The non-zones

Airports. In a way, I love them, they are often connected to new adventures, new places and great expectations. On the other hand, it's a lot of waiting, boredom, goodbyes and existential crisis. Airports are similar non-zones regardless where you are, places that do not have any characteristics except for the characteristics of your own trip and flight experience. You can be at the airport of Bangkok or Cairo without realizing it, it could be London or Helsinki as well. The only trouble you have is with the currency exchange rate.

In the past one month or so I have spent too much time at the airports. It makes traveling annoying and boring. The glory of air traveling has lost its attractiveness. And indeed, the glory was very far on my trip to Luxembourg last Monday. The autumn storm was disrupting ("irregularities" as the flight companies put it) air traffic in Amsterdam so I was ordered to fly through Copenhagen. Why not, the Danish guys are tall and handsome. 

However, the storm had already advanced to Southern Sweden and Denmark. With our second try, we finally managed to land to very windy Copenhagen (people were vomiting at the back of the plane, I was meditating) and the airport was then closed (also trains and metros stopped working). I got in a transit center queue with a Danish sandwich and a beer and calculated that it would take around 20 hours to serve the 800 customers in line in front of me. "Luckily" after 1 hour 40 min, I realized that I had been waiting in a wrong queue and eventually took a number for the correct counter. Only 100 numbers before me (and a tall and handsome Finn!).

Too bad I was overly focused on getting a new flight to Luxembourg (+hotel room) so I wasn't able to go around in the Copenhagen airport which is probably one of the nicest ones in Europe. You find there good shops and many different kinds of cafés or restaurants, unlike in Helsinki-Vantaa airport where you only get one type of vegetarian sandwich in all the cafés of the airport. No wonder my friend told me on Facebook to concentrate on shopping and not on the tall and handsome Danish guys.

Usually I tend to connect airports with lots of emotions. Crying out loud at the counter in Paris-Orly when I had misunderstood the flight schedule (I made it however and got in time to Berlin to see my new boyfriend), buying a 300 EUR Ryanair flight to London when I had foolishly missed my initial flight (and got to see my boyfriend - not the same one - almost in time), leaving my Senegalese tax-free products in Madrid security check (not properly packed liquids) after a lot of negotiations and - on the more positive side - all the proseccos I have enjoyed in order to celebrate a wonderful upcoming adventure. 

Something that I also find thrilling at the airports are other people traveling and expecting great adventures, the feeling of big expectations. It can be contaminating. But then, you also have these usual Brussels bureaucrats, dryly moving from one capital to another.

Airports can also be a place for cultural shocks. When I arrived to the luxurious airport of Bangkok after traveling on budget in Cambodia and Laos, I was disgusted by the boutiques of Louis Vuitton and Prada and the glittering diamonds and golden watches in the shop windows. At the Arlanda airport in Stockholm, on my way from Addis Abebe back to Finland, I was depressed by the Starbucks café (and capitalism): after all the excellent Ethiopian coffee that was roasted before my eyes, I was just uninterested by the Swedish barista asking me if I wanted my cappuccino with a single or double shot, tall/medium/large and made with Guatemalan/Columbian/Costa Rican/Ethiopian /Kenyan /+10 other choices coffee. "Just give me a bloody coffee, will you!" The modern capitalism has given us the illusion of liberty to choose, but to choose what, the coffee beans for my toffee frappuccino latte macchiato. Who cares, and does this illusion of endless choices make anyone happier (I'd say it's the opposite, and what the fuck is "tall cappuccino" in any case)? 

The luxury at the airports can be also nice in certain circumstances. After rough traveling, I love to go to the duty-free shop in my hiking outfit, wearing my last almost-clean clothes and try on the super expensive Sisley hand cream (and wonder who the heck will pay 100 euros for a hand cream), some lipstick and perfume and think that I'm ready for the urban life once again. 

To conclude, here are some of my observations about some airports I've travelled through:

- Entebbe (Uganda): UN flights leaving to South Sudan with peacekeepers on board made my own travels seem quite uninteresting.

- Istanbul: flights all over the world, Muslims wearing their best clothes on the way to Mecca or Medina. Flights to Teheran, Baghdad, Kigali etc. A place to start a real trip!

- Italian airports: last chance to have a cheap and good cappuccino on the way back home.

- Brussels: they have finally ended with the construction work of the train station at the airport, but still, arriving to Brussels still feels like arriving to some backward country in the 1970s, nothing functions. But chocolate is good and last chance to have a cheap Leffe on the way home.

- Amsterdam: the self-flushing toilets are just annoying and uncomfortable.

- JFK: you expect glory and you find concrete. What the heck?? A truly disappointing airport.

-Bujumbura (Burundi): two gates, no screens, and outside some very rusty and old Air Burundi airplanes (to be avoided).

Love and Anarchy: Camille Claudel 1915

I still need to mention this one film, Camille Claudel 1915, that I saw at the Helsinki International Film Festival, because I happened to visit a little exhibition of Camille Claudel at the Musée Rodin in Paris by coincidence a week later.

Jeune fille à la gerbe, by Camille Claudel. Photo from the website of Musée Rodin.

Camille Claudel was first Rodin's student and later his lover. It didn't end up well as we learn from the film. Claudel ends up in a mental institution where she spends the rest of her life, though she obviously doesn't belong there.

Juliette Binoche played Claudel in the film and she was absolutely fantastic in the role. In her face, you can feel Claudel's dolour, despair and hope. Not much is happening in the film, but the intensity of Binoche's presence is outstanding. The use of actual mentally handicapped people in the casting was courageous, but as it turned out, the best possible solution. I can't understand how the people next to me in the theater could have been eating popcorn - constantly, during the entirety of the film - while watching a film as agonizing as this (who invented the combination of popcorn and cinema in general? Argh!).

At the Musée Rodin, which is by the way a very comfortable museum to visit, I wasn't very impressed by Claudel's works (above one of them). But I really like this one sculpture by Rodin: Voix intérieure ou la méditation.

Love and Anarchy: Grigris

Grigris, an African film from Chad, that I saw at the Helsinki International Film Festival had pretty bad actors (or maybe I'm just not used to African style of acting) and very traditional storyline, but I just loved watching it. I felt so happy seeing the African landscape and the African dusty roads and villages. It must be pretty weird, but I felt a bit home-sick.

Too bad, my next holiday flights are already booked for Asia... 

Hmm, I guess I need to live Africa through culture for a while then. Luckily, I have a pile of African literature waiting for me and our last book club reading was The Last Flight of the Flamingo by Mia Couto from Mozambique. How funny, by the way, that we wanted to pick up an African novel by a female author and chose this one among many alternatives. So it was a bit of a surprise when I opened the book the first time and a photo of a white guy greeted me. Mia...

Love and Anarchy: Omar

Once again the Helsinki International Film Festival "Love and Anarchy" offered an excellent selection of movies. 

I went to see five films and while I can recommend all of them, I was perhaps mostly touched by the last film I saw on Saturday. It was a film called Omar by a Palestine film director Hany Abu-Assad. Probably I would have been satisfied just watching the gorgeous principal actor Adam Bakri, but not only that, the film was excellent. The story was like a Shakespeare's tragedy and the spectator can only wish the movie to end quickly so she knows how badly it will end. At some point you just realise that it won't end with a honeymoon in Paris.

Already the beginning of the film is powerful, showing the crossing of the wall surrounding West Bank. The wall is absurd and depressing, anyone should see that. However, the film is not strongly taking sides in the Israel-Palestina conflict. It rather shows the human tragedy taking place in this context - love, betrayal, loyalty, trust. The insanity of wars! The vicious cycles connected to this conflict. In short, a film worth watching, though be aware of some post-film anxiety. 

The conflict in the Middle East hasn't interested me for ages because it seems to be without an end. However, after a good friend of mine spent some time in Palestina as a volunteer, I have taken a new interest in the place. Omar also shows beautiful aspects of the country (and I'm not only talking about the actor playing Omar, but the film in general). Definitely a place to visit in the future.

Hoarding for autumn

I arrived to England yesterday morning. It was freezing in York. I needed to take a long bath (though I don't complain, there's some luxury into it) in the evening trying to warm up myself. And this despite the fact that the first thing I did in York was to buy an umbrella and a cardigan.

After equipping myself for the British autumn weather (and well, after some conference stuff), I went to discover Marks and Spencer's food department and purchased some nice souvenirs: jam, crumpets, cookies, tea, fudge, and some odd but super delicious Welsh cakes (already gone!). Today I continued with some more cookies and chutney in Bettys, which seems to be the top place to have afternoon tea in York (at least their take-away scones were fantastic). 

Though England is a bit like Switzerland - it doesn't move me much emotionally - I love the grocery stores and the little delis here. I might have even got a bit carried away with my shopping, but after building up this hoard of English goodies, the autumn is very welcome in Helsinki as well. How nice to eat an onion chutney sandwich in a park and watch the leaves fall down from the trees.

A Swiss carpe diem

It's good to have the courage to seize the moment and see what happens. This is what I did when I booked flights to Switzerland following a tall and handsome Swiss guy that I hardly knew. Instead of a romance of the life time, I got back home with some great gruyère cheese. Not all the stories end up like some Hollywood films (not that I was expecting that in this case or of my life in general), but you live and learn. Hopefully, the next tall and handsome guy lives in some place a bit more exciting...

                         

To be completely honest with myself and you, it would have been nicer to visit my friends somewhere else in Europe, but I decided to be happy to discover Switzerland a bit. It's funny how the country is beautiful and it has wonderful nature, good bike lanes, town squares filled with cafés and markets full of organic products, but still it doesn't make me say "I just love Switzerland". It's a bit like Belgium (except the opposite in almost any other sense) that it somehow lacks spirit, enthusiasm and passion. It combines good things from France, Italy and Germany and still it's not the sum of these countries, but less.

                           

The Swiss towns are cute however. I enjoyed the beautiful views in the French-speaking Fribourg during the last summer days of the year. Drinking rosé wine at Rue de Lausanne and discovering the small medieval streets in the old town. In Basel, I walked on the banks of the Rhine watching people floating on the river with their picnic stuff packed in water-proof bags (never seen such a thing before). Big groups of people had gathered on the river, probably many of them having got there by swimming (photo below). And the capital, Berne (photo above), had obscure little shops under the long arcades circling around the whole centre and wonderful views from the Rose Garden. Definitely nice places to visit, but maybe not the most memorable towns for tourists.

                             

Perfectionism

No sign of perfectionism when I'm baking. Compare the photo in the cook book and my cake. Mine was delicious however, so who cares. But honestly, I don't how I could have it so wrong...

Life out of balance

The Helsinki Festival had a special focus on the American composer / pianist Philip Glass this year. I went to see his beautiful piano recital, but of more interest was the film Koyaanisqatsi for which he had composed the music. The festival also presented the film in the Music Centre of Helsinki with live music, but I opted for the cheap version in the cinema (perfect!).

The film was absolutely gorgeous and the theme was obviously close to my heart: the exploitation of the planet by humans, the consequences and the craziness of it all. The film is directed by Godfrey Reggio and it was made already thirty years ago. However, the theme is even more actual now. In fact, it is devastating to see how things have only got worse. When will we learn that our way of life is not good for us or our surroundings?

The word 'koyaanisqatsi' is Hopi indian language, meaning 'life out of balance'. How wonderful that they have a specific word for that, it is a truly useful word. The film excellently portrays how life is out of balance: that is, humans and the nature are not in balance and humans are not in balance with themselves.

The film starts with amazing images from somewhere in Arizona or Nevada desert. At first, you think that it will be a film of the beauty of the nature. But suddenly, the tone of the music changes and emerge the tractors, the huge machines turning around the soil, explosions, oil rigs. Exploitation of the planet. After the beautiful images, it's a shock. The film goes on to show images of cities and human constructions. 8-lane highways in the USA. Skyscrapers. Big cities. You are simultaneously aghast but also admiring the capacity of the engineers to create and manipulate our environment. A capacity that is so grand that it makes you a little scared as well. 

However, all these constructions and destruction of the nature doesn't seem to make us happy. A sequence of the film with fast and almost psychedelic music and images makes you think of the craziness of our busy and stressed out lives. Like ants working working working without any idea why, no time to think what we are doing and why. And could there be any other way. We don't treat only the nature in a shameful way but also other nations, other people.

The films ends with the explosion of a spacecraft,  I guess the images were of Challenger exploding after its take-off. It was a great symbol for the capacity of the humans to create unimaginable things, but also how this engineering intelligence and greediness lead us to our own fall.