A GENTLE CROCODILE

I really did not believe too much the guide when he announced that the tour would go to a locally sacred pound where a team of crocodiles was feed with fish alone and, because of this, were not dangerous to humans and did not attack them.
This was during our one week holiday in Gambia, thirteen years ago. Many people do not even know such country exists, less even where it stands!
Gambia is a geographycal non-sense, politically built straightforward from its colonial past. The river Gambia was first explored by the portuguese and later taken over by the british, mainly for getting access to slaves. When the french got the main grip on the area we know now as Senegal, they faced themselves unable to dislocate the british, which were in control of the two margins of the Gambia river and the adjacent areas. By the time of independences in Africa, the french-speaking senegalese elite was unwilling forced to accept that the english-speaking elite aroung the Gambia was not keen on a common country and the experience of Senegambia was short lived. So today Gambia is totally surrounded by Senegal.
Back to crododiles: yes, the guide was telling the truth: like others, my wife and me stood by the crocodiles, somewhat nervous anyway and moving very prudently. I was able to touch - I would say caress! - the tail of one of the beasts. The guide took the picture, as I told him lots of people out of Gambia were for sure unbelievers about the tourist-oriented crocodiles of one certain gambian pound.

I HAVE BEEN IN BAGHDAD

Yes, in 2007. But not the one you surely are thinking of: there are more Baghdads than the media tells you! The one I visited is a small village in Mauritania, poor, quite and peaceful.
My almost 4 weeks stay in Mauritania was for an election observation mission by the European Union, at the time of the 2007 Presidential election there, after some years of military rule. As a short term observer I was assigned to the region of Kiffa, some 600 kilometers east of Nouakchott, the capital. The EU observers work always in teams of two and this time my team mate was a hungarian diplomat, now posted in Saigon as he wrote me recently.We observed the first round in Barkéol, some 150 kilometers away from the nearest tarred road, a very dry area indeed, and the second one, two weeks later, in Guérou, which lies some 60 kilometers before Kiffa, when one comes from the capital along the only tarred road of the region.
Baghdad 2 (the "2" because there are more than one...) is a little bit outside Guérou, but may still be considered as a suburb of the town. We visited it twice: on our standard fact-finding and locations-finding activities before e-day (we drove hundreds of kilometers and as much polling stations as possible, in order to decide the route plan for e-day, only known to the two of us, not the interpreter nor the driver, both mauritanian citizens) and again on e-day as one of the polling stations we decide to observe.

TORUN

Copernicus, the one who found out that the Sun was not exactly turning around himself, was born here. Additionally still partially-walled Torun is classified a World Heritage town ( some more sites world-wide should be classified in a couple of days). Having witnessed the birth of the famous astronomer may have had some psycological effect on the minds of those who made the WH application and those who decided on it, but there was no need for such emotional element. The city fully deserves per se its WH status, although the Vistula river, passing by in an indolent fashion, does not seem to remark it.
But I did: by strolling twice around the walls, the gothic houses on the Rynek (old town market place), the ruins and the parks, the remnants of the Teutonic Knights castle, one during day light, another by night. After what I went fully and peacefully sleep in my hotel fifty meters from one of the walls gates.

AN OUT-OF-EXPECTATION "FEIJOADA À BRASILEIRA"

This Saturday evening my dinner was "feijoada à brasileira", brasilian style beans with meat. Was it in Rio de Janeiro? No, nor in S. Paulo, neither in Recife or Salvador. It was in Wroclaw (pronounce wrotsuav as well as you can), Poland. This "feijoada" was not gastronomically speaking a very memorable one, like that in S. Luiz do Maranhao, with sight-seeing of the beach included plus "caipirinha", if my memory does not betray me, but it was neither desappointing - particularly the out-of-expectation element: a brasilian restaurant some one hundred metters from the local fashionable and spendid "Rynek" of Wroclav, which was used to be called Breslau before Hitler commited suicide and nazism got fully 100% Kapput.
I toured parts of Poland during 6 days, from the Wroclaw airport back to it, using trains and buses. The main pourpose was to visit this town and Poznan, plus 4 World Heritage sites in the western part of the country, which I accomplished. I also had the idea of visiting another one in Cech Republic, but time proved short for it.
Hopefully there will be more travel to come.

BACK IN EUROPE!

I am now back in Brussels from my half-a-month aussie tour.
Tyred, bluntly said! Too many nights out of a bed, it seems at my age something does not happen to be as it was, or near to it.
Just let me count: one night in the outbound flights; one night in a coach from Adelaide to Alice Springs; two nights in the Indian Pacific train from Perth to Adelaide, immediately followed by another night in the coach from Adelaide to Melbourne; one night in the inbound flight from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi, followed by a new one in the flight from Abu Dhabi to Brussels( I planned that on pourpose, to allow mw a full day to see Abu Dhabi ).
Anyway, my selfish ego, please, do not complain: you did it not by necessity, but by some sort of sour pleasure you have in doing now things you did not when you were twenty years old! After all you spoiled more out-of-a-bed nights by taking a 3.15 hours plane from Alice Springs to Perth.
Towards the end of this travelling feast I rented a car for a 3 days tour around Melbourne area. So I visited Sorrento and Olinda and passed by Seville - although none of those you may imagine at first thought.

NOT THAT FAR FROM THE ANTIPODES

The nearest place I have been from my native city's antipodes (which happens to be in the South Pacific sea) is Wellington, North Island, New Zealand.
Tomorrow I will travel to Melbourne, Australia, via Abu Dhabi, with Ethiad Airways - my first experience with this young UAE airline.
I assume that for the next two weeks this blog of mine will be production-closed. Almost for sure no new posts, while I will keep myself busy with Aussies'talks and kangaroos landscapes.
Enjoy your rest during my head's down experience.

BRUSSELS

I am now in Brussels. Having worked for the European Parliament for twenty years till my retirement, I keep my appartment and have resident status. Travelling between Brussels and Lisbon looks to me more as a shuttle than a standard flight.
I know Brussels since 1970. That year I transited here in-between a flight from Lisbon and a train to Cologne, where I had to pick my new car, later to be sent to Angola. It was a Summer Sunday and, near to the Grand Place, I watched on a TV café the second half of the Football World Cup (in Mexico); Brazil won superbly, to my enjoyment (almost every portuguese is a Brazil fan, if the opponent is not Portugal!).
Later I was a regular of the Grand Place every time I came to Brussels. I keep the memory of the its traffic changes: in 1981 the Grand Place was (still, in today's understanding) a big parking place; later the cars could come in and tour it, but no more parking; and later no more cars, just people.
Moving to Brussels, I had for some months a small apartment very near to the Grand Place, so I was quite acquainted with the new "just people" environment. Then, one Winter Sunday I woke up very early, went to the Grand Place and saw it as never more: there was no one but me in the profound beauty of that grey and half-foggy morning. Guess very few have seen it such a way! Later the Grand-Place was approved as a World Heritage site...