Havana Ooh Na Na

On a bit of a whim, I decided to participate in 2019’s first Roll Film Week, which you can learn more about here or explore on Instagram here. The quick rundown: RFW is a semiannual event that’s all about sharing photos made on—you guessed it—roll film, i.e. 120 and 135 film.

I still shoot film for so many reasons – primarily, as a way to cheat due to the fact that I simply like the look of film – but I am even worse about analyzing my analog work than my digital. The same can be said for roll film vs. instant film. And I even shoot reversal more than negative (meaning no need to scan to see what’s what, really)… and cut down entirely on monochromatic negative when I left my ersatz darkroom in California a good 5-6 years ago. There’s no excuse, but scanning is tedious, and I’m fairly certain I lost my loupe or left it with the darkroom gear.

I tumbled into analog photography fairly early in my journey and delighted in the weird and wonderful: light leaks, toy cameras, sprocket holes, cross-processing, I wanted it all. Somewhere along the way as my aesthetic matured it seemed logical to mirror my digital process, and Canon 35mm SLRs were a near like-for-like translation. I started with an inherited Rebel S, graduated to the EOS-1N (which came with to Cuba), and now typically use an EOS-1V. It’s nice to have the option to pivot to a digital back while maintaining a shared set of lenses.

Since switching to the Leica Q in November, I haven’t brought a 35mm on travels and am not certain what might make the most sense. Perhaps my old workhorse Yashica Electro 35? (Rangefinder for rangefinder?) At the same time, I adore the 1V in ways I’ve never loved my DSLR, but half of the switch to the Q was prompted by a desire to travel with less bulk altogether. It will be a bit of an experimental process, I imagine.

On the topic of Havana. I can’t remember any place I’ve wanted to visit as much and for as long as I wanted to visit Cuba, and it was glorious beyond my expectations. The people were so lovely and so interesting to talk to (President Obama was at the time moving toward normalizing relations, which made for fascinating conversation.), and so forgiving of my broken, sometimes-bordering-on-accented-Italian Spanish.

Cuba was also a revelation in as much as I had passing privilege, oddly enough. There are only two places in the world I’ve yet been where I’m not instantly physically other: Hawaiʻi (which is absurdly obvious, given that my family is from there) and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Even my name could be mistaken for either (and I do go by Micaela in PR to make things easier). Of course, it’s all for naught the second I open my mouth to speak, but one can try.

One cannot rightly discuss Cuba without mention of the ever-present specters of Che and Fidel (at that time in his twilight). Castro, as so many “Marxists” have in truth, incited middle-class-led revolution and presided over a regime built on fear and suspicion with an iron grip. There are many positive outcomes of his rule (take the Cuban medical practice, for one), but the same can be said of any dictator. The hero worship by certain segments of left-leaning, middle-class, white Americans (albeit primarily in Che t-shirt activism format) I find repugnant, and this as a nearly life-long socialist. I say this not to overly politicize a highly non-political trip, but because it is an indelible imprint on the fabric of the country and these quaint, idyllic, Buena Vista Social Club fairytale notions of Cuba are highly sanitized, somewhat patronizing, and belie a natural depth of human existence. The narrative is too pat.

What I’ve found everywhere I’ve been is that some degree of “people are people” is true: sometimes it’s the good in people, the ability to make connections despite widely disparate realities, but sometimes it’s the ugliness in humanity which is equally true, if impossible to romanticize. We’re all just trying to make it out there at the end of the day, and to that we all deserve the same chances to enjoy health, happiness, and togetherness.

And with that, I’ll step away from my soapbox and get back to the photos.

All photos made with a Canon EOS-1N on Fujichrome Provia 100F or Velvia 100.

The Great Balkan Hobo Christmas Bustour

A silly habit that began nearly 10 years ago is naming all of my trips. Weirdly enough – since I’m someone who hates logistics and gets anxiety around work travel – I find the structure and consistency helpful. Then again, I also still make paper itineraries and plan capsule wardrobes... which I’ll admit I’ve gotten very very good at throwing together the hour before I’m supposed to leave for the airport.

The name of this trip was a throwback of sorts to one I took back in 2010 called Tumblin’ Tumbleweed Hobo Thanksgiving Roadtrip Adventure, which I think was the first named trip. Other highlights over the past decade or so have been: Miknattsolensland (Norwegian-ish for “The Land of the Miknight Sun” – always with the puns), Nostalgie al gusto di curaçao (French + Italian “Curaçao-flavored nostalgia,” a lift and modification of a Paolo Conte lyric), La Folle aventure (French, “The Crazy Adventure” – crazy in as much as I went to Sénégal three or so days after booking my flight), and of course the classic Mikstanbul.

And thus, The Great Balkan Hobo Christmas Bustour. (I throw hobo into trip names when I am lodging-deficient on holidays.) Riding buses in the Balkans is not something new for me. The rail infrastructure rarely lends itself to border hopping, either due to Cold War power plays or because of the wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia. I’ve taken buses from Bosnia to Croatia, Croatia to Croatia, Montenegro to Croatia... you get the theme here!

(As far as Croatia goes, this was my first trip to the Balkans that did not involve a visit there. It’s a beautiful country, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Love.) 

So here was the plan that ended up on my itinerary: 

• 18.12.26, 09.30 – матпу bus: Sofia 🇧🇬 to Skopje 🇲🇰

• 18.12.26, 16.30 – галеб bus: Skopje 🇲🇰 to Ohrid 🇲🇰

• 18.12.28, 08.00 – local public bus: Ohrid 🇲🇰 to Struga 🇲🇰

• 18.12.28, 09.30 – дурмо турс bus: Struga 🇲🇰 to Tiranë 🇦🇱

One thing worth noting if you’ve never been to the Balkans... while cell phones are as ubiquitous there as anywhere, putting logistics information online isn’t nearly as common. There are some aggregator websites written in English or at least the Roman alphabet that often times have dated timetables  (or, as I discovered in Skopje, said that a particular bus line had a route which they in fact do not at all) which will do you more harm than good. The only reliable method (though Trip Advisor can sometimes help... as long as the date of the original post is within close range) is to show up at the bus station and look at the posted times on the bus company’s window.

Матпу (Matpu), the bus company I took over the border from Bulgaria to Macedonia, was very well organized. Their website (though only in Bulgarian and hence Cyrillic) listed accurate routes and times; the bus itself showed up to the parking lot exactly when it was supposed to. I think I paid 30 лв for the ticket, which is about $17.50. We arrived in Skopje at 13.30, right on time. 4 hour ride including about 50 minutes to clear the border, not bad at all. The best part by far was the constant late 80’s early 90’s playlist that feels so perfectly Eurotrashy in the most amazing way possible.

After the quiet Christmas calm in Sofia, Skopje’s bus station was a veritable riot – people coming in and out, small “casinos” (slot parlors, really) leaking stale cigarette smoke, a million little offices and ticket windows. I made the decision to get on an earlier bus in hopes of making it to Ohrid in time for dinner and put my trust in an erstwhile aggregator site, which told me that there was an earlier bus through a company called Hisar Turizam. I went to their office, asked if they sold tickets to Ohrid, was given a strange look and told that they offer international buses, and directed to one of the central ticket windows. (All I can assume is that one of their buses to Albania can pick up/drop off in Ohrid, but it’s not the best way to get there.)

​At this point, I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a quick glance at the departure board and lo and behold, there was an “OHRID - 14.00 - 8” listed. 520 MKD or $10 later, I had a window seat on a bus that was run by none other than Галеб Охрид  (Galeb Ohrid), the original bus company I had planned on. Should you ever have a reason to take a bus leaving from Skopje, the station has an excellent website with the essentials, i.e. departure time and cost, which I naturally discovered after this whole adventure. (Again, without English, but that’s what Google Translate is for, no?)

Ohrid is in the bottom corner of Macedonia, right by the Albanian border. We took a winding journey through snowy mountain roads before descending to the lake itself. I nearly drained my phone battery taking blurry photos of the winter wonderland in the hills and arrived in Ohrid as desired, well before dinner.

Éblouissante sous le soleil couchant.

“Au bout d’un cap, une ville apparaît, dont la ligne, droite, éblouissante sous le soleil couchant, semble courir sur l’eau”

— Guy de Maupassant, La Vie errante

(At the end of a cape, a town appears, whose line, straight, blinding under the setting sun, seems to run upon the water. )

This quote is from a passage in La Vie errante – Maupassant’s travelogue whence I stole the name of this site – about Hammamet, which may well be my favorite town in North Africa. But that’s another story for another time.

Because this is a story about Macedonia.

And it’s not even a proper story, at that. Just a few photos of the most astonishing, brilliant, sparkling sunset I’ve ever been privileged to behold. The vivid rich colors dashed across the sky and painted the waters of Lake Ohrid like something out of a dream.

If I hadn’t already loved Ohrid, I would have been sold at that moment, but as it was the sunset was the perfect bow on a perfect day. One of life’s simple and perpetual pleasures that no mere photograph can do justice to, but I tried.

Sveta Sofia

“The city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.”

— From my last post. Yes, I just quoted myself.

And love it was with beautiful Sofia—which, incidentally, is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable (i.e. SO-fee-ya) and not like the name as I had previously assumed. I settled on it as a destination as I so often do: finding a cheap flight. In truth, I had wanted to see Macedonia but Sofia was a mere bus ride away and so it was settled.

I arrived on an early Qatar Airways flight from Doha, easily the emptiest I’ve traveled on in years. The emptiness, it would follow, came from the fact that it was of course Christmas morning and most people taking that route had already showed up.

In my defense, most Orthodox-predominant countries celebrate Christmas after the 12th day (so, January 7th), and I quite reasonably assumed Bulgaria was the same. Thankfully, I figured it out prior to departure, but that was little consolation for the hauntingly quiet void that was the city center.

This proved a double-edged sword for my travel passions, which is to say what I look for when I evaluate any destination:

1. People

2. Food

3. Architecture

4. Music

Nº 3 was of course much easier than it would otherwise have been and Nº 2 was not a problem as my hotel was lovely and accommodating. Nº 1 was a near impossibility – everyone was home with families and those who were out and about seemed to be either going to their families or to church – which meant that Nº 4 was an actual impossibility.

So it goes.

I had more than enough architecture to occupy my time. Sofia is astonishingly rich with religious architecture, and I happened to be staying within a ten minute walk of a synagogue (pictured above), a mosque (pictured below), the Catholic cathedral (an altogether hideous building that I don’t think I attempted to photograph), and of course numerous Orthodox churches.

The name of the city itself comes from the church of Света София (Sveta Sofia, meaning either “Saint Sophia” or, as its contemporary the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, “Holy Wisdom”), so it should come as no surprise that the religious tradition runs deep. The Banya Bashi mosque is a relic of Ottoman rule (as one so often finds in the Balkans), and its congregation is primarily Turkish (I had assumed Albanian which is true of neighboring Macedonia, but as it turns out the Albanian population in Bulgaria is very low).

You truly couldn’t have picked a more stereotypical weather pattern for this part of the world. While I find the urban decay (no makeup pun intended) sublimely beautiful, I can see how one might find it too evocative of post-Soviet melancholy. It’s worth mentioning, for the record, that Bulgaria was indeed not part of the USSR but was Eastern Bloc nonetheless and bordered Yugoslavia.

One last thought on the weather – as previously discussed: it’s interesting how different the sky color ended up in each of these photos. Some of that was caused by the light or angle thereof, most of it the victim of my creative editing. In retrospect, there is something to be said for a stylistically consistent set of images… and something else to be said for the platonic ideal of a singular image standing alone.

I’m happy to say I here achieved neither. And, as ever, so it goes.

Post-Processing, the spectacular crutch.

Is it a digression if you start from that point? Post-processing is one of those lovely photographic terms that serves as both an analog holdover and a misleading descriptor of digital workflow. Originally, it happened after processing (i.e. developing) the film. Today, it could be argued that taking a digital raw file and finalizing settings is in fact the processing; in that sense, one could deem Lightroom/ACR/etc. the processing and Photoshop the post.

It seems to me so often the pretentious gearhead semi-novices who argue for and pedestalize a platonic ideal of a photograph that come in critical of manipulation. The type of people that – if I’m being catty – produce technically perfect, soulless, story-less images. You’ll see the judgment thrown in hashtags like #SOOC or #nofilter.

Is it important to learn how to use your tools? Yes

Is it important to maintain some rigid orthodoxy around what the tools produce? No

By the same token, I disdain a “fuck it, I’ll fix it in post” mentality as well. My feelings are this: become a master of the camera you use, digital or analog. (You will miss photos if you don’t.) Craft images that tell stories. As long as you’re not a photojournalist or selling a product – two areas where realism and fidelity are key – the world is your oyster in that quest.

Why does any of this matter? Well, because I hit bad weather in Sofia, of course.

More to come on Sofia itself, but as a quick fly by: the city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.

Pictured here is the view from my hotel (the shockingly charming Sofia Balkan) of the church Света Неделя – Sveta Nedelya – a name which refers either to the term “Holy Sunday” or Saint Kyriaki but is somewhat debated.

This is what my brain goes through when I’m dissecting an image. There are a million and one things to consider when getting to the final image. My first concern was the final aspect ratio (more thoughts on ratios here) as I’d decided a crop was necessary, given the excavations and cars in the foreground. I also wanted to brighten the church without losing the definition in the clouds, particularly since the clouds above the church weren’t much to look at in the first place. Finally, I knew that way-too-modern logo would get in the way.

After some quick cropping and some equally quick exposure adjustments, I had a fairly workable subject and thought first that I’d try monochrome. This would both hide the Huawei logo and allow me to bring down the blues to have more cloud definition. The resulting image is fine, but I missed the hallmark green of the domes.

I returned to color and played with the greens. Is it an exaggerated image? Quite. At the end of the day, it was a much more interesting composition than the original image and as one of many pieces in a tale of the architectural identity of Sofia, it would do the job. However, that bright dab of red kept drawing my eye away.

A quick pop into the shop and voilà, a finished image. It was all about removing distractions to focus on what actually mattered: this gorgeous, storied edifice.

In Autumn's Garden

I’ve never felt as if I had a great grasp on London. By all rights, it should be one of my preferred travel destinations: relatively quick flights (I’ve done JFK-LHR faster than JFK-SFO a few times), nicely melded architectural mix, legendary culinary scene, bustling metropolis, etc. It never grabbed me, and I would have said that I hadn’t seen much of the city.

Upon reflecting, I noted on my most recent visit that I had in fact seen most of the major sights (at least the ones I wanted to - not much of a palace person) and could navigate both the streets and tube reasonably well. Freeing yourself from the burdens of tourist to-dos is the best way to enjoy urban tourism. Eat. Drink. Dance. Experience.

In that vein, I set aside time on the last day for a walk through Hyde Park - people watching and playing with my new camera in one of the legendary urban green spaces is of course one of the easiest ways to decompress before a longer flight.

There is a joy in the dying gasps of color of Mid-Autumn, the fight of the last few shining red-gold leaves clinging to spindly tree branches, the pop of a late-in-season flower against a bleak gray sky.

Viking World or Bust

Or, Viking World Is a Bust

I started traveling on my own in 2007, right as Mapquest was giving up the ghost and smart phones were poised to shake up travel as we know it. There were two options, really: do research and head out into the world with a plan or show up somewhere and cross your fingers that it worked out. Both methods had their highlights – the former brought me to the charmingly named burg of Pizzighettone in search of a golden, mosaic-bedecked church while the latter sustained me through multiple winter trips to Venice, traversing the canals under cloaks of fog – and their lowlights (getting stranded at the Milano Porta Garibaldi station for the umpteenth time in spite of both a plan and a back-up plan comes to mind), but ultimately a combination of the two sparked my love of adventures.

Then iPhones showed up and all spontaneity died. Where to eat? I’ll spend half an hour on Yelp trying to comb through real feedback and casual competitive sabotage only to come up with an insipid meal. Train delayed? Here are five alternate routings. Something off the beaten path? Check Atlas Obscura, of course. I find myself missing the chaos and excitement of those early days when I didn’t know what would come next, but the phone is such an easy trap to fall into.

In the hope of recapturing that spirit, I made the decision to spend my surprise day in Keflavík at a place called Viking World because I saw it on the map. VIKING WORLD. The name alone had me sold.

If you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, then it's true too that you shouldn't pick a museum by its name. 

The highlight of the museum is ostensibly the Íslendingur, a recreated viking ship that actually sailed across the Atlantic. I loved the smoky, resinous scent (made, as I understand it, from actual Norwegian wood... which I could not keep myself from making dad jokes about in Norway. Anyway.) and it was obviously an impressive piece of work, but the museum was a bit lacking otherwise.

The real highlight was the building itself, a spectacular glassy modern dreamboat of a thing. And that's what I got – for all my troubles – and now you can spare yourself the visit.

Trekking and Trekking

It started as these things so often do: a sprinkling of rain in the East Coast, a late plane, a missed connection... the typical song and dance.

I’ve had a particularly bad run of travel luck lately, culminating in 3 cancellations and 12 hours of cumulative delays across 5 days and, ultimately, 9 total flights. (1 flight became 3 in a particularly loathsome rerouting.)

Plane karma is, sadly, not a real thing, and instead of being a given a grace period, the plane gods decided to instead transfer the bulk of my luck to my mother.

A quick caveat: canceled flights on vacation are the ultimate first world problem. They’re also stressful and exhausting and no doubt will increase as climate change continues. And this means that we all need better coping mechanisms, airlines included. I'll hop off my soapbox now.

This semi-structured chaos led to two different treks: my mother’s Odyssean journey across three different carriers and my walk to and from Viking World.

It sounds like they shouldn’t compare, but you’d be wrong.

We had one day in Keflavík before flying to Bergen and the original plan was to do either a Golden Circle tour or see about exploring the Reykjanes Peninsula. I instead had the day to myself and the most reasonable place to visit – picked solely for the name and not because I actually did research – was Viking World. It was the perfect day for a long walk: warm (for Iceland) and sunny and not terribly breezy to boot.

The hotel was at a converted NASKEF building, which meant crossing the airport road to get to Keflavík proper. My primary concern was how to run across four lanes of traffic without turning into Frogger. What I neglected to think about was my poor choice of footwear (espadrilles – I’d packed those and rain boots given the pre-departure forecast. Mistake, but more on packing later.) for traversing the wide open expanse of the base.

I expected sidewalks. This time, I was wrong. 

Before I got anywhere near the highway, I was crossing a patch of lava rock, came down crooked, and took a spill. I took the hit on my right side, landing on my camera which in turn landed on my phone. Amazingly, nothing broke except for my good thermal leggings and the skin of my palm and knee, but the camera lodged itself right under my rib cage and knocked the wind out of me. I was a sight.

Not to be deterred, I kept going (once I got my breath back), got honked at and waved to by some bro-y tourists, and eventually made it to the highway and strategically made my way across, no Frogger-ing to be seen. Bruised and bloodied, albeit no conquering hero, I made my way to Viking World.