Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "ohrid"
Behind the scenes... and personal
'The Silencer’ 2nd Anniversary of publication.
Doing table top research on the Ataturk Boulevard, Istanbul,
just watching...
(Here Sheref Dushman meets contacts and prepares to depart for Greece from Sirkeci Railway Station.)
During the field research I discovered that the 'Friendship Express' service between Istanbul and Thessaloniki had stopped altogether just a month before I wanted to take it. So I had to work out an alternative way of experiencing the journey Sheref makes. My wife and I found a coach trip for Istanbul from Albania on Women's Day 2011, and travelled roughly along the same route through the night, at times parallel to the railway lines. The excursion degenerated into chaos in Istanbul, though, as the passengers complained and demanded their own personal itineraries be met, and the organisers, who had had enough of them, dumped them all in vexation! Caught in the middle of it, we ended up locked inside the coach for over two hours. But that said, I was still able to do what I had set out to. I would have loved to have taken the train. As an aside, it is the first section of the route Bond travels with Tatiana Romanova and the 'SPEKTOR' machine in Fleming's 'From Russia With Love'.
Thessaloniki Railway Station where I just missed catching ‘The Friendship Express’
(by about a month).
With my wife, Albana, and son Hanniel, 6, in Galicitsa Park, F.Y.R.O.M.
September, 2014.
Gathering the grapes in a church yard, Albania.
Me, September, 2014.
By this author: The Silencer
Doing table top research on the Ataturk Boulevard, Istanbul,
just watching...
(Here Sheref Dushman meets contacts and prepares to depart for Greece from Sirkeci Railway Station.)
During the field research I discovered that the 'Friendship Express' service between Istanbul and Thessaloniki had stopped altogether just a month before I wanted to take it. So I had to work out an alternative way of experiencing the journey Sheref makes. My wife and I found a coach trip for Istanbul from Albania on Women's Day 2011, and travelled roughly along the same route through the night, at times parallel to the railway lines. The excursion degenerated into chaos in Istanbul, though, as the passengers complained and demanded their own personal itineraries be met, and the organisers, who had had enough of them, dumped them all in vexation! Caught in the middle of it, we ended up locked inside the coach for over two hours. But that said, I was still able to do what I had set out to. I would have loved to have taken the train. As an aside, it is the first section of the route Bond travels with Tatiana Romanova and the 'SPEKTOR' machine in Fleming's 'From Russia With Love'.
Thessaloniki Railway Station where I just missed catching ‘The Friendship Express’
(by about a month).
With my wife, Albana, and son Hanniel, 6, in Galicitsa Park, F.Y.R.O.M.
September, 2014.
Gathering the grapes in a church yard, Albania.
Me, September, 2014.
By this author: The Silencer
