there's no place like home! this time for real!

I took some days off and flew back to Germany in order to visit my parents. I took my niece with me, who happens to be a black metal  fan14 year old teenager girl. I used to be a metal-head myself so I thought we would have some common ground to talk about. Boy was I wrong! I never heard any of the bands she was listening too and most of the times I had no clue what she was talking about. One time she tried to explain me the bands she liked, folk-metal she called it. Folk-metal?? really? there is a category called folk-metal? When did that happen???

When I started to name-drop all the cool bands like Tesla, White Lion, Skid Row, Buckcherry, Motley Crue all I received was empty, blank stares! Damn you Nirvana, for ruining a whole generation of brilliant music!!

I guess, generation gap caught hold of me. However, the flight itself was not so complicated. She had mostly her headphones on and was listening to some brutal guitar riffs while I tried to read my book.
Since my trip was not only for pleasure I had to drop off my niece at my parent's flat and go from there to various most interesting cities in Germany. But first of all, we went straight from the airport to my beatiful home town Unkel am Rhein. I'm proud to say that I was born there. It is one of the most beautiful towns along the river Rhine. And a very old one as well  with friendly people. It has a historical city center with traditional vineyards. There isn't much industry around except for some small factories in the neighbour-village so people concentrated on small art shops and wine-making here. Unkel is located right next to the river Rhine, 20 km south of Bonn. Very peaceful. If you ever get the chance to fly to Cologne don't hesitate to visit Unkel, you won't be disappointed. There are many things to see and to enjoy, so you will need time. There are one or two guesthouses and a nice hotel 'Rheinhotel Schulz' if you want to stay overnight. Also you won't go hungry there as there are splendid restaurants.

We even have a prision tower from the 17th century where allegedly Beethoven was incarcerated one night, however that could also be an urban legend to attract tourists. Anyways, I am going to listen to some good old rock music now and try to forget about folk-metal and the very fact that I'm getting old :-(

How time passes by...

There's no place like home...! Yeah, right!

I was going to write you about my trip to Rotterdam, Netherlands but since I didn't make it there this month I decided to make a change and write you something about the city I live in: ISTANBUL. I assume for all the tourists who come to visit this exotic city it must be exciting to see the Istanbulian in their day-to-day grind. However, for all us residents this son of a bitch of a city is a pain in the ass. Solitude is the biggest luxury in this city as there are currently 14 mio. people living on top of each other and hey that is the official nose count. I am pretty sure that the census takers do not go to every house in every district of this juggernaut city. And then you have the traffic! Sometimes I'm downright begging my wife that she hits me something hard, while I'm stuggling to get from point A to point B with our car in 2 hours, so I could be released from this hell. By the way, in most cases the distance between them points would be like 10 or 20 kilometers so any sane person would get mad here. This also explains the huge number of psychopaths in this city. Blessfully it is not that easy to obtain guns here as it is in the States, so the number of people killing each other through gun-violence in traffic is low. Interestingly though that most psychopaths here prefer to practice a certain profession. As if there is mutual understanding between psychopaths in this city almost all of them get to become taxi or bus drivers! So Turkey has a huge number of roadkill-victims. I'm telling ya: They are all mad, mad, mad!
And there is the government and their ridiculously high taxes. You even have to pay taxes for breathing dammit! Ok, I'm exageratting a bit but this is how the Istanbulian feel. But then again, this dumb shit of people get to vote every 4 years and who do they vote for? For the same fucking mayor! Anyways,
naturally as a resident doing your daily routine of job-home and home-job you only get a chance to enjoy this mega-village weekends. But guess what? there are 14 million lunatics who think the same way.
So what is left to talk about? I am not going to tell you about the typical sightseeing-shit like the Topkapi Palace with its spoonmakers diamond and the harem-debauchery or the mighty hagia sophia and its counterpart the blue mosque. I would like to tell you about the more interesting aspects of Istanbul, when it was indeed a metropole where different nationalities encounter and had cultural interchanges. Those encounters reflected itself in many forms. I, for my part, am interested in the encounter that comes through architecture. When you cross the Haliç-bridge with all its fishermen you arrive at Karaköy and to your right-hand side you will see the beautiful 'Karaköy-Palace' that was designed by the levantine architect Guilio Mongeri. As part of the levantine minority he was born in the Ottoman Empire in 1873 but died in Italy in 1953. He left his architectural heritance in different cities in Turkey but I am very fond of this building.

Of course there are buildings more beautiful than this one but I like the facade and how you can see the influences of different cultures in his design. That period was indeed culturally very rich. You had Levantine, Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Jewish people living side by side. But as all good things come to end this era ended in the 50s when Turkey's nationalists movement made a hunt for all non-turkish and the good people had to flee so Istanbul can take in the east-anatolian invasion. Before there were operas and theaters but now we have kebap and döner shops. Makes you feel sad when you walk the Istiklal street and see the remains of the cultural heritance of an Ottoman empire that gave home to so many minorities.

Another favourite building of mine is in Eminönü and it's easy to oversee it since it is hidden in side-alleys but it is worth to look for it. This art-nouveau building was designed by german architect August Jachmund, who also contributed to various masterpieces such as the Sirkeci train station, which stylistically seen is a mess but still quite a sight. However the Deutsche Orient Bank speaks for itself. When you see the building among other oriental constructions you get the feeling that it is completely out of place since it has an appearance that rather belongs to Paris or Vienna or some city in Italy. August Jachmund was commissioned by Sultan Abdulhamid II to build the main train station that would welcome European travellers to the capital of the Ottoman Empire. With this task at hand he had to do something to impress the Sultan and designed this piece that is oriental to such an extent that it is already perverted. I do not know whether the Sultan liked it but it still stands to this day.
Anyways, later when he received the order to create something for the German Bank he let the creative european juices flow and designed this art-nouveau beauty. Sadly this building is no longer in use and stands empty.

(Deutsche Orient Bank)

Enjoy the pictures and maybe next time I come up with something more interesting from Istanbul.

It's a rainy day in Belgrade too!!

Last month when I was in Paris I was bitching about the weather and when I went to Belgrade three weeks ago I couldn't believe how beautiful the weather was. I arrived on a Sunday morning and the weather was brilliant: Sunshine and degrees over 25° Celsius. What else can you ask for? But wait, my meteorological happyness lasted only one day! The very next day, I was going to particiapte at the exhibition so I had to get up early. But I could not believe my eyes when I looked out of the hotel window: dark grey clouds with tons of rain splashing against my window. What the fuck had happened? Maybe it is just a cloud I thought. It can't be that one day I was gaping after beautiful serbian girls in mini skirts and the next day I was drowning in the flood of the century?? That was some crazy Balkan weather.

I have to say, I stayed the whole week in Belgrade and it was like this every single day.  I had a room at hotel Life Design, which is in the heart of the city. It is a nice hotel with nicely-decorated, clean rooms. Very recommendable. Right next door was a strip club but unfortunately I didn't go in since I heard only bad stories about such places where they rip you off prettttty gooooood!! But judging from the girls that you see on the streets you can say that serbian girls are indeed really pretty.
Anyways, back to the subject: Flood of the century.
Each time we left the hotel me and my colleague got soaking wet. Nice thing about the hotel was that it had a spa area where guests of the hotel could enjoy different varieties of sauna and a jakuzzi pool.
But boy the weather was depressing. Belgrade is boring as far as sightseeing goes. They have a nice castle and were heavily influenced by the Ottoman. Turks left their mark everywhere. One guy made a joke about it. He told me:
-hey once we were all blond and blue eyed like the Slovenians but after the Turks fucking our nannies for 400 years..look at us..we look like Anatolian shepards!
Well, what could I say? the man had a point. Hmm..although, I'm fair haired, fair skinned, my mom and granny were blond with blue eyes..what does that say about me?
Ok, let us not wake sleeping dogs and let's move to the next important subject of this blog: Food! Serbian food is very meat-oriented but also quite delicious. We went to a fine restaurant at Kale Megdan, where you had a beautiful view over the Danube river, There were 3 gorgeous looking ladies playing classical music. I had a beef soup, which was awesome and a steak. Traditional serbian food includes specialties such as cevapcici or pecenje etc.
The food itself is pretty close to what we eat in Turkey, even the names are similar; however, without the pork stuff of course.

(me looking bored at the exhibition!!)

So, as far as sightseeing goes, not much to see in Belgrade but I have been told that the night-life is one of the best in Europe and that the people know how to party. Everybody was friendly and I did not experience anything bad about this place. Most of them spoke good English. I'd say it's worth a visit!

It's a rainy day in Paris!

1st of May me and my wife took a weekend-trip to Paris in order to refresh things and take a break from the grind that we are slaving away on a daily basis. We left our baby-daugther at home with her aunts and nanny and took Transavia-airlines to Paris-Orly airport. First time that I flew with Transavia, they are you know one of the cheaper options when you want to fly to Paris. Turkish Airlines and the other corporate bitches were way tooo expensive, delivering a shitty service and ripping the people off of their hard-earned cash with ultra-expensive tickets but hey the lounge in Istanbul is great but always overcrowded! Anyways, that being sad I didn't know much about Transavia. And I don't have anything to complain about them other than they changed the flight time but informing me on time with mail and sms. The plane itself was nice with enough room for your legs and the staff was friendly. You can buy some sandwich or coke on board and prices are expensive of course. This was my second time in Paris and I knew how pricey them french fries can be. Especially when you take a taxi you might as well bring your salary-check with you. So I ordered a taxi with we-cab, which was reasonably priced compared to a normal taxi. You can make your reservation online and you share your cab with others. You receive a text message on your mobile phone informing you what gate they are going to pick you up and what time. Worked quite well.

I had made a reservation at the Hotel Auteil Tour Eiffel, which is a 4 star hotel near the famous Eiffel tower. It is basically a 10 minutes walk away and the room was nice, clean and big enough. In Paris you mostly face the problem that hotel rooms are tiny and expensive but we paid 240 EUR for two nights which is okay I guess. So, everthing looked perfect for this stay but of course, there was one factor that ruined the first day. It was raining cats and dogs when we arrived. But we didn't mind. Determined to make the most of our stay we put on our coats and went to see the Eiffel tour thinking that we would be the only ones strolling under the rain. When we arrived at the Eiffel tower the place was packed. There was a cue so long that we'd wait at least an hour to get an entrance ticket. So we cued up starting waiting when the sign said 'upper level is closed due to fucking tourists who climbed the effin tower on a rainy day. Well that wasn"t exactly what it said but it was what I thought. So we decided to come back the next morning. We were determined to make that climb. Next day we woke up, had our breakfast near a cafe and at 09.30 in the morning we arrived at the tower just to see that there were more people waiting in cue than yesterday. What the fuck? So, we just said screw the Eiffel tower. We went to the parks, to the Louvre (where the cue was like a mile long and we didn"t get to see the freaking Mona Lisa), we took a ride with the tourist-buses and it was nice. Paris is a beautiful city but also an expensive one. We had some fine dinner in a small restaurant, drank too much wine, tasted the delicious cheese. So was it expensive for a 2-day trip? yes, of course since you`re not getting away without going on a shopping spree at the Champs-Elysees but it was worth it and I´m glad we did it.