From the windows left ajar, one can hear guns firing, mortars exploding. The frontline is just 300 meters away. The children don’t flinch; by now they are used to this. On the contrary, they enjoy recognizing and imitating the sounds of the weapons. The kalashnikov, the mortar, the dushka, the rpg, the antiaircraft artillery, the Mig, the Grad. As if it were all a game, some sort of “Old Mac Donald had a farm” in time of war. Italian journalist Gabriele Del Grande visits a clandestine classroom for his dispatch The Illusions of Aleppo, now on Roads & Kingdoms.
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From the windows left ajar, one can hear guns firing, mortars exploding. The frontline is just 300 meters away. The children don’t flinch; by now they are used to this. On the contrary, they enjoy recognizing and imitating the sounds of the weapons. The kalashnikov, the mortar, the dushka, the rpg, the antiaircraft artillery, the Mig, the Grad. As if it were all a game, some sort of “Old Mac Donald had a farm” in time of war.

Italian journalist Gabriele Del Grande visits a clandestine classroom for his dispatch The Illusions of Aleppo, now on Roads & Kingdoms.

Damascus has long told itself that it is where all journeys, all religions and all civilizations begin and end. We who live there now also know that Damascus will be where the final battle for control of Syria will be fought. Rebel forces are gathered just a few kilometers from the stone walls of the Old City, and inside the walls for almost a year now we have lived with the terrifying sounds of war, the scream of fighter jets, gun battles raging and shells flying overhead. War on our doorstep. For me the only journeys I ever take these days are around the souks and alleyways of my neighborhood. On these walks I am not only trying to get a sense of the situation, but also a bit of the reassurance that comes from seeing the market busy with shoppers and children heading off to school. I drop in on friends and get updates on the crisis. Often it’s only gossip and rumor, but there are few other reliable sources of information. I check to see what food is in the market and at what price, as there have been days when fresh food and bread have been scarce. Those are the things on my mind as I slam the heavy metal door of my house and head out into the warren of passageways tucked in a corner of the Old City between the ancient gates of Bab Touma and Bab Salam. John Wreford goes shopping for bread and cheese and olives in his adopted hometown Damascus, Syria.
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Damascus has long told itself that it is where all journeys, all religions and all civilizations begin and end. We who live there now also know that Damascus will be where the final battle for control of Syria will be fought.

Rebel forces are gathered just a few kilometers from the stone walls of the Old City, and inside the walls for almost a year now we have lived with the terrifying sounds of war, the scream of fighter jets, gun battles raging and shells flying overhead. War on our doorstep.

For me the only journeys I ever take these days are around the souks and alleyways of my neighborhood. On these walks I am not only trying to get a sense of the situation, but also a bit of the reassurance that comes from seeing the market busy with shoppers and children heading off to school. I drop in on friends and get updates on the crisis. Often it’s only gossip and rumor, but there are few other reliable sources of information. I check to see what food is in the market and at what price, as there have been days when fresh food and bread have been scarce. Those are the things on my mind as I slam the heavy metal door of my house and head out into the warren of passageways tucked in a corner of the Old City between the ancient gates of Bab Touma and Bab Salam.

John Wreford goes shopping for bread and cheese and olives in his adopted hometown Damascus, Syria.

Dish #4 of 11 from the Year in Food Adjika Central market, Sukhum, Abkhazia Oliver Bullough, one of the great chroniclers of the Caucasus, set off our fiercest food fight of the year when he offered up his ode to adjika, a chili-garlic sauce claimed by both Georgia and Abkhazia, contentious neighbors with a deep, patriotic love for this fiery condiment. After angry commenters cried foul, Bullough trekked across the border to try the Georgian version of adjika in a follow-up report, but it was his time in Abkhazia, including a condiment-heavy conversation with President Alexander Ankvab, that won us over. The market was a chaotic noisy place full of vegetables and bread and furniture and clothes and hustlers. I smiled at the thought of Chirikba, careful and precise in his beautiful suit, walking through here. But he was right: everyone knew Seda, who was pleasingly nonchalant about having her produce recommended by the country’s top foreign policy official. “Of course, mine is the best,” she said, pulling out a jar from under a counter covered in vegetables. “It is the purest so it is the best.” She opened the jar and offered me a spoonful to try. More coriander in this one, I thought, as I waited for the garlic and chilli explosion at the back of my mouth. And something else in there too: dill seeds? Cumin? It was indeed wonderful. She just smiled at my questions though: “I will not tell anyone anything about what’s in here”. A bald man, 40 years old or so, was listening to our conversation and chipped in to support Seda’s boast. When he heard I was writing about the national sauce, he insisted on his viewpoint being recorded as well. “Write that Adjika is Abkhaz, not Georgian. They say it is theirs, but they lie. They always lie,” he said, before stumping off, a string bag of vegetables in each hand. The Georgians, of course, have their own thoughts on this. But since the word Adjika comes from the Abkhaz word for salt, I am a believer in Abkhaz claims to the invention of it. Seda dipped the jar in spices to seal it, screwed on the lid, and handed it over. “Everyone knows me,” she said. “Seda, Seda, Seda, in America, in Israel, auntie Seda, they call me. Auntie Seda.com for adjika. Ha!” There is, alas, no website. I checked. With the jar safe in my bag, plus one from her blonde neighbour too, I headed off to see President Alexander Ankvab. We did cover the issues I wanted to discuss—American opposition to Abkhazian independence, Russian support, the return of Georgian refugees. But it was perhaps inevitable we would spend some of our time talking about a particular spicy condiment. “Adjika is number one,” he said with finality, when I asked him to rank it in the world top 10 of sauces. “I can remember, when I was a schoolboy, when we went to the village, the old women would grind the adjika on a stone like this.” I looked on in amazement. I had somehow provoked the president of a war-torn semi-recognised country into miming the action of grinding spices on a stone. He had a glint in his eye too. “There were so many herbs in it, starting with garlic and ending God knows where, but the taste was heavenly. The most tasty kind was done like this, with a stone.”
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Dish #4 of 11 from the Year in Food

Adjika
Central market, Sukhum, Abkhazia

Oliver Bullough, one of the great chroniclers of the Caucasus, set off our fiercest food fight of the year when he offered up his ode to adjika, a chili-garlic sauce claimed by both Georgia and Abkhazia, contentious neighbors with a deep, patriotic love for this fiery condiment. After angry commenters cried foul, Bullough trekked across the border to try the Georgian version of adjika in a follow-up report, but it was his time in Abkhazia, including a condiment-heavy conversation with President Alexander Ankvab, that won us over.

The market was a chaotic noisy place full of vegetables and bread and furniture and clothes and hustlers. I smiled at the thought of Chirikba, careful and precise in his beautiful suit, walking through here.

But he was right: everyone knew Seda, who was pleasingly nonchalant about having her produce recommended by the country’s top foreign policy official.

“Of course, mine is the best,” she said, pulling out a jar from under a counter covered in vegetables. “It is the purest so it is the best.”

She opened the jar and offered me a spoonful to try. More coriander in this one, I thought, as I waited for the garlic and chilli explosion at the back of my mouth. And something else in there too: dill seeds? Cumin? It was indeed wonderful.

She just smiled at my questions though: “I will not tell anyone anything about what’s in here”.

A bald man, 40 years old or so, was listening to our conversation and chipped in to support Seda’s boast. When he heard I was writing about the national sauce, he insisted on his viewpoint being recorded as well.

“Write that Adjika is Abkhaz, not Georgian. They say it is theirs, but they lie. They always lie,” he said, before stumping off, a string bag of vegetables in each hand.

The Georgians, of course, have their own thoughts on this. But since the word Adjika comes from the Abkhaz word for salt, I am a believer in Abkhaz claims to the invention of it.

Seda dipped the jar in spices to seal it, screwed on the lid, and handed it over.

“Everyone knows me,” she said. “Seda, Seda, Seda, in America, in Israel, auntie Seda, they call me. Auntie Seda.com for adjika. Ha!”

There is, alas, no website. I checked.

With the jar safe in my bag, plus one from her blonde neighbour too, I headed off to see President Alexander Ankvab. We did cover the issues I wanted to discuss—American opposition to Abkhazian independence, Russian support, the return of Georgian refugees. But it was perhaps inevitable we would spend some of our time talking about a particular spicy condiment.

“Adjika is number one,” he said with finality, when I asked him to rank it in the world top 10 of sauces. “I can remember, when I was a schoolboy, when we went to the village, the old women would grind the adjika on a stone like this.”

I looked on in amazement. I had somehow provoked the president of a war-torn semi-recognised country into miming the action of grinding spices on a stone. He had a glint in his eye too.

“There were so many herbs in it, starting with garlic and ending God knows where, but the taste was heavenly. The most tasty kind was done like this, with a stone.”

Source: roadsandkingdoms.com

The Middle East smolders, China gathers like a storm, and there are precious few countries that appreciate America’s moral guidance on any topic. That’s why Obama can’t afford to make these mistakes on Burma. Obama in Burma: Why it’s a Bad Idea. A special report from the Kachin War zone, on Roads and Kingdoms today.
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The Middle East smolders, China gathers like a storm, and there are precious few countries that appreciate America’s moral guidance on any topic. That’s why Obama can’t afford to make these mistakes on Burma.

Obama in Burma: Why it’s a Bad Idea. A special report from the Kachin War zone, on Roads and Kingdoms today.

Source:

Moving Day: Inevitably when you travel, no matter how far you go or how different the people, your mind looks for parallels between your life and theirs. It’s not narcissistic, I don’t think, nor does it have to be naive. Sure, it can seem that way sometimes, especially when traveling from the first world to the third, because really, what in my life experience can match up with the experience of this man? He’s a Kachin refugee cooking breakfast in front of the outhouses at the Saint Paul refugee camp in Myitkyina. I live in an apartment where, like many in New York, the toilet and kitchen occupy very clearly defined and well separated spaces. He’s smoking cheap green tobacco—I’ve smoked some lousy leaf in my day, but I’ve also been able to smoke Cohibas with the Cuban Foreign Minister; Marlboros with the greatest photographers on earth; and purple, purple weed with some of the finest and stoniest Californians ever made. I could go into more differences. Only one of us speaks the Kachin language, and only one of us wears skirts. But for some reason I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and was feeling like this guy looks. The reason? I’m moving. I would phrase that, “I’m moving, too.” But this guy’s move was really quite different. He was chased out of the hills with his family in front of the advancing Myanmar army. I am moving nine blocks away to a new apartment in the same neighborhood, in part because my kid is allergic to something in our current place, in part to save money. In simpler terms: it’s a whole hell of a lot less coercive than what the Kachin people have been going through. Yet, here I am, looking at the five dishes and one pot that are left unboxed and which we’ll be cooking and eating with over the next three days or so, and thinking about the refugee camp. Stupid, right? Maybe not. Not to get to get too far into Lacanian gaze theory, but suffice to say that some theorists think that looking at something, or someone, actually changes whatever or whomever is being looked at. In the context of what we do, I think it means that tourism changes that which is being touristed (nearly over-run Laos would be a hell of an contemporary example of that). Also, it must mean that reporting changes the lives of the reported. So this guy and I, we made eye contact, shared a couple minutes of silence, said a few words unintelligible to the other, and that was all it took. He’s in my camera, but also in my head, and I’m seeing a couple new angles in life through him and his cigar, and his big boiling pot of outhouse grits he’s so at peace with. And undoubtedly for him and all the other Kachin at the camp, we must have been a presence not soon forgotten. Large, pale, doughy (or, in the intern’s case, violently ill), attached to cameras, with big relentless smiles. Their war will be over eventually. They will return to their villages, and then have to figure out how to live the rest of their lives, in an area that, as Thant Myint-U points out, is soon to be crowded with jostling superpowers. Maybe something they saw in their strange visitors will stick with them, can offer them some new belief about their own predicament. A refugee has bigger things to worry about than what lessons they can fashion out of their encounter with bule? Perhaps. But these dudes also have a TON of time on their hands. No crops any more, just a few bricks to fire and baskets to weave; life in the camp is tedium. So I don’t think it’s narcissism to imagine their thoughts turning to young Zach or myself. The real egotist among travelers is the kind that thinks he just comes and watches people like animals in the zoo, that the people he visits don’t see him every bit as much as they are being seen. This is the reciprocity of change, whether for good or bad. Travel means being changed, and changing others. That’s why I’m trying not to let my sedentary soul be traumatized by this process of moving, of packing everything in boxes, convincing a five-year-old that the next place will also feel like home. I know the good about going to a new apartment: it requires movement, a little transformation, a bit of acceptance, and that’s all I can wish for in 2012. More roads, more kingdoms, more movida. Happy New Year. Back at you big first thing in 2012. —NT [photo credit: Nathan Thornburgh / Roads and Kingdoms]
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Moving Day: Inevitably when you travel, no matter how far you go or how different the people, your mind looks for parallels between your life and theirs. It’s not narcissistic, I don’t think, nor does it have to be naive. Sure, it can seem that way sometimes, especially when traveling from the first world to the third, because really, what in my life experience can match up with the experience of this man?

He’s a Kachin refugee cooking breakfast in front of the outhouses at the Saint Paul refugee camp in Myitkyina. I live in an apartment where, like many in New York, the toilet and kitchen occupy very clearly defined and well separated spaces. He’s smoking cheap green tobacco—I’ve smoked some lousy leaf in my day, but I’ve also been able to smoke Cohibas with the Cuban Foreign Minister; Marlboros with the greatest photographers on earth; and purple, purple weed with some of the finest and stoniest Californians ever made.

I could go into more differences. Only one of us speaks the Kachin language, and only one of us wears skirts.

But for some reason I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and was feeling like this guy looks. The reason? I’m moving.

I would phrase that, “I’m moving, too.” But this guy’s move was really quite different. He was chased out of the hills with his family in front of the advancing Myanmar army. I am moving nine blocks away to a new apartment in the same neighborhood, in part because my kid is allergic to something in our current place, in part to save money. In simpler terms: it’s a whole hell of a lot less coercive than what the Kachin people have been going through.

Yet, here I am, looking at the five dishes and one pot that are left unboxed and which we’ll be cooking and eating with over the next three days or so, and thinking about the refugee camp. Stupid, right?

Maybe not. Not to get to get too far into Lacanian gaze theory, but suffice to say that some theorists think that looking at something, or someone, actually changes whatever or whomever is being looked at. In the context of what we do, I think it means that tourism changes that which is being touristed (nearly over-run Laos would be a hell of an contemporary example of that). Also, it must mean that reporting changes the lives of the reported. So this guy and I, we made eye contact, shared a couple minutes of silence, said a few words unintelligible to the other, and that was all it took. He’s in my camera, but also in my head, and I’m seeing a couple new angles in life through him and his cigar, and his big boiling pot of outhouse grits he’s so at peace with.

And undoubtedly for him and all the other Kachin at the camp, we must have been a presence not soon forgotten. Large, pale, doughy (or, in the intern’s case, violently ill), attached to cameras, with big relentless smiles.

Their war will be over eventually. They will return to their villages, and then have to figure out how to live the rest of their lives, in an area that, as Thant Myint-U points out, is soon to be crowded with jostling superpowers. Maybe something they saw in their strange visitors will stick with them, can offer them some new belief about their own predicament.

A refugee has bigger things to worry about than what lessons they can fashion out of their encounter with bule? Perhaps. But these dudes also have a TON of time on their hands. No crops any more, just a few bricks to fire and baskets to weave; life in the camp is tedium. So I don’t think it’s narcissism to imagine their thoughts turning to young Zach or myself. The real egotist among travelers is the kind that thinks he just comes and watches people like animals in the zoo, that the people he visits don’t see him every bit as much as they are being seen.

This is the reciprocity of change, whether for good or bad. Travel means being changed, and changing others. That’s why I’m trying not to let my sedentary soul be traumatized by this process of moving, of packing everything in boxes, convincing a five-year-old that the next place will also feel like home. I know the good about going to a new apartment: it requires movement, a little transformation, a bit of acceptance, and that’s all I can wish for in 2012. More roads, more kingdoms, more movida.

Happy New Year. Back at you big first thing in 2012. —NT

[photo credit: Nathan Thornburgh / Roads and Kingdoms]

The Other Burma. St. Paul’s Refugee Camp, Picture 2 of 29. Sunday morning mass with Kachin refugees who have fled the fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar central government. Many of the region’s Catholic clergy were educated in the Philippines; a Kachin-language short-wave religious radio program is still broadcast from there. [Credit: Nathan Thornburgh/Roads and Kingdoms]
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The Other Burma. St. Paul’s Refugee Camp, Picture 2 of 29. Sunday morning mass with Kachin refugees who have fled the fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar central government. Many of the region’s Catholic clergy were educated in the Philippines; a Kachin-language short-wave religious radio program is still broadcast from there. [Credit: Nathan Thornburgh/Roads and Kingdoms]


The Other Burma. St. Paul’s Refugee Camp, Picture 1 of 29. Kachin refugees fleeing the fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar central government are living in makeshift housing on the grounds of St. Paul’s church outside of Mytikyina in Kachin State. The camp, which is already overcapacity, is seeing more refugees even as peace talks between the KIA and Nay Pyi Daw continue. Credit: Nathan Thornburgh/Roads and Kingdoms
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The Other Burma. St. Paul’s Refugee Camp, Picture 1 of 29. Kachin refugees fleeing the fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar central government are living in makeshift housing on the grounds of St. Paul’s church outside of Mytikyina in Kachin State. The camp, which is already overcapacity, is seeing more refugees even as peace talks between the KIA and Nay Pyi Daw continue. Credit: Nathan Thornburgh/Roads and Kingdoms