#back street

[thunderstruck9]

Alfie Caine (British, 1996), Hastings Old Town, 2020. Acrylic on board, 40 x 29 in.

[wanderingflier]

ひがし茶屋街

December 2024

[nothingexistsnever]

1167

[tomiy8walkabout]

狭い通り / Narrow alley May 2026

[rebel-heart-gypsysoul]

[i-j0s]

in the red light district ~ by krummervogel

[eopederson]

Street scene with donkey cart, mosque in the distance, Karachi, Sind, 1978.

1978 was my Wanderjarhe and my first in-depth introduction to cultures other than European. For more reasons than I can enumerate here, it was life altering. After spending many months in Europe and living in the UK, I was dropped into Pakistan with minimal Third World experience (I had spent a little time in México), no command of Urdu, and frankly an inadequate grounding in Islamic and South Asian culture. I had a few weeks before going on to India to meet a girlfriend for a month of travel there, so I wandered around Pakistan with one of the very first editions of a Lonely Planet guide to South Asia and a pocket dictionary. That was enough to profoundly alter my world view and to amplify a Wanderlust which a half century later still drives me.