I arrived home from Cyprus in May and have spent so much time hustling for freelance writing jobs that I have neglected this blog. It has been a strange few months. By the time I returned home my grant funding had dried out, I didn’t have a bartending job anymore, and my writer’s residecy would […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
March
23
Walking through the Dead Zone
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
After spending five weeks amid Palestine’s daily despair, the divisions here in Nicosia seem almost quaint by comparison. The forty year-old conflict between the Turkish North and Greek South has lost all of its heat and momentum, but entrenched feelings of betrayal and distrust keep it going. There is some talk in the newspapers about […]
March
14
Barbed Wire in Bethlehem
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I went to Bethlehem to photograph some of the graffiti on the Wall – which I did – but found myself more enamoured with the coils of concertina that is everywhere. Perhaps I have seen too much of it in the past year, but there is an aesthetic to barbed wire that I find beautiful […]
The Walls of East Jerusalem
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Today I took a tour with an Israeli-Palestinian NGO called Ir–Amim to visit Jerusalem’s backyards and unholy places. A bus carried a crowd of mostly foreigners around East Jerusalem to show the impacts of the Wall. I had been looking forward to hearing about the Wall from an Israeli perspective and was surprised that our […]
March
14
Sending a Message
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
The fingers on Yusuf’s right hand are sore and black. “Some spray cans are more finger-friendly,” he says, and he should know. He finds a broken bottle on the ground, with the bottle cap still on the neck, and discovers it fits perfectly on his spray-finger. The ad hoc prosthetic will make the painting easier. […]
March
08
A Zoo in Palestine
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
The rain and wind has stopped and it is spring again in Palestine, and I feel good. For me, it is not really traveling unless I can feel the sun warm my face. Perhaps this is a Canadian thing. I traveled to Qalqilya the other day, a city in the northern West Bank. Qalqilya is […]
Lamenting a Lonely Planet
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I found an interesting article about travel and guidebooks by author Stephen Henighan in the very excellent Geist Magazine. You can find it here.
A Tree Falls
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
Mohammad told me that he knows every centimetre of his family’s land south of the village of Jayyous. He remembers camping in the middle of the fields in the hot Palestinian summers, and he especially remembers planting olive trees with his father. “It is a special thing for a Palestinian boy, to plant an olive […]
In Jerusalem, with cold
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
I spent twenty-seven of my first forty-eight hours in Jerusalem in my hotel bed, and yesterday slept for seventeen hours. A cold and a cough that descended on me the day before I left Canada turned into a full-blown phenomenon on the plane ride into Israel. I became that coughing, sputtering, disgustingly snotty guy on […]
Inauguration Day
posted by Marcello Di Cintio
As I mentioned below, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to process what learned in India and Morocco into legible prose, and preparing for my next trip. Today, though, like much of the world, I am sure, I spent much of the day watching the inauguration. It is hard, in a way, to react […]
Elsewhere 