When it opened its doors in 1955, the Grande Hotel in Beira, colonial Mozambique was touted as the largest and most luxurious hotel in Africa. The art deco style palace with uninterrupted views of the Indian Ocean boasted 116 rooms and an Olympic sized swimming pool for its VIP guests. But by the 1970s, having spent less than a decade in service and many more in limbo, the Grande Hotel was serving as a military base in a city ravaged by civil war. The basement was converted into a prison. Today, 1,000 squatters called the Grande Hotel their home.

(c) Miguel Manso

As it was…

Ironically, the Grande Hotel was intended to be a symbol of success for Portuguese colonial rule in Beira. The elegant art deco exteriors reflected the style that had dominated architecture in Portugal throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Construction costs however, went three times over budget and once opened, a huge staff was needed to maintain the extensive luxurious hotel. And those wealthy foreign tourists? They never came.

The locals and white residents of Southern Africa just couldn’t afford the luxury prices at the Grande and to foreigners who did have the money, Beira never gained a reputation as a holiday ‘hotspot’. As a hotel catering to businessmen and government officials, it didn’t work either. Diplomats and VIP guests of the state were always given complimentary stays and businessmen chose the more affordable Ambassador Hotel, which opened just after the Grande in the downtown financial area. By 1963, the Grande Hotel had still not turned a profit and finally closed.

(c) Miguel Manso

In the years that followed, the hotel was in a state of limbo. The swimming pool stayed open to the public and even became the main training facility for the Mozambican Olympic swimming team (it was the only swimming pool in the colony). It played host to events and weddings and even occasionally temporarily re-opened as a residence for VIP visitors from the United States.

In June of 1975, Mozambique became independent from Portugal and power was handed over to the new Frelimo government. The bar at the swimming pool became the office of the Revolutionary Committee and the main hall of the Grande Hotel was used for party meetings and weddings right above the basement where opponents of the new ruler were kept in a dark make-shift prison.

(c) Miguel Manso

In 1977, a brutal civil war broke out, leaving the country in tatters. Next door, a newly formed Zimbabwe took advantage of the former colony in its weakened state and established Beira as a neutral zone for importing and exporting their products. As a safe zone, Beira became a haven for refugees literally overnight. They arrived at the empty Grande Hotel in the darkness and it’s said that upon awakening the next morning in the windowless open terraces, overwhelmed by the views of the ocean which many had never seen before, children rushed towards the sea, and fell to their deaths.

Since 1992, relative peace has settled in Mozambique but conditions at the Grande Hotel only continue to worsen. While the common rule for living within the Grande Hotel community is respect, the informal residents find none outside the walls of the crumbling resort. Given the nickname ‘whato muno’ (not from here), they are excluded from the social and economical community of Beira, today a full redeveloped seaport with a booming economy through the transit of minerals to Asia.

(c) Miguel Manso

Architectural student Robert R. Cruiming who has done extensive research on the Grande Hotel notes that “the reputation of the inhabitants of the Grande Hotel in the city of Beira is bad. The Grande Hotel is considered as a place where robbers live and where the police don’t have any form of authority.”

As poverty gets worse amongst the inhabitants, so does the physical state of the hotel. Most of the infrastructure for providing water, a sewage system or electricity has been removed and sold for food and water. The once regal parquet floor has been street to fuel cooking fires and . Even the building’s concrete is being chipped away for sale, leaving the safety of the building in doubt. More worryingly, the swimming pool which is now used for bathing purposes by residents who can’t afford water from the private-owned pump across the road, contains highly polluted water. The Red Cross has confirmed a high risk of all sorts of health hazards lurking in the Grande Hotel, including cholera, HIV and malaria.

(c) Miguel Manso

Still, the Grande Hotel is open to anyone that wants shelter. Trapped by poverty, some of the residents are now third generation.

The local municipality authority wants to help relocate the residents (to housing that would probably be just as grim) and is searching for investors. Of course, being in such a strategic location in the city, the plot could be redeveloped for commercial activities. However the municipality is not the legal owner and has no official responsibility in this case. Remarkably, to this day the hotel officially remains the property of the Portugese group Grupo Entreposto SA, the continuation of the colonial company, Companhia de Moçambique. And with ongoing economic instability in Europe, there is currently no sign of investors stepping up to the plate…

Perhaps the next time you pass your landlord in the stairwell, that complaint about a dripping faucet might not seem so urgent.

Watch this short trailer for a film made in 2010 by Lotte Stoops:

Click here to view the embedded video.

:::

YOU  MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

Do you know where the oldest classified wine region is in Europe? (Don’t worry, I didn’t). It’s not Bordeaux, it’s not Porto in Portugal or Chianti in Italy. In a corner of Northeast Hungary is the little-known Tokaj wine trail, and here, many of the stone wine cellars were built as early as the the mid-1500s.

(c) Amos Chapple

What you see above, coating those bottles that date as far back as 1912, is mold, fed by the wine that evaporates. This particular winery provides wine to presidents and royalty around the world.

(c) Chris Warde-Jones

The winery is Oremus, renowned for its white furmint, it’s one of the area’s largest and most well-known wineries in the region, surrounded by rolling hilltops, vineyards and isolated farmhouses. While above ground, the winery looks like a gleaming laboratory for state of the art winemaking, the cellar is a mold-encrusted room where the wine tasting happens.

One visitor described their visit:

“Before being led in, we nervously awaited his arrival in the village square. Soon an old man in a cheesecutter cap appeared, squeaking down the road on an ancient bicycle. He first told my girlfriend she was beautiful, then led us into the cellar and, after a quiet, dignified tour, sat us down to give us a glass each of his father’s 1956 vintage. Bottled during the Hungarian revolution.”

(c) Benjamin Weinberg

In 2010, a New York Times critic visited Oremus:

Standing in the dim light, I sniffed, then tasted. Though the cellar air was damp and musty, the scent from the glass was richly aromatic and floral. The wine, a Tokaji aszu, was full of citrus blossoms and fruit in the nose. In the mouth, crisp flavors of apricot and orange burst forth, followed by an invigoratingly sharp finish that begged for another quick sip. Lucky mold, I thought.

(c) Benjamin Weinberg

Visiting:

Tokaj is a two and half hour drive from Budapest. The Grof Degenfeld Castle Hotel is a nearby stylish and friendly hotel, which has a special offer for two nights in the hotel, two dinners in the hotel restaurant, a wine tasting and tour of the cellars, as well as wine tastings at two nearby wineries( hotelgrofdegenfeld.hu).

Lead image

:::

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Written by Italian singer/ songwriter and comedian Adriano Celentano, the song was in fact purposely written in nonsense to parody the Italian pop artists and musicians of the day, who were pretending to be able to speak and understand the English lyrics they sang, which were often simply plagiarized straight from American and English songs. It also poked fun at the Italian public who would popularize any song by an Italian artist that sounded like they were singing in English, accurately or not, as long as it sounded like American rock’n'roll.  Needless to say, “Prisencolinensinainciusol” went to No.1.

:::

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

Some cities have a litter problem, some suffer from high crime rates and others might have a lack of affordable housing. And then you have Dubai, which for the last several years has been facing the unusual problem of high end sports cars being abandoned and left to gather thick layers of dust at airport car parks and on the roadside across the city.

Above: (c) Nigel S, Below: (c) Didi Paterno

If you’ve ever been to Dubai or anywhere in the United Arab Emirates, you will have noticed they have a serious car culture out there, with a particular preference for the latest and greatest in high-end super cars. But like the rest of the world, Dubai has fallen on hard times. Once the hub of the oil economy and the centre of a booming property market, foreigners, mostly British, invested in the red hot market. Newly wealthy ex-pats bought the lastest Italian and German sports cars to compliment their millionaire lifestyles– and then the global economic crisis came along and burst everybody’s bubble.

(c) Petes–travels

Thousands of the finest automobiles ever made are now being abandoned every year since Dubai’s financial meltdown, left by expatriates and locals alike who flee in a hurry because they face crippling debts. With big loans to repay to the banks (unpaid debt or even bouncing a cheque is a criminal offence in Dubai), the panicked car owners make their way to the airport at top speeds and leave their vehicles in the car park, hopping on the next flight out of there, never to return.

(c) Danny McL

Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes are regularly abandoned at the car park of Dubai International Airport, some with loan documents and apology notes simply left on the windscreen and in some cases with the keys still in the ignition.

(c) Benoit Pinon

(c) Eccentric M

Last year, a Ferrari Enzo, one of only four hundred manufactured, was seized by police having spent several months in a car park collecting dust. The million dollar motor went on sale at auction alongside other Ferraris, Porsches, Range Rovers and Mercedes plucked from the roadside.

Abandoned Delorean (c) MickyMazda

Residents complain about the unsightly vehicles hogging parking spaces at the airport and sitting slumped outside their fancy yacht clubs– it’s like, so not a good look. On the plus side, discount Ferraris for everyone!

Sigh. 

:::

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

What good is an iPhone if it can’t take you to Paris?! Or an iPad that can’t take  you on a stroll through Montmartre? I love having you vicariously tag along with me in Paris and I’m beginning to feel like you might really have a thing for this city. So I have a hunch you might like this brand new iPhone and iPad application I’ve come across. From the talented team behind the beautiful coffee table book Paris in Color, comes a new digital book combining fine art photography and minimalist video into visual stories of Paris neighborhoods. With every new volume, the Paris Journal will take you on a tour of a different neighbourhood in Paris, down hidden passages, through private gates and into boulangeries that look so good you can almost smell the buttery croissants.

The idea is to take a virtual walk through Paris whenever you want, at the touch of a button. The Paris Journal’s first volume, available to download now, will take you around the irresistible neighbourhood of Montmartre, the way a local would know their way around. While you save up for the real trip, this charming little app could be the perfect handheld substitute.

A free preview version and the full version (for $3.99) are available to download now. Versions available for Kindle, Galaxy and Android will be available soon.

The Paris Journal on iTunes all images (c) Obvious State

:::

MORE PARIS DREAMING:

.

Entirely vegan recipe found on the Minimalist Baker

2. Then & Now Gifs

Find more here

3. Italian Balconies

Photographed in Jesolo Beach, Venice by Luigi Bonaventure

4. The Real Starbucks Lady

(At the Met in New York) Found on Imgur.

5. The first spray on clothes that can be removed, washed, and worn again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

via Reddit

 6. James Dean doing Ballet

Found on Letters of Vintage

7. Paris-themed Handbags by Charlotte Olympia

Shop here

8. An old train station in Switzerland converted into a house.

Found on Home Adore

9. The Pont du Sart: a navigable aqueduct in the West of Belgium

via The Khooll 

10. Furniture made with the Wind

Windworks is a collection of upholstered furniture pieces, of which the wood, upholstery, dyeing and knitting of the yarn are all made with a free and inexhaustible energy source; the wind. 

See how it’s made in this stunning video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

10. Hemingway to Fitzgerald: “Kiss My Ass”

Hemingway sent Fitzgerald the typescript of “A Farewell to Arms”, and Fitzgerald wrote back about ten pages of commentary and edits, ending his critique with a compliment about the book overall, saying “A beautiful book it is.” After reading the ten pages of criticism of his book, Hemingway added his own colorful language (pictured) on the bottom. But, we know from later drafts that he did consider some of the advice!

Found on the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library

12. The World’s Shortest Commercial Flight

Loganair, a Scottish airline offers a commercial flight between two Orkney Islands, Westray and Papa Westray, which can take as little as 47 seconds, depending on winds. The entire 1,750 yard flight costs just about $30 with no in-flight service.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Found on Jaunted

13. 1940s Lingo

Found on Tumblr

:::

13 MORE THINGS:

.

A skeletal fortress built for Lawrence of Arabia, an American gas station used for a forgettable horror film now inhabited by an old shepherd and his dog; entire fake villages have been left behind by Hollywood to be battered by the sands of the south moroccan deserts. Photographer/ filmmaker Ra Di Martino sets the cameras rolling once again on these ghostly structures, this time starring local children born not far from the filmsets, re-enacting in their Arabic dialect a few lines from movies that have been shot there…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Discover the photographs of the abandoned Star Wars sets and more by Ra Di Martino

:::

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

She has a few friends that may or may not haunt you in your dreams later on…

The cloning service is popular among some Japanese women looking to preserve that special moment in life such as their wedding day, cloning hair & makeup and even the dress they wore.

Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact…

Oh you already did?

Because this is what happens to you if you did…

Just kidding! These are just some recently printed 3D heads on a stick drying off or something..

Welcome to the Clone Factory in Akihabara, Japan.

This is Danny Choo, he runs a blog called Culture Japan and went to get cloned.

A bunch of digital SLR cameras all around him took photos of his head…

and then a big @ss printer made layers of ink which harden in a tray of plaster. The head is hiding inside that white pile of plaster dust…

And the clone is born … (and stuck on the body of a plastic Star Wars doll). You now owe them around $1,300. Surprise!!!

But hey, they clone pets too!

Oh no, he made eye contact…

Okay that’s all folks, wave goodbye now…  and you’ll be seeing her later on tonight, crawling out from underneath somewhere…

Toodles!

More photos on the Culture Japan blog.

:::

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

Here’s one they left out of the history textbooks. A recent French film, Free Men, brought to light the remarkable true history of how Muslims gave sanctuary to French Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris during Second World War. An untold “Oscar Schindler” story, the film is inspired by actual events and in this case, our ‘Schindler’ is Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris until 1954.

Image (c) Alice Heartherb

Underneath the fortress of mosaics and tranquil gardens occupying an entire city block in the Latin Quarter, it is revealed the mosque’s underground caverns once served as a refuge for resistance fighters and French Jews, where they could be provided with certificates of Muslim identity. Meanwhile upstairs, Benghabrit, a wise Algerian-born religious and political leader, was giving tours of the mosque to Nazi officers and their wives, unaware of what was transpiring right under their feet.

Watch the trailer for Free Men below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A North African Jewish man named Albert Assouline, who had escaped from a German prison camp, wrote about his experience hiding in the mosque:

“No fewer than 1,732 resistance fighters found refuge in its underground caverns. These included Muslim escapees but also Christians and Jews. The latter were by far the most numerous.”

Giving sanctuary for Jews was largely impulsive and did not result in an organised movement by the mosque, which is perhaps why historical records remain so bleary.  Some claim thousands of Jews were saved, others say it was in the dozens. In 2006, the current rector of the Paris Grand Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, was interviewed by Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In Mr. Saltoff’s book, Among the Righteous, Boubakeur confirms that ’up to 100 Jews’ were likely given Muslim identity papers by the mosque and provides Saltoff with a copy of a typewritten 1940 Foreign Ministry document found in the French Archives, affirming the Nazi’s suspicion of mosque personnel providing false Muslim identities to Jews.

Veteran French actor Michael Lonsdale plays Benghabrit (c) Pyramide Productions

The most notable case of the mosque refuge was Simon Hilali, a Sephardic Jew who survived the Holocaust by pretending to be an Arab named Salim with the assistance of Benghrabit and later went on to become the most popular Arab-language singer of the time. According to Hilali’s obituary, Germans were so suspicious of the Jewish musician that Benghabrit had the name of Hilali’s made-up Muslim grandfather carved on a headstone in a Parisian Muslim cemetery.

I missed the film in the cinemas when it came out last year because I never heard about it’s release, but what an important message to miss out on. The film’s director is lobbying for it to be shown in schools. “It pays homage to the people of our history who have been invisible,” he told the New York Times. “It shows another reality, that Muslims and Jews existed in peace. We have to remember that — with pride.”

In case you’re interested in learning about something your text books couldn’t bring to your attention, the Free Men (Les Hommes Libres) is available to download on iTunes here.

via The New York Times

 Visiting la grande mosquée de Paris for Mint Tea at Twilight…

The mosque in the 5th arrondissement is host to one of the most pleasant cafés in Paris. With winding, leafy courtyards, this is a beautiful place to sip moroccan mint tea along with traditional arabic pastries on a sunny day. While it’s very popular, particular with Parisian families on Sunday afternoons, it’s not a place tourists are very aware of. It’s also open until midnight for tea under the stars while contemplating the fascinating history within its walls.

2, bis place du puits de L’Ermite, 75005 

(c) Francine Vernez

:::

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

.

‘The arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, New York. These portions of the Statue were exhibited to raise funds for the completion of the statue and its pedestal. The arm and torch remained in the park from 1876 until 1882.

‘Members of the public could pay fifty cents to climb to the balcony of the torch.’

via Retronaut

:::

DID YOU KNOW THE STATUE OF LIBERTY WAS MADE IN PARIS?

.