I only take pics

Istanbul This was my first trip outside Europe since 2019, my destination was Kyrgyzstan , where I was for two months. I had to transit in Istanbul so I decided to stop there for 4 days. What impressed me the most was how welcoming Turkish people are, an amazing memory I will keep with me forever is the Turkish wedding I attended. When I am travelling alone I usually try to meet locals and live with them or at least hangout. This time I met Onur who invited me to his sister's wedding, he picked me up from the airport and directly to the wedding, really an unusual start to a trip!.  There I met his relatives, ate good food and dance a lot, an amazing experience!. One of the first things that Onur told me was: "you will learn Turkish dances!", I don't know if I learn them, but for sure I practice a lot, I'm confident there are tons of videos of me dancing at that wedding. Topkapi Palace Museum The day after Onur helped me to visit the most important things downtown,...

 Бишкек, Ак-Туз First I want to say that it's illegal and very dangerous to enter abandoned buildings/places, so please don't take this post as an invitation to do the same. Recently I got fascinated by abandoned places, precisely when I started to do portrait photography, I thought: "why don't do portraits in abandoned buildings?". While I was living in Kyrgyzstan I knew about abandoned villages from the soviet period, so I wanted to visit at least one of them. Thanks to some friends I was able to visit Ak-Tuz, a village not far from Bishkek. Part of it is abandoned, with ruins of buildings from the Soviet period and an abandoned factory. I had in my mind an outfit for this shooting and I asked my friend to dress up as close as she could to it, so the shooting was a bit prepared even if it was the first time I visited the place. After the fall of the soviet union factories and mines in all the country closed so the population moved elsewhere leaving the cities ab...

 Сокулук On Sunday I'll travel to Budapest, so this is my last week and my last diary from Kyrgyzstan. These two months were very intense, and they literally fly between amazing people, wonderful landscapes and discovering a new culture. I think that what I will bring with me from this experience are human relationships, here I found smiling people, open to helping you and sharing their culture. I also found some parallelism between Kyrgyz and Italians (at least people from Bishkek), they have the same behave on the streets, they honk, they get angry, they have their own rules.  For the last week, in the flat, we decided to share traditional food: Italian, Kyrgyz and Vietnamese (I have a flatmate from there). As you can see, I prepared pizza, and the family that hosts me prepared Manti (манты), from the Vietnamese part it will be a surprise. On Sunday I did my last hike, a friend invited me to an organised one in the Sokuluk region not far from Bishkek. We saw three different ...