Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

Selling a house should be regarded as just a transaction. That, at least, is what one of our more unsentimental friends told us.  He is probably right, actually. Yet, as we packed up our now-sold townhouse in the mountain village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in Southern France, we found that the cardboard boxes stacked in our living room were not really enough for the task. They were meant to transport objects, but we were trying to pack something else as well - almost twenty years of life lived in this place. The real estate listing described our house as "a charming two-bedroom property with traditional features." It was not wrong, exactly. But it also did not come close. This has not just been our vacation house. Over the years it became something more - a real home away from home, if that is not too strange a phrase.    The rhythm of returning each summer made us feel, somehow, that we belonged here, at least a little. Though we were never full-time residents, the vi...

This morning, I crawled through muddy, dark Roman-era tunnels below Lisbon.  The tunnels were carved during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and for centuries, they directed underground rainwater while empires above rose and fell. Eventually, they were sealed off and forgotten - to be rediscovered completely by chance during the rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake, which turned most of Lisbon into rubble. Today, the crypts are normally completely filled with groundwater, but they are pumped dry on just a couple of days each year, where only a few visitors are allowed access.   Today, I was among the lucky few.  The only entry to the below is through a narrow temporary shaft in the middle of the busy Rua da Conceição, right between the rails of the 28 tram line. The stairs leading down felt steep and risky, and when I finally reached the galleries, a few lights illuminated the void that had stood in total darkness for more than a Millenium. Some passages were s...

Someone told us about LXFactory, and we decided to go and see what the fuss was about. The place is in the Alcantara district, in what used to be the largest spinning mill in Portugal — 23.000 square meters of brick and iron, built in the nineteenth century, abandoned when the work went elsewhere, and then taken over some years ago by the kind of young entrepreneurs who look at an abandoned industrial ruin and see a food court. This is not a criticism. The food court is excellent. We found it by following the sound of people enjoying themselves down the Rua Rodrigues de Faria, and ended up in a courtyard full of mismatched chairs and tables, where someone was selling very good pizza from a kiosk and the 25 de Abril Bridge was visible at the end of the street, doing its best impression of the Golden Gate. Inside the warehouses, which still have their original bones — the high ceilings, the iron columns, the general feeling of a place that once did serious work — there are now stal...

The other day I was walking through the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon something that felt like a gap in time. I went through an unassuming gate and walked down a narrow, semi-private alley. Just like that, I was out of the noisy present and inside a hidden, completely quiet garden. It turned out to belong to the Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.   Photo: SortirAParis The whole scene looked like something out of an old nineteenth-century novel. Orthodox priests with long beards and flowing black robes moved slowly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly people sat on rickety chairs, chatting in a mix of Russian and French. The sudden shift from the bustling street to this completely quiet sanctuary was so strange that I almost felt out of place with a smartphone in my hand. In fact, I kept my mobile firmly in my pocket. For once, it felt a bit wrong to pull it out just to take the usual snapsho...

  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met a couple of years ago, when we stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. Captain Bob. He arranges these gatherings on the Pont des Arts every month, apparently without exception, come rain or come moonshine — which is actually a better expression here than usual. The bridge is mercifully free of love locks these days. In their place: about fifty people with wine glasses, speaking in what sounded like most of the languages of Europe simultaneously. French people and expats from many corners of the globe were just standing around and talking, and the mood was actually quite infectious. I accepted a glass from a Spanish astrophysics student who seemed extremely pleased with himself and with life in general, and I stood there for a while trying to work out what exactly was happening.  The answer, as far as I could tell, was: nothing in particular...

For a long time, Rita and I have dreamed of finding a small, affordable pied-à-terre in Paris. This September I am finally in town to chase that dream. The city is full of estate agencies. Their windows are plastered with images of quaint apartments, and one might think that in a city teeming with agents immobiliers , securing a modest little place would be as simple as ordering a pain au chocolat. One would be wrong. At my first agency, the door was marked Ouvert but remained stubbornly locked. At the second, a bored receptionist informed me that all agents were en réunion . At the next several, the apartments in the windows had already been sold. How long they had been sold was not mentioned. By the umptieth agency, I had developed a theory. Parisian estate agents with actual apartments for sale exist in a condition much like certain particles in physics — present and absent at the same time, collapsing into definite existence only when observed by each othe...

Why go to the Paris Olympics when you have almost zero interest in sports? We imagined inserting ourselves right in the middle of a global phenomenon that everyone was talking about, but when we actually got there, the streets looked remarkably ordinary. We knew, of course, that the athletes and the national anthems and the actual competition would be kept inside the concrete stadiums. But we had genuinely thought the excitement would spill out into the rest of the city. It did not. Except for a few fan zones scattered around, the Olympic spirit was safely locked away behind forty thousand metal barriers. The city looked like nothing we had seen before — all those grates across the landscape, like an absurdist art installation that someone had forgotten to remove. The Seine was off-limits. Only people with a personal QR code were allowed to walk along the banks. Rows of policemen and soldiers in khaki stood on every other street corner.  The in...

Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin’s Mitte is like walking into some ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942, is now the home of a rather eccentric private art collection Inside the building’s anthill-like network of corridors and small rooms, the art on display completely changes how you experience the space.  You encounter everything from strange kinetic sculptures to multimedia installations flickering in the dark. Each room opens like a window into a different creative mind, and to be honest, the story of the building itself is just as exciting as the art displayed inside it.   During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand civilians from the nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945, the Red Army used the building for prisoners of war, and it later became an East German warehouse for tropical fruit.  After the wall came down, the empty building was squatted by kids. During the nineties, it became simpl...