, such as poetry and novels, are viewed to be the result of a weekend endeavour rather than the product of a full-time profession.

But why is this so? For a group of people who have storytelling so embedded in their tradition and heritage, one would have expected to find a writer in every household.

ILLUSTRATION: VESNA PESIC

Sadly, this is far from the case.

From a very early age we are raised by our parents and community in the tradition of what inter-cultural intelligence

and avoiding shame is such that, if left unchecked, it can surpass what is morally and legally right. Societies that are guided by this principle tend to demand accountability to the group rather than the individual. In other words, one’s honour is directly linked to family, tribe, social background, ethnic origin and political and religious grouping. In such environments information is generally shared with caution, as it must fall in line with the mores of the group that may be affected.

Answers to simple questions such as “What do you personally think?” can cause a degree of discomfort. An immediate answer

specialists today call a strong sense of “honour and shame”. The

might be given out of politeness, but should not be considered in any way final, because the major

importance of maintaining honour

stakeholders — the tribe, the 45

political and religious groups – are not involved. It is clear, therefore,

nurtured, it does not produce bold and creative writers. There is a

members of the elite. Social mavericks and rebels – who are

that if such cultural factors are significant in what an individual

very high price to pay for spilling the nakhaj, for daring to shed light on topics that have for years been

prepared to risk everything they hold dear for the sake of writing what they truly feel needs to be

left in the dark. Memory runs deep in the Arab world and the wrath of

written – are also a source of inspiration, however rare they are.

1,000 angry tribes is not the safest pet to keep under the writing desk.

The writers who can, and do, get away with saying things more bluntly are those with social and

Having said that, the UAE, with its open-minded policies embracing the global economy, has also opened its doors to change.

Its people, especially the young, recognise that if they are to

feels comfortable in expressing in private conversation, then those involved in public writing, especially in today’s digital world, face far greater implications.

The result of this is that although our traditional way of ordering the world produces a balanced society where long-term relationships are

political clout. These include

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FLIGHT 250BC

1913

1925

1927

Icarus attempts to escape

The first airliner in the

The first inflight movie

Charles Lindbergh

Crete by means of two wings

world — the Benoist XIV

was shown on a Deutsche

performs the first non-stop

made of wax and feathers.

— takes off on New Year’s

Lufthansa flight. The single-

solo flight across the Atlan-

Unfortunately, he flies too

Eve 1913. It flies a number

reel short was silent —

tic. He travels 3,600 miles

close to the sun, the wax

of routes throughout

perfect for the extremely

in the Spirit of St Louis

melts, and he falls to his

Florida, but only man-

noisy airliners. It also helped

from New York to Paris. It

death into the sea. Not an

ages to survive for a few

take passengers’ minds of

took him 33 hours and he

encouraging beginning to

months before going bust.

the brutal turbulence the

survived on five sandwiches

the aviation industry.

A return ticket cost $5.

early planes suffered.

and two canteens of water.

46

LOCAL VOICES

effectively contribute to discussion and literature on the world stage,

With each group given the relative freedom to express its art, music,

to world-class authors. We find ourselves face-to-face with

then a far more robust individual worldview needs to be nurtured,

literature, religion and philosophy, the pressure for Emiratis to

not necessarily to replace the traditional, but to promote their

examine their own cultural identity has never been greater.

This influx has been described

writers from other cultures who have already passed through the stages of development we are only

good points while negating the bad.

The massive and rapid influx of expat workers into the country to provide the necessary manpower and know-how to help build the nation has produced one of the world’s most multicultural cities.

1930

by some Emirati conservatives as a “cultural nightmare”, but in terms of literature, it’s an Emirati dream come true. Events such as the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature expose local writers

1936

now experiencing.

The UAE is ready to nurture the seeds of home-grown writing.

The question we have to ask is: how willing are we to swap the traditional gown of being perceived as a writer with the prickly cloth of actually being one?

1976

2011

Ellen Church becomes

American Airlines issues

The Concorde makes its

Centuries of aviation

the first female flight at-

the first Air Travel Card,

debut — flying from

progress reach a zenith with

tendant when she boards a

which allows users to “buy

London to New York in 3.5

the launch of this magazine.

Boeing Air Transport flight.

now and pay later” at a

hours, twice the speed of

OK, we may be exaggerating

The first ‘stewardesses’ were

15 per cent discount — a

sound. The plane is dis-

slightly (only just) but we

actually trained nurses, a

precursor to the modern

continued in 2003 due to

are confident that you will

marketing ploy aimed at

credit card, making travel

rising costs — and making

enjoy this tome as much

making new passengers feel

more affordable and far

the Concorde pilot a rarer

as you will the rest of the

safer while onboard.

more tempting.

breed than US Astronauts.

onboard entertainment.

47

INTERVIEW

MY TRAVELLED LIFE

Michael Palin, 60, is a broadcaster, writer and actor

ON TRAVEL

ON TRAVEL LITERATURE

The amount of travel I do depends on what

I do read other travel books — Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar was a big influence. As was

I am doing. Last year I was away for about a

Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which was wonderful and shows you can be comic

month in total. This year it will be about three

in these types of books. Bruce Chatwin is another one — he gets the essence of the places he

months, as I am filming a new series for the

goes to spot on.

BBC. I still love travelling, it makes you appreciate home, which, for me, is London.

ON WRITING I learnt to write in my own voice and not to copy other writers. I was careful not to spend

ON INDIA

too much time describing sunsets for example as there is no way I could do that as well as

I have been travelling seriously with work

someone like Bruce Chatwin. I prefer to focus on people and their idiosyncracies when I travel.

for more than 20 years now, so most of the places I want to visit, I have done so. There are still places I want to go and places I want to go back to. I was in India last year and have been

4,:$"54

there six or seven times. I love the country, there is always something new to enjoy.

ON WORKING It might be nice to relax somewhere for six weeks, but I have a low tolerance for lying on the beach. Travelling with the BBC is not a bad way to experience places. I get to record the things I do and what I see, so I don’t look back and wonder what happened, as it’s all there on film or in print.

49

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MIA �O BUYER Pants from Comme

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des Garcons

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(FAT, +61396623332).

Vintage everything.

HOSHIKA, TATSUYOSHI DESIGNER &, COMPOSER Both jackets from ESS Laboratory (+61394956112, both jeans from Comme

50

des Garcons (FAT,

UNKNOWN

+61396623332). Her bag

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from Christian Paul.

Vintage Everything.

TILLY ANDY

��, SHOP WORKER

��, DESIGNER

Cardigan from Stella

Jacket from Yohji Yamamoto

McCartney (Cactus Jam,

(Left, +61394199292),

+61396540798), vest from

tanktop from American

Marc Jacobs (Flinders Way,

Apparel (+61395296852),

+61396543331), skirt and

trousers from Dior Homme

shoes from Kinki Gerlinki

(Assin, +61396540158).

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Vintage coat. Sweater and

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trousers from Alpha 60

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51

PLACE RINO LEVI ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS

1979

PAULISTA AVENUE, Sﾃグ PAULO

IMAGE: PEDRO KOK//WWW.PEDROKOK.COM.BR

FIESP-CIESP-SESI BUILDING

53

STORE PAPERCUP

BEIRUT

MAGAZINES / BOOKS / COFFEE

Y

ou would be forgiven for thinking that one of Lebanon’s

most unique stores is trying to hide away from the public.

Located on a back street in the quiet neighbourhood of Mar Mikhael, Papercup has gained a reputation for being the go-to spot for books on design, photography and architecture.

Inconspicuous from the outside, the store (plus coffee shop) maintains a simple feel throughout. Books and magazines cover the walls, and the room is broken up by some small well-placed tables.

The store – which opened in June 2009 – is the brainchild of Rania Naufal, who wanted to focus on content she felt the Lebanese market had been missing.

“When I moved back here [in 2003] I missed a place like this, which can be found in many other cities around the world,” she explained. “At the same time, it was important to find the right balance between niche and accessible.

“I felt there was the need for a change, and I had been thinking about it for such a long time, it was either go for it or leave Lebanon completely,” she said. With a lack of coherent market research on the issue, she took the plunge. “People thought I was insane,” she laughed.

“They said I was crazy for opening in the middle of nowhere, for opening an

54

WORDS: NOUR SAMAHA

arts-centred bookstore; that it would never work in Lebanon.”

But a year and a half since its launch, few can argue against its success. Many in Mar Mikhael credit Papercup with catapulting the neighbourhood from a quiet, familyoriented district to Beirut’s ‘next big thing’. Design stores, architectural offices, themed-bars and avantgarde clothing boutiques have all opened in the past year.

“People say that they want to open stores ‘like Papercup’,” Rania said, bashfully. “I don’t feel like I’ve invented something, but maybe I’ve unleashed something.”

The clientele range from industry professionals to tourists who just want to come and browse. “People come to buy, come to drink coffee and read, some even come to conduct meetings here,” said Rania. whose shelves currently hold approximately 1,500 books. The sections include art, photography, fashion, design, graphic novels and children’s books.

And if it can’t be found, it can be ordered. “With certain publishers I know there is a standard of quality, the only problem is that I have to restrict myself otherwise I’ll end up just ordering for my personal collection!”

Papercup, Agopian Building, Pharoah Street, Mar Mikhael, Beirut.Tel: 9611-443083, www.papercupstore.com

55

1

BOOTY BANGKOK

WE TRAWL THE THAI CAPITAL'S MARKETS, MEGA-MALLS AND BOUTIQUES

2

3

Miniature tuk-tuk, $3.

Siang Pure oil, $6.

The Suan Lum Night

Made from chopped

This concoction will

Bazaar Map, $5.

up soft drink cans,

apparently remedy

Nancy Chandler's

this mini tuk-tuk

dizzines and insect

maps are a delight,

pays homage to

bites.Suan Lum Night

and the best way to

Bangkok's iconic

Bazaar, Sathorn Road.

navigate the market.

form of transport.

Suan Lum Night Bazaar,

Covered Market,

Sathorn Road.

Sukhumvit, Soi 13.

3

1

2

4

4

5

6

7

Chocolate Brown

101 Thai Forms, $9.

Elephant Soap, $5.

Tiger Face Lamp, $11.

Notebook, $6.

A record of all things

Jasmine-scented

Handmade lamp-

A locally-made note-

Thai that are fading

soap in the shape of

shade perfect for

book that combines

from memory, from

Thailand's favourite

(big) kids who want

nice design with

pop guns to coconut

animal. King Power,

to bring a slice of

thick matt paper.

crisps.Page One Books,

Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Thailand back home.

King Power,

Central World Plaza.

Suan Lum Night Bazaar,

Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Sathorn Road.

7

6

5

3 Th u

W ed

Tu e

2

1

CALENDAR

i Fr

4 t Sa

5

LITERATURE FEST The annual celebration of all things literary takes place in Dubai. www.eaif l.com

6

n Su

7

on M

8

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11

Fri

12

Sat

Tue

15

Wed

16

Thu

17 18

Fri

Sat Sun

Mon

Tue We d

Th u

Sa t

M on

Su n

e Tu

28

27

26

GLASGOW COMEDY Four hundred shows in 25 days across the city. glasgowcomedy festival.com

19

20 21

22

www.dolomitiskijazz.com

14

Mon

march

DOLOMITE SKI JAZZ Italy’s coolest music festival is back for another year.

13

Sun

Fr i

PERTH WRITERS FESTIVAL Nearly one million people visit this event yearly — a must for book lovers. www.perthfestival.com.au

HOLI FESTIVAL The annual festival of colours’ takes place across India. www.holifestival.org ART DUBAI The art fair returns for its fifth edition, bringing more than 75 galleries from across the world for the four-day event. www.artdubai.ae

23

24

25 THE HONG KONG SEVENS Rugby action and fun galore. www.hksevens.com

29

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N THE O S I D L R ARY WO NITIES ALLOW R E T I L B U THE ARA EATIVE OPPORT MONTAGUE , N O I T A N S R OF STAG NOLOGY AND C TIAL? BY JAME S E D A C N H E AFTER D T CAN NEW TEC EALISE ITS POTE RISE. BURE TO FINALLY R THE GEN

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63

Even Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz worked as a civil servant while he wrote

O

nce damned by some as the treatise of a traitor, it now reads like a prophecy — a warning of the trappings of absolute power and the corruption of revolutionary zeal. When Alaa al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building hit the shelves in 2002, the intertwining story of the residents of a rundown building in downtown Cairo was a runaway hit, becoming a worldwide smash in Arabic whilst spawning a film and a TV series. More importantly, it got a rare platform and an international audience – it was translated into close to a dozen languages.

But the story of Aswany’s novel is almost as revealing as the book’s plot; a thinly veiled metaphor for the cultural and political stagnation of Egypt since

64

the 1952 revolution. It almost didn’t make it thanks to a mixture of money, censorship and indifference.

“One [Egyptian publisher] told me, ‘It is a good novel but I am going to lose my job if I publish it,’” Aswany recalled in a 2006 interview. Even after the book had been published, he kept working as a dentist at his surgery in the same building he had based his novel on. It wasn’t until his novel caught the imaginations of readers outside of Egypt that his life began to change.

“Before HarperCollins, what I got from The Yacoubian Building I considered as covering the price of the cigarettes and coffee I bought while I was writing it,” he said. That novelists struggle to make ends meet isn’t surprising — that problem bedevils writers from Khartoum to London. But the fact that Aswany

couldn’t make a living from his writing until it reached a wider audience highlighted one of the major difficulties inherent in Arab literature.

Even Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, whose masterful Cairo Trilogy is perhaps the best, and best-known, collection of Arab fiction outside the Middle East, worked as a civil servant whilst he wrote. But since 2002, the game has changed, and not just on the streets of Cairo. The advent of a major international literary prize for Arabic novels, the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, and this month’s Emirates Festival of Literature in Dubai means that Arab literature now has a platform that it has never enjoyed before.

“Arabic fiction, particularly the novel, has achieved greater technical maturity,” explained Professor Yasir Suleiman, founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge University. “That new voices from different regions of the Arab world, both men and, most notably, women, have entered the Arab literary scene indicates a growing recognition that the novel is on its way to becoming a major literary genre on par with poetry.”

The gilded, earnest corridors of institutions such as Cambridge University have, in the past, been the sole entry point for Arab literature to reach a wider

66

audience. But now Professor Suleiman believes it is the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the

region’s capitals, this month’s Emirates Airline Festival of Literature will be a fascinating place to take the

‘Arab Booker’ that is opening doors for Arab writers to achieve the international audience they deserve.

pulse of the Middle East’s literary scene.

The festival has brought together a collection of renowned Western and Arab writers to run

Set up in 2007 by the Booker Prize Foundation in London, it chooses the best in Arabic fiction, awarding $50,000 to the winner and guaranteeing an English translation of the book. The first two prizes were won by Egyptians — Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher and Azazel

by Youssef Ziedan — while Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles by Saudi writer Abdo Khal won the third.

Khal’s book will shortly be released in English, but there will be one market where his books won’t be read — in his native Saudi Arabia. The issue of censorship is the elephant in the room for Arab literature, a

EGYPT WRITES, IRAQ READS AND LEBANON PUBLISHES point brought into sharp relief by the spontaneous street-level protests across the Middle East by people demanding the kind of freedom that would allow them to read whatever they want.

“Censorship is always damaging to the full flowering of the various forms of cultural production; I am talking here about institutional censorship which often leads to self-censorship,” agrees Professor Suleiman, before adding a caveat. “I would contend that censorship can be beneficial in an odd and counterintuitive kind of way, in that it can sharpen the ingenuity of the writer in trying to get round the censor. This has actually led to some of the most exquisite titles we have seen in the last two decades in different regions of the Arab world.”

Given the facts on the ground, and the new feeling of political awakening on the streets of some of the

workshops, give lectures or read passages from their works; everything from a talk by Kamal Abdel Malek on Arab travel literature to the BBC’s Gavin Esler presenting a lecture on the prescience of George Orwell. According to Tunisian poet Ines Abbasi, who will be appearing at the festival, the issue of censorship will loom large.

“The [actions] of some Arab rulers killed freedom of speech for everybody – and of poets first – so they stopped being examples and leaders for people,” she explained when asked of the difficulties in getting her work read in the past.

“I believe that there are many intellectual and cultivated people in Arabic cities from the Atlantic to the Gulf... a festival of literature can be held in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sana’a, Tunis, Beirut or Cairo.”

In many respects, the festival is taking place as the game is changing. Who knows what the political and cultural make up of countries like Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq will be in 12 months time? Traditionally the three countries have been the intellectual beating heart of the Arab world. As the popular Arab maxim points out: “Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, Iraq reads”. Egypt thanks to its history of incubating Arab ideas and writing, Iraq for its high levels of literacy and Lebanon for his historic publishing freedoms.

Can the white heat of revolution finally unlock the latent Arab talent that has been criminally undertapped so far? There has certainly never been more of an interest in the culture of the Middle East from the international community, nor outlets for its works.

“There has been a significant expansion of Arab literature outside the Middle East,” agrees Professor Suleiman.

“Arabic literature is translated into many more languages than was the case in the past... there is

greater demand than two decades ago for Arabic literary works in university courses in the West.

However, there are obstacles that face the spread of Arabic literature in the West. Some people refer to ‘prejudice’. This might be a factor, but the greater factor in my estimation is the translation norms that exist in host societies.”

The statistics reflect this. Arabic is the official language of 22 countries and is spoken by five per cent of the world’s population, but fewer than 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic since the 9th century. That’s less than the average yearly output for Spanish books translated into English, according to the Arab Human Development Report.

The lack of new Arabic writers is another factor.

Pick up a copy of Anchor Books’ Anthology of Modern Arabic Fiction, a book that features short stories and excerpts from 79 Arab writers. The sole Emirati writer on the list is Muhammad Al Murr, who is described as the best-known writer from the UAE. The book also turns up another startling fact: the average age of the 79 living writers (10 have died) featured is 67. And this is a book of ‘modern’ fiction.

So where are the young writers? And why aren’t they being published?

According to Fadhil Al Azzawi, the renowned Iraqi poet and author, the publishing market in the region is “below zero”. “Most of the Arab publishing houses are publishing houses in name only. Instead of paying authors in advance, as is customary in the west, they usually ask the author to pay the publishing costs upfront.”

The Egyptian novelist, Ahmed Alaidy told the Guardian that he believed that younger Arab novelists would find their own way around the decrepit publishing system. “Facebook pages are being created and publishers such as Malamih have published books

from blogs.” There will be more to come. Over the past months, the power of Arab fiction and poetry has been highlighted. Verses of To the Tyrants of the World , by the early 20th century Tunisian poet Abul-Qasim Al-Shabi, were chanted on the streets of Tunis and have become something of an anthem in Egypt, too.

Copies of Aswany’s early novel, the banned The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, are being swapped and eagerly devoured in Egypt. The novelist has even become a prominent figure in the protests. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the winds have changed, as much culturally as politically.

But according to a recent study, an Arab cultural renaissance is already in full swing. A 2010 Ipsos survey found that the UAE now has the most well-read population in the Middle East. 54.2 per cent of those surveyed said they read books regularly, as opposed to just 10.6 per cent of Egyptians.

The cannon of Gulf literature is small, but a huge injection of money into the region’s cultural fabric – the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature being a case in point — means that the “Golden Triangle” of Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq is likely to be challenged in the future. “This would nominate these [oil and gasrich Gulf] countries, known for their big investments in culture and education, to become the new cultural leaders in the region,” the survey concluded. Revolution and oil-funded hyper-capitalism might seem unusual bedfellows, but both might be needed to build on the legacy of Mahfouz and Aswany.

“I am optimistic by nature,” says Professor Suleiman.

“I think Arabs do a lot of self-flagellation in their acts of cultural stock-taking. I prefer to light candles rather than to curse the dark. Yes there is darkness in the Arab literary scene, but there is also light and there are promising shoots.”

James Montague writes for CNN, is an associate editor of Delayed Gratification and author of When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone (Mainstream)

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the

LONG SHADOW of the SPACE SHUTTLE Growing up as an astronaut’s daughter

By Laura Ann Mullane 70

STORIES

I

walk into the apartment parking lot on a sweltering July afternoon in east central Florida. There I see a large bus with the NASA

logo on it. I’m in Cape Canaveral for a family vacation that happens to coincide with a space shuttle launch. Lift-off is scheduled in a few days, and I know without asking

that the families of the astronauts

ferry my father into space three

are staying at the apartment block too, and that the bus will take the family to watch the launch. The

separate times, I might as well be a teenager again. All of a sudden I can feel the fatigue from the sleepless

thought of it makes my stomach sink back against my spine and a

nights and early mornings. I can feel my dry throat and the nerves

wave of nausea roll up to my throat.

Although it has been 20 years

that tangled my stomach. All of a sudden, it is once again my father who will ride a plume of smoke and

since I’ve been the one boarding that bus to go watch the shuttle

fire into outer space.

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When I was seven years old, my father, Mike Mullane, was selected to be an astronaut. It was 1978 and NASA had just announced the beginning of a new space programme: the space shuttle

It’s hard to describe the feeling of waiting to watch a person you love about to blast-off into space.

— a reusable orbiter that would

the bus with my mother, brother and sister, joining the other families. As we drove, the June sky turned pink and the marshlands that lined the road tried to shrug off the thick haze that had settled on them overnight.

The roads were lined with the parked cars and beach chairs of spectators who had camped out

be used to launch satellites and conduct research and, ultimately,

overnight to witness the launch.

Many cheered as we passed.

American flags flew from car

help construct and supply the International Space Station. They needed astronauts and put out the call for applicants. My father, who was 33, had spent his career in the

antennas. Our bus bypassed the traffic and was waved through security checkpoints. All of it made me feel for a moment like a celebrity. Of course, I wasn’t. No

US Air Force flying in the backseat of fighter jets.

He had dreamt of flying in space since he saw the dot of light that was Sputnik arc across the sky as a young boy. So when NASA announced that it was accepting applications, he submitted his and held his breath.

When he was selected, I was too young to realise what this career change meant. To me, it was just another move (as the daughter of a military officer, I was used to moving a lot), this time to Houston, Texas, where NASA was headquartered.

one knew who I was. No one even knew who my dad was.

Astronauts had long lost the celebrity status they enjoyed during the early years of the space programme and the moon landings.

The star of this show was the space shuttle itself. We were all just props.

This was the second time we’d made the drive. The day before, the launch had been scrubbed at 20 minutes to lift-off because of a mechanical problem. This day, we all tried to keep our optimism in check, but still the bus vibrated with

Although my father was an

the same excitement and anxiety

astronaut in name beginning in 1978, his first trip on the space shuttle didn’t come until six years

of a busload of children on the first day of school. Once we arrived at the space centre, we were taken to the

later, when I was 13. I was old enough to know his new job meant more than a cross-country move.

launch director’s office on the top floor of the Launch Control Centre.

A wall of windows looked

It was the 12th shuttle mission and the first flight of the orbiter

out onto the launch pad three miles away. We waited there

Discovery. The NASA bus picked us up at the condominium in the pre-dawn hours to drive us to Kennedy Space Center. I boarded

and listened to the drone of the countdown play over speakers.

At nine minutes to lift off, we were escorted down a hall

and up steps to the roof of the building, from which we would watch the launch.

Nine minutes had never taken so long. I stood with my arms locked through my mother’s, who was practically shaking.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of waiting to watch a person you love about to blast-off into space. First, there’s the sheer, unadulterated excitement of witnessing an event that feels larger than life itself.

The shuttle, even from three miles away, loomed over everything, dwarfing the landscape around it. Vapours swirled at its base.

On the roof, speakers amplified the countdown, which echoed between the buildings. You sensed that something big was about to happen, something that couldn’t be contained, that didn’t subscribe to the laws of the universe.

But in addition to the excitement, there’s a paralysing fear. I wasn’t fully aware of this at the age of 13, when mortality was still abstract and death seemed like something that happened to other people. I didn’t worry that my dad would be killed on the shuttle mission, even though my father had told us repeatedly about the dangers. Strapping oneself to the equivalent of a bomb and being catapulted to a place with no atmosphere was a risky proposition. Still, I didn’t believe that anything bad would happen to him — not on a conscious level.

But on a subconscious one, I was terrified. It’s what had kept me up the night before the launch, pulling me into the bathroom with

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dry heaves that brought tears to my eyes. It’s what made me now hold onto my mom’s arm so tightly that she had to say, “Laura, honey, you’re hurting me.” It’s what made me sometimes imagine a future without my father, with whom I would swim and hike and stare up at the stars. My father, who would bring home flowers for my mom and chocolates for my brother, sister and me. This was the man I might lose forever.

The countdown continued. Less than one minute to lift-off. Things were happening quickly now. The announcer ticked off the status of systems and the passing seconds in quick succession. He’s really going, I thought. This is really happening.

The final countdown: “T minus 10, nine, eight — we have a go for main engine start — seven, six, five — we have main engine start…” A slight rumbling. Smoke billowed at the bottom of the orbiter. He’s really going. He’s really going.

But then, nothing. Four seconds to lift off and the engines shut down. “We have a cut off,” the announcer said. “We have an abort by the onboard computers.”

I looked at my mother and then at the rest of the people on the roof—

to hear what the announcer was

the other families and a handful of NASA brass and other astronauts.

saying over the loudspeaker. I just stood there — at a complete loss of

Everyone was staring in disbelief.

“What happened?” I asked my mom. “I don’t know.” A loud boom

what to make of everything that was happening. The fact was, I didn’t know. No one did. Even my

rumbled across the distance. What was it? An explosion?

dad sitting in the cockpit didn’t know. The computers had sensed

No, the shuttle was still there. It was just the sound from the initial main engine start finally reaching

a problem and shut down the engines. It wasn’t until later that we learnt about the fire on the

us. My mom and sister broke

launch pad, how my father and

always expected.

I didn’t know then that coming home safely wasn’t a foregone

down crying. My brother strained

the other astronauts had sat for a

conclusion. A year and a half later

few terrifying seconds while they wondered whether their rocket would explode. All I knew was that I wouldn’t see my fatner fly into space that day. It would be two more months and more sleepless nights before I would once again stand on the roof with my family and squeeze my mom’s arm and hold my breath until the I heard the words, “We have lift-off,” boom across the loudspeakers. I would feel the ground shake and hear the deafening roar that rattled my chest, and I would watch the shuttle rise past the tower dragging its fire behind it. The shuttle Discovery would carry my father into space and bring him home safely again — just as I’d

— as my dad trained for another mission — the shuttle Challenger would begin its ascent into space,

Today, my father is 65 and an author. He no longer flies, instead

only to be ripped apart when it exploded 73 seconds after lift-off.

mountains. He often says he would never believe he flew in space if he didn’t have the pictures to prove it — the memories seem so distant. I

The shuttle carried family friends, including Judy Resnik, who had flown with my father on Discovery.

It also carried the fathers of several of my high school classmates, one of whom was in my year. We had mutual friends but I didn’t know her beyond that. After her father’s funeral and her return to school, I would avert my eyes when I would pass her in the hallway. Every time I would see her I was reminded that I got to go home after school and eat dinner with my dad. I was reminded that my father would see me graduate from high school and college and eventually marry and have children. Her father never would. How could we possibly live in a world that was so unfair?

Our fathers took the exact same risks, yet mine survived and hers didn’t. It was an unbearably painful awakening for a 15-yearold girl — this realisation that death is random and heartache is delivered with no regard for logic.

sating his ambition by climbing

know how he feels. I, too, look back on those years in disbelief.

My dad joined NASA

He could abandon his desire to fly no more than a racehorse could abandon its desire to run. when I was seven and left when I was 19 after his third shuttle mission. My formative years was spent in the shadow of the space shuttle. Yet when people ask me what it was like to grow up as the daughter of an astronaut, I never know what to say. It was amazing and terrifying. But mostly, it was just my childhood.

As I near 40, I’m beginning to understand how my dad’s career shaped me. It’s only now that I’ve realised how rare that focus is. I was raised by a man who knew from an early age what he wanted to be. That is what makes my upbringing unique: not that my

It also came with the awareness that my father would risk death again. He didn’t quit the shuttle programme after Challenger. In fact, he would fly again twice. I

father flew into space, but that he was able to achieve his dream.

I wonder now what paths my

never wanted him to quit, nor did my mom or brother or sister. We all

defined my father? I don’t know.

But I do know whatever they do, they can look up to the stars and

knew flying was in his blood.

He could abandon his desire to fly no more than a racehorse could abandon its desire to run. It was the essence of who he was. Yet each time, I stood on that roof wondering if I’d see my father again.

childrens’ lives will take. Will they have the same ambition that

know nothing is out of reach.

Laura Ann Mullane is a writer who lives in northern New Mexico. She is co-author of God Sleeps in Rwanda: A Journey of Transformation. Her father, Mike Mullane, is author of the memoir Riding Rockets.

Following in the footsteps of the legendary writer — who died 50 years ago this year — is a popular pastime for devotees. But even casual visitors to Paris can’t avoid bumping into Hemingway’s ghost. Long-term resident Mark Tungate goes in search of Papa’s Paris

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H

emingway came to Paris for the exchange rate, the bohemian crowd and the booze. While in America prohibition had turned drinking into a crime, Paris was one long party, bookended by aperitifs and champagne.

“Exchange is a wonderful thing,” wrote the young Ernest in a column for the Toronto Star. “Red wine is sixty centimes a bottle and beer is forty centimes a glass.” He observed that he and his wife Hadley were able to eat “an excellent meal” for the equivalent of fifty cents each.

The article is headlined Living in Paris on $1,000 a year.

And yet in A Moveable Feast, his wonderful memoir of Paris in the

1920s, Hemingway insists that he was often poor. He describes loitering by the Seine or in the Luxembourg Gardens in order to avoid the cooking aromas drifting from restaurants.

Even his first address was a poor one: a cramped apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, just off the “wonderful narrow crowded market street” of rue Mouffetard. There is a plaque outside the building now, just as there is outside another building around the corner, in rue Descartes.

Hemingway rented a tiny office here “in the hotel where [the poet Paul] Verlaine died”.

Rue Mouffetard is an ideal first stop for Hemingway hunters. Leave the metro at Place Monge, where the aromas snaking from under the striped

awnings of the market stalls would have set the author’s stomach rumbling. A left turn brings you into rue Mouffetard, which is still pleasingly narrow and cobbled, although rather too conscious of its place on the tourist map. It is lined with souvenir shops, crêperies and cheap restaurants

IMAGE: PAUL BIRIS

serving “Spécialités Libanaises”.

But next door to Hemingway’s former home is a delightful bookshop called Les Alizés.

“Naturally, we’re a magnet for Hemingway fans,” confirms its proprietor, Christine Dubosson, indicating a shelf crammed with Hemingway titles in French and English.

Hemingway noted that rue Mouffetard emptied into a “cesspool” called the Café des Amateurs in the Place de la Contrescarpe. The café no longer exists, and the comfortable Café Delmas in the same location is by no means noisome. It has pleasantly scuffed floorboards, leatherupholstered club chairs, burgundy wallpaper, laconic waiters and tiny cups of overpriced coffee. It is, in other words, utterly Parisian.

After a jolt of caffeine, explore

The Closerie des Lilas, at the far end of boulevard du Montparnasse, was an intellectual haunt long before the young writer took a seat here to scratch out some of his best stories. Since opening in 1874, the café had served Zola, Cézanne and Lenin, among others. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hemingway was an admirer of Cézanne’s paintings, whose deceptive simplicity he hoped to imitate in his writing.

He came here during the second half of his Paris stint, when he was living above a sawmill in the nearby rue Notre Dame des Champs (at number 113, to be exact). The café’s green-shaded terrace still lends it a bucolic air; in the 1920s it must have seemed positively rural.

Hemingway liked it not just because it was convenient, but also because it was a brisk walk from the more fashionable Montparnasse bars, such

the cramped medieval streets with their evocative names: rue de l’Arbalète (Street of the

as the La Rotonde, Le Select and Le Dôme. Although he occasionally dropped in to those places to catch up with gossip and friends — notably the artist Jules Pascin — he needed the calm of the Lilas to work.

Crossbow), rue de Pot de Fer (Street of the Iron Cauldron) and

Today, its softly lit piano bar, urbane service and daunting menu – expect to pay more than 20 euros for a main course – make it more of a

rue de l’Epée de Bois (Street of the Wooden Sword). You’ll need to

treat than an everyday haunt.

To walk off lunch, cut through the Luxembourg Gardens, where the author spent many hours strolling and thinking. And there is indeed something

work up an appetite, because it’s almost lunchtime.

meditative about its well-tended gravel paths and watchful statues.

HEMINGWAY: A LIFE LESS ORDINARY If your aim is true, you should emerge at rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lived at number 27 with her partner Alice B Toklas. A writer and art collector (Picasso painted her portrait), Stein invited Hemingway to her Saturday evening salons and taught him much about modern art. She coined

Hemingway is a global

Americans in Paris and

brand. His rugged persona

Spain, captured the spirit of

the phrase “The Lost Generation” to describe those who had survived the First World War. Having developed her own experimental – some might say eccentric – writing style, she had a strong influence on Hemingway’s work. Inevitably, given the size of the egos involved, they later fell out.

This would be an excellent moment to make your way to Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore and lending library run by Hemingway’s friend Sylvia Beach, at 12 rue de l’Odéon. Unfortunately, it closed in 1941. The good news is that another bookstore of the same name opened 10 years later.

and sharply defined universe

“The Lost Generation” when

— good food and drink, war

it was published in 1924.

and passion — are as easy

Hemingway remained a

to grasp as his diamond-

reporter at heart. A Farewell

clear writing. His colourful,

to Arms was inspired by his

restless life has proved so

experiences in Italy, while For

inspiring that restaurateurs

Whom the Bell Tolls captures

and hoteliers the world over

the Spanish Civil War, which

delight in informing tourists

he covered as a journalist.

that ‘Papa’ Hemingway ate,

He wrote with great relish

stayed or lived ‘here’.

of bars, bullfighting, boxing,

Born in a Chicago suburb,

fishing and big game hunt-

Ernest Miller Hemingway

ing. His world embraced

began his career as a

France, Spain, Italy, Key West,

reporter on the Kansas City

Cuba and Africa. The Old

Star. In 1918 — at the age of

Man and the Sea won a

18 — he left for the Italian

Pulitzer Prize in 1952; two

front to serve as a volunteer

years later Hemingway won

ambulance driver for the

the Nobel Prize for

You can experience its tattered charm at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, overlooking the Seine.

Red Cross. For much of the

Literature. It was only

1920s he lived in Paris, where

when his health began to

he honed the stripped-down

deteriorate that he sank into

Nearby, take a break at the Place Saint Michel, where Hemingway

writing style that was to

depression. No longer able

make him famous. His first

to satisfy his lust for life, he

drank St James rum and lusted after a young French woman while trying to write in an unnamed café.

novel, The Sun Also Rises,

shot himself with a 12-gauge

about a group of young

shotgun on July 2, 1961.

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IMAGE: RICHARD GILLANDERS

TYPE DESIGN BY: JAKOB NYLUND

When Hemingway felt flush, he would go for dinner at a buzzing brasserie called Michaud’s in Saint Germain. The well-preserved space is now occupied by an equally lively establishment called Le Comptoir des Saints Pères. Expect a well-off, fashionable crowd.

After dining, the classic Hemingway nightlife option would have been the Dingo Bar, at 10 rue Delambre, where he first met Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemingway paints a teasing portrait of his fellow Lost Generation author in A Moveable Feast. Sadly, this important literary landmark is now an Italian restaurant.

For a more authentic Hemingway experience, take the metro to Opéra and seek out Harry’s New York Bar, at 5 rue Daunou. Barely changed since its opening in 1911, it features white-coated barmen, dark wood, walls decorated with faded university pennants, and the reassuring rattle of the cocktail shaker.

Finally, it is a short walk from here to the Ritz, in Place Vendôme. Legend has it that Hemingway “liberated” the hotel’s bar when he arrived in Paris with the allied troops in 1944. (He took the concept of the “embedded” journalist rather too far and recruited a band of resistance fighters on the outskirts of the city.) He was certainly a regular customer – and today this cosy, unexpectedly gentlemanly enclave is called The Bar Hemingway.

Take a seat, crack open one of the great man’s novels, and enjoy.

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THE DISAPPEARING EXPAT Think Skype and iPods make life abroad better?

You don’t know what you’re missing

By Chuck Thompson

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W

e rioted for Doritos.I

don’t say this proudly.

It was just something all of us had to do.

This was Japan, 1991. There were 12 of us living in an obscure burg called Kojima, a blandas-tofu bedroom community unofficially known as the parking lot of southern Honshu.

We were foreign English teachers — mostly Americans, with a few scattered Brits and the usual landless drifters the ESL trade attracts — but our real job was surviving the loneliness and want of 20th century rural Japan. Believe me, no matter how much you think you like sushi, no matter how healthy you think dried seaweed flakes are, you really don’t want to see them on your plate everyday.

Rumours of the Dorito miracle began trickling into the faculty office around lunchtime. Some sort of “American Day” promotion going on at Happy Town, Kojima’s ironically named shopping complex. When Shanghai Bob brought confirmation to me he spoke nervously, like a guy telling you about the tunnel he’s been digging beneath his cell for 88

the past nine years. “I got word from Glasser,” Shanghai Bob half-whispered. “He’s calling the display ‘smallish’. Twenty bags, 30 tops. No one else has discovered it yet.”

“Can we get there before the others find out?” I asked, casting a wary eye at my comrades, just then curiously slinking out of the room. “Only if we skip our one o’ clock classes.”

By the time Bob and I reached Happy Town, of course, the carefully arranged groceryaisle display featuring the exotic American snack treat had been decimated. You think Target the day after Thanksgiving is a knife fight? At Happy Town, the entire foreign staff of our school was staging a minor insurrection around the Doritos pyramid, scrambling for the last of the hallowed yellow bags, issuing ultimatums and elbowing each other like NBA power forwards, while a dozen bewildered Japanese housewives looked on in mute awe.

Within minutes, Kojima’s expat brigade had made off with every known tortilla chip in the prefecture.

Whatever local appetites might have been stimulated for this prized American delicacy would have to wait a year or two for

the next shipment to arrive.

Japan is where I learned to be an expat. Aside from a few unique details — sumo Saturdays, the incomprehensibly repulsive dough ball known as “manju” which tastes like decomposing toenail clippings encased in vulcanized halibut flesh — the experience was typical of life abroad. Which is to say, a hard, hungry, pathological existence out of which one scratches and claws for a few dramatic rewards; a world in which minor disappointments are elevated to Greek tragedy and meagre fortunes (“Doritos in Kojima? Are we dreaming?”) assume levels of heroic conquest.

Whether it’s goggle-eyed Americans explaining the words “Peace Corps” to warlords in Uzbekistan, wary Germans sizing up hand-scrawled signs outside of dentist offices in Africa or eager Aussies lying to their Argentine hosts that theirs is indeed perfectly correct and

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acceptable English pronunciation, it is upon the twin anvils of privation and isolation that for centuries the expat experience has been forged.

Or so I’ve always believed.

Having left the expat milieu behind in the mid-90s, I’ve continued to assume that, like the sun, stars and Ichiro dribbling out 200 infield hits a year, the trials of residency abroad had remained a reliable constant in an ever-shifting world.

This notion began crumbling for me a couple of years ago, when I went to work in an office in Hong Kong. Initially, the team of expats I was working with appeared to be a familiar lot — youngish Brits, Yanks, Aussies, Canucks, Filipinos, Singaporeans and a few unidentifiable others.

After a few months, however, I began to realise that a fundamental shift in the expat universe had

occurred during my years away; a change that makes the modern avatars of international adventurism profoundly different than the ones I’d slogged alongside

The level of assimilation expats around the world enjoy today was unthinkable 20 years ago in the 80s and 90s.

In a book called Smile When You’re Lying, I wrote, “All expat life is limbo. Lurking behind every discussion, the Return Home, whether it’s one or two or 10 years away, provides the fundamental tension to every moment you live abroad.” The expats I was drinking beer with in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, however, never talked about going home. Ever.

They didn’t avoid the subject

of home merely because they were content where they were — though most seemed to be that — but because, even as foreigners, they had become an integral part of the places in which they lived. This was startling to me.

The level of assimilation expats around the world enjoy today — and not only in Brit-influenced Hong Kong — would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.

Three fundamental changes appear to account for the disruption in the tectonics of expat citizenry.

The first is obvious, though no less important for it. As it has everything else, the Internet has dramatically altered the rules of the overseas game. By this I don’t simply mean a reliance on the comforting immediacy of daily Skype chats with the peeps back in Leeds or the ability to conduct

91

seamless bank transactions with the home branch in Topeka.

Far more revolutionary is that the Internet has eliminated the primary horror that once damaged so many lives abroad.

I speak, of course, of the extended separation from beloved organisations bearing such manly

from his apartment in Sheung Wan. And with the familiar drawl of Jon Miller providing the play-

appellations as Cornhuskers,

by-play, to boot.

In addition to round-the-clock hometown connectivity (“Uncle Paul finally had that boil lanced – send pics!”), the flattened world economy has mostly eliminated the need for Doritos riots. Not only

The flattened world economy has mostly eliminated the need for Doritos riots

can the resourceful expat find pretty much any chip or pizza topping anywhere in the world — from personal experience I’m including the Congo in

Cottagers and Magpies. In Japan in the 1980s and 90s, I used to watch month-old VHS tapes of Los Angeles Lakers games kindly shipped to me by sympathetic friends back home. Today in Hong Kong, I sometimes sit next to a California native and rabid San Francisco Giants fan who not only didn’t miss an inning of the team’s God-appointed World Series triumph in 2010, but who, thanks to Slingbox and MLB.com, followed the entire season live

92

this claim — but he can choose between synthetic ranch, roasted chipotle, creamy spinach, spicy habañero, rosemary and basil, toasted camel droppings and yak butter flavourings.

In other words, the market for canned tortillas we expats in Kojima single-handedly kept alive in 1991 has pretty much collapsed.

More significant than either of these two developments, however, is that the exhausted world seems finally to have given in to, or at least gotten used to, the flood of expats that began spreading

across the globe en masse in the post-colonial era. Once an exotic creature at which benighted locals could not shout “Hello!” at often enough, the expatriate nowadays is a common enough specimen in most countries that he or she can pedal a bicycle to local markets or country schoolrooms without inciting more than one or two shrieks from disbelieving rubes among the hoi polloi.

The most astonishing evidence of the growing international status of the foreign resident comes from Japan, perhaps the most defiantly homogenous society on earth.

According to David Askew, associate professor of law at Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, in 1965 a mere one in 250 marriages in Japan were between couples of mixed ethnicity.

By the mid-2000s, the number of mixed-race marriages had surged to one in 15 nationwide, and one in 10 in Tokyo. Between 1987 and 2004, more than half a million children were born in Japan with at least one foreign parent.

You don’t need to be John

93

Blackthorne to read the writing on the scroll. If the world can’t count on Japan to keep its foreign population at arm’s length, it’s pointless to expect anyone else to do so.

One can easily argue in favour of these developments—life is plainly less troublesome for today’s expats — but before the experience of living among strangers in strange lands disappears for good, I think it’s worth pointing out the dimmer side of all this progress.

Whether in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Mumbai or Cape Town, it’s nice being accepted by the crowd — I hated being poked and prodded everywhere I went in rural Japan 20 years ago — but to me there seems little point in leaving one place for another if, just like back home, you end up with the same old TV, same old food, same old blasé neighbours.

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Some of the baggage that comes with human migration, of course, will always remain. In the midst of my worried ruminations on the passing of yet another touchstone of the international travel experience, I met an American in Tokyo who spent 20 minutes

Nothing spoils and expat's day like running into a tourist from his or her home country

lambasting the poor attitudes of linguistically challenged

“Why do these people even bother coming here?” the American wondered aloud, adopting the unmistakably uppity air of the besieged local. “If they don’t like it, stay home.”

For a second, I nodded in Old Asia Hand empathy. Then I realised he might just as easily have been describing me, circa 1991. Or, for that matter, 2011.

The malcontent who, for all the appreciation of instant video chatting, smart phoning and on-demand Doritos snarfing, still recognises the value of cultural isolation, and who understands that the scars it leaves

foreigners who had yet to master the Tokyo subway system and who complained incessantly

behind are almost always worth the trouble it takes to earn them.

about the peculiarities of

Chuck Thompson is the author of Smile When You Are Lying and To Hellholes and Back. He currently lives in Hong Kong and his latest book about the American Deep South will be released in 2012.

Japanese cuisine. Nothing spoils an expat’s day like running into a tourist from his home country.

LAND OF THE

LOST

IMAGES: JANA VUJTKOVA

PICO IYER REVELS IN THE COMPLICATIONS OF LIFE IN MAURITIUS, A PLACE WHERE NOTHING IS CERTAIN

I

was walking, almost alone it seemed, with

two lion-cubs through a wilderness evocative of Africa. The feral creatures were trotting along beside me, completely free, turning round every now and then to snap, or whipping their heads back if I touched them too close to their necks.

“You’ve got to be vigilant,” whispered their young Zimbabwean manager, Ben. Three other visitors also kept their distance as we walked for an hour through the wild.

Not many minutes later, a cheetah was running his rough tongue up and down my palm, again and again, three others languidly stretched out beside him, and an electrified fence five feet away from us. “You see that?” said Ben suddenly. “I took my mind off him for a second and he bit me!”

Indeed. And yet it’s the prospect of a bite that gives a pretty face its life and character; it’s the edge in any seeming paradise that brings it out of the domain of fantasy and into a place you can touch and interact with.

I’ve seen the most gorgeous beaches of my life in the Gulf of Thailand, but both Sri Lanka and Cuba (and Mauritius sometimes seems to be the love-child of the two) deepen their beauties with the power 99

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of social complication. Bali becomes interesting to me only when you recall that it has been the site of mass slaughter and people “running amok.”

So travelling across Mauritius felt at many moments like that memorable walk with the eightmonth-old cubs, brought over from Africa, who were as engagingly photogenic and as domestic seeming as their names, Kimba and Kiara. I knew things could turn at any moment. As you drive around the small country roads of Mauritius, under billowing cottoncandy clouds and over rolling grassy hills, you see Ali Coiffeur give way to Chan Tek Keng Store (“So delicious, so Mauritius”), and then a scrappy shack offering “Samoussa” and “Gateaux.”

The Trinidad of the Indian Ocean, in fact, takes its name from a Dutch prince, has a capital city (Port Louis) that was rechristened by the British after a French monarch, and features a population that is mostly of Indian Hindu descent, though nearly every town has some Chinese as well. The billboards

along the island’s single highway offer slogans in French, with additional sentences in English.

As soon as you land in Mauritius — a friendly dodo is stamped into your passport in a town called Plaisance — you catch glimpses of the blue-green waters and palmy beaches that must have captured every newcomer who sailed in.

The sharp green hills that rise up between the empty white-sand strips and over the high sugarcane fields make you wonder if you’ve arrived in Rio, though shrunk to the size of a postage stamp.

Vivid cardinals dart down onto your table to pick at papayas, and mynahs sing from the trees. The faces are Indian, but the voices sound like Catherine Deneuve after a spell in Jamaica, and the Creole they utter is a melange of several different tongues.

So Mauritius quickly becomes much more interesting and textured than its parasailing options and massage oils. It first appeared on Europe’s map in 1507 through the Portuguese,

“A PLACE FULL OF GODS IS LIKELY TO HAVE DEMONS, TOO”

but they soon moved on from an uninhabited place that the Arabs had called the “Isle of Desolation.”

The Dutch landed in 1598, after three of their ships were blown offcourse by a cyclone, to find birds so tame you could catch them (hence the end of the poor, too-trusting dodo) and turtles so aged they could carry ten men on their backs, it was said.

The Dutch brought in slaves, Javanese deer and sugarcane, but they too were driven away — by cyclones — in the early 18th century, so the French came in, followed by pirates. When the British took over in 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars, they allowed the locals to retain their land, their language and their legal code, with the result that green British road-signs now point to Flic-a-Flac and Domaine de l’Etoile. They also brought in Indians and Chinese to replace the slaves.

Mauritius gained independence in 1968 but it has never quite decided who or what it is. The brochures proudly tell you that it’s the home of seggae music, the fusion of sega and reggae, and in the upmarket hotels you can hear sitars and tablas accompanied by rhythm guitars.

But the headlines tell you that in 1999 the island was paralysed by four days of rioting after the Creole inventor of seggae, Kaya, an outspoken champion of Creole rights, was found dead in his prison cell, perhaps the victim of Hindu policemen. A statue of Queen Victoria stands near the thriving street market in Port Louis, but on one bus-stand someone has scribbled, in black, “NO RACISM.” I had expected, when I arrived last winter, to find myself surrounded by hedge-fund managers from London and investment bankers from Hong Kong. Yet landing just after a cyclone hit the global economy, I found myself in a luxury resort made for people unaccustomed to luxury. Brawny Russians sauntered through the gardens, taking pictures of their platinum-card companions under every tree.

A pair of slightly dotty, imperial Brits swam silently through a pool with snorkels on. Hip Indian couples from London circled the Business Centre computers at dawn — and, in an entire week on the island, for the first time in my life I heard not a single American or Japanese voice.

“THIS IS A PLACE WHERE NOTHING IS UNMIXED”

You can walk with the lions in Mauritius or stroll along the ocean floor; you can kayak or waterski or pad around colonial houses such as Eureka. You can eat bat curry and visit the small museum in Port Louis that shows off the island’s most famous possession, the Mauritius “Blue Penny” stamp.

Yet at the same time you’re advised not to walk around Port Louis after dark, and at some of the most lyrical beaches, told not to swim.

Mauritius seemed to me a place where nothing, delightfully, is certain or unmixed. And if its sights are often just its faces, its most remarkable events seem to be its skies. Never have I been to a place with heavens so large that they seem to be made for triptyches.

Over and over in Turtle Bay, I’d look to the left and see a grey-black sky angry with storm clouds. To the right was the depthless blue calm of a sunlit day in midsummer. Three, four times a day the skies broke and the water came down in torrents, stopping as abruptly as it had begun. To walk down the beach was to step from April to November.

And then into April again.

Mauritians will point out to you with excitement their gleaming new high-rises saying HSBC, Accenture, Ernst and Young, and the callcentres and “Cyber City” that are beginning to loom over the “Hare Krishna Land” centre and the Birla Institute of Technology. Yet for a typical visitor from the city, its most stunning sight may be its botanical gardens, You can see cashew nut trees and Cuba royal palms and 35 kinds of mango there.

You can eat lotus-seeds, smell cashews in the raw, watch 200-yearold turtles and African carp. There are 80 kinds of palm, nutmeg plants, torch ginger and Bodhi trees.

“Mauritius is the Garden of Eden,” announced Premanand Parmessur, a spirited, irresistible character who likes to entertain visitors around the elephant-foot palms. “But the only difference is, there are no snakes. No dangerous animals at all. Nothing poisonous.” Then, inevitably, he cited Mark Twain’s report on the island: “you gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.” That sounds, out of context, like a sparkling endorsement from one of the least impressionable satirists around. But what is often left out in Mauritian accounts is that Twain was not recording his own observations there, but, rather, those of the local boosters who told him that Mauritius was the greatest place around (for those who had never been off the island).

Just as I was thinking all this, the palm trees began shuddering so violently that it sounded like rain, and then indeed the rain crashed down again, so violently that I had to wade through water up to my ankles just to get back to my room.

Cyclones sweep through Mauritius every summer, The Garden of Eden, I recalled, is the place you leave — only to be confronted, so the old books say, by the Flood.

Pico Iyer is a British writer who has written for The New York Times, National Geographic and Time among others. He has also written 11 books, his most recent, The Open Road, is out now on Vintage Departures.

A Few Miles Travelled A SELECTION OF OUR FAVOURITE TRAVEL LITERATURE

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T

ravel writing often gets a bad rap; with images of sozzled scribes lazily typing away, nervously eyeing the locals. Yet the genre has a number of classics;

each rooted very much in a place, some written by locals, some written by visitors; all enthralling. The books illustrate the bravery and creativity of these writers who travelled to deserts, mountain ranges and cities, each coming back with something new. One of bravest was Freya Stark, whose A Winter in Arabia is a must for anyone interested in the Middle East. We had no space for it here, but that shouldn’t stop you from hunting down a copy. As for the rest, read, and enjoy.

107 107

HONG KONG — Jan Morris A portrait of a city between two goliaths — caught in the dying days of the British Empire and about to

den, through both World Wars and up to the late ‘80s.

Morris is a master of observation and her take on the

be swallowed up by China, Morris captures Hong Kong brilliantly. Her prose radiates an almost kinetic

city — particularly in the early years — is fascinating.

She is fond of the place, but never sentimental, and

energy, reminiscent of the city itself, and her research her clear-eyed prose is wonderful. Morris, of course, and detail bring the place to life. She tracks the has written many books, but this is one of her finest.

Vintage Departures, 1985 origins of the city, when it was an opium smuggling

MAXIMUM CITY — Suketu Mehta If ever a book captured the soul of a city, then Mehta’s tome on Mumbai does. Maximum City is a riveting look at the chaos, noise, people and sprawl that makes up Mumbai. Mehta writes beautifully, interspersing personal accounts of his childhood with

a place as diverse as Mumbai in one book, but after reading it, one is filled with an urgent need to visit the place to see what Mehta has seen; surely the point of a book like this. Although Maximum City is rooted in one place, it’s as fluid and engaging as any travel

stories about fame, power, crime, poverty, money and book of the past decade. love. Of course, it’s impossible to fully encapsulate

Vintage, 2004

VIDEO NIGHT IN KATHMANDU — Pico Iyer A striking portrait of the juxtaposition between East and West, Iyer brought a fresh eye to Asia, travelling

Iyer’s eye for detail illuminates both the mundane and the unusual. While this book is very much a

everywhere from Nepal to Bali and describing the influence of Western culture on these (once) exotic

product of its time (these days Asia exports as much culture as it imports) its intelligence and

places. Iyer’s book — published in 1988 — is prophetic, and was one of the first treatises on globalisation’s influence on the region. The writing is wonderful, and

humour make it indispensable nearly a quarter of a century on. A writer of great wit and compassion.

Vintage Departures, 1988.

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THE ROAD TO OXIANA — Robert Byron Robert Byron’s classic is regarded as the first example of great travel writing. Covering Byron’s

on the architecture he encounters around descriptions of the more ridiculous characters he

ten-month journey to Persia and Afghanistan in the early 1930s, the book is acerbic, eccentric

meets on his journey. For all his barbs, Byron has a deep love for Persia, and especially Afghanistan, and

and intelligent. Byron pulls no punches and it is his candour and wit that set this book apart from contemporary travel journals. He weaves treatises

his beautiful, sparse writing captures both countries wonderfully. A true classic.

Vintage, 1937

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY — John Steinbeck Although known primarily for fiction (his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize), Steinbeck wrote non-fiction all his life. Travels with Charley is part travelogue, part treatise on what he saw as a disappearing America. He journeys from Maine to California with his dog Charley and records a country on the brink of the 1960s. His writing is as elegant and

punchy as ever and is rooted in a sense of place; you get a feel for the cycle of the seasons, the relationship between the men he meets and the land they live in.

While Steinbeck was at the height of his fame he was also aware he was dying, and wanted to see America one last time. Poignant and engaging.

Penguin, 1962

A (not so )

INNOCENT ABROAD MARK TWAIN’S EPIC VOYAGE

I

n 1867 Mark Twain set sail on the Quaker City for a months-long expedition to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Twain uses biting satire, both to highlight the pomposity of his travelling

companions and the absurd claims of the travelogues of the time.

Originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles for The Alta California (which paid the $2,000 cost of the trip), the book was released in 1869 and remains one of the best-selling travel books of all time.

FRANCE We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France.

What a bewitching land it is! — What a garden! Surely the leagues of bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their grasses trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped and measured and their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners. Surely the long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the beautiful landscape like the squares of a checker-board are set with line and plummet, and their uniform height determined with a spirit level.

Surely the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-paned and sand-papered every day. How else are these marvels of symmetry, cleanliness and order attained? It is wonderful. There are no unsightly stone walls, and never a fence of any kind. There is no dirt, no decay, no rubbish anywhere — nothing that even hints at untidiness — nothing that ever suggests neglect.

All is orderly and beautiful — every thing is charming to the eye.

We have seen every thing and tomorrow we go to Versailles. We shall see Paris only for a little while as we come back to take up our line of march for the ship, and so I may as well bid the beautiful

city a regretful farewell. We shall travel many thousands of miles after we leave here, and visit many great cities, but we shall see none so enchanting as this.

I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sincerely proud to be able to make — and glad, as well, that my comrades cordially endorse it, to wit; by far the handsomest women we have seen in France were born and reared in America. I feel, now, like a man who has redeemed a failing reputation and shed lustre upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single just deed done at the eleventh hour. Let the curtain fall, to slow music.

All is orderly and beautiful —

EVERY THING IS charming to the eye

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MILAN We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house. They were going to put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we objected. Each of us had an Italian farm on his back. We could have felt affluent if we had been officially surveyed and fenced in. We chose to have three bath-tubs, and large ones — tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real estate, and brought it with them. After we were stripped and had taken the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity that has embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of Italy and France — there was no soap. I called. A woman answered, and I barely had time to throw myself against the door — she would have been in, in another second.

I said: “Beware woman! Go away from here — go away, now, or it will be the worse for you. I am an unprotected male, but I will preserve my honor at the peril of my life!”

These words must have frightened her for she scurried away very fast.

Dan’s voice rose on the air “Oh bring some soap, why don’t you!”

The reply was Italian. Dan resumed: “Soap, you know — soap. That is what I want — soap. S-o-a-p, soap; s-op-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap. Hurry up! I don’t know how you Irish spell it, but I want it. Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it. I’m freezing.”

I heard the doctor say, impressively: “Dan, how often have we told

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The English know how to travel comfortably, and they carry

SOAP WITH THEM you that these foreigners can not understand English? Why will you not depend on us? Why will you not tell us what you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country?

It would save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance causes us. I will address this person in his mother tongue: ‘Here, cospetto! Corpo di Bacco!

Sacramento! Solferino! — Soap, you son of a gun!’ Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose your ignorant vulgarity.”

Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at

once, but there was good reason for it.

There was not such an article about the establishment. It is my belief that there never had been. They had to send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got it, so they said. We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same things occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have divined the reason for this state of things at last. The English know how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other foreigners do not use the article.

VENICE What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is! Narrow streets, vast

seen, in these old churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate

solemn past, and looking upon the scenes and mingling with the

gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,

sepulchre ornamentation such as we never dreamt of before. We

peoples of a remote antiquity. We have been in a half-waking sort of

and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the restaurant, you must call

have stood in the dim religious light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed drifting back, back, back, into the

dream all the time. I do not know how else to describe the feeling. A part of our being has remained still in the nineteenth century while another part of it has seemed in

a gondola. It must be a paradise for cripples, for verily a man has no use for legs here.

For a day or two the place looked like an overflowed Arkansas town, because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming in and out of the alleys and byways, that I could not get rid of the impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet, and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water mark on the houses and the streets full of mud and rubbish.

Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice. We have

some unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.

NARROW STREETS,

vast gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries

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CONSTANTINOPLE When I think about how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast.

For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath; for years and years I have promised myself that I would yet enjoy one. Many and many a time, in fancy, I have lain in the marble bath, and breathed the slumberous fragrance of Eastern spices that filled the air; then passed through a weird and complicated system of pulling and hauling, and drenching and scrubbing, by a gang... who loomed vast and vaguely through the steaming mists, like demons; then rested for a while on a divan fit for a King; then passed through another complex ordeal, and each one more fearful than the first; and, finally, swathed in soft fabrics, been conveyed to a princely saloon and laid on a bed of eider down, where eunuchs, gorgeous of costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed, or contentedly gazed at the rich hangings of the apartment, the soft carpets, the sumptuous furniture, the pictures, and drank delicious coffee, smoked the soothing narghili, and dropped, at the last, into tranquil repose, lulled by sensuous odors from unseen censers, by the gentle influence of the narghili’s

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Persian tobacco, and by the music of fountains that counterfeited the pattering of summer rain.

That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books of travel. It was a poor, miserable imposture. The reality is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden. They received me in a great court, paved with marble slabs; around it were broad galleries, one above another, carpeted with seedy matting, railed with unpainted balustrades, and furnished with huge rickety chairs, cushioned with rusty old mattresses, indented with

impressions left by the forms of nine successive generations of men who had reposed upon them. The place was vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human horses. The cadaverous, half-nude varlets that served in the establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of romance, nothing of Oriental splendour. They shed no entrancing odours — just the contrary. Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually suggested one glaring, unsentimental fact — they wanted what they term in California “a square meal.”

For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the

TURKISH BATH

BEIRUT

EGYPT

The rest of us had nothing to do but look at the beautiful city of Beirut, with its bright, new houses nestled among a wilderness of green shrubbery spread abroad over an upland that sloped gently down to the sea; and also at the mountains of Lebanon that environ it; and likewise to bathe in the transparent blue water that rolled its billows about the ship (we did not know there were sharks there.)

We also had to range up and down the town and look at the costumes.

These are picturesque and fanciful, but no so varied as Constantinople and Smyrna. A young gentleman (I believe he was a Greek) volunteered to show us around the city, and said it would afford him great pleasure, because he was studying English and wanted practice in that language. When we had finished the rounds, however, he called for renumeraton — said he hoped the gentlemen would give him a few piastres (equivalent to a few five cent pieces). We did so.

The Consul was surprised when he heard it, and said he knew the young fellow’s family very well, and that they were an old and highly respectable family and worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Some people, so situated, would have been ashamed of the berth he had with us and his manner of crawling into it.

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The Sphynx: a hundred and twentyfive feet long, sixty feet high, and a hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember rightly — carved out of one solid block of stone harder than any iron. The block must have been as large as the Fifth Avenue Hotel before the usual waste (by the necessities of sculpture) of a fourth or a half of the original mass was begun. I only set down these figures and these remarks to suggest the prodigious labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so faultlessly, must have cost. This species of stone is so hard that figures cut in it remain sharp and unmarred after exposure to the weather for two or three thousand years. Now did it take a hundred

years of patient toil to carve the Sphynx? It seems probable.

We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother of civilization — which taught Greece her letters, and through Greece Rome, and through Rome the world. We were glad to have seen that land which had an enlightened religion with future eternal rewards and punishment in it, while even Israel’s religion contained no promise of a hereafter.

We were glad to have seen that land which had glass three thousand years before England had it, and could paint upon it as none of us could paint now; that land which knew, three thousand years ago, well nigh all of science and surgery which

We were glad to have seen that land which had glass

THREE THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE England had it

EPILOGUE

science has discovered lately; which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries and necessities of an advanced civilization which we have gradually contrived and accumulated in modern times and claimed as things that were new under the sun; that paper untold centuries before we dreamt of it — and waterfalls before our women thought of them; that had a perfect system of common schools so long before we boasted of our achievements in that direction that it seems forever and forever ago; that so embalmed the dead that flesh was made almost immortal — which we can not do; that built temples which mock at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded little prodigies of architecture; that old land that knew all which we know now, perchance and more; that walked in the broad highway of civilization in the gray dawn of creation, ages and ages before we were born; that left the impress of exalted Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx to confound all, who,

Wherever we went in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation,

a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris

and, I suppose I may add, created a famine. None of us had ever been any

they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them

where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance to the natural instincts that were in us, and trammelled

in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, because we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them. And yet we took kindly to the manners and

ourselves with no ceremonies, no conventionalities. We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans — Americans! When we found that a good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere, that had lately been at war with somebody, we pitied the ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance.

Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud of it.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant.

They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the

might seek to persuade the world

wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we

that imperial Egypt, in the days of her high renown, had groped in darkness.

looked out for expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of

customs, and to the fashions of the various peoples we visited.

The grand pilgrimage is over.

Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory to it, I am able to say in kindness. I bear no malice toward any individual that was connected with it, either as passenger or officer. Things I did not like yesterday I like very well today, now that I am at home, and always I shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves me, without ever saying a malicious word. The expedition accomplished all that its programme promised and we ought to be satisfied with the management of the matter, certainly. Bye-bye!

The Innocents Abroad is published by Penguin

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INTERRUPTED

Vietnam’s capital is 1,000 years old and as enchanting as ever. Greg Girard captures Hanoi’s hidden charms

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A family altar in the backyard of a home in the old city (left). This was only discovered after knocking on the door of someone’s house and asking to get up to their second floor balcony to photograph a street scene. The elderly gentleman who let me into his home asked if we’d like to see more of the house and, showing us his backyard, revealed this altar. A barber’s chair in an open-fronted shop (below). Scenes like this are not uncommon, although they are becoming rarer.

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This dense low-rise neighbourhood is near Hanoi’s main railway station, and throughout the day locomotives pull freight cars and passenger carriages past kitchens, bedrooms and small shops that line the tracks. As Hanoi modernises, one has to wonder how long these homes and shops, built alongside an active railway line in the centre of the city, will last.

129

Getting onto balconies in private homes is always a challenge, and in this case it took a couple of tries before the occupants relented and let me photograph the view from their balcony. Part of the home had been converted into a workshop, and so as I photographed this scene, a room full of young women was sewing plastic awnings in the room behind me.

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ALL IMAGES: GREG GIRARD//WWW.GREGGIRARD.COM

A view of raised train tracks curving through the centre of the city. The building where we took this photo is owned by a family with a bakery business on the ground floor, and it took several visits before the bakery staff called a family member. Happily they agreed to allow us access to their rooftop, revealing a view of the raised tracks curving through the city.

Hanoi Calling is out now on Thames & Hudson

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IMAGE: BALDOVINO BARANI; WWW.BALDOVINOBARANI.COM; STYLING BY HOLLY SUAN GRAY; WWW.HOLLYSUANGRAY.COM

STYLE • MAPPED

LADDER ST, HONG KONG, July 21st, 2009 2:30pm

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BRIEFING N ERV E CEN T RE

IES: E OF THE SK THE SCIENC S TES KEEPS IT HOW EMIRA RNE FLEET AIRBO

P140

CA R D ART

P RTISTS SCOO REGIONAL A S IN SKYWARD TOP PRIZES ISTS FUTURE ART N COMPETITIO

P138

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EMIRATES NEWS

ARTISTIC REWARDS THE FIRST THREE WINNERS OF THE ANNUAL

from the sky to the earth, the rain of love and

Skywards Future Artists competition have

peace for people all around the world.”

the great pleasure of seeing their creations

Fellow-Iranian sculptor Amir Vafaei

on the highly valued personal membership

won the Silver brief to create a piece that

cards carried by Skywards members around

encapsulated sophistication and intelligence.

the world.

The Tehran-based artist’s work was inspired

Launched in 2010, when Emirates

by Turkman carpet motifs. He said the

re-branded Skywards — the global frequent

competition was a great opportunity to

flyer programme — Skywards Future Artists

showcase his work internationally. “I am

offers an unparalleled platform for emerging

pleased that my work has gained the viewer’s

artists to showcase their art on a global scale.

attention and it’s an honour to demonstrate

The competition not only offers support and recognition to budding artists, it also

my work through this exhibition.”

The Gold category was won by the

invites Skywards members to actively

Baghdad-born artist, Nedim Kufi.

participate themselves. Members can submit

Specialising in multimedia art, he created

their own works of art or nominate friends

a computer-generated image of scattered,

and family to take part. Members continue

shining bones, to capture the qualities of the

being involved in the entire process, with the

card: luxury, elite and precious.

ability to vote on the winning selection.

The prizes for the Blue, Silver and Gold

Kufi, who has exhibited in both the Tate Modern and Bonhams in London said the

membership cards that represent each

award brought him “one step closer to my

tier of Skywards membership allow the

dream of creating Rummana in a public

winners to gain a worldwide audience for

space. Thank you to all the Skywards

their work. They also receive the opportunity

members who voted for me.”

to display their work at one of the leading

The winners follow in the footsteps of

contemporary art fairs in the region, Art

artists such as Damien Hirst, Simone

Dubai, as well as $5,000 in prize money.

Cenedese and Christopher Ries, whose

This year’s winners were vetted by six art

works adorned the first series of cards. If

experts from around the world who chose

you would like to partcipate in the next

50 entries from the thousands that were

Skywards Future Artists competition,

submitted. These were then broken down

please visit: www.ourfutureartists.com.

into a short-list which was voted on by thousands of Skywards members worldwide.

Iranian sculptor Kambiz Sabri created a futuristic design for the Blue card, a fascinating piece that featured enlarged rain drops encased in a transparent cube. Sabri explained his vision: “Rain is a blue message

138

“ THE PRIZE GIVES ARTISTS A GLOBAL PLATFORM FOR THEIR WORK”

EMIRATES NEWS

8,000

S ER OF BAG THE NUMB D�IN BE CHECKE N A C T A H T IONAL INTERNAT I A B U D T A � TERMINAL AIRPORT’S

EVERY HOUR

NERVE CENTRE CHECK LOOKING TO MOST FIRST-TIME VISITORS LIKE

glitch in Cape Town or a passenger problem

President Network Control, explains how

a high-tech set from a film, the Emirates

in Paris, the NCC is there 24 hours a day.

his team stay focused.

Network Control Centre (NCC) is a real-life

Opposite the screens and running the

example of state- of-the-art technology

length of the room are vast windows

of the equipment is to help us be precisely

in action. Serving as a nerve centre for

offering an impressive panoramic view

that,” he explains. The central screen shows

the entire Emirates Airline operation,

of the airport. With 1,162 flights per week

a patchwork of aeroplane icons moving

the importance of the NCC cannot be

from Dubai International Airport alone,

across a map of the world as their course

exaggerated. Everything that happens across

the logistics of such an operation is mind

is updated every few minutes. “Globally,

111 destinations in 66 countries is observed

boggling. Sweeping his arm across the

this is how we stand at the moment, with

and recorded. Whether it’s a technical

wall of screens, Gareth Williams, Vice

around 80 planes up in the air”, Williams

140

“Being situationally aware is key and a lot

EMIRATES NEWS

continues. “We are a working example of

medical diversion, and what we are good at

an operations management environment

here is getting a group of experts together

and logistically this could be applied to any

very quickly to discuss the problem at

network and it’s all happening live.”

hand, evaluate the options and roll out the

Now in its fourth incarnation, the centre has a back up facility in place for

recovery plan.”

Connectivity is the crucial tenet of the

contingencies such as an evacuation.

business, and the NCC team helps to ensure

Overseeing the operations of the 151

that Emirates keeps flying day and night,

aircraft in service, the team at work in the

365 days a year. .

NCC is trained to expect the unexpected.

From weather disruptions to volcano eruptions, planning is vital and devising strategic, time efficient solutions and resolution is paramount to maintaining Emirates’ schedule integrity at all times.

“There may be [a warning] or it may just

“BEING AWARE SITUATIONALLY IS KEY FOR WHAT WE DO HERE ”

happen. It could be a weather issue or a

AD

141

EMIRATES NEWS

THE GREEN MILE IN A WORLD OF EVER-INCREASING ABUNDANCE

attractive design as well as their 100 per

when it comes to the sheer volume

cent recyclable benefits has seen them

of products on the global market, it is

establish a permanent exhibition in the

increasingly incumbent on the consumer

Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

With polystyrene and plastic disposable

to buy responsibly. For those who are mindful of reducing their carbon footprint,

coffee cups being another ubiquitous

there is a growing choice available.

environmental blight, brother and sister

The market for eco-friendly products is

team Abigail and Jamie Forsyth decided

growing and a number of innovative and

to take responsibility and create an eco-

environmentally conscious companies are

friendly alternative for the customers of

catering for consumers who want to know

their local sandwich shop.

where their money is going and how their

Their KeepCup reusable cup was born when Abigail found herself appalled at the

purchases are made.

idea of giving her young daughter milk

One such business is enviro-cap, an Australian company utilising a method

in a disposable cup. After two years of

of combining shredded post-consumer

development the KeepCup now boasts a

plastic bottles with natural cotton to make

global demographic of customers prepared

baseball caps. Another company

AIR�

AIRCRAFT ENTERING DAY FLEETS TO E

combating the proliferation of plastic bottles is the more established Swiss company SIGG. For more than 100 years SIGG has specialised in reusable aluminium water bottles. Their

to make thoughtful changes to

OR ARE 70% MIE NT IC F F -E L FUE RE E W Y E THAN TH S AGO R A E Y 0 4

their daily habits in aid of the environment.

WWW.KEEPCUP.COM

THE GLOBAL AVERAGE FOR AIRCRAFT OCCUPANCY IS AROUND ��%, COMPARED TO ��% FOR CARS AND �����% FOR TRAINS

76% 438 WWW.ENVIRO.AERO

THE AMOUNT � IN THOUSANDS OF TONNES � OF FUEL SAVED ANNUALLY PER MINUTE OF SINGLE�ENGINE TAXIING

WWW.ENVIRO.AERO

WWW.ENVIRO-CAP.COM WWW.SIGG.COM

EMIR ATES ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES & VOLUNTARY CARBON OFF-SETTING

ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WWW.EMIRATES.COM/AE/ENGLISH/ABOUT/EMVIRONMENT/EMVIRONMENT.ASPX LOW EMISSION FLEET WWW.EMIRATES.COM/AE/ENGLISH/ABOUT/EMVIRONMENT/EMIRATES_A���.ASPX RECYCLING ��� TONNES OF WASTE IS RECYCLED EACH MONTH FROM OUR AIRCRAFT IN DUBAI WASTE MANAGEMENT

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THESE PRINCIPLES AT WWW.HEROESOFTHEUAE.AE

VOLUNTARY C OFF-SETTING

WE BELIEVE THAT WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR REDUCING OUR EMISSIONS, NOT OUR CUSTOMERS

CARBONZERO FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.CARBONZERO.CO.NZ/INDEX.ASP 142

CABIN L BE CREW WIL P IF HEL HAPPY TO D YOU NEE

EMIRATES NEWS

E C N A T S I S S A G THE COMPLETIN FORMS

TO US CUSTOMS & IMMIGRATION FORMS WHETHER YOU’RE TRAVELLING TO, OR THROUGH, the United States today,

free as possible. The Cabin Crew will offer you two forms when you

this simple guide to completing the US customs and immigration

are nearing your destination. We provide some simple guidelines

forms will help to ensure that your journey is as smooth and hassle

below, so you can correctly complete the forms.

CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM

IMMIGRATION FORM

All passengers arriving into the US need to complete a CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM. If you are travelling as a family this should be completed by one member only. The form must be completed in English, in capital letters, and must be signed where indicated.

The IMMIGRATION FORM I-94 (Arrival/Departure Record) should be completed if you are a nonUS citizen in possession of a valid US visa and your final destination is the US or if you are in transit to a country outside the US. A separate form must be completed for each person, including children travelling on their parents’ passport. The form includes a Departure Record which must be kept safe and given to your airline when you leave the US. If you hold a US or Canadian passport, US Alien Resident Visa (Green Card), US Immigrant Visa or a valid ESTA (right), you are not required to complete an immigration form.

144

EMIRATES NEWS

ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR

THIS MAY BE REVOKED OR

TRAVEL AUTHORISATION (ESTA)

WILL EXPIRE ALONG WITH

IF YOU ARE AN INTERNATIONAL

YOUR PASSPORT.

TRAVELLER WISHING TO ENTER

APPLY ONLINE AT WWW.CBP.GOV/ESTA

THE UNITED STATES UNDER THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME, YOU

NATIONALITIES ELIGIBLE FOR

MUST APPLY FOR ELECTRONIC

THE VISA WAIVER*:

AUTHORISATION �ESTA� UP

ANDORRA, AUSTRALIA,

TO �� HOURS PRIOR TO YOUR

AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRUNEI,

DEPARTURE.

CZECH REPUBLIC, DENMARK, ESTONIA, FINLAND, FRANCE,

ESTA FACTS:

GERMANY, HUNGARY, ICELAND,

CHILDREN AND

IRELAND, ITALY, JAPAN, LATVIA,

INFANTS REQUIRE AN

LIECHTENSTEIN, LITHUANIA,

INDIVIDUAL ESTA.

LUXEMBURG, MALTA, MONACO,

THE ONLINE ESTA SYSTEM

THE NETHERLANDS, NEW

WILL INFORM YOU WHETHER

ZEALAND, NORWAY, PORTUGAL,

YOUR APPLICATION

SAN MARINO, SINGAPORE,

HAS BEEN AUTHORISED,

SLOVAKIA, SLOVENIA, SOUTH

NOT AUTHORISED OR IF

KOREA, SPAIN, SWEDEN,

AUTHORISATION

SWITZERLAND AND THE

IS PENDING.

UNITED KINGDOM**.

A SUCCESSFUL ESTA

* SUBJECT TO CHANGE

APPLICATION IS VALID

** ONLY BRITISH CITIZENS QUALIFY UNDER

FOR TWO YEARS, HOWEVER

THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME.

THE SIZE, IN FOOTBALL PITCHES, OF EMIRATES’ SEVEN AIR�CONDITIONED ENGINEERING HANGERS:

17 192

AD THE NUMBER OF AIRCRAFT CURRENTLY ON ORDER BY EMIRATES�

202

THE AMOUNT OF BEEF TENDERLOIN IN TONNES USED ANNUALLY

BY EMIRATES:

145

ROUTE MAP

146

147

ROUTE MAP

148

EMIRATES NEWS

irhal.pdf

2/17/11

5:35:03 PM

What are holidays without queues?

Lisbon: One of 85 cities featured on www.irhal.com

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www.irhal.com for the outbound traveler from the Middle East 149

THE FLEET

OUR FLEET S ��� CONTAIN ADE UP PLANES, M SENGER OF ��� PAS ND � PLANES A ANES. CARGO PL

For more information: www.emirates.com/english/f lying/our_f leet/our_f leet.aspx

FLEET GUIDE

Airbus A330-200 Number of Aircraft: 27 Capacity: 237-278 Range: 12,200km Length: 58.8m Wingspan: 60.3m

Airbus A340-300 Number of Aircraft: 8 Capacity: 267 Range: 13,350km Length: 63.6m Wingspan: 60.3m

Airbus A340-500 Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 258 Range: 16,050km Length: 67.9m Wingspan: 63.4m

Airbus A380-800 Number of Aircraft: 15 Capacity: 489-517 Range: 15,000km Length: 72.7m Wingspan: 79.8m 152

Boeing 777-200 Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 274-346 Range: 9,649km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777-200LR Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 266 Range: 17,446km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-300 Number of Aircraft: 12 Capacity: 364 Range: 11,029km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777-300ER Number of Aircraft: 53 Capacity: 354-442 Range: 14,594km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 64.8m 153

EMIRATES NEWS

BEFORE YOUR JOURNEY CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR BEFORE TRAVELLING IF YOU HAVE ANY MEDICAL CONCERNS ABOUT MAKING A LONG JOURNEY, OR IF YOU SUFFER FROM A RESPIRATORY OR

IN THE AIR

CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITION. PLAN FOR THE DESTINATION � WILL

TO HELP YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR DESTINATION

for your holiday or be effective at achieving

YOU NEED ANY VACCINATIONS OR

feeling relaxed and refreshed, Emirates has

your goals on a business trip, these simple tips

SPECIAL MEDICATIONS?

developed this collection of helpful travel tips.

will help you to enjoy your journey and time

GET A GOOD NIGHTS REST BEFORE

Regardless of whether you need to rejuvenate

on board with Emirates today.

THE FLIGHT. EAT LIGHTLY AND SENSIBLY.

SMART TRAVELLER

AT THE AIRPORT ALLOW YOURSELF PLENTY OF TIME FOR CHECK�IN.

DRINK PLENTY OF WATER

TRAVEL LIGHTLY

AVOID CARRYING HEAVY BAGS THROUGH THE AIRPORT AND ONTO THE FLIGHT AS THIS CAN PLACE THE BODY UNDER CONSIDERABLE STRESS.

REHYDRATE WITH WATER OR JUICES FREQUENTLY.

CARRY ONLY THE ESSENTIAL ITEMS THAT YOU WILL

ONCE THROUGH TO DEPARTURES TRY

DRINK TEA AND COFFEE IN MODERATION.

NEED DURING YOUR FLIGHT.

AND RELAX AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

DURING THE FLIGHT

MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE

SUCKING AND SWALLOWING WILL HELP

KEEP MOVING

EQUALISE YOUR EAR PRESSURE DURING ASCENT AND DESCENT. BABIES AND YOUNG PASSENGERS

LOOSEN CLOTHING, REMOVE JACKET AND AVOID

EXERCISE YOUR LOWER LEGS AND CALF MUSCLES.

MAY SUFFER MORE ACUTELY WITH

ANYTHING PRESSING AGAINST YOUR BODY.

THIS ENCOURAGES BLOOD FLOW.

POPPING EARS, THEREFORE CONSIDER PROVIDING A DUMMY. GET AS COMFORTABLE AS POSSIBLE WHEN RESTING AND TURN FREQUENTLY.

WEAR GLASSES

USE SKIN MOISTURISER

AVOID SLEEPING FOR LONG PERIODS IN THE SAME POSITION.

WHEN YOU ARRIVE CABIN AIR IS DRIER THAN NORMAL THEREFORE

APPLY A GOOD QUALITY MOISTURISER TO ENSURE

TRY SOME LIGHT EXERCISE OR READ IF

SWAP YOUR CONTACT LENSES FOR GLASSES.

YOUR SKIN DOESN’T DRY OUT.

YOU CAN’T SLEEP AFTER ARRIVAL.

154

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