Moroccan Nikita's

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do." Rumi   Hungary, on a  December  evening. It's saturday, I am working, this time in the Bela Bartok concert hall of the Budapest Palace of Arts. I've seen quite a few concerts halls already, but I can hardly find words to describe this architectural gem, feast for the eyes and delight for the ears. Everything here pays tribute to Art.  Whether you are seated on stage or in the audience, c olours , shapes , atmosphere aspire and reach to pure harmony. You can also be seated right behind the musicians, on a balcony, beneath this magnificent organ -  ninety-two stops, five manuals, 6804 pipes -  which building requested a three years joint effort of the GermanOrgelbau-Mulheisen, the Organ Building Manufacture Pecs, Gabor Zoboki, the leading architect of the Palace of Art, and numerous top-notch organists, musicians and acoustics specialists.  Here it is in images :   http://mupa.hu/en...

Day one:  "The earth is blue like an orange" Paul Eluard I remember arguing years ago about oranges. My patriotism, if it can be called so, always goes through mystomack. Obviously, the best oranges, for me, were the Moroccan ones. And last week, only when I crossed the border between Spain and Portugal for the first time, an obvious fact  stroke my mind. In arabic, we call the orange "burtuqal".  "Portocali" in Greek, "portakal" in Turkish, the sweet orange was brought to the  Mediterranean  by the  Portuguese  in the XVIth century. As the  Mediterraneans  rapidly adopted the fruit as their own,  they forgot it had come from China. Portugal, the T erra  I ncognita  I was to discover during this weekend was from then on wrapped in a poetic haze. I saw a village overhanging the sea which was conquered solely for the beauty of its landscape, every street was named after a writer, or a poet, and...

O nce upon a time, in a faraway land amidst the Big Waters, there was a kingdom usually called the La nd of Joy . People there lived in harmony and peace thanks to an exceptional repartition of powers. The re was no concept of Evil or Good because humans lived in constant contact with magic. The magic was represented by various Creatures such as witches, satyrs, trolls, naiads,fairies, wizards and other kinds of demons who were at first feared by humans for their extraordinary powers over them. Over time, however, the humans discovered their good sides; the fairies fulfilling wishes, little demons cleaning their places overnight and even witches curing their illnesses. The y realized these creatures just needed attention, respect and to be believed in. The y decided that they had better live together in peace rather than fight an unequal battle. Still, the creatures would avoid humans, hiding their powers except in special cases to maintain this respectful aura of mystery around t...