i wouldnt say that Tran Anh Hung's film rendition of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood was a great film, but it certainly is a beautiful one.

And i cna imagine the Murakami's books would not be the best suited for film anyway. I have long been a fan of his books, even though i find they need to be read seperated by some months to prevent them all from gelling into one in my brain. i discovered him when i was still living in russia, where for some reason he is epically popular. my flatmate, not normally much of a reader, was so engrossed in the Wild sheep chase that he couldnt leave his room for a whole weekend. as a result, i ended up reading most of his works in Russian. given the apparent russian love of murakami, i suppose it is not surprising i ended up watching the film in russian as well. perhaps it is available on DVD in the UK, but i havent seen it (not that i have gone out of my way looking, mind) but on my last trip to moscow, the film was all over the place, for sale in supermarkets, the metro and in my favourite bookshop. the dvd i got was certainly worth the 500 rubles i paid. the plot line is somewhat limited, and the book was more psychologically sophisticated, but the film is so visually stunning that none of that mattered. the story is set in Tokyo in the late 1960s, amidst the student unrest of the era. whilst protests are taking place all around, Watanabe is struggling to manage adult life and finds himself torn between to drastically different women. in the meantime, they all have amazing clothes, amazing hair and live in amazing flats and listen to the Beatles. the film is done in a way to highlight the beauty and draw it out in front of the viewer- stunning all around.

Middle England, Part Two

most of my travels around Britain have been to fairly industrial areas- Sollihull, Slough and Newport come to mind. my father complains that i have developped a skewed view of england as consisting of foreigners (in London) and masses of working class estates (outside). so i was quite intrigued to be invited to have a glimpse at a posher side of the country, being invited randomly to a wedding in Beccles, East Anglia. As i went as the date of my great friend H, and we are both determinded travellers, we decided to make a weekend spectacle of the whole thing, and use it as an excuse to travel around East Anglia. so we jumped on a train in London Liverpool street and headed off into the great English unknown. it didnt take long out of London for the scenery to start to change. by the time we got to Chelmsford, i already felt i was in a foriegn country. We were exceptionally lucky, the weather was gorgeous. it was a bit on the cool side, but unusually for England, there was bright sunshine. the wedding itself was a very English affair. H and i didnt know what that entailed, but my flatmate was able to walk us through the routine beforehand, and these things obviously follow a script, because everything he said, no matter how improbable it seemed at the time, proved to be spot on. Once I was actually there, even i was able to recognise a few things that are clearly part of early 21st century wedding traditions. For example, someone from my office got married a few months ago and asked some of her friends to do readings at the wedding. One of the readings was a Lovely Love Story by Edward Monkton, which her friend adapted for her, and which got read out to us in the office after the wedding.....and sure enough, when H and i got to the wedding in East Anglia, the ceremony featured selected readings by friends, including the very same Lovely Love Story, adapted slightly differently to fit this couple. clearly it is the hot poem for wedding planners to recommend! In the hotel in Beccles, our room was filled with wedding brochures, as that is apparently an industry there, and one of them featured a cake made of discs of posh cheese on the cover. the article inside informed me that old fashioned wedding cake is now passe, and that you should serve a dessert first, then cut a cheese wedding cake which later gets turned into a cheese spread for the guests.....i had never heard of this, but obviously i dont go to enough weddings, cause the exact same looking wedding-cake-of-cheese-discs appeared at this wedding, indeed after the dessert. i was quite happy with this arrangment i must say, as the dessert had been average, but the cheese selection proved to be most delicious.

in addition to the wedding, H and I also made a tour of the region, as we had plenty of spare time the day before and after the wedding. Before the festivities started, we had a lunch in Beccles in an all pink tea room. we hadnt exactly intended to end up there, but the 2 pubs we found were full and the one restaurant we passed was booked for another wedding. we were the youngest in the tea room by probably half a century and i felt vaguely like i had suddenly been given a provincial English grandmother and plunked into her dining room. the food was like something from a French person's imagination of English food...the only vegetarian option was baked beans on a jacket potato, whilst H's involved mushy peas and chips. Sverall of the guests were elderly women sitting on their own, mainly consuming tea and biscuits. they all ate very slowly whilst seemingly staring out the windows. H and I were often the only ones speaking which made me feel vaguely self conscious. in moments it reminded me of visiting my own grandmother, if you ignored the very English food, much of the rest of the scene was elderly home universal. Beccles itself was a lovely little town with views of green fields and all the postcard style images, but the average age must surely have been at least 55. the few young people we saw seemed to be wedding tourists, walking around as i was with a camera. we spent the night in Oulton Broad, which proved to be overlooking an inlet waterway which we explored in the morning, after a breakfast which consisted of even more baked beans than the previous days lunch. that afternoon, we made our way to Lowestoft, where signs informed us we were in Britain's most westerly town. Lowestoft was more of a town than Beccles, and in some ways it is sort of a mini- Brighton, minus the notoriously raunchy gay party scene. like Beccles, the average age was high, and we ended up chatting on a bench with a lonely widower, his wife had died in December of last year and he was still trying to sell the house. He had noticed H and I, clearly not from the area with our wierd accents and tendency to walk around speaking Serbian, and had approached us, looking for company. from the lookout pier, the widower had a beautiful view of the sea, looking out towards Scandanavia. We joined him on a bench and followed his gaze. The wind blew gently over our faces. it was a beautifully peaceful place.

But after 2 days i was desperate to get back to East London!

Middle England, Part One

After a year of travel all over Europe, to some of the world's most exciting capitals, my last trip with my current company sent me to....Basingstoke, middle England.

Basingstoke doesnt have too many claims to fame, Elizabeth Hurley was born there, but that is about all i can think of. although i had actually never heard of the place before starting my current job, in the past year i have made more trips than i would like to recall to this odd location, and each time i have felt completely like tourist. many of my english colleagues dont believe me when i say that, but then many of them are from small english towns that might well be very similar, so i guess it doesnt hit them as incredibly different as it does me. london is an international city, where you can find anything you want, and thus we are quite isolated in london from english reality. a reality which is utterly terrifying.

you walk out of the train station and you will see massive newish yellow housing complexes on your left. but i always have to walk straight and down the brick steps in front of the station. they take you into a nasty fleabag shopping centre that is currently under reconstruction, but which leads (eventually) into a newer and slightly more posh shopping complex. i am not one for shopping complexes in general, but this one is worse than most. yet the town is designed in such a way that it is nearly impossible to get from the train station to where i am going without going through the mall. but the mall is massive and i manage to get lost everytime, even though everytime the analyst i travel with and i try to record exactly where we need to turn and so on. after i eventually manage to find the correct exit, i have to wander through the supposed "old town." basingstoke often gets mistaken for one of the post war "new towns" along the lines of Milton Keynes, but it isnt. it has actually been their for several centuries, it just manages to feel as soulless as an artificial post war invention.

i frequently have to kill time in basingstoke, waiting for meetings or for trains back to London after meetings have concluded. there are a few pubs that colleagues and i have tried. there is the one that has handcuffs behind the bar and neon drug prevention lights in the toilets, where your feet inevitably stick to the floor. there is the one with the beer garden filled with people in track suits. they stare at us as we walk in, three outsiders dressed in suits. there is a tattoo parlour and a dominoes pizza. and i know this is not as extraordinary as i think most of small town britain looks exactly like this...which is precisely why i rarely venture beyond zone 2....

Paris

Walking around on a random Thursday afternoon, i look around and find it hard to believe i ever used to live here. i spent 16 months living and working in Paris, in fact it was living there that i started this blog. it wasnt a very happy year, and i always knew i was in sort of a holding pattern, waiting for the next academic year to begin so i could start my PhD in England. in attempts to save up for my studies, i had very little money and lived out in a dodgy banlieu. Accordingly, i rarely ventured out after dark. i hated my neighbourhood, and i hated my job even more. i found the work environment stiffling and overly rigid. in the begining, in an effort to make a good impression, i set out to work harder than my colleagues, putting in full effort and asking for overtime. After some weeks, the boss took me aside and said i was setting a bad example for the other employees and upsetting people. if i was working longer hours, i could risk showing them up in front of higher management, and that would be bad for team morale. i was specifically ordered to stick to my 35 hour perscribed work week and 2 hour lunches. i had a similar conversation with the same boss when i arranged to stay at a friends and walk into work during one of the city's chronic transport strikes. again, i was told that my going out of my way to get to work was "setting a bad example," the correct behaviour was to call in the morning of the strike and simply explain that you couldnt get in. at some point, i gave up and stopped trying. like my colleagues, i came to regard my job as a minor annoyance interupting my life and proceeded to indulge in 2 hour lunches and afternoon walks in the park. but leisure time is harder to enjoy when you are poor and broke. Paris has great museums, but i could rarely afford to visit them, and the restaurants were virtually off limits to me. i wandered all over the 20 arrondisement on my long breaks, and in the evenings as i avoided having to take the RER back to the ghetto i lived in. i know pretty much all the streets of Central Paris perfectly, probably better than i will ever know London. i also spent a lot of the year reading. i bought used paper backs at Gilbert Jeune and then swapped them with friends or trader them back in when i was done with them and wanted something new to read. whilst i enjoyed reading lengthy sagas, i would have prefered to work harder, earn more money, and live better. France was clearly not for me.

that said, even though i doubt i would ever want to work in France again, i still enjoy going back for the odd visit, especially if i dont have to actually do much work with French companies. if the weather is good, i like going for a nice wander. Paris, unlike London, is centralised, so you have everything of remote interest in the 20 arrondissement, and then absolute nothingness out in the banlieu, where there is no point in going unless you are unfortunate enough to live there. but i always end up wandering down the mouffetard. some family friends live in that area, and finding myself with a free evening in the city, i agree to meet them for dinner at our usual haunt- Cafe Delmas on Place de la Contrescarpe. but i arrive in the area early and go for a wander while waiting for them. when i lived here, i used to come to visit them every few weeks or so, and, knowing that i was broke, they were always kind and would take me for dinner. in those days, compared to my horrid banlieu, the contrescarpe seemed like paradise. i felt like i was crossing between different worlds, which actually i was. after a nice evening out in the civilised part of the city, i would feel a sinking sensation in my stomach as i got on the escalator to the RER at Gare du Nord, for that is the moment you feel you are descending into the ghetto. if i had dressed up in the day and had to travel back late, i would often change my clothes before going down that escalator, for fear of attracting attention to myself. even though i had an ipod even back in those days, i would put it away before i got on the escalator, and hide it carefully in my bag, knowing it would be stolen otherwise. today as i sit in the contrescarpe, able to pay for my own drinks, i find that i still find the place very pleasant, perhaps even more so as i do not have the feeling of impending dread as i leave.

moscow vegetarian

lots of people mock London's food, i think unfairly. true, english food is disgusting, but there is so much choice that it is easy to avoid. You could probably try a different kind of cuisine every night for a month in London with out ever repeating yourself. yet, unfairly, the city still often comes second to other European capitals (Paris, Rome) when food gets brought up. I have been to many great restaurants in Rome, but i find that cities with good national cuisine tend to suffer from a lack of variety. try getting a good korean meal in Rome, or Eritrean dinner in Lisbon- good luck.

But alongside London, another city that often gets a bad culinary wrap is Moscow, which i find equally unfair and outdated. Sure, choice in 1995 was limited, but that is no longer the case. Furthermore, in a traditional country where you can probably count the vegetarians on one hand (ok i might be exaggerating- but only slightly), you can get an increasingly decent vegetarian selection, something that is seemingly near impossible in Madrid.

I found myself spending much of the past week in Moscow, by myself on business. I had lots of reports to write up and conference calls with out London office that i had to dial into rather late. So whist i did go out to treat myself to my favourite Georgian and Sushi favourites a few times, several times I simply ordered into my room, but even then i had exactly what i wanted, made exactly to my specifications- an it was delicious. my mother hated the Soviet Union for a number of (obvious) reasons, but one of her chief gripes was the lack of "salad," it bothered her immensely that even when something called "salad" could be located, it normally consisted of peas, potatoes and mayonnaise, without lettuce ever making an appearance. so I took the picture here of a Moscow salad for her- no lettuce shortages these days.