Obsessive Observationist

RGB to Greyscale

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:52:00 +0000

Some formulae

This post follows on from Colour Brightness Greyscale Experiment, Exploring the W3C Accessibility Guidelines for Text in Colour where I give some examples that might challenge the web accessibility guidelines from W3C about readability of text in colour.

Based upon the idea that relative brightness of two colours is significant in determining how legible one is above the other, why does the formula recommended by the W3C not produce consistent results, in particular why does a given brightness value not convert to a consistent shade of greyscale?

Probably because the formula they give is wrong, (I’m increasingly coming to believe), but if their formula is wrong, what formula is actually usable?

Here are some formulae for converting to greyscale.

From the documentation for Gimp:

Three options are available:

Choose shade of gray based on

Lightness

The graylevel will be calculated as

Lightness = ½ × (max(R,G,B) + min(R,G,B))

Luminosity

The graylevel will be calculated as

Luminosity = 0.21 × R + 0.72 × G + 0.07 × B

Average

The graylevel will be calculated as

Average Brightness = (R + G + B) ÷ 3

A discussion in Stackoverflow.com has an interesting comment, that the conversion values given by the W3C as YIQ conversion, i.e. red × 0.299, green × 0.587 and blue × 0.114, are wrong ‘as they apply to gamma-corrected RGB values’, says Jason Sundram. Aha!

That same discussion gives a formula from ‘the luminance component Y (from the CIE XYZ system) ’ of

mono = (0.2125 × color.r) + (0.7154 × color.g) + (0.0721 × color.b);

This is similar to the Gimp luminosity formula – that sounds promising.

Hmm, next stage is to devise some experiments that use these formulae instead, and we’ll see what transpires.

Colour Brightness Greyscale Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Exploring the W3C Accessibility Guidelines for Text in Colour

On my page Text Colour on YIQ Brightness Levels, Colours of an Equal Brightness Difference there is a mechanism for showing text at a constant YIQ brightness level, but at different red, green and blue component levels, over a specified background colour. And doing that experiment produces some results that do not seem to fit with what the W3C Accessibility Guidelines for text in colour would appear to suggest. (For a summary of the guidelines, see my page Colour Text Legibility).

Using the formula suggested by the guidelines, you would think – or I would think anyway – that if we convert any colour of a given brightness level to greyscale, you would get a consistent shade of grey. But no. Evidently not. So is there something wrong with the W3C’s suggested formula? Or is it something else?

Here are two results from an experiment using my page Text Colour on YIQ Brightness Levels, Colours of an Equal Brightness Difference. The first shows thirteen examples of colour-brightness 126 over background #FF0000 (red). The second shows colour brightness 50 over background #000000 (black):

Converted to greyscale in Photoshop 5.5:

Converted to greyscale in GIMP 2.6.1:

A greyscale conversion in Photoshop on each of the colours, 255,0,0 red, 0,255,0 green , and 0,0,255 blue gives greyscale values of red: 130, green: 220, blue: 69. There are some further thoughts on this on my page: RGB to Greyscale.

Text Colour on YIQ Brightness Levels

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:16:00 +0000

Colours of an Equal Brightness Difference

This page is related to my page Colour Text Legibility where I take issue with the Web Accessibility Guidelines from the W3C regarding legibility of text in colour.

Here on this page is an experiment where colours of a given brightness level, calculated to conform with the W3C Accessibility Guidelines at the Y of YIQ (YIQ is the color space designed for the NTSC color TV system, and the W3C guidelines refer just to the Y of YIQ, the brightness level) can be seen over a constant background colour.

The W3C guidelines suggest that the YIQ brightness difference between foreground and background colours is significant in determining whether text of a given colour is comfortably legible on a background of a different colour. Hmm, it might be a bit.

Fill in values below to show the results of experiments. The results show that a given YIQ brightness difference does not, in fact, give a similar perceived relative brightness for each background and foreground pair. For example try a background colour of #0 (black) and a YIQ brightness difference of 50 brighter. Oh dear, W3C, back to the drawing board.

A YIQ brightness difference of 50 is considered to be below the threshold for good legibility, which is generally right, but the perceived relative brightnesses are, as you can see, not quite what you would expect from the guidelines. Further thoughts on this are on my pages: Colour Brightness Greyscale Experiment and RGB to Greyscale.

Readable Text in Colour

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:16:00 +0000

Here’s How You Do It

You have some text on screen in a colour, and you have a background in a colour. How do you ensure that the text is readable over the background?

The first thing we need to consider here is what we mean by readable. Black on white is readable, white on white definitely isn’t. Shades in-between will depend on a number of factors, and you may not want the text to shout at you, you may want it to be just readable, as in for example a watermark.

A second thing to bear in mind is that the larger the text is, the more readable it is likely to be.

Happy Candy

There are the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on the readability of text. These are disgracefully inadequate, as I explain on my page Colour Text Legibility.

You can determine the clarity of a piece of text over a given background from the type size and whether the text is lighter than the background or darker, for the relative brightness of dark over light versus light over dark makes a difference too.

The only other thing you now need is some Javascript code, that I give here below.

The code will produce a relative brightness level as a positive or negative number. As a rule of thumb, I regard numbers that are outside of a range of -65 to 45 as at least just about readable, and numbers that are outside of the range of -140 to 110 as definitely readable. Though to each his wicked taste, naturally.

The function checkforreadability will return the relative brightness level as a positive or negative number. It takes as parameters the foreground and background colours expressed in web notation, ie a 6-digit hexadecimal number beginning with # (eg #000000 for black) and the font point size expressed as a number (eg 10pt would be 10). It assumes you have validated that these numbers are correctly structured.

/* *******checkforreadability ************** */

function checkforreadability(foreground_colour, background_colour, currentFontSize){

if((foreground_colour==background_colour) || (currentFontSize < 4) || (currentFontSize > 500)){

    return 0;

}

var currentcolours=newArray();

for(var i=0; i < 3; i++){

   currentcolours[i]=parseInt(foreground_colour.substr((i*2)+1,2), 16);

   currentcolours[i+3]=parseInt(background_colour.substr((i*2)+1,2), 16);

   }

var fontasjustpc=new Array(2.5, 1);

var yiqs=new Array();

for(var i=0; i < 2 ; i++){

  yiqs[i]=getyiq(currentcolours, i*3)* Math.ceil(Math.pow(1-(fontadjustpc[i]/100),currentFontSize-4));

 //  this formula magically gives the font size increased by 2.5% for each font-point 

}

return yiqs[0]-yiqs[1];

}

/* ******* getyiq *********** */

function getyiq(trycolours, imod){

var brightnessweightings=new Array(0.299, 0.587, 0.114);  // these are the relative brightness weightings for the red, green and blue colour pixels on screen  

 return ( (trycolours[0+imod]*brightnessweightings[0])+(trycolours[1+imod]*brightnessweightings[1])+(trycolours[2+imod]*brightnessweightings[2]) );

}

At least I think that’s right. Seems to work for me.

And then with the number that gets returned from the function you decide whether it seems to be within the range that you want for a given readability level. As I said above, outside of -140 to 110 should be fine; outside of -65 to 45 should be at least just about readable.

You can experiment on Colour Text Legibility which does the formula in a slightly different way; it adjusts the readability ranges according to type size and gives the brightness difference unadjusted. But the principle is much the same.

My page Typeface or Font Readability uses a formula similar to the above one to decide whether to do light-coloured text or dark text on the menu that is titled Some links for you to click on, my maniacal rants on specific fonty-type topics: where the background colours of the boxes are created randomly each time you load the page.

A Bucketful of Hope

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:12:00 +0000

Haverfordwest, West Wales – October 2011

I was walking the streets in Haverfordwest when three young men in suits and ties said, ‘Hi’. I immediately knew they were Mormons because they had name badges pinned to their lounge-suit jackets, and the first label I read said, ‘Elder’ something-or-other.

I didn’t quite catch whether the Elder’s name was Lee, or Statesman, or Ardo, or Berry, or Flower, for the three wanted to engage me in conversation. Which I didn’t mind too much, for while I know something of their religion they know nothing of mine, and when I tried to explain that I was walking the streets as an observational nerd from outer space, sent to study the behaviour of the world’s inhabitants they didn’t get it at all, they kept suggesting that I was on ‘vacation’, which I persistently tried to explain was not the case at all.

I pointed to a shop just opposite where we were standing. ‘See that shop’, I said, ‘It has a brilliant name, emblematic for me of Haverfordwest. It’s called A Bucketful of Hope’.

The lead Elder liked that and tried to use it as a reason to give me a tract. I reluctantly accepted the little booklet and went on my way.

A Bucketful of Hope is a charity shop started by a chap called Adam who has leukemia. What an excellent name for the shop!

I read through the booklet and it had pictures of young boys in lounge suits and ties, serving a biscuit and small plastic beaker of water to all-white middle-class churchgoers. And men in lounge suits and ties being baptised. Do these Mormon’s really think that is going to appeal, when I have spent a lifetime taking every opportunity to avoid putting on embarrassing and smelly lounge suit outfits? Totally stony ground there then.

Haverfordwest is the county town of Pembrokeshire. It’s quite run down in parts.

Spectacular Balconies. But the building is derelict and unoccupied.

Dead Hotel.

Wesleyan Chapel. In need of a little care and attention.

Haverfordwest High Street. Still called the High Street but the shops have mainly moved elsewhere. The Old Three Crowns, pub to let.

Many of the shops are now in a new development alongside the still waters of the river. They’ve been there long enough for the moss to grow on the rooftops.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. In Market Street there are some trendyish shops, including The George’s restaurant. (But they should learn that on your website, put the days you are open first, and those closed somewhere other than pride of place – but I suppose it is Haverfordwest after all).

We had lunch in the George’s and found the place to be charmingly eccentric, really a throwback to the hippy-alternative 1980s. Lunch was good though.

The George’s restaurant in Market Street, Haverfordwest. Lunch of smoked bacon and three cheeses (grated) on salad, the salad consisting of lots of micro-pieces, beans and sprouts and small shoots. Very good. Pity about the pack of butter in terms of presentation.

The east side of the Market Street is quite trendy. The west side cashes cheques.

A bucketful of hope, in parts. Uphill struggle I would think, for the burgers of Haverfordwest.

Though there was a man playing the Welsh harp in the doorway of the Army Careers Office in the damp empty morning shopping street. There’s always something to reinforce one’s faith in humanity, even in Haverfordwest.

Crumpled Britskin

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:04:00 +0000

Spot a British Tourist

‘I can always tell when someone is British’, said Paul, who was our tour guide in Lebanon in May 2011, ‘By their noises’.

‘What sort of noises?’, we asked, much intrigued.

‘Big pink noises’, he replied, ‘They look like Mr. Bean’.

Which may well be true. But you can spot someone who is a British tourist by a number of other clues too, one of which is their clothes. The clues include:

1. Crumpled trousers. Quite why Brits wear crumpled trousers is as yet unclear to me, for other nationalities don’t.

2. A hat. The Japanese wear hats when overseas too, possibly for the same reason, which I think is that they have been got at by the health and safety inspector, who tells them that exposure to sunlight will give them cancer (or in the case of the Brits it probably is not so much the health and safety inspector as the Daily Mail, which is famous for attributing cancer to just about everything, including even Facebook)

Anyway, whatever the reasons, you can spot them a mile off.

These two are on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The woman isn’t wearing a hat though, so much for my theories.

The man in an ancient uniform is something to do with the celebrations of the day in Bad Kühlungsborn in Germany. Behind him are two British visitors. Well, obvious innit?

Brits in an Italian town. No hats either. So much for theories. But the crumpled-trouser theory is holding up.

The woman on the right, she with the uncrumpled look, I think if I heard her accent right, is not British. These tourists are at the Baalbek temple in Lebanon.

Postmodernist Matrimonial

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 20:06:00 +0000

A Wedding in Italy – September 2011

Paola organises weddings. That is her business. A couple who are getting married and who think that the Marche region of Italy is just the place for it can contact Paola and she’ll get the whole reception thing organised. Does it beautifully.

Paola is unlikely to plan a wedding-day for local people, for the local people and their relatives will do what has always been done, they will have the formula.

No, Paola does postmodernist weddings, those with a tendency towards inherent suspicion of global cultural narrative.

So there we were, sitting reading the newspaper one Saturday afternoon in September when we heard music in the streets. An accordion playing, hands clapping, and the sound making its way towards us up the street.

So unexpected was this that even some nuns in the convent opened their shutters and peeked out. You simply never see them doing that. They quickly withdrew and closed the shutters again before I had time to get the camera ready.

The procession made its way up towards the church:

And then were gathered together for a group photo.

An Italian man was getting married to a Dutch girl. Both work in London.

If you look carefully at the photo you will notice some particular things about this group. The first may well not immediately strike someone in Britain or America where it would be un-noteworthy, it is how ethnically mixed the group is. This is because some of them will be the couple’s friends from London. An Italian wedding would be 99.5% Italians. Notice the London glamour poses adopted by some of the girls.

The second thing is to look at the bride’s mother, and some of the other relatives. They look completely perplexed. The groom’s parents do not seem to be there and that is because his granddad, I guess it was, and some other relatives had decided to sit on the plastic chairs outside our neighbour’s house and bemoan to the neighbours that it was never like this in our day, and they don’t know what the world is coming to. They were from Milan.

And the third thing is the slogan on the band’s T-shirts. It translates literally as ‘You want a clean world, sweep!’, which seems innocuous enough, except that ‘scopa’ also has a meaning exactly like English-speakers use the word ‘screw’. It also means ‘broomstick’, hence the sexual allusion. You can see why granddad needed a rest on a plastic chair. Many of the guests will not have seen the nuance, as many will have spoken no Italian.

The couple had no previous connection with Santa Vittoria where the wedding reception took place, Paola had organised this wedding because she is a weddings-organiser. The wedding ceremony itself was a civic one that was conducted some 30 miles away. Santa Vittoria was used just for the reception. They all turned up, paraded and danced around the town a few times, then assembled for dinner in the courtyard of Palazzo Monti, which is owned by the commune, for dinner and a disco that went on until 2am. Paola decorated the courtyard beautifully and it was a warm evening. Dinner was brought by hand from the Albergo Farfense opposite, which had to close its restaurant for the weekend.

Fortunately from our bedroom we cannot hear discos in that courtyard. Very fortunately, for much of the town can, very boomingly.

But it all helps prop up the economy. The hotel had a bumper weekend, as did the flower shop. The taverna in town was rushed off its feet with overspill from Farfense to add to its already busy ambience. Paola brings fortune.

Although the parade in the street came as a surprise to many, that does not stop some of them from tagging along and joining in, as you can see in the video. The man in the white suit in the first video who says to me, 'Salve', is Davide, Paola’s father.

All best wishes to Stefano and Isjah on their matrimonio. It’s the way things are going.

Small Bus up the Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:08:00 +0000

I Find a Small Bus to Take Me Home – Servigliano, September 2011

This follows on from School Bus from Fermo. I am on a journey back to our house after having dropped off the hire car and I find myself on the school run.

By the time the Porto san Giorgo to Amandola bus gets to Piane di Falerone there’s no one left standing.

I’m now wondering about getting a ticket from Servigliano to Santa Vittoria. According to the timetable I still have plenty of time between buses, but it’s now coming up to one o’clock, and in Italy you buy bus tickets in tobacconist shops, and at one the tobacconist is as likely as not to close for lunch. You can sometimes get them in bars, but I’ve no idea what the arrangement is in Servigliano.

As we pull up to the stop in Servigliano, there’s a small blue bus waiting ahead, and a fair number of youths get off our bus and make their way towards that one. I go with them, and take a quick look at the front of the little bus to see where it’s going. Ascoli Piceno. So this is the Ascoli bus. I’d assumed that was no longer running, not having been able to find any reference to it on the timetables that are posted at bus stops in and around Santa Vittoria.

I wonder if my ticket from the previous bus might be valid on this bus too so I get on and say to the driver, ‘Santa Vittoria?’

‘Si’, he replies, one euro fifty. And he starts fishing about in his bag for a ticket.

I have that in change. Meno male. Though the coins get a bit stuck to an elastoplast that’s covering the thumb of my left hand, where I’d cut myself on a kitchen knife, the plaster is beginning to disintegrate. Embarrassing, that.

The Montegiorgio to Ascoli Piceno bus makes its way up the hill to Santa Vittoria. I think that's Santa Vittoria on top of the hill, difficult to tell with all these hills.

So the Ascoli bus is still running, and you can buy a ticket from the driver. Why is it not mentioned on the timetables? I look at my ticket. START, it says. Ah yes, that will be it, the timetables have been put up by TrasFer, a different company.

START have not seen fit to post their timetables, and in fact the TrasFer timetables are new, previously there were no timetables, you knew about the times of the buses in the way you always did, by asking someone – though we’ve never managed to find anyone in Santa Vittoria who knows when the buses run – or by phoning the bus company, if you know who the bus company is.

But now we know. And now we’ve downloaded the timetables from both the START and TrasFer websites so we are among the few privileged people in Santa Vittoria who know when the buses run. There are more buses per day than we thought.

The little START bus made its way up the hill to Santa Vittoria, the hill we’ve driven so many times and it was so much more pleasant doing it in a bus. Seemed to take less time. Youths got off along the way, and an elderly lady got on at Curetta and asked for: ‘Santa Vittoria’. One euro five cents from here.

I got off at Santa Vittoria with a gang of youths who all said to the driver, ‘Ciao’.

‘Ciao, grazie’, I said as I got off. ‘Prego’ replied the driver.

It’ll be a scenic ride from Servigliano to Ascoli Piceno on this little bus, First up the hill to Santa Vittoria, then down to Ponte Maglio, then up, up, up to Force, then down, down, down, to Venarotta and then further down into Ascoli, twisting and winding all the way. But the Italians don’t know the value of things like scenic rides on buses. And even more missing a trick, the seats on the little bus are quite comfy coach seats. Stuck in the past. That’s their trouble.

And you would think that if you publicised when the buses ran, there would be some chance of people using them. But Italy hasn’t quite got the idea of the economic value of information yet. Will it ever? Who knows?

The Montegiorgio to Ascoli Piceno bus sweeps into Santa Vittoria in Matenano at 1pm on a Saturday in September. No one about – it’s lunchtime. It’s called the MADEBUS, it says on the side. And who put that lamppost up? It’s not straight. The leaning lamppost of Santa Vittoria, a tourist attraction.

School Bus from Fermo

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:49:00 +0000

A Bus Ride with Scholars &ndash 15 September 2011

This follows on from Slow Train on the Adriatic. I am on a journey back to our house after having dropped off the hire car.

The man in the tobacco shop at Porto san Giorgio train station (for in Italy you buy your bus tickets in ciggy shops) said that he could only sell me a ticket as far as Servigliano, and he did not know how I would get a ticket for the final leg of my journey from Servigliano to Santa Vittoria, this despite it stating on the bus company’s website that you could book right through. Though in fact, as it turned out, he did the best thing, for a reason I was to discover later.

The Amandola bus arrived, a coach-like bus with comfortable seats. I stuck my ticket into the strange backwards-facing validation machine at the top of the steps leading from the door of the bus to the seating area (disabled access? Oh, yes, so we are, we’re in Italy), the machine swallowed my ticket and then to my relief made scratchy printing noises and spat my ticket out again, stamped. Meno male.

I decided to sit one row from the front, where I could watch the driver, but wouldn’t get projected through the windscreen if he ran into the back of a truck. The bus was fitted with seatbelts, but using them would have seemed nerdy to the point of rudeness.

A few people get on the bus. Some ask if he is going to Fermo. Si.

Along by the railway and then turn left – a tight turn into a road with a tree-lined walkway down the centre, the roadway a fair squeeze for the bus. Slowly along this road.

There’s a serious fire blazing a couple of streets away to the right, with flames leaping into the sky. No one seems to take any notice. (We discover in the paper next day that a fire had started in a park and a few pine trees and palms had gone up in flames.)

We pick up a few more passengers and then cross the SS16 at the traffic lights and up the hill towards Fermo. Fire engines wailing their way down.

Some people get off the bus, and some get on, though only dribs and drabs. The bus takes the climbing road with the tight right hairpin up to the entrance to the main square of Fermo, the Piazza del Popolo, where all but about three people get off. The driver gets off too and talks to a man who tells him about a Somali child, a black child, who it seems will need help somewhere during the day. I only understand about a third of this. The driver nods while tucking his blue-grey open neck shirt into his trousers. The man puts the driver’s collar straight for him, that had got turned inwards.

The area outside the Piazza del Popolo in Fermo is where the buses pull up at the bus stop, then circle round and go back down the way they came up.

Our bus seems to be going back to Porto san Giorgio, but I suppose the driver knows what he’s doing. Down a suburban road with speed humps, then turn left and, ah, that’s it, we’re pulling up at a school, a large modern orange-red building, there’s a serious number of secondary-age children anticipating the arrival of the bus.

The young people bundle onto the bus, far more of them then there are seats for. Boys and girls. Jammed in, though had some of them moved down the bus a bit more it wouldn’t have quite so tightly packed at the front. The driver doesn’t say, ‘Move down inside the bus please’. He doesn’t say anything.

There’s a seat vacant next to me. A girl of about 15 with acne – quite unusual for an Italian, though she looks more northern-European than Italian – says, ‘Posso?’ ‘May I?’ People do that in Italy on trains and buses. Very polite.

The children, though chattery, and notwithstanding their unreadiness to move down the bus, are very well-behaved.

A large girl in a white T-shirt and glasses, maybe 14-years-old, is almost sitting on the driver’s lap. He tells her with a smile that he can’t drive with her big fat bum pressed against the steering wheel. Not that I can hear what he actually says, all I see is his smiling face in the mirror. The girl tries her best not to get too pressed down on the driver, though there isn’t much other room for her to be. Perhaps she enjoys the thrill of sitting on the driver every day.

The youths piled inside the bus are getting progressively hotter, pinker, and sweatier. They’ll do this every single-bingle school day.

The bus leaves the school and then stops again on the hill leading into Fermo – the hill we came up less than half an hour earlier – where yet more young people cram themselves in somehow, together with the ticket inspector, who proceeds to squeeze his way down the bus, somehow.

I give the inspector my ticket and he punches a hole in it, and then a hole in the magnetic strip so the ticket can’t be used again, not that it probably could anyway, and then slides it to me. Not gives it, slides it, under his hand, as if passing me a card on a card table.

Acne seems not to have a ticket. She talks the man round. I think he is telling her to get it sorted pretty soon. Looks like she might know him.

The bus pulls into a kind of bus park, where a pile of youths, including acne, get off and transfer to a bus showing destination, Monterubbiano, and an equivalent number, who had arrived on the Rubbiano bus, get on.

A few more stops yet in Fermo, where even more people squeeze themselves into the bus, pressed right up to the steps at the front door. This seems to be normal. Everyone squeezes on somehow.

A mass of young arms and bodies, filled to the doors..

As the bus makes its way down into the Tenna valley, past the road to Monte Urano to the Oasi shopping complex, sweating youths get off at bus stops along the way. Some of the bus stops are just alongside a wall on the main road. They don’t look like very safe places to get off a bus.

The bus makes its way along the Tenna valley road, stopping to offload more youths every so often. At some of the bus stops there are cars, on the school run, waiting to pick up the youths to drive them the final leg home.

The bus is clearly running a bit late, not helped at one point by its having to follow a tractor for quite a long stretch. We get to the point where there are just two cars between us and the tractor, and the traffic in the opposite direction clears enough for the first of the cars to get round comfortably. But he doesn’t go. Parp! Parp! The bus driver blows his horn. ‘Huh!’ he whacks his forearm down on the steering wheel.

Eventually the two cars in front do get round the tractor, and then the bus does, the driver giving the tractor a two-tone on the horn as he passes. The farmer looks surprised, wondering what all the noise is about.

It is now about a quarter to one. The bus will have picked up the young people from outside their school a good half hour ago. Presumably they finished school at twelve. There will be no afternoon session. Everything must come second to lunch, and then there’s no point in repeating the whole process again today. Perhaps not surprising that Italy does not come high in the international educational quality tables.

The school day in Italy is generally said to be 8.30am to 1.30pm, and maybe it is, for there are later buses that do this route. Maybe it was just some of the pupils who get away early on certain days. Maybe. There were quite a few scuolabus (school buses) to be seen on our journey. The driver nodded or or flashed his lights.

And there are such things as Italian school dinners, possibly just for much younger children, who may, I suppose, not be able to get themselves home on the bus.

The Unesco Education Information Network in Europe document on Italy suggests that schools provide a certain number of teaching hours per year, rather than having standard-length days, so perhaps that’s the answer. As with so many things, I need to find out more about this and Google is poor on the sort of things that I wish to know.

The story continues with Small Bus up the Hill.

Hotel House

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:10:00 +0000

A Condominium in Porto Recanati, Italy

South of Porto Recanati, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, is Hotel House, which is not a hotel, it’s a block of flats that is home to 2,000-odd people, nearly all immigrants. No one says much about Hotel House, though it is a sight to behold. Almost a town of its own.

You see it as you drive down the autostrada, and when you pass on the train, a 17-story block of four wings dating from 1970, more than 50 metres high, topped by satellite dishes. This is Hotel House.

The first stone was laid, with Italian ceremony, in 1967. The complex was originally intended as a summer-only hotel, which even for the 1960s seems a bit of an optimistic speculation. It was opened in late 1970. Since the 1980s it has been used to house immigrants.

I am getting the following information from The most dangerous lodger, the Camorra (in Italian) in the online newspaper: Cronache Maceratesi, dated 25 March 2011:

There are 480 apartments, each 70 sq metres. The block houses people from 35 different ethnic origins. Only about 100 of the 2,000-odd are Italian [I’m surprised it’s that many]. The number of inhabitants is said to double during the summer months, when people from north Africa move in to live with their co-nationals, and who sell counterfeit designer-label goods on the beaches of the Adriatic coast, goods that they obtain from the Camorra.

[Now this is odd, for I have never seen a north African selling goods on the beaches. I have seen plenty of Black African and Asian beach traders, but never a north African. But the local paper should know more than I do possibly.]

African immigrant beach traders, Marina di Palmense on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The bags might be counterfeit designer labels, for all I know about it. The source of these bags might be the Camorra. But then again, in either case, they might not. I wouldn’t know. There are three bag sellers in this picture, and this is typical at certain times of the day on Italian beaches in 2011.

Summer apart, the residents of this ‘giant block of cement’ constitute about a sixth of the population of Porto Recanati, though in reality the block is somewhat outside the main town.

The most numerous nationality that lives in the block are Senegalese, followed by Bengalis, Tunisians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Chinese, Macedonians, Moroccans.

The block houses shops and, (according to the article in Cronache Maceratesi), a swimming pool and is basically self-sufficient – except for income from work of course.

The people in this block live a life that is effectively separate from that of their fellow citizens in the society outside – and this will no doubt suit some very well – though there is an exception with the children, of which there are 400-odd from the apartments who attend school in Porto Recanati.

There are at least sixteen businesses operating at the base of the complex, also a mosque and a pentecostal church. Some of the inhabitants are employed on the security and control of the building [not clear who pays for this].

As might be expected in a conglomeration of people such as this, while the majority are law-abiding and want to live in peace and tranquillity, there are some who are delinquent, and it tends to be these that get Hotel House into the news and that give it its bad name.

In fact as the article in Cronache Maceratesi points out, the repeated criminality and associated violence that some of the residents of Hotel House get involved in can make it seem like Hotel House is like an atomic bomb waiting to explode (the article is a bit colourful in its language).

It’s the Camorra, says the article, that are driving this criminality and violence, partly through bootleg goods but above all it’s the pushing of drugs.

There’s certainly been problems with pushers, and in September 2011 there was talk of the residents forming vigilante groups; some pushers operating in the grounds of the property were beaten up. The carabinieri came in and have attempted to discourage the forming of a citizens police force, they have searched some flats and arrested some illegals and people possessing drugs. But that may be a one-off. The article suggests it’s a regular control since earlier this year, though with the talk of residents’ policing that sounds more Italian hope than planned reality.

And how does the author of the article, Guiseppe Bommarito, know that the Camorra are behind the drug supply? He doesn’t say.

In addition to all its other problems, and as might be imagined, there have been difficulties getting enough water to 3,000 people, some of them 17-floors up, in the middle of nowhere. A piece from the Reformed Communist Party of Italy, Hotel House, You Do Ethnic Cleansing Without Water reports on this in November 2009. Possibly this issue has now been resolved, though equally possibly not.

Hotel House is a ghetto, whichever way you look at it. And as with so many things in Italy, it looks so considerably like a fuse waiting to blow.

Slow Train on the Adriatic

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:18:00 +0000

A Train Ride in Italy – September 2011

It was a modern three-car unit, like we see trundling along the line when we are at the beach, that formed the 10.30 train from Ancona station. Stopping all stations to San Benedetto.

I had taken the hire car back to Hertz. The little black Fiat Panda with a nasty dent and scrape on the near-side bumper which we hadn’t noticed on picking the car up, despite a careful check over, and which we had seen when the car was parked at Pedaso and thought must have been done in the car park at Santa Vittoria. I had even reported to the barber that someone had scraped our car while it was in the parking area sopra. Highly annoying, I had said. And a new car too. The barber had seen me driving it yesterday. The smiling barber misses nothing. But he hadn’t noticed any damage.

But the lady at Hertz said, no problem, era già, it was there already. A sigh of relief. I had only just learned the Italian for a sigh of relief, and here it was coming in useful already.

And I crossed the road to the station feeling quite relieved, not only because of not having to pay for damage to the car, but even more for not having a car at all. It is one less thing to potentially hassle a person. Now I am free of that encumbrance. And we have eight days now when we can’t go anywhere. Excellent.

I bought a ticket for Porto san Giorgio at the self-service machine. Plenty of choice of self-service ticket machines, for everyone wants to queue at the ticket window and argue the toss with the man. And why? The machine is straightforward and you can choose your language and you slot your credit card in and out pops a ticket. €3.75 for a 45-minute ride on the train. Simple and cheap.

I had got to Hertz in good time, not least by having something of a feel for Ancona. Following the directional signs for the station would have had me in the wrong lane and filtering down roads I didn’t want to go to pretty consistently. In fact I did it only once. Then top the car up with petrol and 50 yards up the road to the car hire shop.

I had half an hour before the train left so I stood outside in the sunshine watching the buses come and go. The bus to the hospital, the bus to the airport, the buses to the ferry terminal. An AtlasSib going to Romania. And opposite, among the hotels, was a building with windows open and bare rooms visible and what looked like African immigrants appearing periodically at the windows. Maybe that’s one of the places where they’re staying. (See African Beach Traders.)

Then, and amazingly remembering to validate my ticket at the little yellow stamping machine, I went and found a place on the train.

‘Pronto!’

‘Prronn-to!’

‘Non sento! Sono in treno!’

‘Chi è?’

‘Ah, Franco!’’

The train fills up. Italians shout down their telefonino.

A man opposite me with ginger hair and stubble, doesn’t look Italian, talks into his mobile with his hand covering his mouth, quietly, so no one can hear. But speaks natural Italian. White slacks, no socks, brown sneakers, blue shirt and a blue lightweight plastic jacket that he keeps covering his shoulders with. Brown mock-leather plastic briefcase. Could be gay. Going to San Benedetto, not used to travelling by train for sure, too fidgety. Carries a copy of Corriere della Sera but doesn’t look at it.

Two boys holding motorcycle helmets come and sit in the foursome beside me and the man, one of the boys has quite sore-looking lacerations on his leg, probably from falling of his bike. White slacks asks them something and they reel off, more or less, the stations before San Benedetto. White slacks has already asked me about the socket where he can plug in his mobile, and detected that my Italian’s not that good, so doesn’t ask me anything again. Meno male. We find the socket though, hidden beneath the folding table, but he doesn’t plug his mobile in. Fidgety.

Quite a few folks in the train strike up conversation with each other, I notice.

On the way we pass at least two giant edifices of note, IKEA south of Ancona, and Hotel House at Porto Recanati.

We arrive at Porto san Giorgio and I make my way to the door.

‘Non funziona’, says an elderly man with a raspy voice. He has obviously taken upon himself the civic responsibility of telling everyone that the door is not working.

‘Ah, non funziona’, I reply, which I think is what you do, while thinking, an Italian train with a set of doors not working, what a surprise!

And I follow on down the train to where everyone else is waiting, by the next set of doors. Porto san Giorgio is a busy station so there is no panic in getting to the doors on time. Meno male.

The story continues with School Bus from Fermo.

The Pope is a True Socialist

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:23:00 +0000

The Pope in Ancona – September 2011

Comments by the Pope at Ancona on 11 Sepember 2011, as reported in Il Messaggero, make him sound close to Soviet in his views. Messaggero were non-judgmental, but then they are said to have links to the Church. But neither has the Daily Mail commented on what to them should surely be a scandalous situation. All to do with hot potatoes I suppose. Never underestimate the flaccidity of a newspaper, especially the Mail.

Il Papa visited Ancona on 11 September. He preached to 100-thousand people from a specially-constructed stage at the quayside, in the area where shipbuilding takes place, but hasn’t done since May because of lack of business, under the giant Fincantieri crane, that has nothing currently to lift.

The article in Il Messaggero, Monday 12 September 2011, page 14.

We noticed when we were in Ancona in July that that part of the docks looked a bit empty. Previously there were cruise ships being refitted.

Ancona docks, the big Fincantieri crane with nothing to lift. The ships in the picture are ferries for Croatia.

Minoan Lines ferry from Greece coming in. The caravans awaiting its arrival for loading. The big Fincantieri crane in the distance.

The Pope said, ‘We need a new model for development, the strength of the economy is not enough’. Really? That sounds somewhat revolutionary.

‘They are giving you stones in place of bread’. Right on, there, Vladimir Ilyich!

‘There should be the dignity of work, not job insecurity’, declared the Pope, ‘The way to overcome the uncertainty of job insecurity and temporary employment consists of abandoning individuality. We need more solidarity’. Faith first through offering prayer because God guides our rulers, ‘Awakening in them the desire to work for the common cause’. ‘It is dangerous to marginalise faith and therefore God because the imbalance that comes from this causes trouble at many levels and in diverse sectors.’

Abandoning individuality? Solidarity? Working for the common good? Sounds a bit familiar.

And this at a time when most educated and objective observers are saying that what Italy desperately needs, not only for itself but for the future of Europe as a whole, is more innovation, fewer restrictive practises, opening up of markets to create jobs, and greater freedom for organisations to change and move forward.

The unions aren’t saying that, of course, they are asking for ‘the right to work’ and no change that makes it easier for organisations to fire people. They clearly have some powerful support from the Vatican.

All this makes it difficult for any Italian politician to stand up and argue for the changes that must come. Possibly only Casini has gone some way towards this. Berlusconi isn’t going to because he just wants to be loved. Mostly now he’s just being ignored except as an embarrassment over the antics surrounding his personal life, and for him being ignored must be the greatest of failures.

Has the Daily Mail started reporting the excesses of the Red Ratzinger? It’s the sort of thing it would do, had anyone else high-profile expressed such views. But there’s nothing about it on the Mail’s website. The pansies!

And as for Fincantieri, no worries, it’ll be relaunched in October 2011 with the construction of two new ships. Oh yeah? We’ll see.

Article in Il Messaggero on 20 September 2011 explaining how bright the future looks.

Doggy Day

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:20:00 +0000

Black Combe Country Fair – 29 August 2011

We went to a country fair at Bootle, Cumbria, in the north west of England. Seemed like it might be fun. On reading the programme later we find that by attending this fair we were offering our support to Black Combe Beagles and the re-introduction of lawful hunting with dogs in the UK.

I don’t have strong views on hunting, it’s something that other people get excited about and I don’t, like television programmes and football, but I do have strong views on dogs, I don’t like them, I think they smell like a dog, and the country fair had a lot of dogs. We only saw one pile of dogshit, though I expect there was more awaiting the tread of the unwary.

I was not at all interested in the dogs, but there were plenty of people there and that was much more to my taste.

By good fortune we had eaten lunch before we went to the fair, a Traditional English Lunch.

We had pondered something being available to eat at the fair, and so it was, and what a good thing we didn’t follow that inclination, for there was but a choice of one option, a burger van. And that would not have been somewhere we would have rushed towards with our appetite all aglow.

Presumably burger, sausage and chips is what doggy people eat. I wouldn’t know. There was certainly a long queue at the van.

The burger van. Looks clean enough.

Oh dear. Here’s where you help yourself to sauces, and milk for your tea.

Hmmm, well I suppose we could have eaten our chips naked and drunk coffee or tea without milk, which I usually do anyway, so for me a little less unappetising, possibly.

The queue behind the sauce table. A man holding his dog, then he'll pop the chips in his mouth with his fingers. Charming.

With her tea tucked underneath her arm. Having bought your lunch, time to eat it in comfort.

Lunch with dogs. Delightful.

Popping the chip in the gob. I was a bit worried about that long grass with so many doggies about.

There were some fairground stalls at the fair too. This dog looks like it’s gasping for air, as well it might.

But then just as I was beginning towards the despondent, the smiling vicar arrived to assure me by his countenance that all is well in the world. The vicar spent the entire afternoon grinning, every time I saw him he was grinning.

You live and learn. Now I know something about dog-owners, or should that be hound-hounds?

I don’t think I’ll be applying to join them.

English Dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:13:00 +0000

Traditional English Dinner – 29 August 2011

We had lunch (which used to be called dinner in England) at the restaurant at Millstones Farm Shop, Bootle, Cumbria. For my lunch I ate two very traditional English dishes.

For main, Cumberland Tatty Pot, this is similar to a Lancashire Hotpot, but with black pudding in addition to the neck-end of lamb.

Lamb, black pudding, potatoes and carrots all a-glistening.

For pudding, a bread and butter pudding, but called croissant and butter so perhaps was made with croissants as well as bread.

Bread (croissant in this case) soaked in milk and sugar and baked with butter and raisins.

These two look rather similar don’t they? Fortunately they don’t taste at all similar. And they both tasted good. A restaurant to recommend.

African and Asian Beach Traders in Italy 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:59:00 +0000

Will the Beach Traders Outnumber the Sunbathers?

On any beach in Italy in the summer there are African and Asian men selling cheap goods: towels, bags, music tapes and CDs, sunglasses, hats, cheap watches and jewellery. It’s almost entirely men. I have only ever seen one woman doing this.

Man selling sunglasses and bags on the beach at Marina Palmense, Italy. There are hundreds of such traders walking the beaches of Italy at the moment. Must be a soul-destroying job, but they keep their chin up.

I don't know from which country or countries the Asian traders originate.

The beach traders who sell towels, almost all of whom are Asian, look quite colourful as they march along with their wares on display.

The number of Africans in particular are mushrooming since the arrangement between Berlusconi and Ghaddafi to stop them from leaving Libya fell apart and the boats to Lampedusa became ever fuller and more numerous. There is a write-up about this, giving some inkling of the exploitation behind it, in a Daily Telegraph article Libya’s lost immigrant souls with nowhere to go. A harrowing article that explains why since August 2011 the influx of boats has stopped. Italian government ministers will be somewhat relieved, though not half as relieved as the Africans who made it before then. I mentioned this to a recently-arrived Nigerian street seller, but he appeared to be unaware just how fortunate he was.

African men also try to sell you things in the car parks of some supermarkets. I have never seen African women doing this, though I have seen them begging in shop carparks.

They get shoo’d away by the staff, but they keep coming back.

Taken through the door mirror of my car. The trader is hassling someone who is about to drive away, or thought they were. I spoke to the trader, a cheery soul, he spoke natural English and said he came from Nigeria.

The African traders walk for miles, calling on peoples’s doors, trying to sell some cheap rubbish or to get someone to take pity on them and give them a euro. Many of them are extraordinarily cheerful and almost universally polite, and people do take pity on them and give them something, sometimes, though with there being so many . . .

I asked one young Nigerian in September 2011 how long he had been in Italy. Two years he replied. And is it not frustrating walking from village to village trying to flog people trinkets? Eeeh (a Nigerian form of don't ask awkward questions), but what else can I do? There is no work.

Where do they get these goods from? There must be an organised supply system somewhere, and I think these traders are being exploited, none of them wants to be trying to sell junk to greasy half-naked Europeans, but it’s presumably the only way they can make a little income.

There’s a writeup on where some of these traders may live, and what may be the origin of some of their goods, on Hotel House.

Marina di Palmense on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The bags might be counterfeit designer labels, for all I know about it. The source of these bags might be the Camorra – see Hotel House. But then again, in either case, they might not. I wouldn’t know. There are three bag sellers in this picture, and this is typical at certain times of the day on Italian beaches in 2011.

The African beach trader might have a sale. Behind those reflective sunglasses, what’s he thinking? The women have tied the neck strap of their bikini tops behind their back, for the sake of the suntan; this seems to be something of a fashion at the moment. Presumably works alright if they don’t jig up and down too much.

There’s very little about this on the web, or anywhere else for that matter. Googling it, I can find one article, dated September 2006. I cannot find any pics on Google images. The Economist did an article on Senegalese street traders in Italy in 2006 and this article helps to explain where many of these traders go in the winter.

In the late afternoon in the seaside-town railway stations and alongside the main roads, you see the traders boarding a train, a bus or waiting for their lift, with their bags of merchandise still unsold, on their way back to wherever it is they are all staying. Someone or some organisation or organisations are controlling all this.

And some of the immigrants work the stations and trains, begging, see Gawd Bless You Guv.

Some of the traders who have clearly been doing this for a while lose their cheerful countenance and replace it was one of frustration and misery.

An immigrant trinket-seller is trying to flog his wares at a restaurant in Ancona. People studiously ignore him, except for me, I told him to piss off and don’t interrupt my lunch, which he duly did, with a look of anger and outrage on his face.

The African beach trader is trying to sell something, some tapes it looks like, to a group of sunbathers at Grottammare, Italy. This beach is no longer there, unfortunately, it has been washed away by the sea. Notice the cigarette in the potential customer’s mouth. Typical. Italian beaches can get to look like a giant ashtray at the end of the summer season. You sometimes see someone who is being sold junk offer the immigrant a cigarette. He’ll take it and light it and go away smoking it though clearly an entirely unfamiliar experience for him.

The same African, trying his luck some more.

It’s Italy that is awash with such traders. They’ll be booted off the beach in Greece by the tourist police. Not sure how much they exist in France. maybe a bit. And where is it all leading? The prospects don’t seem too good to me, either for the traders or their host country that is trying to turn and look the other way.

First Communion

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:22:00 +0000

A Catholic Ritual in Central Italy

First Communion Relatives

Children about 8-years-old have their first communion service in the Catholic church, each of them dressed in a white smock. Then the banner of the saint is paraded round the town, carried by four men in grey smocks, the children go too and the priest follows on in the passenger seat of his battered old Fiat Panda, intoning Santo Spirito and Ave Maria and the like into a microphone, the sound relayed to a pair of speakers carried by another man in a grey smock, the speakers looking menacingly like a couple of axes. On first communion day, the childrens’ relatives come, many dressed in what they consider to be their most stylish outfits, and this is where I come in, for while they think they look stylish, I think they look hilarious, not least the man in the hat and shorts. The people in the above photo are waiting for the procession to return after its tour of the town.

While the procession makes its way round town, this being Italy, everyone talks. And, as the man in the yellow shirt is on the point of demonstrating, grabs the chance for a Micky Moke.

Lizard blue shoes.

High heels and no socks

There must be a caption for this photo but I haven’t got it yet.

How do I look?

Some have doubts, as well they might.

There’s always some old geezers standing in the shadows.

Then when the formalities in the church are over, the friends and relatives drift away from the church to their respective lunch parties, where gifts are brought and everyone eats and drinks and talks, still dressed in their bizarre outfits, though to be fair, and as you can see from these photos, it’s OK to come in your shirt and trousers too, but it’s somewhat the done thing to look ridiculous, the more so the better.

Lupetto 25

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:38:00 +0000

Let’s Ponder Fried Fish

In the mid-1980s I was on a train travelling from London to Birmingham and in an adjoining foursome sat some union officials on their way to a meeting, three men and a much younger woman. The woman mentioned that Indian food had overtaken fish and chips as Britain’s most-purchased takeaway food. This caused her three dinosaur colleagues to completely ignore her point and begin a discourse on ‘fish and chips I have known’, smugly and self-satisfyingly.

For the grey-suited men thought that fish and chips were very traditionally British, not knowing that fish fried in batter had been brought to the UK not much more than a hundred years before, brought either by Jewish immigrants from central Europe, or, more likely, by Italians.

Fish fried in batter is still widely to be found in parts of Italy, while it has largely had its day in the UK, where the places you do find fish-and-chip shops tend to be in those areas that are poor or slow to change, plus a few eccentricities like West Bay in Dorset.

Whereas in Italy . . .

The following pics are of a fried fish van in the market that takes place every other Monday in Servigliano in the Marche region of Italy. The van dates from at latest 1970 (when production ceased of the OM Lupetto 25), its owners, clearly, from before that.

OM Lupetto 25s were made in Brescia between 1958 and 1970. This one in Servigliano market has the original Ascoli Piceno numberplates. It’s clearly been patched up a bit over time.

People buying pesce fritto, fried fish.

For you my friend, a piece of pish, for you to try. The photo is level – see the posters on the wall, it’s the van that’s on a lean. At the back of the van, the big black frying vat.

The server’s diamonte cross round her neck.

Betty Boop hat picks a pesce.

While in the UK fried fish has pretty exclusively been white fish, cod, haddock, skate etc, in Italy they fry up everything, bits of old octopus, tubes of squid, lubbly grub! Provided you can put mind over batter.

Gawd Bless You Guv

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:38:00 +0000

I Give two euros to an African

At Verona Porta Nuova station for the 22.18 Venezia train. The station dark and shabby. A train comes in from Brennero, the end of its journey, four people get off.

We try to validate our tickets at the yellow stamping machines, the first two machines we try aren’t working. One of the validation machines on the platform works for us, though a person who tried it ahead of us didn’t have any luck and went to look for another. The driver taking the Brennero train to the siding lights a cigarette.

A young African man with a shaved head approaches us. Do we speak English, or Italian? Either, as you wish. In that case, he says in English, I would prefer to use my own language. With a story about needing the fare to get back home to Treviso, he is clearly trying to tap us for some money. How much do you need? Just one euro. There’s a two-euro coin in my back pocket so I say, here’s two euros, where are you from? Ghana, he replies, and God bless you, remember that if you have faith in God, you will be secure, for God is goodness, God is . . .

‘Hold on’, I interject, ‘if you’re going to push religion down our throats, I’ll have my two euros back.’

He smiles a wide smile, his white teeth the only display of brightness on the gloomy nighttime station.

The young man seems genuinely delighted with his two euros. He will almost certainly have arrived in Italy on a boat at Lampedusa and be trying to make his fortune in Europe, which he’s never going to do by begging the cost of a few cups of coffee.

The Milano to Venezia stopping train pulls in, every carriage covered in graffiti. A lot of people get off, including an African family that seems to have its entire household in suitcases and pushchairs. Where are they going? We find seats in a carriage that smells of wee. The train is quite busy, for in addition to the vast number of people who got off, there was an equally large number getting on.

Our carriage has seriously flat wheels. Flat wheels are where a section of the rim gets flattened out when the train brakes and skids, then as the wheel subsequently rolls the flat section makes a banging sound, and the problem tends to get accentuated. This carriage was banging so dramatically that it sounded like the train would be lucky to reach the next station, never mind Venezia, but it probably would.

The Ghanaian came through the train holding a card of some sort, begging for money. On seeing us he smiled and made his way to the next set of seats. That card probably means he’s part of a syndicate. A post-modernist Lambedusa Fagin outfit.

The first station after Verona was San Bonifacio, where we were to get off. The platform was on the other side of the train from that at Verona Porta Nuova, and we hadn’t noticed that the doors opposite where we got on were locked shut. A panic and dash with our boxes of wine that Catya had given us in Verona, through two interconnecting doors to the next carriage, where fortunately we were in time to get out before the doors closed and the train, the last of the day to stop at San Bonifacio, accelerated into the darkness on its clattery way.

The Gypsies of the Bek’aa

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:18:00 +0000

Bek’aa valley, Lebanon, 18 May 2011

On the road south from Baalbek, in the Bek’aa Valley, Lebanon, there are gypsy encampments. The gypsies, we were told, are Muslims from Saudi and Yemen from way, way back. They have Lebanese citizenship.

The gypsies work the land. You see women in brightly-coloured dresses bending over the crops, backbreaking work, and women washing clothes in the rivers, and areas of dumped cars.

Gypsy tented encampment. Taken from a moving bus.

Entrance to the Gypsy camp.

As so often, when you really want to know something, the information is either next-to impossible to find or is thin on the ground on Google, though I found one article called The Gypsies of Lebanon that gives a little bit of information about the gypsies in the Bek’aa Valley, and tells us that not all the gypsies in Lebanon are Muslim.

It also tells us that the gypsies in the Bek’aa are a bit more integrated than those elsewhere, especially more so than those living in the shanty towns of Beirut – who regularly get moved on I should think.

It also tells us, on the page headed Learning Domari Unit 1, that the Domari word for father is babu. Which is intriguing, for the diminutive word for father in central Italy is also babu, which people also use in the third person (eg ‘Babu is in the garden’). I wonder which came first.

It seemed to me like some of the houses under construction in the region of the fields where the gypsies work might be gypsy houses, with their over-elaborate and unfinished look, a bit like the houses being built by some of the gypsies in Romania. Though there was no one to ask, and there is nothing I can find about it via Google (it’s a non-Googly subject, the living circumstances of the underclasses).

Gypsy house? Taken from a moving bus.

Maid in Beirut

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:33:00 +0000

Young Women in Pink or Grey Overalls, Beirut, Lebanon, 17 May 2011

As you wander the streets of Beirut you see women in a pink or grey uniform. These women are clearly not Lebanese. They are maids.

The uniform and ethnic origin indicate a maid. Place d'Etoile, Beirut.

We asked about working parents and how they coped in Lebanon and were told that both parents of a middle-class family are likely to work, earning around $1,000 a month each. For between $300 and $400 a month they get a maid, who lives and eats with the family and looks after the children and the household 24×7. $300 will get an Ethiopian maid, for a Filipino you’ll pay $400. Midway will be a Sri Lankan. This article explains the price differential.

In general, jobs as maid are in demand, for she can send a fair lump of the salary back home to support relatives there. Though there are also the tales of horror, especially, it seems affecting the Sri Lankans and Ethiopians.

The Witches in the Mosque

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sun, 29 May 2011 20:35:00 +0000

Women Visiting Mosques, Beirut, Lebanon, 17 May 2011

In Lebanon you can generally visit a mosque, in fact it is quite encouraged. Whatever gender you are you must take off your shoes, and if you are a woman you must cover your head and arms.

Coven Ready. Hilary, Rebecca and other female members of our group donning the witches outfits provided for the women who visit the Omari mosque, Beirut. The women said it’s all very well, but you dunnarf get hot and sweaty.

Hilary and Diana leave the Omari mosque in Beirut dressed in their witch costumes. They have passed through the plastic curtains that separate the main hall of the mosque from the vestibule area.

Photography had not been invented when the Koran was written, so there was nothing to ban.

Ads Defying Belief

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Sat, 28 May 2011 17:14:00 +0000

Roadside Posters, Lebanon, 20 May 2011

In the strict Shi’a Muslim areas of Lebanon, much is banned, including suggestive ads. While this is at the opposite pole to my general belief in the good sense and intelligence of humankind, I do sometimes concede that they have a point.

Taken from a moving bus, so the quality of image is not good, but then neither is the quality of ad. Seems to be advertising Kelloggs Special K.

It is noticeable as you drive out of the Bek’aa valley, which is Shi’a, and onto the Damascus Highway, the main road from Beirut to Damascus, how much less restrictive the roadside clutter becomes.

Climbing the hill out of Chtaura on the Damascus Highway. I guess this ad would not be permitted in the strict Shi’a areas.

Marie France ads alongside the Damascus Highway.

Teach your children well, to wear short skirts and long hair.

Not all the ads are pushing sexualised images. We thought this one was especially funny:

Once I Was Happy But Now I’m Forlorn. But it’s in Arabic, so reads from right to left. An ad for hair transplants. Taken from a moving bus in a polluted street, next to a power station north of Beirut.

Hubbly Bubbly

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Thu, 26 May 2011 18:09:00 +0000

The Narghile, Lebanon, 19 May 2011

Smoking is widespread in Lebanon. As well as cigarettes, which are widely advertised – often using sexually-suggestive imagery, many people will smoke a narghila, or hookah, with their dinner.

In Lebanon (and probably other countries in the Middle East) taking pot luck from a restaurant menu can be dodgy, for you might order narghile, which you don’t eat but smoke. It’s a hookah or hubble-bubble. The waiter gives the tube a good suck as he brings the machine to your table, to get the smoke going, so as well as all the respiratory diseases, you’ll get whatever he’s got. I suppose if Israeli jets are as likely as not to wipe you out any day . . .

Café ad in Saida (Saidon). Typically for Lebanon, Nescafé is seen as a product on a par with ground coffee. The narghile will be on the menu along with the coffee.

There’s a fair description of how a narghila works on Wikipedia.

The narghila vapourises tobacco that has quite often been flavoured with fruit, and the user draws the resulting smoke through a tube into their mouth.

The jury seems to be out over whether smoking a narghila is more or less dangerous than smoking a cigarette; what is not in dispute is the quantity of smoke that a narghila produces, which is many many times that of a cigarette.

Laziz restaurant, Beirut. On our table, from where I was taking the photograph, the ubiquitous bottles of Almaza beer, brewed in Beirut. These are either served to be drunk from the bottle (as here) or from a glass that has been in the freezer. The woman is smoking a narghila. The menacing-looking nozzles behind her head are for the waiters to clean the tables between customers.

Young man sucking on a narghila in Jbeil (Byblos), Lebanon, in a restaurant called Cookery. I think the man in a black shirt is the waiter placing more tobacco on the narghila.

I told Paul our Lebanese guide that the narghila or hookah was sometimes known in English as a hubble-bubble. He recorded this in his memory as hubbly-bubbly, so hubbly-bubbly it became.

But plenty of people smoke cigarettes too. The following picture is the priest from a Maronite church in Byblos, whom our guide Paul had just fetched to open up the church.

Paul our guide had gone to get the priest to open up the ancient Maronite church in Jbeil (Byblos). The priest obliged, while finishing his cigarette.

Lebanese Home Cooking

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Mon, 23 May 2011 20:37:00 +0000

Family-style Lunch, Lebanon, 19 May 2011

For me, the highlight of our trip to Lebanon with Explore was the lunch we had in a country family home at Tannourine.

Paul the tour guide is handing round bread from a plastic bag. In café/restaurants in Lebanon bread comes in a plastic bag, and you are supposed to take a piece and leave the rest in the bag, for the next person or next meal. On the table, cabbage in olive oil and lemon juice. Delicious! A bowl of yogurt and some excellently tasty green olives. This is a Maronite Christian home.

The starter of fried potatoes with garlic, plus raw cabbage marinaded in olive oil and lemon juice, and some marinaded green olives. I could have eaten those potatoes with garlic until my stomach tripled its girth.

The main course of bean and buckwheat stew. This was very pleasant but to our taste rather bland and samey. The Lebanese in contrast wolfed it down in great quantity. That’s cos it’s what their mamma cooks for them. Sopra tutto il mondo uguale. In the background Diana is spooning yogurt onto her cabbage and bread. She has not yet got to main course.

For dessert, wonderful homemade apricot jam and bananas. For some reason the bananas were from Equador. Lebanon grows very fine and tasty bananas, which tend to be smaller and less uniformly shaped than the EU supermarket standard. Possibly our hosts thought they were being impressively up-market.

Hilary said to me, you must pretend you need a wee, for the washing machine in the bathroom is wearing a frock.

The light switch in the bathroom had just been signed off by Health and Safety.

The walls of the house were covered with blown-up country photographs. We were not sure which country. Not Lebanon, we concluded. Every other available space had a Christian icon, and every spare surface a Madonna statuette.

Altogether, a lunch that was both delicious and privileged.

My Glittery Pussycats

noreply@blogger.com (Hazy Dave) — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:24:00 +0000

Beiteddine, Lebanon, 15 May 2011

At the Beiteddine palace complex in Lebanon were a young Muslim couple. Lebanon is quite a relaxed sort of place, where many people express symbols of their religion without being too prissy about it. Perhaps they’ve spent so many years fighting each other in the name of beliefs they have decided that taking it all seriously is for dickheads. Be nice to think so.

I was intrigued by a young Muslim couple where the girl kept her head covered, but in other respects was not what you might call deeply pious. I especially liked the glittery pussycats on her T-shirt. Other members of our group unkindly accused me of being a bit fixated on her pussycats.

The colour coordination, mobile phone, glittery pussycats and cigarette all post-date the Prophet, I think.

She has the dark eyebrows and eye-liner of many Lebanese. Her pussycats seem to be called Konnechiwa and Sayonara (Hello and goodbye in Japanese). Of all things. He keeps a firm hold on his pack of cigarettes.

A rose by any other name. And even her fingernails are colour-coordinated.

Muslim Chic. With pussycats Konnechiwa and Sayonara. Hai! Beiteddine Palace, Lebanon.