Decoration details

Some details of the decorations on the palace walls.

Inside Tosh-hovli

Virtual explosions of blue tiling in the central courtyard.

Tosh-Hovli Palace

Still inside the Khiva fortress, this time by the Tosh-Hovli (Stone) Palace.

Interiors and more details to come.

Around Ichon-Qala

Now, mainly the 20th century Islam-Hoja medressa (with a nice handicrafts museum) and lighthouse-style minaret and the opposite-lying Pahlavon Mahmoud mausoleum.

Opposite the ark...

...is a medressa.

Nothing in Khiva was alive though - it was all museum.

Marking today

In Sweden, today is midsummer and for many lost in a a celebration haze to summer, friendship and tradition. The UN marks World Refugee Day today. Give them a thought too (and thank you Ibn ad-Dunya for the reminder).

Dagens Nyheter has an editorial on refugees today.

happy midsummer, all of you!

Khiva ark

The rulers of Khiva (one of 3 khanates in the territory of present-day Uzbekistan before Russian domination) sat here and most of the structures are 17th century (but the ark itself is older).

Save a mother - and other campaigns to support

Just a reminder for some good causes you can easily choose to support.

The Swedish Red Cross' campaign for mothers of the world.

Swedish Save the Children work against child soldiers, encouraging corporations to support this.

At Ecpat Sweden you can find clickable buttons to report child porn and child sex trade.

Ark tiling

In the main courtyards of the Khiva ark, the blue tilings completely dominated.

Inside Khiva fortress

Just inside the main gate of the protected fortress, these sights meets the eye. The difference between the surrounding desert colours and the sandcolour of the building stone and the intense blues and greens of the tiling were a recurrent feature of our trip.

Quote updates

My husband's report was quoted again today, this time by Dagens Nyheter in an editorial column. This quote is more into the substance of the subject matter and putting it in a contextual setting than previous media coverage has been.

Wood carvings of Khiva

Maybe starting with details is odd, but I have such amounts of photos that I'm afraid to drown you in the massive impact of the overall magnificence.

Anyway, we saw gorgeous wood carvings, especially on doors, almost everywhere we went. All of these are from Khiva's Ichon-Qala - inside the fortress or Old City. It was oddly empty and sterile, but the full glory of the buildings shone.

Picasso in Abu Dhabi

Emirates Palace Hotel features the only Middle East-stop of a large new Picasso-exhibition - the first in the region. It's well worth a visit.

Furry caps

Already on day one we met a fantastic selection of (Turkmen) headgear, in Khiva.

Travelling Uzbekistan

I can only praise our travel operator Roxana Tour, for providing a nice itinerary for us and having a personal and professional attitude towards service, with just enough hands-off touch for our taste, giving us logistic support (and someone to ask all our thousands of questions...) and freedom to roam all at once. We found and selected them after a small Internet market survey, by the waý, and fixed our own trips to and from Tashkent separately.

Another link I would really like to share with you, is a Danish site affiliated with the Bukhara Center for Creative Photography. I wish their wonderful photos could one day be exhibited in Sweden also, if they haven't already.

Ozbekiston Havo Yollari

Our trip started out with flying Uzbekistan Airways from Dubai to Tashkent. Sort of Turkish Airlines feeling actually...

Trotting Central Asia

For several reasons, I rarely feature me. For one, the blog is about travelling and photo as such, not necessarily about me. And I rarely photograph well myself, I claim to be better behind the camera than in front. But now when I do have a decent shot (thanks to my husband) of myself taken while travelling, I'm treating you to it. It's in Bukhara, by the way.

Summan av kardemumman!

Sorry, a pun in Swedish. Anyway, this rather shaky picture is to inaugurate photos from a tenday-trip through Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, I had to take it with the phone. It shows you 200 USD-worth of Uzbek sum...



Tuesday update: pictures are a bit delayed due to an extremely sore neck stopping me from putting in a lot of computer time. Unfortunately. But it's getting better and here is some more sum, with a better camera this time.

Sailing on the Gulf

While boating on the Gulf last week, I caught this picture, a stark contrast to the glitzy modern outlook one usually meets.



More to come of Abu Dhabi and the boattrip, but have patience...

And now... Dubai!

And now, for something completely different.


The skyline of Dubai as seen looking out over Sheikh Zayed Road from the heights...

Burj Dubai is on the left.

Black Madonna

The Black Madonna I have shown you before, but now we will say goodbye to Vilnius (at least for this time) with a new look.

Vilnius ghetto

Few traces remain of the Vilnius ghetto, once an important centre of Jewish learning, later ravished and demolished. Some remnants and memorials scattered through the streets can be spotted below.

Golden pen

World Association of Newspapers has an annual conference in Gothenburg right now. Svenska Dagbladet writes on the press freedom prize awarded to an absent Chinese journalist and higlights the threats against journalists in the last year.

Early summer reading

But here in the Gulf it is really hot already!

BBC writes here on authority in Sadr city.

The Swedish government has hosted Arab NGO's discussing death penalties and critizing the practice.

Chair of Kvinna till Kvinna-foundation (woman to woman) critizes Swedish Foreign Minister for ignoring the role of women in post-conflict societies in a Dagens Nyheter op-ed.

Gulf News tells of maybe the closest thing to "UAE on a shoestring"?

Eurasianet comments US-Iran-relations.

BBC features Hizballah actions.

Expressens Anna Dahlberg contrasts Sweden political ambitions internationally with the political clout used to shape up its foreign service...

Amnesty's annual report highlights the lack of moral leadership in the world, here as reported in Svenska Dagbladet.

Barbara Slavin writes here for LA Times on the importance of the regional security map in the Middle East being shaped with a higher degree of responsibility among regional actors themselves. Rami Khoury recently wrote on the same theme, but I don't have a link I'm afraid.

BBC reports on Bahrains new ambassador to the US.

Sigrid Kahle reviews a new translation of Nizar Qabbani to Swedish, in Svenska Dagbladet.

Dagens Nyheter interviews Ian Buruma visiting Sweden.

The global water situation and Tony Allan's "virtual water" are highlighted by the business magazine E24.

More on the Swedish debate on equality in the labour market in the editorial comments of Svenska Dagbladet.

Dagens Nyheter comments a new book on former Swedish prime minister Olof Palme.

Svenska Dagbladet tells the story of a man moving from a plush neighbourhood to the reputes ghetto, in Stockholm.

Dagens Nyheter pinpoints social (gender) conservatism in the revolutionary 68-generation in sweden.

The pope's cap

In a small closed room next to the Black Madonna in the Vilnius town wall, you can peek throught the door and see a purple cardinal's cap on the wall. Vilnius lore has it that this was sent by John Paul II on becoming pope, as a greeting to the Lithuanian catholics that they were not forgotten. His own endeavours had put Polish catholics back on the map and he wanted to give courage to his Lithuanian compatriots (historically close to the Polish - his own grandmother was also supposedly Lithuanian). On visiting Vilnius himself much later, he gave also a white pope's cap.