Almost done

Today is our last full day in Belgium, having spent a brief while in each of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. From now on we're going to more or less hang out in France until our return. This might be the last time I can be bothered writing anything here, since while we enjoy France it's hardly new territory for us.

The North has been noticeable by how much more expensive it has been, especially buying food and drink. Often Alison and I have simply declined to have a sit-down meal or a quiet beer based on our refusal to pay the sort of money they are costing. The $50 lunches, with $12 beers, at restaurants in inner Bruges for instance suddenly made me considerably less hungry. 

The train trips have been quicker, more crowded and with sealed windows, so taking photos is largely useless. We flew Copenhagen to Amsterdam, because it was as cheap as the trains and far quicker. There's only so much I can take of the plains of northern Europe anyway – they're not particularly exciting. 

The rest has been pleasant, but largely as I expected, as I've been through this area before, albeit more quickly.

Hamburg was a pleasant surprise, as a city without great reputation as a tourist venue – we did three days there and could have done more. I always knew it was one of the world's great ports, but I had no idea just how maritime it is, with canals and lakes across downtown.

Copenhagen was easily the cleanest place we visited, and probably the most expensive. We largely went there for Alison, although I was keen to take the train over the bridge to Sweden and revisit my old school in Lund for pure nostalgia's sake. 

Amsterdam was the most disappointing – very crowded and while the shops weren't as full of souvenirs as say Venice, we didn't find sex shops, brothels and dope bars to be any more interesting. The houses along the canals are sweet, but after an hour they start to look very samey. I suppose if I had wanted to see Van Goghs or Rembrandts the museums might have been more interesting, but I saw them the last time I visited. 

Luckily we only did Amsterdam as a day trip, as we were were based in Utrecht. It was much nicer there, if only because less busy, and the canals and their houses just as interesting. 

Belgium was more varied than the Netherlands. We avoided Brussels, and visited Bruges and Ghent. Each was fine, but we're starting to overload on cute medieval cities. The coast was a pleasant change, and luckily we had a good day to see it. They run a tram along the whole coast and a day pass isn't too expensive, so you can travel along and see the various towns quickly and easily. We really like de Haan, in particular.

One thing we have enjoyed in this part of the world though is some really good modern architecture – domestic, commercial and municipal. They aren't afraid to build bold buildings, and have the money to do so. 

The Czech Republic

We're in Copenhagen now, having spent a while in Hamburg. They're nice cities to visit, even if Denmark is horrifically expensive, but I'm struggling to think of anything interesting to say about them, so I'll write about our visit to Czechia.

We stayed in five towns – Ostrava, Brno, Ceske Budejovice, Pilsen and Karlovy Vary. We omitted Prague and Olomouc because we'd been to them before.

Ostrava was quite a surprise, but it wasn't the conventional things most tourists like. The castle is the worst one I have ever visited (and I have visited well over a hundred, many of which were pretty poke themselves), the local churches were completely ordinary and the city museum quite poor.

But the history of the place as a coal mining centre was fascinating. We went and saw the model houses for the Rothschild workers from the 1850s and then the model Soviet Poruba suburb from 100 years later. From the period in between those there were lots of lovely buildings from the wealth the coal brought – including a magnificent town hall that has largely complete interior decorations from the Deco era.

Inside Ostrava's New Town Hall. The whole interior is in original style like this.

The city has struggled mightily since the mines closed, and isn't on most tourist lists, but while not everyone's cup of tea, we enjoyed the place a lot.

Brno (pronounced somewhat like burno) is a much bigger place with an older history, had a decent old town but again that wasn't particularly gripping. We mostly explored the edges of the town, including a nice castle at Veveri after a walk along the town reservoir. Also the Functionalist and Modernist buildings it has scattered about. There was a fascinating exhibition by Alfons Mucha, who was a native of the town, that we were lucky was still going.

From there we went to Ceske Budovice. Its German name is Budweis, and its only real fame arises from the local brewery producing Budweiser (not the US variety, which started as a direct copy, but got much worse). Alison and I are suckers for manufacturing processes, so we toured the plant.

Really we only stayed there because it was cheap and allowed useful day trips. We went to Ceske Krumlov, which is one of the best towns I have seen for retaining its medieval character. It is genuinely lovely, but that does come with dozens of coach loads of tourists, which spoil it somewhat.

Panorama of Ceske Krumlov castle and part of the new town

Once you got out of the old town and away from the hordes it was much nicer. There was a lovely Renaissance garden to walk in and it has a good museum of local history which, typically, had almost no visitors.

The locals take advantage of the extreme meanderings of the river to raft and kayak down, but we didn't have time for that sadly.

We also went to Trebon as a short bus ride from Ceske Budovice, which has a interesting and somewhat different countryside. It was a focused on fish farming in the past – although now largely a centre for people who visit the spa and/or like the local cycle trails. We walked a couple of the routes.

Plzeň, or Pilsen in the German, is the place where pale lager was first brewed. We visited the Pilsner Urquell brewery naturally, although the exact details of the brewing still largely escape me. (One consequence of having spent so long in the Czech area is that we got very used to their nice pilsner beers, and are now struggling with the sweet nature of the beer elsewhere.)

Houses in Pilsen. Need those turrets!

It was a sweet place, and the I enjoyed the houses from around 1900, since it seemed that having an ornamental turret was a sign of taste, but you'd not want to spend too many days there.

Last up was Karlovy Vary. It was famous as Carlsbad, and was a spa town going back centuries and very wealthy. The result is that the entire old town is ridiculously pretty, and very up-market as the hotels and shops compete for the wealthy clientele who seem to like it. Sadly, that also meant it was crazy full, and very expensive.

Originally the visitors were largely Germans and Austrians – it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the town was completely German speaking, until 1945 when Stalin shipped nearly all the ethnic Germans out (Pilsen and Budejovice were mostly German until that point too). Since the fall of the Iron Curtain the Germans are returning, but there are enormous number of Russians. I suspect it is cheaper than Germany but has all the same goods and that the Czechs find Russian easy to learn (apparently quite a lot of the place is now actually owned by Russians). Weirdly, and I don't know why, there were also a large number of Arabs and Israelis.

The mineral waters that made it famous come out at up to 70°C, and taste utterly vile. In the past they used to consume large quantities of the stuff (literally litres a day) but now people mostly sip it and pretend it is doing some good. Given the incredible pink scale it leaves on the fountain, I have my doubts about it, but I can see how it used to kill internal parasites before modern drugs.

 Fountain in town

It was a remarkable place to visit, despite the crowds. There were nice trails in the hills too, carefully labelled so tourists didn't get lost.

We also made a short trip to Locket, which is an old castle town in a bend in the river (the name literally means "elbow") and blessedly free of crowds for such a nice place. From there we walked most of the way back to Karlovy Vary, along a cycle track.

All up we spent over two weeks in the Czech Republic, and that without seeing Prague. It was well worth the time.

Our only real downer was that we didn't think very much of most of the food. We had a couple of nice lunches, but some of the offerings were decidedly average. If we had wanted to spend more there were nice places, but they tended to offer international food, which we could have anywhere.

Iron Hut City

Alison has a penchant for "model" towns. We've seen a few over the years, and when she heard about Eisenhüttenstadt it really had to get added to our itinerary. We couldn't actually stay there, since no AirBnBs seemed to operate, so we visited from Frankfurt an der Oder.

Starting in 1950 the East Germans built a new town, Eisenhüttenstadt, pretty much from scratch (it was not far from an old town, Fürstenberg, but initially the two were entirely separate). It was based around a new steel mill  – hence the name, literally Iron Hut City – and associated works.

The town and the mill grew to be quite sizeable. Then with the fall of the DDR, the jobs were largely gone, as the communist era mills were grossly inefficient. The mill still operates, but at a quarter the original size.  The industrial end of town is pretty grim now.

The town's population has shrunk by nearly half as a result.

One of the old mills still going. Most are abandoned or gone.

Nothing unusual so far – Nova Huty outside Krakow, which we have also been to – went through pretty much exactly the same thing. As did similar towns in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria etc.

Another of our visits was to Sillamäe in Estonia. It was a uranium mine, which went from being a model city to almost entirely abandoned overnight (the dirty way the Soviets mined did leave it just a touch radioactive).

However there are distinct differences with Eisenhüttenstadt, which made it well worth a visit.

Firstly, although even Germans couldn't make Communism work very well, they did a lot better job than anyone else, so the DDR was a lot wealthier than other communist states. Thus while all the model cities started with sweeping plans utopian for "model living" the Germans carried through with it a lot longer.

The inner centres of Novy Huta and Sillamäe were once quite grand, but almost immediately they started to build crappy Soviet-issue concrete apartment blocks when the money ran out. However in Iron Hut City they still had the budget to keep building properly. The newer blocks are actually better than the first one. The attached schools, hospitals and shops were also built as planned, whereas in most other Soviet model cities they either never got built or were thrown up cheaply.

(There were some of the poor quality apartment blocks in Eisenhüttenstadt when they couldn't keep up the pace with the inner city, but the reduction in the size of the town has meant most have been emptied out and pulled down. Most people in the town live in the "model" blocks now.)

Modern Germany is also richer than the countries to the east and south. Which means that they have had the money to restore those inner city blocks. I say "restore", but I suspect that they are actually nicer now.

One of the nicer style blocks. Each "block" is a group of apartments in similar style.

The result is that you can wander around a town that looks like the DDR intended it to look like. The places are all fresh and clean and the grounds between them tidy and with play equipment. It's really quite nice and inviting, assuming you like living in an apartment, of course.

Of course, since although the buildings were well designed and up-to-date for the time, they are now stuck in a time warp. As the town hasn't grown, the hospitals, schools, town hall etc are still big enough, so haven't required modern extensions. (There are new buildings, especially shops, but they are separate from the model DDR town.)

The shops are in matching 50's and 60's styles, which adds to the charm. 

Eisenhüttenstadt has started to realise that it can actually play on what little history it has. There's a nice museum of daily life in the DDR over the decades, and they have a well planned and explained walking route of the town.

Some people take guided tours of the city that show the abandoned steel plants and ruined apartment buildings, but to be honest you can see similar all over Eastern Europe (and indeed Detroit, Glasgow etc). While revel in ruins when the real joy of Eisenhüttenstadt is that you can see a very large model town from the Communist era looking nice? 

Wildlife

Because we are travelling without a car, we tend to spend most of our time in towns. That could get a bit samey, especially as we are travelling quite slowly, so we don't get the rapid variation in the towns themselves that a flying visit gets.

So we take the time in most places to have a decent walk in the countryside. As often as not the local trams and buses run to right on the outskirts of towns so getting out of town isn't an issue.

There's usually marked trails we can find with a bit of research, but identifying which trail is which has been an issue. This has resulted in a few walks taking fairly sizable detours, although without actually getting lost (Google Maps is a life-saver in that regard, because we can always place and orient ourselves).

What has surprised me is how much variation in animal life we have seen, and also what we haven't seen.

Southern Europe was alive with butterflies while we were there, with huge numbers and lots of variety. There's a lot fewer to be seen now, but it may be because spring is their time. We've seen loads of dragonflies, damselflies and similar too – and the fish jumping to catch them.

Deer and hares are everywhere, and we see them out of the trains frequently. There's a lot of wooden structures on stilts in the fields in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia etc that we assume people shoot them from.

In our walks in woods we have seen deer up close when we startled a pair that were resting and a fox who studied us briefly and then went on its way. Nothing particularly surprising there, but one day we were sitting on a fallen tree and a couple of owls flew overhead and landed about 30 metres away. I wasn't expecting to see any of them, given that we only go out in full daylight. They were creepy too, because they made absolutely no noise as they flew over.

We've seen surprisingly few squirrels though, even when walking in oak and beech forests. Perhaps they stay quiet in the heat, but the only time we've seen one not in a town park was when two were having a fight and the noise alerted us to them. We saw squirrels all the time in France, so I was expecting a lot more of them.

Alison is extremely good at spotting dead animals – she watches where she puts her feet far more than I do – and among others she's found a dead snake, a mole and a water vole.

My favourite sighting was a couple of days ago though. We were walking a cycle trail largely through open countryside, when Alison saw something in the distance. I went one side of the small clump of trees and made a lot of noise, and Alison stayed still on the other. Sure enough, a wild boar headed away from me, with two piglets in tow. We knew that there were boar in the woods, of course, I just never expected to see one.

It's not a great photograph – they really weren't much interested in hanging around us. 

But the incredible find was on an amble around Treviso early one evening. It is intersected by rivers, and we were alongside a not particularly inspiring one – I think it may have actually been a diversion to form a moat for the town –  when Alison spotted an otter.

It seems that cleaner rivers and less hunting means that otters are recovering in numbers across Europe, but it was none the less a big surprise to see one inside a sizable town. We now scan every river for otters, but in vain.

All rich countries are the same

Matilda made a point that I write about buildings a lot on this blog. There's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I am really interested in buildings – old and modern, grand and minor – especially as it crosses my interest in history and so that's what I go to see. But also because it's not as easy to write about the countries we are in, especially as we move north.

There's a line in Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Well, recently I saw someone extend that to "Rich countries are all alike; every poor country is poor in its own way". There's a lot to be said for that.

For the most part the Czech and Slovak lands are just like travelling anywhere in Western Europe. If you are playing GeoGuessr (where you are given a view of some random GoogleMaps street view and you have to guess where you are) then you'll know that inner European cities are strikingly the same. They have many of the same shops, the same clothes, the same cars, etc. The new buildings, whether commercial, residential or industrial are identical.

Somewhere pretty. I'll be impressed if you can tell which country.

It's only when we visit poorer countries, like Jordan and Mexico, that we note substantive differences. And even then, the richer downtown areas aren't that different from each other.

We went to a really nice collection of works by Alfons Mucha yesterday. He was a Czech artist from Brno, which is where we are at the moment, so they're very fond of him here. You'll recognise his work even if you don't recognise his name.

Typical Mucha posters 

But there doesn't seem much point talking about an artist whose work is already recognised across the globe, working in a style that was internationally copied. He did most of his well known work in Paris and the US anyway.

So I tend to be most interested in what I can see around me that I could not experience at home. That does include castles and grandiose Communist palaces. Alison and I have been enjoying the large number of Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings that remain here, but again it's an international style and you can't tell a Hungarian one from a Czech one.

I also like to see the changing geography, both natural and human, but discussions on the different ways countries behave at the beach probably makes architecture look interesting.

Some of the sameness of places is reaching epic proportions. I often like to buy T-shirts from the places I am in, but like to have ones that evoke the place rather than just say "I went to Dubrovnik". I've basically given up now, because T-shirts everywhere are in English. On the streets, regardless of where we have been, it is exceedingly rare to see a shirt with any writing not in English.

Even national symbols are affected by the move. You could buy football shirts in the red and white checks of Croatia all over the place while the world cup was on, but not a single one had the name of the country as Hrvatska – it was all "Croatia".

There are differences remaining, of course, but they are increasingly trivial. The local road "people crossing" signs here tend to look more jaunty, perhaps because both legs are always bent. But regardless of that, they always have hats on! (Since the locals basically dress like anywhere else, hats are no more common here than anywhere else.)

Food is one area where local tastes still resist globalisation, at least a bit. Unfortunately the Czech and Slovak lands really haven't caught up to modern standards for cafe food, and the local dishes we have had have tended to be very disappointing. Badly cooked meat in gravy with dumplings is filling, but not hugely appetising.

The nicer places tend to serve international food, Italian dishes being especially common. The cafe we went to today had a nice roast river trout, which is very local, but the soup was gazpacho and the alternatives on the menu were spaghetti and a sweet potato dish.

It's a nice country Czechia, but it is awfully like Austria (of which it was a part for many centuries, of course, so hardly surprising).

Sl(ov)ak(i)a

I knew Slovakia was a bit different from the other countries we have visited, because it never really had a separate existence as a country prior to WWII. It was brought into Czechoslovakia because the languages are very similar, but the cultures were not and they never really got on that well. The Czechs have always been very westward looking, but the Slovaks not so much.

The Slovaks seem to have been much less perturbed by Soviet rule than most of the old Warsaw Pact, perhaps because they'd never really had self-rule before, and the Soviets let them be their own Slovak Republic inside the Czechoslovak one. So the Soviets were better in some ways than their previous rulers, who tried to make the Slovaks into Czechs or Hungarians.

The thing is huge – the statue on top is 5m high alone

It's the only place we have seen which still has Soviet iconography up on pubic monuments. You can actually see hammer-and-sickle motifs and red stars, even in the centres of towns (often with the original inscriptions removed, so not exactly glorifying, but they haven't scrubbed out the period entirely). The photo above is from Bratislava overlooking the town, and is a memorial to the Soviet liberation. It is massive, which is perhaps why they haven't got rid of it.

Because the Slovakian cities didn't grow much prior to WWII, the Soviets needed to build a lot of housing as the country folk moved in to be in the new industrial factories that the Soviets loved so much. That means that outside the small inner cities there is a massive ring of Soviet era apartment blocks. Most town Slovaks have to live in one, because they completely dominate the housing stock.

Unlike most of the Soviet bloc, the local Communists decided that it would be cheaper to stick to only a couple of building plans, and they really went to town on repeating them. Whole suburbs are the same block of what are called panelaky or panelovy (since they are built of prefabricated panels). At least they seem to have been built rather better than the average Soviet tower block, and have not started to crumble too badly.

Across the river from old Bratislava

The modern Slovaks have done what they can to minimise the damage to the visual environment. They have renovated most of them, and when doing so painted them in a mix of colours and schemes, which does a surprisingly good job of hiding their uniformity. Individually the strength of some of the colours seems odd, with strong pinks and oranges in particular, but the overall effect is as good as can be expected, and a vast improvement over dirty concrete.

The blocks were also generally built back from the road and with decent space between them (this was always the ideal, but in so many places money concerns over-rode common sense). In Slovakia those spaces now have lots of mature trees, which improve the look amazingly. Despite the uniformity of the buildings, it was quite hard to take a photo of the sort I could take easily in Romania or Belgrade, with block after block the same, because the trees shielded them.

The are exceptions, however. In quite a few towns the Soviets decided to build a series of blocks on a hill over town. No amount of trees can hide them looming over the town, and they must have been much worse in the original plain concrete.

Also in smaller towns the apartment blocks built on the outside sometimes end precipitously at the end of town, leading to a wall of them as one approaches.

The lack of infrastructure in the cities extended to administrative buildings. So the Soviets got to build lots and lots of town halls, universities and "houses of culture" as the towns expanded. That gave lots of opportunities for Alison and me to see some more of "Slaka".

The Slovakian buildings are far less grandiose and peculiar than the Romanian or Belgrade version, but they retain the essential parts of "Socialist Realist" style, and that's all good with us.

Touristing in Slovakia

After a few weeks in Italy and Austria, we're back in the old Soviet Eastern Europe. We've just finished a flying tour of Slovakia and are into Czechia.

Slovakia a nice place to visit as a tourist, although with its own peculiarities. On the plus side, they use the Euro, and prices are relatively cheap. The amount of English is patchy, but most of the tourist places have enough to get by.

The towns often had periods of decent wealth in the late Middle Ages and after the 30 Years War, and were on trade routes which brought them the latest techniques as well as styles. It then lost it as they, alongside eastern parts of Poland and Hungary, went into relative decline. They were largely spared the bombing of much of WWII. That means that all the old towns are remarkably compact and intact, built in recognisably European, mostly German, styles.

Bardejov, from the Cathedral tower

Many of them, other than the much larger Bratislava, are built around a sort of very wide main road, with the cathedral and town hall in the centre, so which effectively is also the town square (as in the picture above). You can see most of the interesting parts in quite a short walk as all of them are either on this main "road" or a street directly off it.

Even better, the old inner cores have all been either pedestrianised, or make using cars so difficult that few bother. That means you can walk the centres very pleasantly, with less noise and without being constrained to sidewalks.

The museums have been quite patchy, with some good and some not so good. Fortunately they are all cheap, so even the less good ones weren't so bad. They all close on Mondays, however, which was annoying when we turn up to Bardejov and couldn't get in to what promised to be quite a good town museum.

Getting to the smaller towns, however, isn't easy. The main cities of Bratislava, Košice and Prešov are on regular train connections, but after that we had to plan quite carefully, and make lots of interconnections to get to the smaller ones. The trains are quite well set up in terms of the connections, but the stations aren't very good about telling you which platform and intermediate destinations. We ended up taking the wrong train out of Slovakia as a result, because it turns out the "Prague" train runs two different routes – and we got the wrong one. It wasn't a huge deal, but it did waste two hours as we make a very circuitous tour to get to Ostrava.

Because Slovakia is quite small, the distances aren't huge, but we still stuck with public transport They are constructing motorways all across the place, but as yet don't even have one that runs the length of the country. Off the motorways driving involves narrow roads and negotiating frequent rural vehicles, so just didn't seem very relaxing. In five years when the motorways finally link up, I suspect driving will be a good option.

The main keep at Devin Castle

It's a good place to see untouched medieval stuff. Quite a lot of castles and old town walls survive outside the main cities, because in the period when they tended to be demolished the area was a military and economic backwater.

Devin Castle is on a Bratislava city bus route, fortunately for me, so we did get to that one – and it's a beauty. We also toured across to Nitra, to see what is one of the most disappointing castles I've ever been to (although the church was quite nice). After that the castles proved too difficult because they are out in the countryside and transport doesn't connect well, so we largely stuck to the cities and towns, with their city walls and old buildings.

For the same reason we never got to see the famous wooden churches which survive – they're even more remote.

Slovakia was also interesting for its slightly different route under Communism, but I'll cover that in a day or so.