3 things you love about London

2. There’s a feeling here that anything is possible, that anyone can be anything they want (Except maybe royalty. That’s a pretty exclusive club).

3. Sometimes I forget what a majestic beast of a city this is. And then I catch a glimpse of the Houses of Parliament from the Hungerford Bridge, the boats on the Serpentine in Hyde Park or the view from the Members’ Room at the Tate Modern and I get butterflies.

3 things that drive you crazy about London
1. The city is often covered by a heavy woollen blanket of grey that gets everyone down.

2. Rush hour. The Central Line. The Northern Line. Actually, all the lines.

3. West London. Don’t live there and if you live there don’t expect me to go there.

A stereotype that’s true
How much we talk about the weather. Unless you’ve experience the worst summer ever followed by the worst winter ever, you can’t understand how all-consuming it can be.

A stereotype that’s sooooo wrong.
When I moved to the UK seven years ago, there was very little good coffee to be had anywhere. Now, it’s everywhere.

The best thing about your neighbourhood
I live in Hackney Downs, about a mile from Dalston, two and a half from Shoreditch. They’re generally considered the “cool” parts of London but they’re too much and everyone tries too hard. Hackney Downs barely tries at all but all my friends are nearby and so is Violet and Railroad, Broadway Market and London Fields.

Describe the view out your window
I’m in an office in Soho, just off Carnaby street. I can see the shapes of other offices, a zig-zag of dark tiled rooftops under a low grey sky.

Something you can’t live without daily, what/where?
A strong latte from any of these places: Monmouth / Tapped & Packed / Association / Fernandez and Wells /Allpress / Prufrock / Workshop

Book/movie/poem/song that captures the spirit of London for you.
Hitchcock’s London is beautifully, accurately brooding.

If you were the boss of the tourism board of London what would the city slogan be?
“Sun?”

And if you didn’t live here, where would you live?
If visas weren’t an issue, I’d move to Brooklyn tomorrow.

Victoria Hannan is a London-based photographer and writer. She also runs a stunningly thoughtful blog.

]]> http://lets-get-lost.com/2013/05/guest-post/feed/ 0 http://lets-get-lost.com/2013/05/guest-post-love-moscow/ http://lets-get-lost.com/2013/05/guest-post-love-moscow/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:42 +0000 Una http://lets-get-lost.com/?p=5994

3 things you love about Moscow
1. Summer in Moscow: Let’s face it, we do have a long and painful winter here. It starts in November and finishes in April and features such wonderful things as just 5 hours of daylight and temperatures that fall below -15C on average. So when summer comes it’s a true miracle. People eagerly stop the apartment hibernation and enjoy white nights, summer terraces, open-air concerts and everything else that warm weather has to offer in a bustling metropolis.

2. The rhythm of the city: Moscow’s constantly moving and changing. Sometimes for the worse, but most of the time – for the better. It’s never easy, but definitely never boring. New places and projects spring up here and there pushing the it-crowd into a constant rivalry for the “who’s been to that new cool place first” title.

3. The city’s history: It’s nearly 870 years (founded in 1147) transpire when you take a stroll in the heart of Moscow. And we love how the old blends with the new. There’s definitely an Asian feel to the city due to the mélange of different architectural styles and bright ads, but you also feel a very strong European presence. Moscow is unique in that sense: just as you start thinking it’s another northern European city, it goes all oriental bazaar on you and the illusion is gone.

3 things that drive you crazy about Moscow
1. Traffic: You think it’s bad where you live? Think again. Moscow is hell on a rush hour. Everything is congested – the roads are at a standstill, leaving drivers in jams that last for hours and hours and at the same time the metro is so full of people you can sometimes lift your feet off the ground and you won’t fall as you’d be squashed by fellow passengers. Summers are usually less painful with many people leaving the city for holidays. And the authorities are finally launching bicycle initiatives, but it’s still early days.

2. The size of the streets: Here we have to thank the Soviet Regime that took down hundreds of houses forever transforming the historical look of the city. This was done to create wide (very wide) avenues suitable to host military parades involving large military machinery like tanks. Think modern day North Korea. So now I’m left with an 18 (!!!) lane street to cross on my daily walk to work. No kidding. 18 lanes. Every day. Smack in the center of Moscow. Can you imagine how noisy and polluted it gets with all the traffic I mentioned earlier?

3. Pollution: It’s a big problem in the city. Moscow appears clean, with no garbage on the side walks or rubbish in the streets thanks to an efficient army of street cleaners, but recycling is still not a common practice in the city and the amount of cars doesn’t help at all. Jokes about double headed fish that live in Moskva river are a common thing again referring to how dirty it is.

A Moscow stereotype that’s true
People don’t smile at you. It’s just not part of the culture. Smiling at strangers is considered fake and even stupid in certain cases. Of course the service segment has been trained to smile like a westerner would, but they fail frequently. Don’t be offended and don’t be angry. When was the last time a Chinese waiter smiled at you? The food was still good, right?

A Moscow stereotype that’s sooooo wrong
It’s cold all year long. Moscow’s located in a flat area of the country so this means in summer, when the sun is high, it’s light nearly 24 hours a day. And hot. In recent years temperatures have been creeping up to +40C, but that’s still considered abnormally hot. Your average summer T is +30C which feels super hot when you’re surrounded by concrete.

The best thing about your neighbourhood
It’s human sized. I love Khamovniki and honestly think it’s the best neighborhood in town. It’s very middle class and calm, with parks, cafes, restaurants and galleries located in a comfortable walking distance. It’s also well connected with the rest of Moscow when it comes to public transport and car access (providing alternative routes in case of traffic jams elsewhere). Two of Moscow’s best hang-out areas are a 25 minute walk from where I live, I’m talking about the Red October and Gorky Park. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

Describe the view out your window
It’s a glorious mix of the old and new. I find my bedroom view slightly bizarre and captivating at the same time. I can see the park where I used to play as a child and behind it the austere soviet building housing the military academy. To it’s left – two huge candy striped chimneys blowing white steam that shapes itself into magical creatures and funny faces. And in the middle something that was never there when I was little – the futuristic skyscrapers of Moscow City, a one of a kind business district. At night the tall glass buildings turn into clocks, ad boards and random light patterns – I like to think that by seeing them out of my window I save money on a lava lamp.

Something you can’t live without daily, what/where?
I think the only two things I really need on a daily basis are water and air, but if we start thinking in weekly terms, than definitely yoga classes in my favorite studio – NYM, a 15 minute walk away from where I live. I also absolutely need to see water, so I plan my daily routes to go by the embankment of Moskva or Yauza rivers. The views calm me down and they are great running or biking routes too.

Book/movie/poem/song that captures the spirit of Moscow for you.
Master & Margarita by Bulgakov gives a great feel of a dusty summery Moscow.

If you were the boss of the Moscow tourism board what would the city slogan be?
That’s easy! “Moscow is My Oyster”, of course. We called our blog that because we think Moscow isn’t the easiest city to live in but once you actually crack it, the world is your oyster. It’s a great place to be.

And if you didn’t live here, where would you live?
I love New York and Katya loves Berlin. But I also adore smaller picture perfect places like Montreaux in Switzerland, or French Dijon, or Oxford in England etc. Maybe when I’m older I should consider moving there. For now my place is here in Moscow.

Anya and Katya live and work in Moscow and run a super cool city blog Moscow is My Oyster.

But just so it’s not dull around here for the next month, I’ve planned a few guest posts by some fantastic women telling us about the cities they live in… get ready for Moscow, London, Hiroshima and more.

And I’ll be posting some Japanese excitement over on Instagram.

(photo by hello sandwich)

About 500 dogs are estimated to live in Moscow’s subway. Many have learned to use the metro system to commute to the downtown core in search of food. Using their sense of smell and sound pattern recognition (when names of stations are announced), as well as their developed sense of timing to recognize particular stops the dogs navigate the complex system often better that their human counterparts. Some are even seen obeying traffic lights at street level.

The dogs often provide protection to passangers, guarding subway cars from drunks and aggressive people and in turn embrace the crowds, knowing scraps of food might be their reward. Sometimes their tactics are more cunning: a loud bark behind a person eating may result in a sandwich on the pavement, and a cuter, smaller dog can beg more successfully, thus feeding the rest of the pack.

But this relationship is not without it’s darker side, there have been hundreds of attacks by Moscow’s almost 35,000 stray canines as well as unprovoked violence toward the dogs by their fellow human commuters. Read about Malchik here, his heart-breaking death is commemorated by a statue in Mendeleyevskaya station. He was stabbed to death by a commuting model, who was enraged when the dog barked at her designer jacket-wearing pet.

Andrey Poyarkov, a zoologist who has studied Moscow’s strays for over 30 years says: “In Moscow there are all sorts of stray dogs, but there are no stupid dogs. The street is tough and it’s survival of the fittest. These clever dogs know people much better than people know them.”

Photos by Maxim Marmur & English Russia. Read an excellent article about Moscow’s dogs here.

My friend Jeff (a talented photographer in his own right) alerted me to to this incredible series of European mythological monsters brought to life by artist Charles Fréger. The child in me rejoices and recoils, remembering Serbian stories I was told as a kid of ‘bauk’ and ‘babaroga’. I could study these for hours, and have ordered his book to make this possible, I suggest you do the same. I’ll post more about this when the book arrives, but in the meantime:

“I was going on an excursion within tribal Europe, the polar opposite of our images of modern civilisations. I was entering into a territory of landscapes as far as the eye can see. Wilder Mann was its archetypal hero, half man half beast, a hairy monster, a multi-faceted devil, a bloodthirsty or soft teddy bear, a fertile caprine or a scapegoat wild boar.
 I had envisioned an organic wild man, hidden behind mud, grease, charcoal, the sculpted wood of his horned mask, covered in leaves or dead animals, wearing his bells noisily. I had already fantasised that he was like an animal belonging to a pack of crouching bipeds: the essential model of a zoomorphic figure, whose rudimentary appearance and ritualistic attire would classify him as belonging to a form of universal nudity”. —Charles Fréger

And here you can listen to composer Teho Teardo’s musical tribute based on this project.

And if you like these, don’t miss Eyes as Big as Plates

“This blending of figure and ground recalls the way in which folk narratives animate the natural world through a personification of nature. The slippage of elderly figures into the landscapes suggests a return to the earth, a celebration of lives lived, reinforcing the link between humanity and the natural world.” —Ikonen & Hjorth

This year they’ve taken their project on the road to New York, so keep an eye on ongoing work on their blog. A show of images from Eyes as Big as Plates is on in New York until April 6th.

Recently, the access-restricted prefecture of Fukushima which was ravaged by the 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami invited Google Streetview to document the area. Take a walk through the town of Namie-machi, by eerie school playgrounds, collapsed homes and through vast fields swept clean by the violent waves. The project will also become part of Google’s Memories for the Future site which will preserve before and after images for future generations.

And here, a view of the Ukrainian town of Pripyat, similarly devastated by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster by Russia’s answer to Google—Яндекс. Walk through Pripyat’s snowy streets 25 years after the nuclear disaster, while a small Facebook group demands an official visit by Google. 

Yesterday a most excellent package arrived from Tokyo. A beautifully put-together city guide from Ebony Bisyz of Hello Sandwich—and she happens to be from the neighbourhood where we’ll be staying, so the pages are packed with places to eat, enjoy, bike, shop and hang out exactly where we’ll be. And she’s plotted them all on google maps too (my hero!). Highly recommended for tips by a super cool Aussie with an eye for design. You can get it for $25, fresh off the press.

In the last few weeks I’ve also dug up my dandy Monocle guide to Japan in all its slick glory, and dusted off some of my dad’s stunning vintage books: Imperial Villas of Kyoto by Tadashi Ishikawa (1970) and Ikebana by Senei Ikenobo (1966). Plus for my last birthday a friend with a premonition gave me a Tokyo mini-guide from Toronto antique goldmine Monkey’s Paw. Ahhhh, my favourite kind of reading.

Now I just need to get my hands on a killer English Road Atlas on the cheap, and we’re off….

If you find yourself in any Israeli city, you’re likely to be met by a gang of cats. The legend goes that when the British occupied Palestine, they brought along cats with them. Generations of un-neutered cats has left Israel as the land of stray cats.

This fire was made during a Peace Circle discussion between a group of Israelis and Palestinians. They meet once a month to have honest discussions about the conflict. Mostly they want to meet “the other” and see that we are all not so different after all. 

A view of my apartment in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot. Once sanctioned off as the place for new immigrants from Yemen and North Africa, Nachlaot is now the uber trendy spot for young Israelis. Most of the homes are dilapidated and over-priced.

I found this man at an ancient olive press in Latrun—he sits and watches olives become oil all day long. 

One of the most wonderful things about Israel is that strawberry season is in the winter. 

The Machane Yehuda “shuk” aka market, is one of the highlights of living in Jerusalem. Every Friday morning this place is packed with shoppers preparing their Friday night Shabbat meal. It’s a madhouse. Vendors yelling, old women knocking you over with their carts and a general feeling of chaos. It’s wonderful.

Anabelle Harari is a food blogger writing about seasonal and sustainable food from around the world. She is the community attaché for Birthright Israel Experts and currently lives in Jerusalem. You can connect with her on twitter @thelocalbelle.

The plan so far includes a good chunk of time in Tokyo (staying in Shimokitazawa which seems like the prefect ‘hood for us); zig-zagging north to Nikko; spending a few days in the Alps near Nagano and Takayama; then it’s over to a ryokan in Kyoto; and some biking in and around Hiroshima with a day trip to Naoshima (thanks for the tip Emma!); a stop on Ise peninsula and back to Tokyo. 

Any and all recommendations for stuff to eat/see/do are welcome!

We’ll have have wheels for most of our trip (thus plenty of chances to get super lost!). What is driving in Japan like? We’re pretty good at navigating but it’ll be our first time on the ‘wrong’ side of the road while interpreting kanji signs. GPS a must?

And now some dreamy ukiyo-e prints paired with Murakami’s ‘Windup bird’ quotes. Enjoy. Get Lost.