Children playing everywhere, families in the parks eating fish that the men just caught in the Bosphorus strait, busy markets and streets, and smoke of waterpipes all around you. Istanbul is not only a very beautiful city, but foremost a very active one with a lively outdoor culture. It breathes life in every corner you find.
You don’t have to go far to discover this, to sense the Istanbul atmosphere. Its people are very alive pretty much everywhere. Within a minute that I walk out of the door of my new place I can easily find someone smiling, a shopkeeper saying hello to me or people speaking to each other. Children look very happy all the time and sometimes don’t stop laughing; so full of life they are. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: istanbul, photography, travel, turkey
Lying in a tree, picking cherries. How wonderful life can be. One day earlier, in Belgrade, I didn’t even know I was going to be in this place as I was trying to hitch out of Serbia, to Macedonia. But there I was, a day before departure to Istanbul, in a cherrytree in the beautiful and extremely relaxed countryside of Serbia.
Before arriving in Istanbul, I had my last stop close to the city Niš, the third largest city in Serbia. I stayed with a family who hosted me through couchsurfing in a nice and self-build house on one of the hills around the city. Staying here turned out to be one of my more distinctive experiences during my four months of traveling. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: couchsurfing, family, hitchhiking, nature, photography, serbia, travel
Hitchhiking in the middle of the night! Never had I really done it before. Always do I calculate my travel in such a way that I would be sure to arrive at my destination or to have my final ride, within the last hour after sunset, just before it really gets dark. But there I was, some hours before midnight at the Turkish border and 350km still to go for Istanbul…!
Some actually thought I had already made it when I wrote last week I finally arrived in Turkey. Nothing was less true. I still had over a thousand kilometers to go but Wednesday night at 3 a.m I arrived. Le Grand finale you could say. One of my most exciting hitchhiking adventures as I was traveling from Niš in south Serbia to Istanbul, Turkey, through Bulgaria.
I was given rides by smoglers, salesmen, truckdrivers and refugees. It took me over 12 hours to drive 750km. A relatively good day with 60 kilometers an hour as half of my road were no highways, and half of trip was done with slow trucks. I crossed two borders in one trip, both by foot. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: balkan, couchsurfing, hitchhiking, istanbul, travel
Turkey, finally I made it! The border of the Ottoman empire used to be here in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade. Although almost three hundred years ago for the last time, those in total five-hundreds years left a great influence without a doubt.
It had already started in Slovenia, with only two types of coffee: Turkish coffee and ‘other coffee’. But here in Serbia there is a lot more. The typical dishes are Turkish, many people look Turkish even, and the chaos in Belgrade makes it a little brother of Istanbul. The language is different but they share one thing: I don’t understand a single word.. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: balkan, hitchhiking, serbia, travel
So I have heard the requests. You have seen enough buildings, birds, flowers, abstracts, waterfalls, sunsets and so on. Now it is time for a people-report! “We want to see how a city feels like from the viewpoint of those who live there. We want people-photos!” So I have heard, and so I thought myself too. It became time for something more indept.
Therefore I made a photo-essay about Zagreb, its life from the inside: how the city breathes, how the people think and what is going on over there. I discovered it is very much a city in transformation, a city full of life, with people who are not having it easy but who remain positive and smiling.
You can find a series of photos with the article called “Exploring Cosy Zagreb, a Changing City” at the homepage for JPG Magazine. The list of all photos you can find at my profile. And do not hesitate to leave your feedback, remarks or your comments here.
Categories: travel
Tagged: art, articles, balkan, croatia, photography, travel
Sometimes you come to places with a touch of magic. Take Zagreb for instance. Here it feels, above everything, really cosy. It’s a city of one million but it feels as a town with its picturesque medieval center, lively markets and friendliness everywhere. There are no big touristic attractions and not many tourists either, so overcrowded places are hard to find.
There is a lot of beauty in this place but it is also very much a transitional city. Croatia has a war-past and is currently in a process of moving from a post-communist country to a country that mainly based on consumerism. A lot of the city is broken down, houses are waiting to be renovated or to be destroyed. Housing-speculation is very populair which also leaves a lot of space for urban exploration. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: art, croatia, photography, travel
Traveling means you are biting the dust, you are not living the luxury tourist life, but you live low-budget, work while travel, be a bohemian, a troubadour, a busker, or a person who just finds a regular job at the temporary permanent location.
Traveling is not the same as being on holidays. On the contrary. The people I know who consider themselves travelers don’t have a home, work while they travel and are always busy with all kinds of things. I also consider traveling as a profession, a daily occupation, with some brakes in between.
Generally people on holidays stay at place A, and maybe they circle around it. But what is traveling? People on holidays do they also travel? When they are ‘traveling’ to their location or when they circle around their location? For me it is not the same. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: hitchhiking, thoughts, travel
Fifty-six cents was the fee, but no change was given. “Welcome to the Balkan”, said my Slovenian driver when we passed the border with Croatia. He had picked me up from a gas-station ten minutes before, and was used to the toll-worker not giving him back the change from the one euro he had given him. My driver, a pizza-maker who “knows people here very well”, only interest was the price of drugs in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
I finally made it. Slovenia was already a small beginning but now I really have the feeling I arrived in a country where the culture seems to be very different to what I was used to. People look different, they talk different, interact different, and so on. After a tough hitchhiking day, this was quite something I had to get used to. Keep reading →
Categories: travel
Tagged: balkan, croatia, hitchhiking, slovenia, travel
