For as long as i can remember i had a grudge with Parisians. Arrogant, self anointed members of a higher caste among Europeans, sole judges and definers of beauty, connoisseurs of all good things. Why do i have a feeling faux pas is a term coined by Parisians.

This was partly the reason for me not visiting it before. Its funny how one constructs perceptions at young age and grows so fond of them, so much so, that there is no consideration in mind for re-evaluation. But hey, everyone needs something to hate when they are young. Parisians, are probably one of the least dangerous things to be hating.

This year i paid Paris a visit. 4 days is hardly enough to form an informed opinion, but i no longer care what Parisians per se are like. That’s because i love Paris. Relaxed, beautiful, artsy, revived at every corner by the smell of fresh coffee and the smiles of beautiful women.

It is a city full of life and i look forward to visiting it again in spring.

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Thank you notes to

• Dorin for the introduction to apertures and shutter speeds but also for being the reason i saw Paris,
• Carolina & Olivier for a wonderful night spent among very nice Parisian.

Before the madness began with the season holidays and other serious events we went to Morocco to visit a friend and travel a bit around.
I will not talk so much, i will just let the pictures do the talking and give you a brief note on the places i have seen.

Rabat, featured below, is by Moroccan standards, the cleanest city i have seen. But who cares about that? It is the capital town, with embassies, government offices, etc. Loved the Medina, with a very Mediterranean feeling to it, the proximity to the ocean which made it also very pleasant in terms of weather. Good restaurants around, good sea food!

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Fez, is the cultural capital of Morocco, one of the oldest universities in the world was founded here, a town bustling with activity, very chic in a rudimentary kind, with donkeys still a main transport mean. The terrines smell awful though. I had to smile all the time to stop my gagging reflex.

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Marrakech is amazing. Really gorgeous. We stayed in a little Ryad, a 15 minutes walk through very busy, very narrow streets to the center. Walking through Marrakech is an adventure in itself. You will have scooters whizzing past you at 40km/h madly slaloming through crowds, bicycles crashing into you and lots of food stalls.

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Imlil is a starting point for all trecking trips in Morocco. Just at the base of Atlas mountains, a gorgeous place to observe berber hospitality and feel humbled by the views.

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I wish i were a better photographer to have captured it all. Hope you will still enjoy the photos,
Cezar

Gotta love me London! :)

See the pictures and captions.

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Vienna – Maastricht – Vienna, the long way round :)

3032km, 8 days, 5 countries, 11 cities, 4 churches, 1 wedding.

Trip itinerary: Vienna > Wels (overnight stay-OS) >Rosenheim > Stuttgart (OS) > Liege (OS) > Maastricht > Liege (OS) > Stuttgart (OS) > Innsbruck > Verona (OS) > Lazise > Verona (OS) > Cortina D’Ampezzo > Lienz (OS) > Vienna.

Here it goes:

1. A good car helps. And by good i mean comfortable, easy to drive, economic not necessarily fast.  I am sure you knew this, i just feel i needed to emphasize it a little more.
2. Don’t expect too much from German no speed limit highways. They exist, don’t get me wrong, they are not a myth, but they are so packed with cars and poor drivers that you barely get a chance to flex your engine’s muscles.
3. Dutch drivers are a menace. Yes, you know yourselves, the ones with the yellow license plates and the big ass campers. They are not trucks, sure as hell they are not cars, but they think they are Ferrari’s. If you see one on the slow lane on a highway, the driver must also be eating or playing cards while driving cause otherwise they only use the fast lanes. In the mountains, if you find a block it’s usually caused by dutch cars. Apparently they do not like to (to be read: know how to) drive uphill or downhill. If they see a curve, they almost stop before engaging. They also stop to cool their breaks at the bottom of the mountain because they do not understand the concept of engine breaking.
4. Sneezing at speeds greater than 180km/h should be on the list of Extreme Sports. Catching a cold on a road trip isn’t a great idea. Be careful of what you take for your cold :)
5. Get off the highway as much as you can and take the winding road. Use the GPS as a guide to check your current speed (5-10km/h less than the on-board meter), to know where you are, not as a step by step instructor. Doing this will take you to places so amazing you will end up thanking yourself. I got so much energy from the off the map (off the reservation :) ) places.
6. If you road trip for the pleasure of driving, Tirol (both Italian and Austrian) is the place to do it. No highways, civilised drivers (with the exception of one or two slow dutch drivers), good roads, high incredible vista points (2239m high Pordoi Pass-mind blowing), the Dolomite’s owe inspiring peaks, fresh air, full of small places to stop, eat, drink, stretch a muscle. Don’t take your kids on these roads unless you want to put them through a lot of vomiting. As a child i think i would have died, had i gone through this.
7. Get a road map atlas for the entire Europe: Europe, Road Atlas. It will save you a lot of time. It gives you an overview of where you are traveling to, that GPSs cannot offer.
8. In my opinion driving 300kms per day is an optimum. You can do more but then you should pause one more day before continuing. We had a much higher average and combined with the colds we had, it made for some pretty tiring days.
9. Having a joker friend in the car with you can shorten the trip considerably. You know, the ones curious about every little thing, prone to saying or doing silly things, never quite sure what the hell they are doing.
10. This is probably the most important thing i learned this trip, so make special note of it: 50kms before your end destination for the day, switch drivers. The last minutes come with a feeling of relief that drops your concentration and it can be very dangerous, or in best case scenarios, it will result in traffic contraventions (jump red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road, enter one-way streets, parallel parking near disasters / close encounters, etc.).

Below are a few photos we came back with:

I will come back in the next post with a few highlights of the trip. You can read more about Belgium vs Holland, Verona, The Dolomites, Lienz. So do not forget to subscribe :) or leave a message if you want more or if you don’t.

The Jugendstil Ankeruhr - Hoher Markt

As the blog title says, today i did a bit of wandering. 2 hours to be exact. Alone, with a camera, with no particular objective. Today Austrians were celebrating again. It was a free from work day so most shops are closed, which kind of makes it a good day to visit the city center otherwise infested with crazy shoppers looking for that extra bargain.

It made finding some rolling tobacco a total failure but compensated by giving me a lot of space to wander about. Took off on roads i never walked before and paid attention to things i never noticed.

The church of the Danube Boatmen - Maria Am Gestade - Salvatorgasse 12

I discovered a few corners less traveled and i would like to share them with you in a two step riddle. I photograph big spaces to capture a piece of detail that i consider beautiful and so i will post those details now and in about 3 days will show the full image.

I am hoping the one above is easy to guess if you have been or live in Vienna. If you do and post the correct answer to riddle 1 or the following, more difficult riddle 2 below before 3 days a special hand made gift awaits you.

Below a few of the other things i saw today.

This post was originally written in Romanian and then translated in English.

As i was telling you last week, Labour’s Day found me in Graz, Steiermark’s (Styria’s) capital city.

As soon as we entered Steiermark region by highway I was surprised by how green it actually is. It seems it’s nothing but a big forest, sometimes coniferous, but mostly leaf shedding. It certainly gives the impression the Styrians built the highway on purpose in the middle of a forest to fool everyone into thinking it really was the green heart of Austria. Well, it is not a fake. This region seems entirely green and when it’s not green with trees, it’s green with vineyards. But i’ll leave the vineyards for another time.

Graz is a city of approximately 300.000 souls. A famous university-education and scientific-research center and wood related industries. Through the city flows the river Mur, high with spring’s melted snow water at the time i saw it. Here, on the banks of this river landed our ‘Friendly Alien’. In the above picture, center-top. The black looking thing, if you didn’t get it yet.

It appeared here during city’s preparations for being the European Cultural Capital (2003) and houses ever since Graz’s Art Gallery. The ‘Friendly Alien’ is what people in Graz call the building.  The official website where you can find out more and also see a better picture of it can be visited here.

At the same time with the Alien, the Mur Island (Murinsel) appeared too. It is a floating metal structure across from the Art Gallery and is a relaxation spot with a coffee shop, a playground to get rid of the little ones for a while and terraced steps where you an lounge in the sun, read or whatever other things you feel like doing. Click on the picture to see a bigger image.

After about 10 minutes on the island we decided to climb the hill overseeing the city to the Schlossberg castle. 473 m to be climbed on stairs isn’t that much if you climbed Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka (5200 steps). If climbing gives you asthma attacks you can take the elevator or the train up. Once there, you are surrounded by history. This is the castle from which Austrians resisted Napoleon’s armies more than once and in which the city’s folks found refuge every time they needed it.

On top of Schlossberg lies one of the city’s oldest landmarks, a clock tower. It was undergoing restoration when i was there but i found this landmark to be a very witty one. The clocks on each of the 4 sides of the tower point the hour with the big watch-hand and the minutes with the small one. I’m telling you this, so you don’t get fooled by it if you get there. I couldn’t find the explanation why it was done so, i suppose to help old people with poor vision know the days hour, since minutes for them are irrelevant, but i prefer to think it was as a prank to mess with tourists too preoccupied with time.

Everywhere on the top you can find locations where you can eat, have a coffee or other thirst quenching liquors or even sleep. I saw a lot of signs explaining the past of a particular building and then towards the end it would invariably say: “since the year 1800 something it houses a restaurant/pub”. I’m telling you, as soon as wars end drinking joints flourish. In the picture to the right you can see a very cute little coffee shop hanging over a beautiful garden and overlooking the city center. Again click on the photo to see a larger version.

The old city center in absolutely charming. Narrow streets, surrounded by tall buildings with sharp roofs and flower burdened windows with wooden shutters. Loads of small shops, lots of them selling knives, but don’t ask me why. Maybe they have a hunting tradition. Coffee shops, beer and wine gardens, trams that share streets only with pedestrians and heaps of bicycles left all over without fear of being stollen.

Obama’s name and image has been borrowed even here to help with marketing. I found an Obama Lounge on a small street. Click the picture to the right.

To end, i’d say Graz is indeed a beautiful town that fully deserves the comparison to Sibiu i intuited in my previous post. Proud but reserved, old but unashamed to support the modern, with young and also calm people. I recommend you visit it. As a bonus, the city’s surroundings are gorgeous themselves and i will tell you more in my next reportage. If Graz is a lot like Sibiu, the surroundings are like the Tarnave or Rahau hills. Very pretty, so do not miss my next post.

Dedicated to Günther, who let us use his flat, drink his wine and finish his butter.

As spring arrives, Vienna changes entirely. Flowers take over the town from street intersections, to parks, to buildings’ balconies and windows. It feels as a colour explosion after a most grey and long winter. It all starts with a famous wind around here locally named Föhn. It’s a dry and warm wind that in less than 24 hours strips you of the winter jacket and warm pullover to a t-shirt and a flimsy jacket.

What’s interesting about this wind is the supernatural powers associated with it by Austrians as well as others in the Alps region. They say this wind makes people do crazy things. The phenomenon is called Föhnkrankheit in German (Föhn sickness) and it is manifested by illnesses ranging from migraines to psychosis. During this wind, studies say mortality due to suicides and accidents grows by 10%. On aspirin derived preparations you can find sometimes in the prospect that it is indicated for Föhnkrankheit.

Soon after the wind, coffee shops, bars and restaurants pull out their tables on the streets, parks are full of students shedding their sickly paleness and together with the slight tan, the entire population becomes happier. You can see smiling people all over the town, babies learning how to walk, children riding a bicycle for the first time, young people enjoying a coffee, a beer or a wine splash out in the sun, happy to be wearing their sunglasses for the first time.

Two weeks ago there was a festival in front of the Municipality and i would like to tell you a little about it. It was organised by the Steiermark region, also known as Styria, the green heart of Austria. The festival’s name was The Steiermark Spring. What happens there? This region takes over the square in front of the Municipality and shows the world the best they have.

Folk music specific to the region, the wines they are so proud about, their beer, their food and most of all their hospitality and good humour. I was pleasantly surprised by all of it. Not just the perfect organisation of the event, that is the norm here in Vienna, but the way in which the Viennese and tourists enjoyed the feast.

There were a lot of tourists because the weekend coincided with the Vienna Marathon with over 50000 participants. As me, they were very happy about everything but i would like to give special mention to the Austrians present. Vienna is home to many nationalities, one prouder than the other but in the same manner it is home to Austrians from all its regions, all very proud of where they come from.

I enjoyed seeing how much they cared for their traditions and how glad they were for the opportunity to show off (in a nice way) and represent their region. I saw a lot of men dressed in leather shorts specific to the Alps, the so called Lederhosen and women wearing green skirts with flowered aprons and white linen shirts.

Everybody was singing around me, wine and beer were flowing endlessly, pretzels and ham sandwiches with horse-raddish were being eating.

Styrians are famous for the pumpkin oil sold all over Austria as a delicacy and believe me it is awesome when poured over an omelette, for their region’s specific wines like Welschriesling, Weißburgunder, Morillon, Traminer and Schilcher.

The region’s capital city is Graz, aparently very similar to Sibiu in Romania. It was the only city holding the title of European Cultural Capital in 2003 and twice was the imperial capital. They say about Graz that they are famous for the enjoyable tendency to idleness. Sounds a lot like Transylvanians. This is the region’s English version website for more details. I will travel there this weekend and will come back with my own impressions.

For all my friends without proficiency in Romanian language i am sorry i have been writing in Greek for you. I am working at the moment on translating the latest posts and providing a language switcher for you. Hope to get it ready soon.

Until then, enjoy this video colage of some TV ads promoting Romania that i re-discovered from a friend. You may have seen them or not as they are not exactly fresh from the oven.

This image shows the real landscapes beyond the commercial Dracula’s castle near Bran. The image was taken by Ionut. Please check his blog to see more images of beautiful Romania.

The houses you see are part of villages without street  or house numbers. They measure the village’s size by the number of chimneys not the number of people.

Kids from these families go to school by walking down the valleys every day for hours. Their classes start later in the day to allow them to get there and finish early to give them time to get home while there’s still light outside. Their school terms are also shorter cause winter shortens the day further.

I remember i used to envy them as a small boy. It seemed to me they get to play to get to and from school, they have less classes and longer holidays.

But i now realise their life is so much harder. They work hard everyday helping out with the animals that are their livelihoods or on the small plots of land that give them a few vegetables at the end of the summer. When i was a kid my parents used to say these kids are more afraid of cars than of bears with whom they learn early age to deal with.

Their most prized possession is not their bike but their dogs. Big shepard dogs from the only romanian dog breed called the carpatian shepard dog: Ciobanesc Carpatin. They have red cheeks and big smiles, are humble to unknown measures for city people.

They are the people that give romanians the well deserved title of some of Europe’s most hospitable people. They have little but are ready to share it all. Through out romanian history, they have gathered everytime our history required them to take up arms and defend their land.

And will forever have my utmost respect.

Cezar

Dorin published another amazing photo to make me dream of beautiful Vietnam. Definitely an amazing destination to put in my future traveling plans.

The bay looks so pretty and i hope Dorin can comment and give more details about this wonderful place. I found a website promoting this bay and giving more details about it, including more photos.

You can check this photo and others at his online gallery.

Cezar