Feelings from Journeys |
Here are links to some of my travels albums: Need for escaping or pleasure of making discoveries, I don't know what
pushes me to travel the world rather than to consult it on Internet or watch it
on television. For me, nothing replaces the feeling felt on the spot. More than landscapes, cities hold my attention, immediately
and forever pictured in my mind. Each one has its odor - hot wind and grasses
in Provence, the stagnating water in Venice, odor of Coal in Cracow, heady
perfumes in Tashkent -, each one its din or its murmurs, palavers, each one
its sky - so short sky of Manhattan, truncated by human buildings -, each one
the taste of its food, women, profiles, dream of its foundation. |
I love the North Sea. I wish I were born over there,
in this country under the sea, scratched by the wind and the channels, hidden
between dunes and paths of rain. |
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Venice, with its astounding light-obscure, its architecture
of laces and its channels - faint or sometimes dead- remains the privileged
destination of artists, writers and photographers avid to lose themselves in
search of inspiration. |
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Andalusia, eternal witness of Reconquista: insane battles
of Cid, Isabelle and Carlos Quinto. Now still, like each year, fighting
against these storms of German and Belgian tourists. |
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I like ruins. They very often look to me hanged in the
sky like these walls of Cnossos, more linked to my memory than to our
ancestors' life. I enjoy dreaming on ghosts moving in these destroyed
palaces, to see them building day after day, through their insipid daily
life, the brilliant civilizations |
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Samarkand, as a silk wire that one unrolls under the
blazing sun of History, spreads out its mausoleums, medersis and mosques. It is
a station hall for History and people from Asia: Muslims, Russians and Mongolians
await a train called Marco Polo or Tamerlan that will never come. |
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Crossroads for the people, as hidden from the world
but containing it all, Picadilly Circus raises up its crowd like a museum its
treasures. A moment is enough -without rainstorm - to make the whole planet
having an appointment here. |
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Walking in Franz Kafka's steps, Prague is a stage where
sometimes are played Middle Ages farces, baroque tragedies or some dark revolt
during the famous Spring against the grey Stalinist era. |
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Beachhead for the magic East, imperial Istanbul, placid
witness of so many civilisations, shines like too many fireworks in my memory:
the song of the muezzin in the morning, the souks and the mosques queuing
like a tale without end... the blows of canon when comes the Ramadan evening
and the noisy nights like wedding's suppers... Immortal Istanbul… so is life. |
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Riviera, ground of rest. Actually, I do believe that
Mediterranean sea itself, this Mediterranean sea, root of our civilization,
lies there on holiday. |