We are now very close indeed to final agreement on the small Galata flat. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but it is the sensible choice and hopefully we will rent it out most of the time anyway instead of having to live in it. Two of our visitors – the ones staying in […]
Nearly two months later
It’s nearly two months after the Beirut explosion. This blog has not reflected how much it’s been on my mind. The horror of what happened, in a long line of terrible events, is very persistent. Partly because I did fall in love, or at least in fascination, with Lebanon when we stayed there, and to […]
Oh no
Distressingly, the flat the GF and I most wanted to see – the owners have disappeared. No longer on the market? Hard to say, but there is another similar flat in the same building with a higher list price, which is making me wonder if the owners are quietly disentangling from the dealer we have […]
Another market
Yesterday we realised that, for all our efforts, we were getting low on fruit, so at lunchtime we went to the Sunday market near the flat. A very different experience indeed from the previous day’s organic market. This was set up along a street, with stall after stall overflowing with produce and interspersed with stalls […]
Submarining
A small nod to yesterday as I found an attractive squid, waved it at the GF and brought it home for dinner (to eat, not to host). Also had an extended moment of work-related panic as I had to give a quote for a project and, as usual found myself virtually incapable of calculating how […]
Day aquatic
There was an aquatic theme to today, as we went for lunch to renowned old seafood place (founded in 1940, so before the white army retreat into Taiwan) where we had the set menu for two. It began with mullet roe and squid, a crab soup and shrimp rolls, the centrepiece was mud crab on […]
Life change plan
I’ve decided, once again, to become a little more organised, a little less scattered, less prone to feeling at the end of a day that it has been a wasted day and I’m that much closer to death with little to show for it. In particular, I tend to put work above anything else, and […]
Week of silence
No particular reason – I had plenty of time, plenty of interesting things happened, wasn’t feeling particularly loathe to engage with the world (at least after I decided to stop reading MetaTalk), I just… didn’t. We have finally made our plans for our next destination in August. East and SE Asia are not really opening […]
Back to Beitou
Today’s Chinese lesson went better than Monday’s, when both the GF and I felt rather stupid and beaten down. It made me very thankful that I was always quite good at school, as it was a taster of how deadly it is to be made to feel like an idiot and given no time or […]
Black rocks
This article made me a little teary. Last night was the first meeting of the board of a publication I am involved in. It’s a semi-academic publication and all the others involved are academics of one sort or another. A pleasant bunch, but it definitely ran on university time and the meeting extended for 90 […]