2013 - Insideotherplaces

2013

Liberia, the land of signs

I’d hesitate to recommend a decent, well publicized war as a development policy but ten years of aid after the country’s horrors have seen improvements due to foreign agencies which would never have occurred otherwise. Few indications of the war remain, only the occasional abandoned ruin, some graced with the pockmarks of bullets and shrapnel, forlornly waiting for their former owner to return, in the slim hope they may still be alive. If there is one thing aid agencies love…

The worst hotel in Guinea

The initial signs were not good: as the manager led me in to the hotel he didn’t feel it necessary to comment on the unconscious figure sprawled in the lobby. Checking to see if the first room was available we obviously disrupted a prostitute and her client, judging by the noises coming from within but the next room with a dusty motorcycle parked outside in the corridor was deemed suitable. I was welcomed by the death throes of cockroach in…

Soul of the city: Conakry, Guinea

If you were to judge a city by its outskirts you would have turned round a long time before getting even half way into Conakry and called in a tactical nuclear strike. Lurching at crawling speed over the 4×4 test track, which is the main road into the city, along with far too many road users than it was designed for, you are surrounded by the clanking of improvised industry amongst clouds of dust and smouldering heaps of plastic and…

Guinea

It has taken much time and effort to find just the right words to encapsulate the true essence of this country and after much consultation of dictionaries and thesauri, contemplating adjectival comparisons and literary metaphor I believe I have captured concisely the quintessential Guinea: absolutely fucked. For a nation that hasn’t suffered war it suffers a level of decrepitude rarely matched in African nations. If you have not had the opportunity to become a connoisseur of relative levels of fuckedupness (this is my opening bid…

Dear Allah

Dear Allah I am very sorry but I may have inadvertently insulted your great religion. Please allow me to explain. I know being omniscient you already know this but I would just feel a bit better about it if I put it into words, if you don’t mind. Ever since George Bush decided that Islam was a bad thing I have sought to better understand your religion, after all I wasn’t going to take that dimwit’s word for it was…

Bamako: inside the entertainment industry

With Mali’s musical reputation having spread far and wide you could be forgiven for thinking that this might be reflected in the night clubs of its capital Bamako. The reality is however at the opposite end of the spectrum to that presented in the comfortable confines of the European world music media. Purely in the interests of research, naturally, I embarked upon a few nights of club crawling with some fellow English speakers. With free entry and taxis at a…

How the other half live

Let me take you away from the headline grabbing suffering in Africa and go down to the simple realities of everyday existence, to my friend Mamadou’s home: a one room mud brick shack with a corrugated iron roof, in a small town a few km outside the capital of Burkina Faso – Ouagadougou. Apart from a lucky few who could afford concrete blocks, all houses are built like this, so every rainy season brings some new collapses. Here, where I…

Trabzon shows Yerevan how to rock the party

I wouldn’t normally have considered a post about Turkey as its somewhere you are probably reasonably familiar with, but it provided a suitable contrast to the atmosphere of city life I experienced in the neighbouring Caucasus. The instant I stepped off the bus in the port city of Trabzon on a Sunday afternoon it was obvious that it had a vitality which was missing throughout the Caucasus. Just the simple heart beat of everyday life hummed with an enthusiasm and…

Some quirks of the service industry in the Caucasus

When confronted by a hostel manager reluctant to discuss the price of a room but insisting on serving up tea with bread and jam, you tend to be suspicious as this is quite possibly a prelude to charging an extortionate rate, having made it awkward to walk away after such hospitality. This was the case in Zugdidi, Georgia, but was followed by the insistence that the room was, “no good”. Could this be some reverse psychology tactic to make me…

An Armenian cemetery, Gyumri

Near the epicentre of a devastating earthquake in 1988 Gyumri is a town that at first glance appears to have recovered fairly well: most buildings have been rebuilt, very few are still abandoned and some display minor damage, which if you didn’t know the history you could have put down to neglect. The graveyard, however told a different story. With a profusion of stones, monuments and graves packed tightly together, in what was hardly a small area, it obliged visitors…

Year: 2013

Liberia, the land of signs

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The worst hotel in Guinea

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Soul of the city: Conakry, Guinea

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Guinea

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Dear Allah

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Bamako: inside the entertainment industry

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How the other half live

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Trabzon shows Yerevan how to rock the party

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Some quirks of the service industry in the Caucasus

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An Armenian cemetery, Gyumri

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