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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Nagorno Karabakh: the land that doesn’t exıst

In the unlikely event you don’t share my passionate interest in small wars, in forgotten corners of the world, your response to the name Nagorno Karabakh may well be, “where”?  So let me fill you in.  Back in 1998 in the heady days of the downfall of the USSR the mostly Armenian population of this neighbouring region of Azerbaijan reopened their long simmering claim for independence, which kicked off with peaceful protests in the capital Stepanakert.  As you can imagine…

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Armenia: too much history

History is everything in Armenia, particularly its Christian heritage. In fact to question someone’s religion can be seen as questioning their very Armenian character. Given that it became the world’s first Christian state in 301 AD (followed in the next few decades by Georgia and Ethiopia) one could hardly blame them for thinking otherwise. Decades of atheist communism made not the slightest dent in their belief. So it comes as no surprise that the landscape is dotted with ancient monasteries…

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Soul of the city: Yerevan, Armenia

Yerevan is nice. Thus Armenia’s capital city is dammed by faint praise. It’s difficult to find fault in the immaculately clean streets and plentiful parks and trees that any city need to smooth its harsh edges. Its stylish residents enjoying their espressos  would not appear out of place in southern Europe. So whats the problem? A look at the night-time celebrations for the city’s 2795th birthday may give a clue. Such a ripe old age for a city is indeed…

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Azerbaijan: the darker side

If there was ever a total give away that you were in a dictatorship, it’s the profusion of huge images of one man around every town. If it’s a woman, it’s not a dictatorship. The twist here is that the images are of Heydar Aliyev, the deceased father of current president Ilham, as if his divine grace bestows legitimacy to the son. Although neither of them are up to Saddam Hussein’s standards you can be sure that none of those…

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