Travel

Beijing After Hours

I love the silent hour of night, For blissful dreams may then arise, Revealing to my charmed sight What may not bless my waking eyes. ― Anne Brontë

Street Life

The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the center - William H. Whyte.

After Dark

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present - Francis Bacon.

Gateway To The Unknown

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end - Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction

Many of us joke about how we – or other family members or friends – are addicted to their smartphones. But, there is a serious side to this ubiquitous behaviour and although smartphone addiction has yet to be classified as a mental disorder – psychiatrists and psychotherapists are dealing with troubling symptoms linked to technology overuse. The key sign of smartphone addiction is when the importance of using the phone plays a disproportionate role in your life to the extent that your functioning is impaired. This amount of things we now do on our phones – from checking bus/train times, the weather and the news to listening to music – all create a dependency on the phone which fuels smartphone addiction for some people. But it is the compulsive need to check what’s going on, upload comments and/or check feedback on social media apps that are the real signs of out of control use of a smartphone.

Stillness

Without desire there is stillness, and the world settles by itself - Laozi.

The Calligrapher

Nestled within the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Lorong Panggung, alternately known as Kwai Chai Hong, is a neglected lane in Chinatown restored in 2019. Inside this laneway are six murals depicting the daily activities of the Chinese community in the area during the 1960s. One of them is of a calligrapher. Malaysian Chinese in the old days would seek out the services of a calligrapher who had the necessary education required to write letters to their families and auspicious sayings.

Garleries Royales Saint-Hubert

Designed by Dutch-born architect Jean-Pierre Cluysenaer and completed in the mid-19th century, right in the heart of Brussels, are the magnificent Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, one of first shopping arcades built in Europe. From the day of their inauguration, these 200 meter long glazed galleries have been highly successful and entertaining. Later on, the luxurious specialized shops added their part to this success. The "exterior" terraces of the cafés, cake shops and ice cream sellers attracted a smart public that came there to forget the humid Belgian climate for a few hours.

Rest In Peace

Poblenou cemetery in Barcelona was originally created in 1775 due to space issues caused by the growing population within the old walls of the city. Destroyed by Napolean’s troops in 1808, it was later reconstructed in a neoclassical style with the aid of Italian architect Antonio Ginesi. Peaceful but macabre, the cemetery of Poblenou is an intriguing place to visit.

Stones & Walls

The Gothic Quarter, or Barri Gòtic, is a dense web of historic buildings and shady atmospheric squares nestled between La Rambla and the Via Laietana, and has formed the central part of the Old City since Roman times. Layer upon layer of different architectural styles illustrate the different periods of Barcelona’s history, from remnants of the Roman city to contemporary architectural solutions seen in renovation work and extensions to old buildings. Gothic ­predominates, however, reflecting the glorious medieval period when Catalonia was at its height.

Hired

Hong Kong is one of the few cities in the world with such a uniform fleet of nearly 20,000 taxis. Not only do they share the same color (red in the urban areas, green in the New Territories and blue on Lantau), but also more than 99% of all taxis are Toyota Crown Comforts, a distinctively boxy model of car made exclusively for taxi use. So, being ubiquitous and iconic, Hong Kong's taxicabs aren't just a way to get around – they define the city's visual landscape.

Memories Of Green

Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime - Haruki Murakami. Murakami’s words hold true for one of the most vibrant, fast-paced cities in the world, namely Hong Kong. The latter offers to its visitors two contrasty day and night faces. From a beautiful city in the daylight, it turns to a magical place at night: the setting of the sun and decreasing humidity breathes new life into Hong Kong.

Minutes To Midnight

Tracing its history into the modern age as well as into the future highlights many aspects of Hong Kong that are distinct from other major cities in the world. From its hot neon lit shopping malls to its dark, dirty underworld, Hong Kong creates a unique space as a city, existing simultaneously in the past, as well as the present and future. Its visual spaces, filled with chaos, sexuality, violence, peace, and calm exist together in a strange harmony that presents a vision of the past struggling to maintain its identity in an uncertain future.

Definitely Closed

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us - Alexander Graham Bell.

The Bicycle

The return of the bicycle to the modern urban transport paradigm continues unabated. However, all over the world, citizens are rediscovering the benefits of cycling. Cities are responding by building the infrastructure to serve and keep them safe. This rush to increase cycling levels and improve the quality of city life is the greatest movement in global urbanism. Of course, not all cities are equal. Some charge ahead, while others lag.

Ta Prohm: A Timeless Beauty

Built from 1186 and originally known as Rajavihara (Monastery of the King), Ta Prohm was a Buddhist temple dedicated to the mother of Jayavarman VII. It is one of the few temples in the Angkor region where an inscription provides information about the temple’s dependents and inhabitants. Almost 80,000 people were required to maintain or attend at the temple, among them more than 2700 officials and 615 dancers.

The Great Wall Of China

China's Great Wall is one of the world's great feats of engineering and an enduring monument to the strength of an ancient civilization. This network of fortifications is the product of countless labors over a period of some two thousand years. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, took the remnants of truly ancient fortifications, walls, and earthworks begun in the fifth century B.C. and linked them into a unified wall circa 220 B.C. as part of a massive project to protect China against marauding barbarians from the north. By the time construction on most of the stone-and-brick Great Wall, with its turrets and watchtowers, was completed during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the Ming Wall had become the world’s largest human-made object. At its peak, this amazing the Ming Wall was guarded by more than one million men. It has been estimated that somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 million Chinese died as part of the centuries-long project of building the wall. The Mutianyu Great Wall served as the northern protective screen, guarding the capital and imperial mausoleums for generations.

Shower Of Colour

Colour is all. When colour is right, form is right. Colour is everything, colour is vibration like music; everything is vibration - Marc Chagall. Suspended from mid air by wires between buildings in Siem Reap, stunning colourful umbrellas put other art installations in the shade. Walking under that sky is magical.

Long Way To The Light

Not knowing where somebody is going is what should inspire him to travel to it.

A Tale By Light: Hong Kong

Shaped by some of the world’s greatest architects, Hong Kong‘s iconic skyline symbolizes the city’s status as one of the greatest commercial and business centers in the world. With soaring skyscrapers that glisten against the horizon, the breathtaking grandeur of the skyline inspires all who lay eyes on it.

An Afternoon In Zerhoun

The whitewashed town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun sits astride two green hills in a cradle of mountains approximately 3.5 km miles from Volubilis, and is one of the country’s most important pilgrimage sites. It was settled by Idris I, founder of the Idrisid dynasty when he came to Morocco in 789 AD.

Walkers In The Street

Walking in the city is as old as cities themselves. Most of the world's urban inhabitants have usually gotten around on foot and, consequently, have mainly experienced their cities as pedestrians. What a famous architect notes of classical Greek cities has been true of most urban life until well into the industrial era: Man was compelled to walk through a whole complex of buildings and live within them in order to achieve his end. This end has traditionally included not merely physical mobility but also social and cultural goals; as observed, traditional streets tend to act both literally and metaphorically as exterior rooms in the city. They function as places as well as links. No matter what the image of the street, it has always included a set of assumptions about who should own and control it, who would live on it and use it, the purposes for which it was built, and the activities appropriate to it. Walking in the city has thus been from the start a complex human act.

Masjid Jamek

Masjid Jamek is situated where both rivers the Sungei Klang and the Sungei Gombak meet. Right at this very place has the history of Kuala Lumpur started. This is the very spot for KL's history, where the early settlers built their shacks. In the 1850s, early miners would unload here their equipment and provisions. They would then trek up the jungle path to Ampang, where they would dig for tin. This graceful, onion-domed mosque, designed by British architect Arthur Benison Hubback, borrows Mogul and Moorish styles with its brick-and-plaster banded minarets and three shapely domes. It was built in 1907 and officially opened by the Sultan of Selangor on 23rd of December in 1909. It remained the city's centre of Islamic worship until the opening of the National Mosque in 1965.

The Restaurant

The Houhai Bar Street, in the famous Shichahai area of Beijing, is a place where traditional Chinese and western culture hits. When the first bar opened at a common Siheyuan (四合院, quadrangle courtyard) in the area in 2000, there were only approximately a dozen of bars in the Shichahai area. Three years later, a cluster of bars, restaurants and cafes surged in the area within half a year and now over 120 ones welcome visitors from all corners of the world every evening.

Maitreya: Buddha Of A Future Age

The Yonghe Temple is a glittering attraction in Beijing Buddhist firmament. It's the place where riveting roofs, fabulous frescoes, magnificent decorative arches, tapestries, eye-popping carpentry, Tibetan prayer wheels, tantric statues and a superb pair of Chinese lions mingle with dense clouds of incense. However, the pinnacle of the complex is inside the fifth hall: a magnificent 18m-high statue of the Maitreya Buddha, a messianic Buddhist figure, in his Tibetan form, clothed in yellow satin and reputedly sculpted from a single block of sandalwood.

Unreachable Legacy

The Clock Exhibition Hall is one of the unmissable highlights of the Forbidden City. Located in the Hall for Ancestral Worship (Fèngxiàn Diàn), the exhibition hall houses about 200 clocks and watches of different kinds, both domestic and foreign from the 18th century. Time pieces in China have a long history. Before the Qing Dynasty, sundials and clepsydras were the main timepieces. At the end of the Ming Dynasty or the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, mechanical clocks began to be introduced into China. In the eighteenth century, mechanical clocks were widely used in the imperial palaces. While reckoning time, these clocks brought motion to their decorative people, birds, and flowers. Those clocks and watches were not only useful timekeepers, but also pleasing entertainment and exquisite craftsmanship

A Table Apart

The past few years have seen Malacca evolve from a sleepy Malaysian coastal town into a bustling, world-class UNESCO World Heritage site. Someone who strolls by the Malacca River will find its banks lined with 17th century shophouses painted with trendy colourful murals — an example of the city’s perfect blend of the old and new. Along with its evolution comes a thriving café and bar scene. While Malacca has always been known for its delicious cuisine, where the visitor will find a mix of Peranakan, Kristang and Malaysian food, the scene has really taken off over the past few years — with themed cafés, hip bars and stylish restaurants sprouting up all over the seaside city.

House Of Stone

We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them - William Arthur Ward. Country life offers so much beauty that people always tend to forget about the hardships and problems that hide beneath that beauty. Country life is simple, but not always easy. The rose-colored glasses might make us forget that, once we want to embrace the beauty of country life, we also must embrace its roughness.