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Paris 1

October 4, 2015

Weather has finally broken. Distinctly chillier, wind picking up and skies overcast for the first time since we arrived. Rain forecast for tomorrow but we have had a very good run so can’t complain about our change of fortune.

Yesterday we were up early for a run out to Clingancourt, the very large Paris flea market in the northern suburbs. Since we had a dinner party planned for the evening and needed to get back in time to shop, prepare the apt for guests and organize the meal, we decided to arrive at the market an hour later than the official opening time of 8 am. Jane, V and I took the subway out and arrived shortly after 9 to find that most of the vendors did not feel the same urgency that we did and in fact very few of the stalls had yet setup and opened.

We had a coffee, wandered the narrow little alleys and streets and poked among all the trash and treasure of the last 300 years of French life. If you have been to Paris but have never been to Clingancourt or the Marché aux Puces, then please rectify this on your next trip. The entire setup of the market is like a small city consisting of about 14 sub-markets, indoors and out, upstairs and down, in alleys, passages, shops and warehouses. Some streets go two or three blocks deep into the market. Of course the deeper you go, the less pretty it is, but that’s where a lot of the treasure hunting happens.

Fashion shoot on steps of local church

There is a wonderfully helpful web site called Flea Market Insider that’s well worth looking at and their coverage of the Clingancourt market is covered here if you click on this link.

Kids and bubbles

Took a bus back to our neighbourhood about 11 and spent a couple of happy hours wandering up rue Montorgueil, one of our favourite food shopping streets. Bought a gigot of lamb, perfect little french beans, a mound of potatoes dauphinois, cheeses, fruit, salad stuff, wine and a very tempting iced chocolate cake and a plum tart. Tonight is a joint birthday party for Jane and V, the seventh in the series that began on their official birthdays in early September. I say this quietly, so as not to be overheard, but I sincerely hope it’s the last. We are being joined by a Parisian couple, friends of Jane and David and we’re looking forward to getting a local’s view of time, place and events.

Wedding shot, Notre Dame
Paris

October 1, 2015

Moonrise over Paris from our apt.

Arrived on Tuesday after an uneventful but pleasant flight. At least as pleasant as a 7.5 hour overnight trip can ever be; it’s either 3 hours too short or 3 hours too long. Not long enough to settle in and get some sleep and too long to feel relaxed and rested on arrival.

Café lunch

Had plans for getting my blog posts up in a timely fashion but discovered on arrival that my laptop was unable to boot. I’m guessing that my cat Harry, who tries to help me by engaging himself in my computer activities, and who was once again sitting on the keyboard as we were leaving for the airport, had somehow managed to sit on the correct keys to force the laptop into an emergency shut down while it was installing an update (hindsight?). Not the first time he has done this but in this case, because of the way it had been shut down, I could only boot the laptop in Safe Mode at which point it would freeze. It has taken me two days to re-format the drive and re-install the OS so I’m once again operational but at points I was certain that I would have to replace it, the laptop not the cat!

Demonstration in progress

Weather here is beautiful and Paris looking its autumn best; not a cloud in the sky for the past three days and the air crisp and cool in the shade but warm in the sun. We are in a fabulous apartment on the top two floors of an old building in the 4’th. It’s a very modern reno’d two-storey apt on the 7’th and 8’th floors with 3 large en-suite bedrooms on one floor and a large open plan living room, dining room and kitchen on the floor above, reached by a circular staircase. Fireplace and floor to ceiling windows across one wall in the living/dining area with sliding doors to a balcony that runs the length of the apt and spectacular views across the rooftops of Paris.. We are sharing the apt with Jane & David, our friends from NY; for any of you who’d like a quick trip to Paris, we have lots of room!

Oysters and wine on the sidewalk at our favourite Paris oyster bar, Huitres Regis
Lunar Eclipse

September 28, 2015

We went down to Cherry Beach at about 10:00 last night to watch the lunar eclipse as the moon rose over Lake Ontario. Hundreds of people there and most interesting of all were large numbers of Chinese young people, scattered about in small groups, each group lighting small candles in nylon balloons, and then as the air in the balloons warmed, releasing them to float high in the air as they drifted in the slight breeze. Chinese moon festival meets lunar eclipse. Magical!

Especially so as the sky was covered with clouds so no eclipse visible, but dozens of small, brightly coloured moons drifting through the evening sky.
Off to France

September 27, 2015

Eiffel Tower shot from our last visit

This year is V’s 70’th birthday and a milestone occasion. We have been celebrating more-or-less continually but in a low-key way since the official day at the beginning of September. Tomorrow we are off to France for the final birthday event, a week in Paris and a week in Burgundy.

We will be spending our Paris week in a large apartment we have rented in the 3’rd, a little north of the Marais, an area in which we have no prior experience but we are looking forward to exploring some new territory. We will be joined by David and Jane, our friends from New York, with whom we have shared some adventures in earlier travels to various parts of asia and India. Jane and V have been close friends since their days at Smith and share a happy birthday co-incidence, their birthdays are only a day apart. We have often tried to co-ordinate a celebration but have never yet succeeded but this year it felt important enough to try extra hard to make it work.

We all love Paris and it makes an easy and pleasant location to raise our glasses, eat well and celebrate 70 decades, when compared to the highlands of Burma or Bhutan. So off to Paris tomorrow and very much looking forward to it.

Stay tuned!
Oaxaca Impressions 2

April 13, 2015

Spent our first couple of days wandering the city, and discovering new interesting spots and re-discovering old haunts. Restaurants continue to feature largely for us and we easily slid into a more local routine of lunch at 2:00 and dinner at 8:30. Only one dreadful meal to date, a dinner at supposedly hot restaurant, Zandunga which I would not recommend.

Oaxaca wall and windows

My spanish is very creaky but workable for the simpler moments in life and normally utilitarian enough for restaurant use. Unfortunately the menu items were in spanish and each a paragraph long so it was not a simple matter to try and understand their intricacies and none of the waitstaff had any english, as a result we were flying blind. Not the first time this has happened and we usually pretty relaxed about this since in a good restaurant we’re pretty comfortable with folding our arms and falling backwards, trusting in a good kitchen to catch us before we come to harm. Unfortunately, not in this case. When the food did arrive it was unpleasant and the service even more so. We were served by a short, round, elderly woman, clearly the patroness, who brought our mains before our starters and was not best pleased to be asked to bring our starters first. Our mains were banged onto the table and so we proceeded to eat them, our starters then arrived about 5 minutes later and all the dishes piled up on our table. That would have been annoying but marginally acceptable, a quirky eccentricity of the restaurant, had the food been good but it was unpleasant in the extreme and my starter tasted as if the meat was rancid. Paid our bill and beat a hasty retreat. Zandunga, should you be in the neighbourhood and tempted, give it a miss!

More Oaxaca kites

Drove out to a market about an hour away from Oaxaca, in Tlacolula de Matamoros. A very old market and one of the largest in the region. It covered all the side streets for blocks around the zocalo and the market building and was comprised of hundreds of small stalls set up by vendors who travel from market to market as well as local farmers and producers coming from the countryside to sell their goods. The market is held only on Sundays and was teeming with people when we arrived. We did not have a mission, but as usual we found lots of reasons to buy and came away with incense made from copal which is a local tree whose resin is collected and burned, wonderful aroma; I bought four very beautiful hand-painted bowls made from gourds which will be great for soup; a block of the uniquely flavoured local chocolate; and a ball of Oaxacan string cheese which is produced in strips about the width and thickness of a leather belt and is wound into balls and sold by the ball; these can be anywhere from tennis ball sized up to the size of a small volley ball. Fascinating to watch the vendors take an enormously long strip of cheese and wrap it into a ball of the desired size and then cut the strip of cheese and tuck the end in to produce a perfect sphere.

On our way home we stopped in a rug weaving village, about which more tomorrow, and then on to a restaurant for lunch, at 4pm. Mexico, that’s why I love it. We had been told to go to a particular restaurant, Sopa de Piedras, because of their unique food prep method, and the name of the restaurant says it all. The soup is made by heating baseball-sized granite stones on a very large open hearth until they glow and then dropping them into a soup bowl to cook the dish. The building housing the restaurant is a very large wooden building with a thatched roof lit only by very large fire built on a stone platform in a brick annex which ran along one side of the building. There was barely enough light to read a menu, had one been provided, but the only choices were a bowl of the soup, with either shrimp or fish or a combination of the two. We each chose the combination and watched as water, vegetables and a piece fish and a handful of fresh shrimps were added to each bowl, the bowls being large dried gourds. A red hot stone was then place in each bowl and as you might expect, the bowls bubbled and spat. A wait of 2 or 3 minutes, the stones were scooped out and a second stone was added, the soup now hot and seething and seriously exploding gouts of hot soup on unwary bystanders. Again 2 or 3 minutes later the second stone removed and a final stone was added which caused volcanic eruptions in the liquid and waiting only a minute to calm the troubled waters, the bowls were brought to our table. Surprisingly good with the addition of a squeezed lime but too hot to eat for quite some time. Interesting as a novelty, but not a serious contender for Michelin. Nonetheless it is a traditional cooking method of the tribal group in that area of the state.
Oaxaca Impressions 1

April 10, 2015

Oaxaca is a relatively easy run, 4 1/2 hour direct flight to Mexico City. a rather longer than desirable layover of 5 hours and a 50 minute flight to Oaxaca. First impressions didn’t suggest any wholesale changes to the city and we slid easily back into remembered locations.

Oaxaca floor tile design.

Our B&B, Casa Los Bugambillias is a charming, small house only a couple of blocks from the Zocalo, with three rooms only. Since it was after 8pm when we settled into our hotel we set out to find a spot for dinner and stumbled into a a very attractive restaurant, Cathedral Restaurant, in the central courtyard of an old building not far from the Zocalo and you guessed it, the Cathedral. We were quickly reminded that we were back in Mexico as restaurants were only just opening for dinner and most places were still without diners.

Fabulous dinner, and we kept it on the light side since after a long day of travel we wanted to ease into the local cuisine, metaphorically dipping our toes into the water not to see if it was too cold, but rather to make sure that it was not too hot. V and I only had a starter and soup each but no main dishes and we shared a desert.

I started with scallops aguachile, a dish that I had first come across in Puerta Villarta and had forgotten about; it will not be forgotten again. It is a local version of cevice, and is composed of lime juice and very finely minced fresh serrano chiles, and thinly sliced red onions, in which mixture thinly sliced fresh scallops are briefly marinated. Fabulous!

Oaxaca kites

This was followed by a rich broth filled with just cooked leafy vegetables and slices of fresh queso fresca. V started with a tortilla wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed, rather than the more traditional corn husk wrapping. It was slightly sweet and was garnished with a spoonful of cold fresh thick cream. Her soup was local speciality and was light fish broth with lots of fresh shrimp and sliced avacados. Everything fabulous.

We finished with a small shared loaf of sweet, hot corn bread accompanied by house-made vanilla ice cream which is a toasty brown colour with strong undertones of cinamon and almond barely hidden behind the flavour of locally grown and super-charged vanilla. A glass of smoky mescal to finish and we stumbled happily to bed.
Oaxaca

April 8, 2015

Arrived home on Good Friday from my Scottish photo shoot in time get some laundry done and then re-packed for a 10 day trip to Oaxaca in central Mexico.

I’m still moving very slowly; we hiked up hill and down dale for most of the Scottish location days carrying a tripod and 7 or 8 kilos of equipment as well as a large Pentax medium format camera and at 71 I’m not as spry as I’d like to be. We have lots of time in Oaxaca and are staying at one hotel for the whole time so hope to slow things down a little and move to a more relaxed and unstructured daily itinerary.

We visited Oaxaca on our first trip to Mexico about 15 years ago. A significant percentage of my impressions of Mexico were formed from having read “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowery and while the book was not set in Oaxaca it, like Quauhnahuac the setting of the book, was an old colonial town in the central mountains and which shared much of the cultural context of the book.

I found the book troubling when I read it and it weighed heavily on me. I was frankly a little nervous when we first decided to travel to Oaxaca however, it seemed important to go to the source of the darkness to try and understand it rather than travel to a beach resort which could be located anywhere in the world and which would only be co-incidentally Mexican.

We were immediately charmed by the city and found it bright, interesting and not at all pervaded with the kind of dark colonial and indigenous overtones that I had expected. Virginia keeps reminding me that the world is not constructed like the sub-text of a novel, but as graduate in English Lit, my inclinations were formed at a very early date!

Since that first trip we have returned to Mexico on many occasions, often to Mexico City which we love, as well as to the mountainous, central, colonial cities of the country which continue to attract us. On one occasion we decided to try an oceanside trip, to Porta Villarta, but it was not a success, too humid and full of tourists and so we have continued to travel to the parts of the country, like Oaxaca and Chiapas, that we really enjoy.

This is our first return to Oaxaca after many years and we are very much looking forward to it.
Outer Hebrides shoot

April 2, 2015

Harris, sunset beach

Rest of the week quickly fell into a rhythm of early morning shoots, late breakfasts, boxed lunches on the road, afternoon and sunset shoots, dinner and bed; repeat. The routine was only varied by the weather which in a matter of hours could, and did, ring all the changes on cold, windy, cloudy, sunny, rainy, snowy and back again.

Harris, beach

If this description sounds as if it was not interesting or enjoyable, let me set correct that impression; it was very good fun and very hard work in equal parts and there was terrific sense of accomplishment in completing some of the more challenging shooting assignments. I think that there will be some good shots and I’m looking forward to having the leisure to review all the raw images that are piling up on my traveling hard drive.

We spent a total of 3 days on Skye and 3 on Harris and Lewis and 3 back on the Scottish mainland in the Cairngorm mountains. Very varied but compelling landscapes, reduced to their bare essentials. No trees, rolling heather-covered hills, lowland peat bogs, cliffs, headlands and around every turn a different view of the sea. My only regret is that our time was limited and as part of a small group it was not possible to stop and explore. There were many times when I had to keep my impatience in check as we drove past locations where, had I been on my own, I would have stopped and spent the day exploring. I know that Lewis and Harris will be on our itinerary again and I look forward to V and I exploring them at our leisure.

Lewis rocks and seas

Cairngorms, day of departure, snowstorm

Exploring the Harris tweed shop in Harris I found a series of books by an author previously unknown to me, Peter May, who has written three mysteries set on Lewis which are wonderfully evocative descriptions of the life and culture of the area; can’t recommend them highly enough. Look for the “Lewis Trilogy”, great reads!
Isle of Skye – Day 2

March 24, 2015

Turns out we will have a local photographer, Peter Cairns of NorthShots as our location guide so after loading our two vans with equipment and photogs we headed out for the 4 hour drive along the side of Loch Ness to the Sligachan Hotel on Skye.

Old hotel, built in the 1830’s with a long history as the jumping-off point for climbers of the surrounding Cuillin mountains. It’s a wonderful, isolated spot at the side of Loch Sligachan with the Black Cuillin towering at its back. We will be spending 3 nights here with each day beginning with a sunrise shoot somewhere in the surrounding country, necessitating a 6:30 departure. Back to the hotel for breakfast at 9 and then out again at 2 for late afternoon and sunset shots returning to the hotel at 7:30/8 for drinks and dinner.

Having to get used to Scottish hotel hospitality, radiators on only between 9 and 5 during the day and drafty windows around the clock. However a very nice snug bar with a roaring fireplace and a thick quilt on the bed so all will be bearable.

Days have been cold, strong gusty winds and intermittent rains. On the positive side, very atmospheric and moody skies which work very well with the barren nature of the landscapes.

Today was my birthday, V called from Canada and to my surprise she and my daughter Diana had hidden a number of birthday cards deep in the recesses of my suitcase so it was very nice to share the moment with home.
Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides

March 22, 2015

Have been planning a trip to Scotland, to Skye, Lewis and Harris. Why and how? I discovered Andy Biggs a number of years ago as the founder of Gura Gear, a couple of whose camera bags I bought before our first trip to Africa. I knew that he was a wildlife photographer who specialized in Africa and who had also designed and built camera bags by a photographer for photographers. However after buying, traveling with and loving the bags, Andy fell below my radar. V and I have been beginning to plan a trip to Namibia this fall and during the course of digging around to research the trip Andy’s name kept popping up. I went on his website www.andybiggs.com, loved his photography and discovered that he was organizing a small trip to the Outer Hebrides to shoot b&w landscapes. I signed on without a second thought and here I am.

Left Toronto on Saturday night, flying to Dublin and then a commuter flight to Inverness where we launch off. Group is quite small, 6 of us and Andy and should be great fun. Tomorrow morning, Monday we leave for Skye.

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