The Adventure Issue

WelcomeAccording to Google, an adventure is “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.” It is synonymous with ‘risk’, ‘hazard’ and ‘jeopardy’ and apparently usually in-volves physical or psychological strain. It also often involves a love affair.For us, adventure has been putting to-gether this zine. We’ve eaten watermel-on in Tajikistan, sifted through stamps, spoken to South Korea’s biggest indie-folk band and spent a whole lot of time looking skywards. We’ve made a first step, and while we’re still not entirely sure where we’re going, we’re pleased as anything to have you with us.So, in the words of Yuri Gagarin, “Поехали!”

Toothpick For the little things

Layli ForoudiContributor

Childhood Crush: I had a crush on my physics teacher which I guess is quite normal. Then again, it was because he looked like a shark.

Elly WatsonEditor

Childhood Crush: Simba the Lion, but when he’s grown up, or else that would be weird.

Chelsea BrewerArt Director

Childhood Crush: Captain Feathersword from The Wiggles. Got to love a man with an accent, even if it is Pirate.

Ali RodneyContributor

Childhood Crush: The once upon a time goal keeper for Arsenal -Mr. David Seaman. Look him up . UUUrrrg GAAD. ohhhhhhh

Hemma PhilamoreContributor

Childhood Crush: Robin Hood, the fox in the Disney film. It never fails to surprise me how many girls my age shared this pre-pubescent love! Toot

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When In Melbourne,Do As The Hipsters Do.

An Instagram photo-diary

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1. Topshop 2. Chapel St shopfront 3. Graffiti behind the best Szechuan restaurant in Melbourne 4. Centre Place 5. Quick Brown Fox 6. Tiffany & Co chandelier 7/8/9. Melbourne Central 10/11/22. High St, North-cote 12. Jumbo cocktail at Crown Casino 13. Flinders Street Station 14. Pimp My Carriage 15. Sunset over Yarra River 16/25. Hosier Lane 17. Melbourne Museum 18/27. Brunswick Street 19/20/21. Madame Brussels 23. Melbourne Library 24. Palomino, Northcote 26. Block Arcade.

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Summertime in TajikistanWords and Photographs by Layli Foroudi

land crossed between Persian poetry and Soviet style

bureaucracy, Tajikistan is a unique country that both reflects and rejects a whole array of cultures.

The capital’s name, Dushanbe, is the Tajik word for “Monday” as the city grew from a Monday marketplace in a hillside village. While it still retains its village feel, nowadays the streets of Dushanbe are full of taxis and small Chinese buses which look like oversized toys. Women in long colourful dresses thread in between the traffic holding a baby or watermelon or several of both. Though mostly consisting of markets and chaikhonah (teahouses), this small city has some surprises such as the tallest flagpole in the world; a new, very big and very shiny library containing very few books; and a disproportionate number of oversized photos of the president. If the latter is something citizens or tourists need to further familiarize themselves with, the whole third floor of the National Museum is devoted to such giant portraits.

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“Women in long colourful dresses thread in between the traffic hold-ing a baby or watermelon or several of both.”

Tajikistan’s charm is in the detail. Sit on brightly coloured, heavily patterned cushions around an embroidered tablecloth spread on the floor and covered in plates and teacups painted with flowers and rimmed with gold. This tablecloth is then covered with plates of sweets, fruit and a big dish of plov, the national dish of rice, carrots and meat drenched in oil and garlic, accompanied by tomato and cucumber salad topped with coriander. No cutlery or individual plates necessary. This ceremony happens very often. “It’s so expensive, we do not really need all of this”, one Tajik man said, “but it is our tradition, and it is nice.” He is right, it is nice. Any time in Tajikistan is infused with exaggerated hospitality, much tea and, in the summer, kilograms of watermelon. Summer is also wedding season. Every weekend cars covered in flowers and white ribbon drive around the city and newlyweds queue to have their wedding photos taken at the Botanical Gardens and other places of significance. I went along to part of a wedding that started off in a neighbouring flat. The bride walked out of the building preceded by streams of dancing friends and family and followed by one man carrying a stereo playing loud music and another man playing loudly on a drum. From the top-floor apartment, a woman threw sweets and paper on the newlywed couple. The occasion is full of joy but the couple do not smile, understandable considering they are about 18 years old, both clad in layers of finery, the bride laced in gold and buried under mascara in the sweltering heat while trying to remember the necessary procedure of when to bow and when to walk, when to look up and when to look down.

A short drive from Dushanbe is a small village called Sarytag, a few houses with mud walls, shiny new roofs bought with Russian remittance money and a back yard of potato fields. Situated in the Fann Mountain region, this village is the perfect place to stay and experience the beautiful mountains, lakes and a rare type of silence that seems to inhabit the region. I wanted to stay a few days and so drove into the village and asked a man riding a donkey whether he knew of any places to stay the night. He immediately offered his family’s home. A short walk away is Iskander Kul, a lake named after Alexander the Great who was said to have stopped there on his way to India and whose warhorse is said to graze around the lake at midnight on a clear summer’s night. History aside, it is worth to just stand still and be stunned by the stillness and beauty. Again lots of tea, watermelon and plov, people from the village are incredibly warm, stopping to chat and trying to persuade you to move from whatever family you may be staying with to their house. Be careful of being ripped off though: home stays, taxi drivers and even children offering their photo to be taken may try and charge you (relatively) extortionate amounts. From knowing nothing to gleaning truths of one of the more mysterious pieces of land on the globe; summertime in Tajikistan will send you home with your belly well fed, boots well worn and a few more marriage proposals than are ever really necessary.

Art Colony: go and visit artists work-shops on Omar Khayyam street, artists will talk to you about their work, offer you a drink and maybe their son’s hand in marriage.

Blue Mosque on Rudaki: Beautiful mosque, cover up.

Norak Region: drive through mountain-ous scenery to see the biggest dam in Central Asia, swim in lakes, have lunch in a straw hut on the river.

Sagbar Market: Buy traditional hats, Afghan jewelry and best holiday fridge magnets I have ever seen. A short walk away from the Green Bazar where you can go and browse for more goods

Shahidi Museum: A small house mu-seum set up by Munira Shahidi on Loik Sherali street, the daughter of a famous Tajik composer, see traditional instru-ments listen to her father’s music and talk to Munira about her foundation for peace building and integration through music and arts.

Five places to go, in no particular order.

STREET LEVEL

An alternate perspective of four diferent cities from around the world.

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BerlinBy Roman Padlewski, Pilot

STREET LEVEL

New YorkBy Ali Rodney, Actress

LondonBy Hemma Philamore, PHD student (robotics)

Saint PetersburgBy Elly Watson, Language Student

of stamps as an evacuee child returning to London in 1945. His Uncle William had been a sailor during the war and, having no sons of his own, entrusted his collection to his twelve-year old nephew. Stamp collecting was something of a phenomenon at the time as the King himself had a collection and, in my Grandad’s words, “it wasn’t just the stuff of strange old men.”

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Words and Photograph by Elly Watson

Talking through my Grandad’s stamp collection

Getting into the spirit of things my Grandad made a habit of stealing stamps from Woolworths for about two years, amassing a respectable collection before things degenerated and he got into girls instead. The stamp collecting days were over apparently. Now, my Grandad gave me this stamp collection when I was eight years old. It has since been shipped half way across the world and back, has been

man-handled by children with Pritt sticks and suffered abominably from my short but intense interest in decoupage. Yet it

A3 envelope and a large tobacco tin. It is blatantly not the fruit of two years of petty thieving, so I asked my Grandad some questions.

Why so many Nigerian stamps? Well, because he worked for Pierre Cérésole’s ‘Service Civil International’ for a while, which is also why there are so many Greek stamps. Why so many Swiss stamps? Because he received a letter asking if he’d like to help rescue a house in the Alps from mushrooms, so upped sticks and moved to Geneva. He ended up falling in love with a Swiss girl and lived

of Yugoslavian refugees, but that’s appar-ently a different story. Why the Russian stamps? Because he worked with a man “with a really weird name, even worse than Julian” who happened to be in cor-respondence with a Russian rebel group. And so on and so forth. When I asked my Grandad why he collected stamps, he said that everyone liked collecting things, because it made them feel safe to have things around them. Then he thought for a bit longer and said: “Thing is, to own the world you’ve got to have a bloody huge army. But you could just own the stamps.” It seems that he did both.

BrilliantFrom the global wanderer to the urban explorer

Penfield Idlewood$76.50

available at:www.asos.com

Herschel Pop Quiz$69.99

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Duluth Laptop Scoutmaster$175.00

available at:www.duluthpack.com

Dusen Acidwash

Selling out every where so if you find one, buy it!

Backpacks

Duluth Scout Pack$95.00

available at:www.duluthpack.com

Jansport Super Break$40.00

available at:www.jansport.com

Fjallraven Kanken $93.50

available at:www.asos.com

Pendleton Yuma$175.00

available at:www.endclothing.com

E: What does the anacronym stand for?W: We Aren’t Gay We Are Korean. Everyone always thinks we are a couple, so we thought we’d set things straight.

E: How would you describe your music in five words?W: Are they really two-piece band?

E: Which would be your ideal band to collaborate with?

Taking Five with

Interview and Photograph by Elly Watson

South Korea’s greatest indie-folk bandWAGWAK

W: No doubt about it, Fleet Foxes

E: Top five musical influences?W: It’s difficult to choose top five? We get influences from all the bands we listen to, and it always changes! Perhaps choosing top five bands would mean we have a narrow view of music?

E: Fine then, top three favourite places in Seoul?W: Han River, Hongdae and Jongno.

WAGWAK

E: And your favourite place in London so far?W: A chinese restaurant called ‘Noodle Bar’ in Dalston.

E: Best advice given to you in your musical career so far?W: I can’t really think of anything, but we have decided that hypnotics is the way to go if we want to build up a strong following. Maybe incorporate some sort of optical illusions into the

set and get some really flashy lights, you know like in the Pokemon opening credits? I heard it made all those kids in Japan throw up on themselves, but they carried on watching the show, so maybe it could work for us too?

Check out WAGWAK’s new EP, The Way to Drive into the Arabian Sunset at bandcamp.com

Calling all:writers, painters, detectives, satirists,poets, cooks, collectors, decoupage masters, actors, models, sages, historians, photographers, designers, dreamers and enthusiasts of every sort

We want to hear from you! We’ve loved putting together Issue One, but making a magazine is a bit like playing Twister, it’s only fun if there are silly amounts of people involved. We are interested in virtually anything, so if you’ve got an idea bumping around in your head, or have done something amazing that you think needs sharing, send it over to

eleanor.rose.watson@gmail.comor

cj.brewer@hotmail.com

Look forward to hearing from you!