(Brussels – Charleroi – Dresden – Plzen – Budapest)
Brussels Midi: peak hour. An argument breaks out in the MosBurger crowd between two local youths and an edgy black guy. Two armed soldiers and railway security are suddenly 'there'. Surrounding spectators are suddenly 'not there'. They arguing men are all "encouraged" to leave. It's a wet and miserable peak hour, not assisted by late and graffiti covered trains. And I'm not exactly heading into tourist holiday areas here.
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Charleroi: "...a poor, polluted and violent city that is not attractive at all." - Wikivoyage.com
I travelled through this area of Wallonie in the early 1980's when the string of picturesquely scrappy hilltop mining towns with their street-front two-storeyed terrace housing (no fancy Paddington lace balconies here: just industrial red brick and the front door straight onto the street) were held together by the last vestige of a rural tram network which had once crisscrossed all of Belgium. (The other remnant is along the Belgian coast where you can travel from the Dutch to the French borders through small seaside towns in one tram ride over a couple of leisurely hours).
Charleroi is, if you like, the Cleveland or Pittsburgh (but NOT yet Detroit) or Newcastle of Belgium with some remnant steelworks but nothing like the coal-and-iron-and-steel dirty industrial boom of a century ago. In the Byzantine regional and linguistic politics of Belgium - remember this is a country that recently managed without an elected government for a year until elected parties could agree on who would govern because the French speakers and Flemish don't actually agree on much - various attempts have been made to bring life back into a chronically depressed Charleroi.
A father of a friend was an architect involved in plans to create a a glossy new metro system from the remnant tramway. With declining population and family incomes and tax base, the plan has been watered down over 30 years to a semi-finished and over-engineered network of 3 newish lines using old trams, some empty tunnels and bridges, and the whole thing shuts down at 8pm due to lack of passengers. A "new" fourth line is a rebuilt old tramway in real streets. I had trouble finding my pub as the old core of the downtown shopping area has been bulldozed for some other Brave New Development. If you want to see how NOT to revive a dying "rust belt" city, Charleroi should be on your list.
North of Charleroi is the gritty mining town of Gosselies, (imagine Lithgow or Wallsend with brick-terraced ridges and a better diet) where the last remaining single line of wandering street trams twists tightly through narrow streets, just inches from arched wooden doors and peeking distance through front window lace curtains into working class and increasingly Islamic Belgium.
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Taking the (graffitied) express back to Brussels, the announcements and telescreen are in gentle French. On the approach to Bruxelles Midi, there is a sudden automatic change to more businesslike Flemish. The other occupants of first class were off duty train crew with their feet up checking Facebook their mobile phones.
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I'm not your usual profile for Business or First Class travel (some of us are just built for economy class) but on a Eurail Pass, one must. The Thalys high speed train slid into Brussels from Paris. What emerged from the posh red-lit-maroon-upholstered armchairs into the grey light of Brussels were the well-fed bureaucrats, businesspersons and entitled children who seemed to be very "at home" in the Eurocapital. The 2 hours to Cologne was in bordello-rouge luxury with trolley delicacies wheeled to your seat. (Not much was dairy free so they plied me with several serves of what looked like vaguely familiar Chinese frozen berries and drinkies.) Also on offer was one whingeing child, and a 30something deal maker in the seat opposite: tapping frenetically on his laptop, drawing flow charts on his spirax pad, but it's the phone calls which really entertained. "Yes, Engineering will approve it... No the US guys will just have to understand... They have the suppliers and they have the best options... Seven million has been offered...Let me get clever about it...I'll give you another call..." At which point the dark suited Englishman across the aisle patiently indicated that Mr Dealmaker should be clever and make any further calls from the vestibule. He did.
Much of the Thalys route through Belgium seems to be within freeway easements, easily zipping past the fastest traffic. Like freeway travel, you are totally divorced from the reality of the surrounding, now snow-dusted geography, rolling along in an alien and silentish world.
A slow down for a small junction, a slower crossing of a narrow river valley (with several large wigwams below the train) and a change from left to right-hand running and we are in Germany. No graffitied trains here: towns look more prosperous and the wifi improves dramatically.
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German Inter City Expresses are a little more like a businesspersons' private club on wheels: black leather armchairs, wood panelled walls, some in panelled meeting pods of 4, discrete lighting and near silence at 200+ kph apart from the rustling of newspapers, tapping of keyboards, occasional whispered conversations and solicitous orders for drinks at your seat. The 5.30 ICE from Frankfurt was very much a serious business commute in near silence, an image spoilt slightly by the free distribution of packs of gummy bears. The front compartment looked through glass panels, past the driver, to the snowy, headlit, night landscape rushing the train at 300kph.
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Dresden: severely cold; walking across iced grit to Praguer Platz. It's the sort of town planning that could only have come out of the "imagination" of ambitious centrally commanded East German DDR city planners. Severely rectilinear 10 to 12 story buildings are "relieved" by spare plastic bubbled top floor decoration. Two cheerless metal sculptures, a vaguely abstract mural of former buildings (lost in the fire bombings in 1945, and not improved by this reincarnation) confront a massive three parallel-block-hotel for groups tours or congress-attendees, much loved by the "Democratic Socialist" regimes of the 50's. Even the addition of capitalistic neon lighting of shopfronts and top floors cannot lift the spirit of the place.
The hotel blocks seem to now be three incarnations of “Ibis”. I stayed in Block One, with its long institutional corridors now carpeted in the lime and mission brown so loved by Accor: the more lime carpet and white paint, usually the cheaper the hotel.
Hotels in the "Russian Zones" used to all have "floor ladies" parked at the lift well on each floor to "mind the key", but also to phone at odd hours to check you were in your room, and to report on your movements to anyone who might want to know. Sadly the floor ladies' desk is no longer there, but even the lurid carpet cannot quite take away from the democratic socialist 'charm' of the place. The laundry bill was a sharp reminder that Dresden is definitely in capitalist territory now.
The Ibis breakfast featured a lactose free table of goodies including a not-too-bad Brie... It almost made up for the carpet, and the antiseptic architecture.
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Beyond the DDR architectural "dream" of Praguer Platz, on an icy but sunny morning, I wandered the old city which was decimated in the 1945 Allied firebombing. Many buildings such as the (now spectacularly rebuilt) Baroque Frauen Kirche had been left as ruins by Erich Honeker's town planners, but the majority of the old palaces had been carefully rebuilt so that some of the ornate Baroque glory that was Dresden has been maintained. From across the icy river flats and freshly dressed in snow, the towers and gold sculptures sparkled in the weak sun effecting on the still, icy waters. I tried to book the 'Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5' walking tour, but was told that I was the only taker, and that we couldn't gain access to buildings "due to markets".
At Palais Platz the heroic gold sculpture of "Frid.Augustus I" in cold glistening armour on a rearing gold horse, was hemmed by pure white snow with black snow-clad tree lines to the south. Commuters were cross-country skiing to work around him, and parents were dragging their kids to school on rope-drawn sleds.
The returning tram from the rural village of Weinbohla (with wineries and mansions atop the snow dusted southern hills) passed a sign for "DDR Museum". How could I resist? It was housed in a severe aluminium and dark blue plastic-panelled 5 storeyed block, up a severe set of stairs and into a faded unwelcoming marble and white landing, and a left turn to offer my Euros to a severe looking woman in a glass box. She looked at the Euros as if disappointed that they were not Reichsmarks, and severely directed me to Floor 4.
Well.... It was four floors of 50's to 70's kitsch detritus with some rooms of uniforms and propaganda. Nothing much about the Stasi, and one room about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but whole rooms of baby carriages or cameras, or reconstructions of the kinds of domestic rooms and "consumer" products that would be nightmares to IKEA or even Joyce Mayne. Floors of outdated technology and "approved" entertainment included some fading political, industrial and sporting propaganda displays, scarily reinforced by sudden outbursts of Erich Honecker's finest speeches which were triggered by sensors (or by watching long-retired Stasi operatives) at the tops of stairways, which echoed away long after anyone had passed. The complete ground floor was taken over by Trabis and other automotive delights, including wooden caravans equipped for approved fun in the East German outdoors. I really wanted to buy something to remember the place, but there was nothing the Severe glass-boxed lady had on display that could entice me to buy... This was a bit of metaphor for the place really, as apart from she and the two old caretakers picking the dust from the upstairs displays, I was the only visitor.
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The Stadtmuseum in a restored palace in the centrum was a more even handed: "In 1933, the National Socialists of Dresden burned books, in 1938 the synagogue. In 1945 nearly the entire historical old town burned to the ground..."
It was the history of the city focusing on political and social changes from Napoleon, the restoration of the royal houses, the failed 1848 revolutions through to German unification, militarisation, wars, liberation, domination by Russia, unification: a huge swathe of History, but carefully presented by tying the "big" historical events to personal diaries, bourgeois and working class life and contemporary films. If anything, this low key presentation made the last 200 years of German history even more confronting and gutting. The East German raincoat made from plastic milk bags was a bizarre display in the midst of the evil and mayhem.
The firebombing of "old Dresden" led to a sense that it was once some kind of Utopia, utilised by the Socialist Unity Party to use the anniversary observances for anti-American propaganda (compared to the the delightful and peaceable Soviet Union, or perhaps the DDR itself, when it come to gently managing its own citizens…). The British were not blamed to the same extent (!). The history display ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cowing of the DDR officials by protesters in Dresden, and film of the invasion and plundering of Stasi headquarters.
There is so much in Dresden to keep an old (as opposed to Ancient) history teacher immersed for many days...
Day 2: the crisp sun is gone and it has been a steady, silent, settling snow for most of the night. Roads, paths, parks are all one white carpet. Shovelling, scraping, clearing are thankless as the next layer relentlessly falls. There is little other noise as minimal traffic is subdued and muffled. Trams rule the road. Walking to the tram in fresh flowery snow is a novelty that soon wears off as snowflakes cake the brow, beard, glasses and form a thick layer on the day pack. Tramways are parallel black lines in pristine snow. The ticket machine won't take banknotes as it has iced shut. The "view" over the snowy river from the historical cable cars is snow upon snow upon snow. The camera 'packs it in' in the cold. A local bloke skis gingerly down the steps from the lookout. The bus back into the centrum is a muggy and fogged-window experience: so glad I took the historic landscape photos yesterday...
Midday and the snow has eased, although it is nearly covering the delightful sculpture of a semi-buried unexploded bomb at the Statdmuseum. Walking is more of an adventure now: feet crack through a thin layer of ice and plunge how deep into snow? Am I on path, park, gutter? If it's suddenly a deep step, probably gutter. Sticking to the trodden paths is slipping on others' ice. Not an outdoors day, and not much open for lunch, but one place has lights on and menus on display. I stagger into the heat and unlayer to be greeted by a waitress in a rather fetching tram conductor's cap and uniform. I am in 1900 Restaurant, tram-themed throughout: a 1900 vintage tram is in the centre, occupied by a tour group. The chardy is good, the food is German-solid, and I'm ready to face an afternoon with the German Expressionists and introductory rooms of Monet, Cezanne and the luminous (in this weather), Gaugin. How appropriate to finish a Dresden visit with "Degenerate Art".
Walking the 500 metres from the awful Praguer Platz to the station, hauling a bag through thick snow-with-grit is like trying to drag wheeled baggage half the length of Bronte Beach. But there is an almond milk 'Cap' with free wifi at the other end.
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Prague's main railway station is a long, low, 70's airport-terminal-style hall lit through a glossy red plastic ceiling. Behind the indicators is a stairway to the impressively preserved art nouveau hall of the old station. Under the gently floodlit dome is an upright piano, which works, but has seen better days. Taped to the keyboard, a sign: "The piano is a dangerous weapon. Do not sit drunk in close proximity and do not play whilst drunk. THANK YOU"
The regional express to Plzen lacked the car number for my booked seat and, more importantly, lacked any heating. During the 90 minute trip, passengers (already rugged up to climb from the snow onto the train) gradually put on even more woollen clothing. The fancy digital information board and many lovely automated announcements worked spectacularly well. Sadly we were too cold to care. When the conductor is wearing a fur collared coat and beanie, then we have a problem... The large double deck local train labelled "City ELEFANT" on an adjacent platform was looking pretty good by comparison...
Plzen station also has a piano, strategically placed below an impressive memorial to World War II rail workers, and an old lady was bashing out Chopin (with her shopping bags on the piano) when we arrived at yet another glorious art nouveau concoction of French pavilion roofs, impassive female faces sculpted into pillars and cast iron filigreed decorations. My language skills were not up to buying a transport pass until I took a photo of the ticket poster on the window and shared the camera’s screen with the booking office lady behind glass.
Hotel Czech-in (sorry about that...) was bizarre. “Sir, the room rate is 60 Euros but your voucher says 45 and breakfast is another 7 Euros but if you don't want breakfast I'll give you a discount rate of 40 if that is ok”. What followed was several rides in a temperamental lift as we explored several possible rooms to find the one which had working heating to only sub-Arctic levels. Nice! The bathroom was actually quite warm so I contemplated sleeping in there...
The "information" office opposite the impressive Gothic monster of a cathedral was also interesting. "No sir, nothing is open. It is Sunday and it is off-season", so an extended walk around town with its architecture going back 9 centuries it was, then further afield where early 20th century art nouveau apartments battled for attention with crumbling Communist era blocks and a large, colourful and rebuilt synagogue with its banner of black and white pictures of the Nazi roundup of the city's Jews. Across the road were two large concrete pillars and plinth, thanking the Americans for liberating the city in 1945 (before it was handed over the the Russians...).
Sunday night Czech TV includes "Midsomer Murders" dubbed into German. Go figure.
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The Slovan Express from Prague to Budapest departed late and arrived later, despite brave bursts of 160kph running on the mesmerising digital message stream above the door to the diner. Lunch of venison and Merlot was rather good, as was the heating, so I missed most of Slovakia after Bratislava... I dozed off to fog and sleet over snow-covered ploughed fields and awoke some hours later to fog and sleet over snow-covered ploughed fields... Only the surrounding passengers had changed, along with the train crew and announcement languages after each border. Trains change to blue, cute villages hug minimalist rail stations and we are in Hungary. The first station is "Szob". The second station is "Szob Also". The carriage telescreen which previously apologised for lateness "due to technical difficulty on trolley line" is now streaming decidedly accented Hungarian. No sign of border fences, guards or razor wire: no more crowds of immigrants at Keleti station, no welcoming signs in Arabic that were in German terminals, (but for how much longer?).
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I was met by Judit, the owner of my Budapest Apartment. Even the curt email exchanges over 6 months had not quite quite prepared me for Judit. As arranged, she collected me at Keleti station, followed by a wild drive through the lively dark-at-4pm neon lit and bustling streets, texting as she drove between phone calls and abrupt welcomes in English to me. "Parking is bad" so she ran up a gutter and ran with me (and bags) across 6 lanes of traffic and jangling 7 carriage trams bearing down on us in the drizzle, to a large filigreed cast iron gate of a Habsburg apartment block. I was handed keys: "Theyellowoneisforhtegateifyoudon'trememberthecodewhichis45key0045." (Pause for breath run into pitch dark cobblestoned archway til light flashes on. Pause another wrought iron gate.) "Thisiswhereyoucanuseayelowkeyorifyouwalkdownstairsyoupressthebuzzerswitchinthecornerandyouwillbeletout. Thereisanotherbuzzerinsidethefrontentranceifitisclosedbutitisopenduringhteday." We ran two metres further into the gloom. "Hereisthegatetotheliftyoucanuseyelowkeyifitisshut." Up four floors in a very s-l-o-w elevator while I'm briefed on the 'normal' key to her balcony and the black key to my door.
This was merely the start. The deal with Booking.com is that you book with the card you intend use to pay when you arrive. It was not to be... "Youdonothavecash?" I had Czech cash, not her preferred lovely Euros. "Wewillgetcashfromamachine". ATM card in hand, and my new landlady clinging to me like a limpet, we run the stairs (with the key advice explained again in reverse double time. I will spare you...). The ATM only spits out 10,000 Fl notes (less than $50), so we need change to pay the last 1000Fl (as Judit opens her purse and upends it in the street to demonstrate her deep financial need). She leads me into a shoe shop (won't give change), grocery (won't give change), pharmacy (won't give change) where I buy toothpaste (WILL give change). I pay the last 1000Fl to the hypermanic Judit, hoping at last to "decouple" myself from my new Best Financial Friend. She wants to drive me to the airport at the end of my stay. I decline (not knowing how to get to the airport but suffering a severe bout of The-Opposite-Of-Co-Dependence and just wanting to fend her OFF!!). We agree that I will communicate any problems by email, and I run for the subway towards a currency exchange and what look like ok Turkish Cafes across the 6 lanes and jumbo-sized trams of traffic, and never see Judit again....
The Turkish places are great (and all over Budapest) and the apartment is quite wonderful, and on the main transport to 'everywhere else'. Apart from the other neighbours in this very elegant block treating me like Judit's intruder, all is well. I would do it again.
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Budapest weather seemed to vary from thick fog to pea soup fog to cannot see beyond the other side of the road fog. No sunny riverfront photos then...
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The National Museum portrays Hungary as the plaything of greater powers for centuries, of which the post WWI and post WWII divisions of Europe were yet another stage in the continuing affront to Magyar culture. It's interesting seeing the local take on World War I and the political convulsions as the country was divided up and language/ethnic groups were force-migrated into new borders, and World War II where attempts to appease the Nazis ended in disaster (including the suicide of a Hungarian Prime Minister when he saw no further options were available to avoid the inevitable).
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At another great, basic Turkish caff (with food I can eat: just Hold the Yogurt!) and at the communal table is a Pakistani MBA student called Ash, from the Swat Valley near the Chinese border via family in St Petersburg, and not confident about scoring employment in increasingly Islamophobic Europe, and hardly likely to return to the festering instability that is Pakistan. We talked the sweep of history, politics and education for more than 2 hours drinking rather too much free tea and both grateful for an extended conversation in English. Blame-shifting to the various imperial powers seems to be my strongest memory of the night, and a very full bladder.
Day 2: Thick fog and thicker fog, so a day in the Buda Hills might be above the fog: Not quite, but from the Children's Railway (another hangover from Socialism: children learning how to operate a scaled down train service to prepare for future careers. Perhaps we should suggest it as a new high school VET subject... No?) the sun was a distant silver disc at least. By midday I was back at the Buda riverside and gradually, shimmering and vaguely Monet pink/orange in the mist, the monumental Parliament buildings emerged and hovered on the opposite bank reflecting warmly on the grey-green water. Bridges north and south were mere black silhouettes sandwiching the warm opposite shore in the semi-dispersing mist.
A roar down Metro Line 3 in very basic Russian-built 1970's subway cars (some with flickering incandescent lights to match the standard Eastern Block dirty two shades of compulsory blue livery with screw-on metal numbers) takes away any sense of peace as the train scraps, squeals and grinds to a stuttering halt to take you in the direction of Memento Park and the collection of Communist-era public sculptures and heroic memorials which were removed soon after the “Socialist” government collapsed in 1989. They have been collectively (of course) placed into one park:
http://m.mementopark.hu/.
DO "go there".
The fog was thick. The local bus driver had to physically point me in the right direction (the two-storeyed epic Lenin-and-Marx-and-Engels-clad entrance, 300 metres away, was invisible...). The misty bleakness and the cold ice crunching underfoot (again, I was the only visitor) all seemed entirely appropriate as another severe woman stuck one mittened hand out into the cold air to take my currency, surrounded, as she was in her brick and glass box, with so much saleable propaganda, while the 1950's radio pumped out patriotic anthems.
So, as I sat on the plinth supporting the "1956 Martyr Sculpture" (that would be the image above, in memory of the "workers’ heroes" who fought to put down the uprising against enforced Communism), looking out at severally foggy, indistinct Lenins, with muted patriotic music somewhere out there in the mist, I was reminded of that old P.B. Shelley poem from high school English:
"'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'"
Nothing beside remains..."