'Staying Alive By Not Staying Still'
I’m back in Balat, my favorite neighborhood in Istanbul, biding time and getting some work done in advance of the Rolf Potts Travel Writing Workshop I’m attending July 30-Aug. 4 in Paris.
The Flixbus trip from Sofia, Bulgaria, to here was eventful.
I’m having the greek salad, about as authentic as it gets where I am in the beautiful, rural foothills of the White Mountains on the island of Crete, Greece.
I watch the regulars start filing into the tavern in the early afternoon, spicing the air with their husky voices, breaking the stillness of morning with lively, spirited talk of whatever old Greeks talk about with time on their hands.
“Without music, life would be a mistake,” said German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
I surely agree. A life-long love of music has played an important part in my post-retirement travel life, providing many new, wonderful opportunities to hear and see live musical performances throughout the world that I would never have had without it.
Many of my most memorable travel experiences have involved music.
From the mad rock sounds of the French band The Inspector Cluzo in Peru; Gregorian chant in an 11th century cathedral in Berlin; impromptu jams by indigenous musicians in Iquitos on the Amazon River; the Amazon Symphony Orchestra itself playing Hayden and Strauss in Manaus, Brazil; to most recently discovering the incredible polyphonic voices at Tbilisi, Georgia’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, and many more, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a grand variety of world music along my journey.
This week I was looking online for more live music in Tbilisi and discovered to my delight that the internationally renowned Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra was performing this week at the Kakhidze theater, just a six-minute walk from where I live!
My first week in Georgia was spent in an outlying neighborhood of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital city.
Knowing little about my latest destination, I booked a hotel room in a section of the city called Isani.
My plan was to stay wherever this hotel was, while learning a little more about Tbilisi, this city of a little more than a million people, then rent an apartment I could actually inspect first to reside in for the next three months.
On Sunday I went to the impressive Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi, 11 a.m. mass, hoping to see and hear the renowned polyphonic cathedral choir.
It’s been too long since I last posted. I was in Turkey at the time, which was two countries ago on my continuing journey.
For the past 11 days I’ve been in Georgia — the country, not the state — and before that I spent a week in Barcelona, Spain, where I visited a friend who I first met in 2017 in Medellin, Colombia.
I reviewed a new travel book this week on amazon.con, “Go Now: Adventures and Advice Mostly About Travel, But Not Entirely” by Nick Zoa. Nick’s a friend of mine (one …
Readers of my travel blogs over the years know that I often say meeting people and making friends is what travel is really all about.
On Friday for the first time that belief was put to the test.
“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
– Miriam Beard, American author, traveler, born in England (1901-1983)
An important part of the book I want to write about travel involves change. Here’s the beginning of an examination of the phenomenon that’s affected travelers since the first time someone wondered what lies beyond the distant horizon, and went off to find out.
The weather is dreary this Monday in Istanbul. Gray skies since early morning persist, and post-lunch raindrops have begun speckling the windows of my apartment by the park on the Golden Horn. The air is damp and cool for such a late-spring day.
This is in contrast to Sunday’s brilliance, just yesterday when the sun reigned in the glory of a regal blue sky, shedding warmth across the city.
Yesterday was perfect for a walk from my apartment in humble, colorful Balat in Fatih, across the Golden Horn waterway on the Galata Bridge, to historic Galata Tower in the bustling tourist area of Beyoglu. It’s an easy, interesting walk of about two miles.