Bookpacking’s Blog

Here’s the rules of the road when we’re lighting out and exploring that big old world of ours…

1.    Stay in a hostel, or couchsurf. Locals are there to provide you with information and give you the inside track.

2.    Check the listings guides and scan the papers. Want to be in Krakow and then miss the annual (free) charity fireworks/concert because you didn’t know it was happening?

3.    Travel with the locals. Get buses and trams, see how people are living. What are they reading? What are their ringtones? How sophisticated is the transport system? Is it vandalised?

4.    Eat with the locals. Skip the fancy restaurant and eat cheap with residents. From Sunday snacks with Madrileno’s in the rastro, to the students and old people in Gdansk’s milk bars; it’s an anthropological adventure.

5.    Keep your eyes open. Posters and graffiti help you appreciate the mood of the nation, region or even the city. From anti-tourist slogans in the Basque country to the parental status of Putin or the ownership of Kosovo; what are people talking about?

6.    Initiate conversations. No use being a wall-flower here; start a chat, ask questions. People respond to genuine interest. And after all, everyone’s favourite subject is themselves.

7.    Get lost. Guide books are great, but take some time to wander off the beaten track and you never know what you’ll find. There are atmospheric empty alleys only minutes from Las Rambla, or serene spots for contemplation round SF’s Telegraph Hill.

8.    Go to something different. Like a political meeting, or an alternative art show. In Dresden’s Neustadt you might catch the German Bob Dylan imitator for only a few Euros, or meet interesting progressive political types at a Move On film screening in a US city.

9.    Look up! Especially if you’re a photographer; there’s a whole different world up there that so many miss. You might find 100 year-old advertisements, or eclectically elaborate rooftop decorations signifying a building’s provenance.

10.    Be open and be flexible. People make suggestions for reasons, so follow the tips. Change your schedule to take advantage of opportunities, and cut your losses when a location disappoints.

11.    We said 10 rules, eh? Rule 11 is know when to throw the rules out of the window!

© Bookpacking

 Bulgaria; Sofia; The Apartment

It’s Valentines Day in Sofia. But for the lone traveller like Bookpacking, they can console themselves that 14th February is also the feast day of St Trifon – crying into your glass is just fine today, as long as it’s wine at the bottom of it.

It’s an interesting day, hooking up with a couple of locals who work in travel & tourism for an informal tour of the town. Today the washed out colours of a European winter jarr with the E-number red of Valentines Day balloons from sellers  – like here in front of the Popa statue. A local landmark, it’s the place to meet if you’ve got a rendezvous.

The stone figure of a 14th Century religious leader made contrasts sharply with the vivid man-made material of 21tst Century tat. In front of the National Palace of Culture there is another one of those juxtapositions that seem to leap out at you in this region. A group of old people stand in front of a memorial, drinking wine and eating small pieces of some kind of sweetbread. With their heavy coats and a drooping flag, they are commemorating the death of General Hristo Lukov who was killed by communists. We shouldn’t get too sad though, because he was apparently pro-Nazi; history never seems to be neutral in this part of the world.

Meanwhile, in another part of the park, a PA system is pounding. Girls in modern dress are dancing on a stage in front of the dilapidated national monument while a young guy dressed as a giant condom hands out free prophylactics for what looks to be the Red Cross. The OAPs come from an era where the lucky few survived, the young people from an era where the unlucky few die. Will they come to monuments like this when they are that age, and reflect on past injustices while the younger generation parties on in ignorant bliss? One hopes they won’t have to.

Later, on the edge of town – past even the Panelka – we find ourselves at an obscure concrete monument full of bells. Some sort of UNICEF project to symbolise solidarity between the world’s children, it speaks of another century. With bells donated from countries which no longer exist or have been renamed, like the DDR or Kampuchea, it feels like time has stopped. Even the huge double-stacked tv’s in the security guard’s shack (to stop “gypsies” stealing the metal) look like they came from another era with their wood-effect sides.

There is no-one else here, and in the late afternoon gloom, the sentinel-like main tower cuts a dark angular silhouette against a uniformly grey sky. Dogs prowl and on the main road prostitutes stamp their feet as cars fly past on the dual carriageway. Horns sound as excited men impulsively leer, but no-one stops.

Walking through a field strewn with rubbish, to the start of the housing estate where the bus waits and a lone dog stands territorially on the potted tarmac, this feels like a frontier. Not so much the edge of town, as the edge of civilisation. An old game, with old risks, for those girls.

So when we get to back to town, and the safe warm confines of one of Sofia’s coolest ‘bars’ Apartment – “It’s not a bar, it’s the Apartment” – the soothing sea sounds in the aquatic-themed room we’re led to are all the more appreciated. Sinking into the sofa with a Leffe and some organic chocolate cake, we can reflect that the world changes. But not that much.

One of the delights of the Berlin is just wandering the streets. Today it’s Friedrichshain, which is quashed between Karl Marx Allee and the Spree river and one of many sub-centres of this diffuse city. Berlin feels like an ever-shifting urban canvas, and leaving the new style bars behind in the avenues, we find esoteric treasure in the side streets and alleyways.

Like a plane crash survivor, Berlin is city embraces the now and all the possibilities of existence that brings, yet can never escape the memory of its trauma. Pasted on a garage wall, a riot of CMYK announces another rendezvous of the colourful-but-cool in a venue which will enjoy its moment in the sun, before returning to the tumbledown obscurity from whence it came. This is the city of the Geheimtip, the nod and the wink about a bar, cellar or even someone’s front room which is temporarily the focus of the fickle and fashionable.

But underneath the posters, where yet another team of spray painters have left their mark, a mural depicts a Zeppelin. Immediately recognisable, its shape speaks of a dark past but is somehow softened by a loss of edge that the passage of time gives to memories that cut less deeply the further back they are. From the pre-Hitler era, before Friedrichshain was renamed Horst Wessel Stadt in honour of the Nazi anthem writer, it belongs to a conflict that is less offensive than its successor.

Across the street is a yard full of Volkswagen T25 camper vans. Appropriately VW’s spiritual home Wolfsburg is a short drive to the west. Two African men load a lorry with parts, before approaching us to see what we’re staring at. The vans are not for sale but only for export they tell us. Import/export: the people involved in this business never seem to welcome scrutiny. Presumably, given Berlin’s low costs and the popularity of these vans abroad, they’re being sold overseas. “Das ist Kultauto” we manage to say – a cult car. Unimpressed but satisified we pose no threat, they amble away. Berlin is one of those places where you can sense things happening underground, in hidden places. For good and bad.

Turning another corner onto Modersohnstrasse, one of the many open spaces you find in Berlin (bomb damage or communist lack of care?) is gated with a sign which appears to announce something defiantly to the world. Inside, it is packed with a collection of those distinctive two-axle  trailers that you only see in this part of the world. Like the T25, they have a certain boxiness; but unlike the camper vans in the yard, there are heat shimmers denoting working stoves – they are occupied. A gypsy encampment? A travelling circus? An artistic paradise? We’re seized with a need to know.Then a paramilitary figure, clad all in black, emerges on one of those sit-up-and-beg bikes that are fantastic for stately patrols of the flat Berlin cyclepaths, but would be useless in London. He stops to adjust his phone; such an opportunity is not to be wasted.

His clothes are actually Carhartt rather than military fatigues, the only war he is fighting is the annual one against the bitter Berlin cold. This, he tells us, is a community of squatters. Rather than travellers, they are stay-putters who spied an opportunity in this empty patch of land and took it. Our pragmatic new friend tells us how it is: “This land was empty so we decided to squat. The government said ‘Ok, no problem, we don’t need this right now so you can have it. But when we are ready to build our sports development, you will have to move on.’ But, this is Berlin, so they have no money, so they cannot build it and we are still here.” Ah this city, such a cheap date for the decadent but destitute. “If you look carefully,” a friend once said, “you’ll notice people nursing the same beer for a long time.”

But being Berlin, this cosmopolitan community of squatters are very much in touch with the modern world.  “She works in IT,” he says as woman in a hooded top and baggy jeans slouches past, “So we have very fast internet. Another guy is a businessman and he owns several companies.” Anarchists, alternatives, entrepreneurs and IT specialists – all living cheek by jowl in this soon-to-be-gentrified quarter. But how long can this coexistence last, as capitalism spreads its polarising wealth and business also spies an opportunity. Are the anti-yuppy car burners of Friedrichshain fighting a losing battle?

The Fernsehturm looks pretty now, this 1,200ft long futuristic rocket to the stars. It welcomes you to an ultra-modern city where individuality is welcomed and self-expression encouraged. But spend a few days in Berlin, and read your Stasi history, and you start to see it in a different light.

There it is again, as you cross a street. And over your shoulder as you drink a coffee outside. It’s never out of your view for more than a few minutes. It’s like being shadowed by an impassive silvery spy. Outwardly symbolic of communist construction skills –  and a giant “Up yours” to West Berlin – it would also have jammed TV pictures and Radio Free Europe, just like its Prague counterpart.

And that mirrored glass; maybe a too little like the windows in an interrogation room or the shades on the guy who always happens to turn up when you do in the cafe. The tower once served – like all communist architecture – to dwarf those below it; to remind you that you were nothing compared to the collective, namely the state and its many tentacles. There is a reason why dictators build big, just like they did at the imposing Tempelhof under a different – but equally totalitarian – regime. Always there. Always watching. Always bigger.

Little could they know they would be building one of the city’s top tourist attractions, bringing the enemy from all over the globe to spend their ill-gotten capitalist gains. It is now the drab socialist showpiece of Karl-Marx-Allee that shrinks beneath the tower. And at night, looking up from Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, this trophy of the former anti-fun state resembles a glitter ball in a decadent disco. The Spartacists must be turning in their spartan coffins.

It’s perhaps crass of the artist to make comparisons with the Stasi, but the stencil makes its point.

Sometimes puerile though often political, the simple medium of stencil art is enabling a new generation to make their point all over Europe – using striking images instead of cliched sentences.

This follows in the tradition of such groundbreaking agitprop as the Berkeley 4973 posters of the 60s. A picture tells a thousand words. And it’s difficult to shout down a drawing…

Germany; Weimar; ACC gallery/cafe; “Kangaroos Run Wild in Weimar” exhibition

Another little Weimar bonus tonight. Stopping off at the gallery/café ACC we saw a sign for an event that evening discussing Australia’s image, as portrayed to Germans in mainstream film. Dipping into overdubbed films ranging from Walkabout to Priscilla to Rabbit Proof Fence, local academic/artist Olaf Nenninger presented a compilation of clips to show how manufactured and manipulated this portrayal is.

All countries self-mythologise. America focuses on the Wild West and the Revolution; in Britain we have WW2 when ‘we were all in it together’. But living in Europe and having worked in Australia, Bookpacking is aware that it exists today as a brand; something for foreign tourists like ourselves to buy into.

Thus the recent film with Nicole Kidman can be seen (and visiting Aussie artist and war correspondent George Gittoes confirmed it was) as a huge advertising vehicle, leading a tourist board charge. Fellow Aussie and artist/activist Deborah Kelly pointed out that it is one of the most urbanised countries in the world, yet the images associated with it are of landscapes not cities.

The celebrated Gittoes – who has worked with Michael Moore and has his own Iraq-related release “Soundtrack to War” – has some experience of working with Aborigines in the Northern Territory, and so was qualified to give us a list of what we ought to see to get a more realistic picture of the country and its Aboriginal people.

Gittoes’ list:
They’re a Weird Mob
The Last Wave
Romper Stomper
10 Canoes (highly recommended)

Deborah Kelly also recommends:
The Boys
Head On

An aside from Bookpacking:

One of the curators asked George and Deborah if they could relate to these desert/outback landscapes. A valid question, and they answered in the affirmative.

But if you are a European who has never been to either Australia or America, it can be difficult to fully grasp the scale of the individual countries. An office worker may live in the suburbs of Melbourne, taking a tram to his office job in the cold rain, suited and booted. In the centre, another guy in jeans and bush hat might be working on a cattle station the size of Belgium which is running out of water. Even further north, a Park Ranger in stereotypical Blundstone boots and short-shorts might be dodging crocodiles on the rounds of his tropical reserve.

Of course there’s a certain homogeneity to the culture, but the environments are very different. Cultural/language differences aside, it’d be like asking someone who farms in Morocco if they can relate their surroundings to an office worker in Switzerland. Some things really do have to be seen to be appreciated.

Czech Republic; Prague-Dresden train EC170

Some things just have to be done. We’re sat on a Euro City train waiting to leave Prague for the former East German city of Dresden. Cued-up via YouTube is the classic Kraftwerk ode to pan-Europeanism, “Trans Europe Express”.

OK, so this isn’t one of those shiny new ICE trains (Germany’s TGV), but a red box of a locomotive with eight Hungarian carriages attached. But it’s clean and modern, and we can’t but help get excited about a train journey. Sentimental Journey, Brief Encounter, Casablanca; travel is romantic, full stop. But there’s something even more so about a train. The bus was going to be 500Kc, the train was only 600 and ran more frequently. So here we are riding along the Vltava with the pioneering electric rhythms of Germany’s most famous band.

And for extra novelty value (for a Brit at least) we’ve got ourselves a compartment. Remember those? Windows all steamed up from the days when diesel engines used hot steam to heat the carriages. One day last month, on a journey beset by problems, we sat on the platform at Doncaster while a useless tannoy mumble unintelligibly and harassed travellers asked hapless station staff the same question over and over.

Out of the gloom like a vision from the past appeared one of the rail charter trains that take enthusiasts up unusual branch lines or behind rare engines. Table lamps illuminated white-clothed tables through those steamy windows; it looked like the cosiest place in the world to be. And not for the first time we wondered about ‘progress’.

So as we travel through what was presumably the Sudetenland (annexed by Hitler), Dresden looms. The old “Florence of the Elbe” was completely devastated in WW2 by Allied incendiary bombs. My grandfather was in Bomber Command – the men who had the highest attrition rate, but were sidelined post-war as Churchill distanced himself from responsibility for “total war”: the deliberate targeting of civilians. And there’s a double irony in that my Grandmother was a fire warden in the blitzed-out Black Country city of Coventry.

Readers of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” can hear about the destruction of Dresden; or rather un-destruction – the action all takes place backwards. 25-35,000 dead in one night; bodies melting in pools of fat. Words are inadequate. Perhaps some things are so unreal that postmodern semi-sci-fi is the only way to make sense of them.

PS with regards to the old ‘Is the Euro making things more expensive’ chestnut: the Czechs aren’t in the Euro zone yet, but the odd tourist-related business appears to take it. The same sandwich was £1.20 in Czech Crowns at the train station, or £1.75 with Euros. This is a pattern you see all over. Where’s it all going, we wonder?

 Czech Republic; Prague; Kafka Museum

Kafka is often credited with having anticipated the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. Visiting the Kafka Museum in Prague, it’s easy to see why. The powerless individual helpless against an unfair and uncaring system whose decisions make no sense perfectly sums up the life under communism that one often reads about; everybody agreeing that the sky is green while staring directly into the clear blue.

Yet it was obvious that Kafka was a prisoner not of some external system, but of his own mind. As one display panel points out, he was never able to commit to a relationship because he was never able to “shake himself free of the rules he himself had imposed”. Just like one of his major writing influences, Flaubert, he also sought refuge in long-distance relationships and the abstract world of a love conducted by letters; where he could control things.

Kafka is yet another tortured artist who seems to prove the maxim that the best art comes out of pain. The allegorical Prague he dreamt up was composed of walls and boundaries which he had built for himself. Self-loathing and a hatred of his own body meant he was always held back. He found solace in the “Prague Four” band of intellectual friends, and gave himself eventually to his first love – literature.

He was the perfect example of the frustrated artist, driven to the edge of insanity by the mundane of a 9-5 that he hated. One of the sections of the museum is called “The Endless Office”. Anyone who has been in job that feels like a slow cerebral death can sympathise with that feeling of being trapped; a purgatorial paralysis of the mind and a overwhelming sense of stagnation. One of the displays refers to those “infinite” eight hours of the working day.

But if there is a hero in this realm of anti’s, it is Kafka’s comrade Max Brod. Nietzsche was dishonoured in death by a sister who manipulated his pre-life coaching message of liberation from the self (the “will to power”) to suit Nazi ends; but Kafka owes Brod a big posthumous debt. In life, Brod had recognised and nurtured Kafka’s superior talent. In death, Brod went against the wishes of his loved and respected friend, and bravely but guiltily disregarded Kafka’s request to burn his manuscripts. A tree fell in the literary forest; and thanks to Brod, we heard it.

 Hungary; Budapest; Terror House

History is very much alive in this part of the world. A couple of decades is nothing, and even if the teenagers of today don’t remember Communism, their parents do. And while some countries try to move on as quickly as possible, glossing over the past with a ’sleeping dogs lie’ attitude, others take time to remember what went before.

Contrasting with the Slovakian indifference we found in Bratislava, here the excellent Terror House museum not only commemorates the victims – it names the guilty. From the menacing Soviet tank which sits under victims’ mug-shots, to the chapel-like cellar which contains their names, the moving exhibition tells reminds us not to forget the victims of one of the Eastern Bloc’s relatively moderate regimes. The museum is situated in the very building where the Secret Police of both Nazi and Soviet regimes operated, and it rams home the point that Fascism and Communism were but different brands of the same kind of systemic oppression and control.

But surprisingly, another wall names and shames some of the torturers. Or perhaps that’s not surprising. Perhaps what’s surprising is that there isn’t more of this in the other countries we visited. Is this testament to the power of forgiveness, or an indication of unfinished business and a lack of lustration? Only time will tell.

Hungary; somewhere between Vienna and Budapest

As overhead screens drop down to start playing the passenger information video that precedes a feature film, the pretty Hungarian stewardess leans over. In perfect English asks if we’d like complimentary coffee, tea or chocolate? After a safety briefing she’d passed down the aisle with free headphones and while we’re plugging these in she returns with a thick and creamy hot chocolate.

Giving our arrival time in Budapest, she had told us the name of the man tasked with getting us there in one piece, but hadn’t mentioned our altitude. At a rough guess, we reckon we’re cruising at somewhere in the region of 8 feet. Hungarian carrier Orangeways is another new central European bus company giving planes and trains a run for their money. Last week Czech competitor Student Agency* took us from Brno to Bratislava in style, and tonight Orangeways quietly and efficiently whiz us from one former bastion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to another. Doubtless Austria’s OBB would have provided a smooth and comfortable ride too, but their trains would have cost 3-4 times more and taken just as long.

Their German counterpart DB is supposed to be buying the British government’s stake in Eurostar. Does National Express have anything to fear from foreign competition? Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing if, in the free trade Euro-village, the likes of Student Agency and Orangeways became players in the UK market? Student Agency even give out free magazines and newspapers, and on both lines if you don’t like the film (broadcast in the local language and English) you can always listen to the in-cabin radio. They’ve even got Wifi on some routes.

One of the few things that gets Bookpacking really riled (enough to rip a bookmark in two; a card one obviously, not leather) is overpriced UK transport. Mega Bus have brought prices down on some routes with their no frills approach, and National Express (who also said goodbye to coach stewards a long time ago) offer Fun Fares which can work out at £1 per hour of long distance travel. French operator Veolia, which one driver told Bookpacking is owned by the French government, is already quietly expanding into the UK. But maybe a bit of this Hungaro-Czech style of coach travel wouldn’t go amiss. Orangeways and Student Agency have already named their crossborder operations using English words. Have pan-European brand name, will travel?

* open to all, though students are as welcome as anyone else