Wallflower Dispatches

Leaving Kiev at dawn, the air smelt sweetly. This was the voyage’s last surprise. I had come across this well used phrase in novels, but never inhaled the air that inspired it.
But here in the northwest outskirts of Kiev, the air really did smell sweetly, pure and warm. There were no blossoms in sight and [...]

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It is hard to remember that we are in the People’s Republic of China, the largest communist country in the world.
There are no obvious signs. To all intends and purposes we might actually be in a rather generously sprawling part of Chinatown in New York or Chicago or London.
Fact is, Shanghai is a business town. [...]

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Writers’ rates being what they are, Shanghai’s most relevant shopping spot is Market 580 in 580 Nanjing Xi Street.
Until June 2006, this market was located outdoors in a park which was a maze of stalls, very dirty and quite confusing. It was also one of the biggest markets in China to offer fake designer goods.
Today [...]

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It is common journalistic and literary practice to focus on a detail to explain the larger picture. Six years ago this was perfectly summed up in Shanghai’s Yu Gardens in the old city, which is dominated by a large flying eave wooden Chinese structure, a live Huang Gongwang painting set in 2004.
The small Starbucks Coffee [...]

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Next week I will be in Shanghai for about nine days. Be ready for some Charming Mountain Goat observations and WD Interviews – jet lag permitting.
Do not expect shiny new photos of the latest Shanghai skyline – more recycled charming shots in black and white have already been sourced and scaled to size.

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The first love for an object – Nutella-soaked breakfast crackers, Glenn Gould and his variations on Goldberg, before Florence in May, even before the nimble feet of Fred Astaire – the love that came before all others was England, and more specifically: London.
Like all other first adolescent emotional attachments this love was abstract, idealistic, unconditional, [...]

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If it is May, if it is Cannes, if while queuing up for a coffee you bump (literally) into Angelica Huston, if there is a police escort riding through the busy rush hour streets to the nearby private Cannes-Mandelieu airport, then it must be the Festival de Cannes!
This is the time when the orthodontist’s secretary [...]

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Florence is exceedingly beautiful. You arrive and its full force elegance knocks you out. You stare with gaping eyes, mouth open and wander around the streets disoriented. Florence is exceedingly beautiful!
It used to be more separate, tourists passing through, tolerated as a necessary audience. The Florentines would not bother communicating with you in any other [...]

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On being German, Part I
It will be twenty years this November that the Berlin Wall came down in what is called here the “peaceful revolution”. Naturally, Berlin is remembering the event, but compared to recent public parties such as the 2006 Football World Cup, it is still all rather low key.
A permanent information box in [...]

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