BootsnAll Travel Network



A Room at the Bauhaus

April 25th, 2008

Wagenfeld [Bauhaus]Dessau isn’t the most attractive town in Germany. The British flattened it in the 1940s and the Soviets towerblocked it after the war. The city seems an unlikely destination for an architectural pilgrimage, but hidden away behind the station is one of the great buildings of the 20th century, the Bauhaus.

I booked a room in the Atelierhaus [student wing] of the Bauhaus for 25 euros a night. The room was high up on the third level of the building with a shiny crimson floor and a tiny-lipped balcony.  Internal walls were painted white to create the illusion of more space and furniture was sturdy and functional; just a bed, coat stand, storage unit and two Marcel Breuer chairs tucked under a table. Two spotlights threw shadows around the walls and I quickly tidied my possessions away. This wasn’t a room that would tolerate mess,

I remembered my own halls of residence in the north of England; the nylon carpet and the wonky shelves. Nothing like this. I used the balcony and the clear February night to chill my Riesling.

There are other Bauhaus buildings dotted around Dessau. Walter Gropius designed a low brick Employment Office and a whole suburb was built to a Bauhaus spec. Beautifully preserved are the four Meisterhausers Gropius added for the college teachers and their wives. These are now open to the public and restored closely to their original design. Beautiful as they are they appear more museum than house. Door handles are gleaming and the smell of fresh paint hangs in the stairwells. The clutter and spills of daily life have been removed.

My favourite building was the Kornhaus restaurant, a lovely sweep of glass designed by Carl Fieger in the late 1920s. I got lost in the woods looking for it and then discovered I only had eight euros in my pocket when I arrived. I ordered a salad and a fruit juice from the menu and hurried out after leaving a measly fifty-cent tip. It was the last of my cash!

 Before I left Dessau, I bought a 1950s Wagenfeld cup and double saucer from the Bauhaus shop. It was so nice I bought the rest of the set from ebay for about £100 when I got back to London. A week later I was photographing some Bauhaus-inspired houses in Stanmore and found an identical set in a charity shop for £5.

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James Joyce & the Adriatic

April 11th, 2008

Our first encounter was in Trieste. Back in the days of empire this city port belonged to the Habsburgs and later became the southern pin of the iron curtain. Most of the surrounding coastal towns are Venetian in character, with tall campanile towers and arched loggias. Trieste has greater subtlety, atypical of Italian cities; a kind of Vienna-on-Sea. It’s graceful rather than attractive, the squares floored with Carrera marble and behind the imposing civic buildings sits a crumbling medieval quarter built across Roman foundations.

One hundred years ago, in strode the young James Joyce. He was newly married with a degree in Latin and keen to take what we now call a gap-year, teaching English abroad. The year away eventually stretched to an on-off decade in this pretty corner of Europe. It was here, among the cafes and piazzas that he wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and large chunks of The Dubliners.

A bronze statue of Joyce stands by the Grand Canal in Trieste. He looks in a hurry, with a book tucked tightly under his arm. The sculpture is lifesize and in the bustle of a passegiate, he merges with the crowd, head down, thoughts of literary genius on his mind no doubt. After that he seemed to follow us everywhere. At the Hotel James Joyce with its traces of the 18th century and Italian copies of Finnegans Wake in reception, we drank cheap fiery grappa and awoke with headaches.

In Pula, around the coast in Croatia, we bumped into him again. This time he sat outside a cafe (Cafe Ulysses inevitably) legs crossed, enjoying the April sun. Joyce taught English here, but showed little affection for the town. Pula has beautifully preserved Roman temples and a colossal amphitheatre and now celebrates a writer immune to its charms.

He returned to Trieste with the germ of a Homeric idea and tapped out early chapters of Ulysses. This most Dublin of novels evolved so many miles away from its backdrop. He wrote to his wife calling Trieste “the city which has sheltered us” and a century on, with its statues and plaques and literary trails, it shelters him still.

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Bad Guys in Buenos Aires

April 11th, 2008

How do you get under the skin of a city? Some would suggest spending time with locals, others, drinking your way around the bars. Me? I go to football matches.

In Buenos Aires there are two decent choices; River Plate, colloquially known as Los Millionaires and based in middle class suburbia, or Boca Juniors, Maradona’s alma mater, down by the docks. The district of La Boca is what guidebooks call a ‘tough’ neighbourhood. It has one camera friendly tourist street full of brightly painted buildings and smartly dressed tango dancers. Behind the façade lies a down at heel district, paint peeling from the shutters, an area where Lonely Planet advises vigilance.

The football ground sits in urban wasteland, an area of rusty cranes and abandoned cars. I walked around the stadium to the ticket office with two female friends. We passed a teenage boy sitting on a bike, otherwise the streets were empty. He rode away as we passed, his squeaky wheels in need of oil. Besides the ticket booth we stopped to sort out cash. Argentine football is incredibly cheap, about £4 a ticket. We pooled our pesos and I turned towards the ticket window. A hand written sign said Cerrado.

A familiar squeaky noise came from behind and I felt my arm pushed up into a half-nelson. I looked down to see a large kitchen knife held against my throat. A voice close to my ear hissed “Dinero! Dinero!” and flexed the knife threateningly. My wallet was in my hand, so I pulled the money out and threw the wallet to the ground. The girls did the same. The kid was screaming, “Todo! Todo!” adding pressure to the blade. We emptied our pockets of change. In one movement he withdrew the knife, snatched the cash from my hand and pushed me hard. He must have pocketed about £30 from us. Not peanuts, but below the value of my neck. He pedalled hard on his squeaky bike, looked back once and accelerated away.

My limbs were a little wobbly and I clumsily stabbed a cigarette into my mouth, lighting it at the fourth attempt. We sat down on a wall. The knife had cut through my St Christopher chain. Patron saint of travellers, my arse. Back at the hostel, backpackers crowded round to hear our tale. We tried to add a philosophical spin, the kids are desperate, he needed the money more than us. At the same time we considered plenty of what ifs? Why didn’t I try some Matrix moves? What if one of the girls had kicked him in the bollocks? All these theories were academic and most were likely to have left me in two bits.

Three years later on I can still picture the boy’s bike (a Grifter no less!). I still have nightmares (the latest – last night), always in the same form; I’m walking down a street and someone jumps me from behind. I think part of the problem lies in never seeing the boy’s face. In my dreams the attacker is always cloaked in shadows. I try to shout and the only person who hears is my girlfriend, who reminds me I’m home, in bed, and the bad guys can’t get me.

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Vienna & the Curse of Franz Ferdinand’s Car

April 11th, 2008

I walk through Vienna across rain-sparkling cobbles to the History Museum. This Austrian city has fascinated me since childhood. At ten years old my favourite book was a mouldy paperback called Stranger than Science. These frightening stories of real life horror ignited my childish curiosity. The best was The Curse of Franz Ferdinand’s Car. It was a tale about a ‘demonic motor’ that ended up in a Viennese museum after a succession of owners met with grisly deaths.

The car’s relationship with its owners generally followed this formula: car breaks down, baffled driver peers under chassis, car reverses over baffled driver. The car fell into the hands of the Hapsburg Court and in 1914, claimed its most famous victim, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The shots fired on that Sarajevo morning lit the touchpaper for a world war. The book is unequivocal; the car was the evil mastermind. The story engrained itself in my young memory and although it took some years, I finally reached the city that fired my childhood imagination.

The ring road preserves an old city atmosphere, creating an island in the centre of the metropolis. The streets have spillover cafes and elegant shops, architecturally independent but never crassly juxtaposed. Eccentric public housing sits alongside slim art nouveau offices and rose-bordered gardens add colour and scent. I see Stefansdom and its reflected glory in the glass facade opposite the church. Mozart lived here, Haydn just over there. I hurry past the Third Man sewer tours, away from the city of Orson Welles and Graham Greene. The streets have a brooding, moonlit atmosphere and the squares shine romantically as locals splash through the rain. Vienna has many stories; of smuggling and war and demonic cars from cheap horror books.

Inside the museum, against a plain orange wall is the cursed car from my childhood. It appears innocuous, studded with leather and a faint smell of engine oil hangs in the gallery. It looks in better shape than several cars I’ve owned. I tell the curator the story and he laughs, “do I believe the car has its own will?” My hesitation amuses him. “Your first visit?” I nod, “The city of Klimt and Schiele, Mozart and Freud and you’re interested in this car!”

I grin, recalling that tatty paperback story that brought me all the way here and I think of all those other Viennas, waiting, just outside the door.

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Looking after Dracula in Transylvania

April 11th, 2008

A bust of Vlad the Impaler sat atop a stone pedestal. His eyes were mean and cold beneath thick matted hair. Laid around the base were a collection of offerings; ground saltpetre overlaid with flowers. The petals were bound tightly in cotton and the stems handbroken and twined into a circle. Shockingly, in the middle lay a dead sparrow, tiny feet pointing upwards. A trickle of blood congealed into a sticky pool. I couldn’t begin to guess the significance, but it made me shudder. Welcome to Transylvania.

I was in the central Romanian city of Sighisoara. The walled settlement sat on a bluff enclosing narrow cobbled streets too tight for cars. In Ceaucescu’s time, agriculture drove the town’s economy, now it’s unashamedly tourism. Pastel coloured houses fronted cobbled plazas, many with chipped stucco and dark painted shutters. Cameras clicked at a mustard coloured house; Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace, now a restaurant with sullen service. I sat patiently for ten minutes as the waiter finished his newspaper. Finally he sloped past. I asked for coffee. He looked at me with distaste and returned with a Fanta.

Dracula’s author, Bram Stoker, never visited Romania. He wrote most of the Transylvania chapters from his writer’s retreat in Aberdeen but it’s still possible to follow the novel’s journey through the region. The historical parallel with Vlad Tepes (The Impaler) is pure fable. The fictional Dracula is a composite character drawn from diverse sources. Part Jack the Ripper, part Romanian folklore, but the name Stoker borrowed for his creation belongs to a barbaric and very real individual.

Vlad Tepes was the son of a warlord known as The Dragon (Dracul in the local vernacular). The Impaler suffix came later, synonymous with Vlad’s favoured method of execution. Those who displeased him; such as thieves, the workshy, or particularly the Turks, were bound to a cross and violently slaughtered with sharpened stakes.

I left Sighisoara just after dawn, travelling south by modern train and rickety bus, arriving in Bran at midday. Transport is cheap, even by Central European standards. It’s in this tiny town that Transylvania’s number one tourist attraction lies; Dracula’s Castle. It’s called Dracula’s Castle because the Romanian Tourist Board know an opportunity when they see one. In reality, Vlad didn’t live here, in fact he may even have attacked it once. Filtered through the lens of countless Hollywood movies, it has the trappings of the gothic imagination, all hidden doors and secret stairs. “A vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky” reads the book. It is uncannily accurate.

From Bran I bussed north along bumpy roads and up onto the high plains. I was heading away from the historical context and back into the imagination of Bram Stoker. Like Jonathan Harker, the hero of the novel, “it was on the dark side of twilight when I got to Bistrita.” I headed into town, reading as I walked, “Dracula directed me to go to the Golden Crown Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old fashioned.” Well, my guidebook suggested the same approach but old fashioned it isn’t.

The hotel was built during the nineteen-eighties. Nearly one hundred years after the events described in the book. I ate dinner in the Jonathan Harker suite, drinking the sweet Golden Mediasch wine just like the protagonist himself. Two German lads rolled in and ordered beers. They told me of a hotel not far from the Bistrita Pass, where the Dracula connection was camped up even further. Staff jumped out of hidden cavities to frighten guests. “But no longer!” A Canadian tourist had been so shocked by the sudden appearance of a vampire he died from heart failure. The hotel was now struggling to break even.

Jonathan only managed two glasses of Golden Mediasch. I polished off the bottle surrounded by stuffed bats and red velvet drapes. A waitress pulled a rope and the drapes opened to reveal a widescreen television. The Germans found a channel showing football and I crept off to bed. I could hear their shouting from six floors up.

In the morning I headed away from the charming and back towards the charmless, destination Bucharest. Once the train had threaded through a narrow pass in the Carpathian Mountains and swayed away from the fields of Transylvania, the prettiness faded. The capital began to swallow up the rural heartland with battered factories and dreary estates. I read Stoker’s closing description of Transylvanians, “the women looked pretty, except when you got near them.” I laughed and thought of Stoker writing his sinister book in Scotland with no idea of what these people looked like, or how beautiful their country was.

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When is a tourist attraction not a tourist attraction?

April 11th, 2008

When it has Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance and harbours the apparatus for millions of executions. Auschwitz has been open to the public for a good number of years. Do you need to justify a visit? I guess some tourists have a conscience-wrestling match and decide to skip it for various reasons, but judging by the coach park and the organised tours from Krakow, curiosity gets the better of most.

I saw many older people crying and also busloads of schoolkids play-fighting, bored. What can it mean to a ten year old? How do you begin to explain it? Concentration camps are a part of history, albeit history in its most awful guise. This is no First World War battleground, where your imagination has to add noise and mud and gunfire. All the fixtures are still at the camp, the barbed wire, the ‘showers’, endless railtrack.

A short film forms an introduction to the horrors. Full of crackly edits and stomping boots. It looks so cold in black and white and the striped prisoners all drained and gaunt. Leaving through an unremarkable door, you walk into the camp with its lying sign suggesting work brings freedom.

It’s the scale that hits hardest. The order and symmetry of the construction is terrifyingly vast. Whole rooms contain the remains of the everyday; shaving brushes, shoes, hair, spectacles. All stacked to the ceiling and stripped of their context. The photographs are equally harrowing; bodies stacked like butchers meat, the shaved heads and twiggy limbs. One of an uncovered mass grave was grotesque and simultaneously compelling. One corpse was lying half submerged by the hardened mud and you couldn’t work out where the body ended and the ground began.

The showers were simply squat brick buildings. The sort of structure that graces any campsite. Except, in camp, you have options. These were one-way showers, a mass guillotine. You can view the holes where Zyklon B was piped in. I remember a tourist asking the guide a very detailed scientific question about the composition of the poison. The guide became impatient, “does it really matter what it was?”

On the way out, a young boy asked a received wisdom question, “is it true that birds don’t fly over Auschwitz?” The guide had a stock response, “birds fly over the camp, but they never sing.” The rain started hammering down as I came out. I rushed to find cover. By the exit is a café, but how can you eat in Auschwitz?

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Bruce Chatwin Hotel, Tuscany

April 11th, 2008

I’ve been a devotee of Bruce Chatwin’s wrting for years and once formed part of the cliched Chatwin Traveller set, hitchhiking around South America with a scruffy copy of In Patagonia in my backpack.

I’ve read the books, echoed his footfalls, and now, the ultimate piece of the jigsaw; stayed in the hotel. I’m still unsure why there is a hotel devoted to Bruce Chatwin in the Tuscan countyside. But there is, in the town of Arezzo.

Now in cultural terms, Arezzo already has much going for it. Pierro della Francesca’s fresco cycle in a local church is both neck-craning and breathtaking. Robert Benigni grew up in Arezzo and Life is Beautiful was filmed among its streets. And now a hotel devoted to the writings of Bruce Chatwin. Painting, cinema, literature in one handy Italian town.

We stayed in the Ouidah suite. How do you decorate a room in the style of a Brazilian slave owner working out of Africa? Like this: Blood red walls looped with bamboo. A black wooden mirror ringed with animal skulls. The glass covered in rusty flakes. A dark wooden headboard and heavy red bed linen. It was incredibly strong in colour, if a little oppressive with the shutters closed.

Other rooms explored similar themes. The China room picked up from a short story in What Am I Doing Here while the Arkady Suite took inspiration from The Songlines. Other references were more obscure. The Oxiana room was based on Chatwin owning a copy of Robert Byron’s travels and one room was a homage to Italo Calvino and nothing to do with Chatwin at all. The receptionist was happy to talk about the history and the maid turned a blind eye as we cleared the bathroom of anything not nailed down. It was a little pricey, but I would have paid double to stay.

I once met a man who knew Chatwin. He was a grizzled old ‘entrepreneur’ (his word) who said he was fond of the Gringo. This is unusual in Argentina where Chatwin upset the majority of those he met through unflattering portraits. He showed me a photo of Chatwin and himself and said the Englishman was unique (he, in turn, is described by Chatwin when the writer falls off his horse in Patagonia). He also tried to rip me off over a bag of crisps. He said, don’t give me money, give me a present. While looking through my bag I pulled out my camera. He said that would do but I said it wouldn’t. I was half expecting him to appear in the lobby of the hotel, “this was my idea!”

Addendum
One of travel’s joys is a delight in trivia, those quirky local customs or snippets of history picked up along the way.

I’ve just returned from Italy and came back with a couple of great finds. I now have a photo of the smallest window in the world (in the city of Siena) and a certificate proving I am insane because I walked around a fountain three times in a town called Gubbio. These tiny delights are as welcome as Boticelli’s Primavera and Michaelangelo’s David.

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Kurt Cobain lives in Bolivia

April 11th, 2008

I couldn’t place the song at first. It was drifting across the courtyard and flaking in the breeze. I wondered where the radio was and why it was playing American music. I roused myself and followed the source of the noise.

It wasn’t a radio at all; it was a blond-haired guy hunched over a guitar. He didn’t see me approach and I stood silently until he finished playing. The song was About A Girl and the singer? Well, yes, the singer. See, that’s the thing, it was Kurt Cobain.

Except it couldn’t have been, because it was February 2001. I knew the story. Kurt had got bored of his head and removed it with a gun a few years back.

We chatted for a while. He was the first English speaker I’d encountered for a fortnight and he was as surprised at the chance of company as I was. The courtyard belonged to a hostel in Tupiza, Bolivia. I was retreading the final days of Butch Cassidy’s life. Him? Well, he never said. Evasive to say the least. American, but he offered no more. After a little silence he strummed through Lithium. The voice, the piercing eyes, the unkempt hair. Everything about him was Cobainish. I snapped a photo of him.

We spent the evening chatting music and discovered a mutual love of the Raincoats. I’d never met anyone who liked the Raincoats. We hit it off. Cheap wine and a shared passion for screechy music can do that. I was never bold enough to probe too deeply and after the third bottle, I was so convinced I was chatting with the dead grunge man, I didn’t want annoying facts to shatter the illusion.

In the morning he disappeared. Gone by the time I woke. I don’t know where he could have gone. There was nowhere to go to. Perhaps he popped over to see Elvis

In an otherwise perfect camera film, one photo came out totally black.

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Likoma Island, Malawi

April 11th, 2008

“Hey Mazungu!” a voice calls, “I am Gift, and this is my brother, Advice.” The younger boy smiles shyly. Mazungu is a generic Swahili word meaning white man, although its curious literal translation is man without smell. Gift offers himself as a guide. I ask Advice what pearls of wisdom he can impart. He points to the lake and says, “crocodiles.”

Likoma Island lies near the north tip of Lake Malawi, nudging into Mozambique waters. Baobab trees front the shore acting as natural umbrellas, for the humidity is intense and the sun dangerously hot.

Over the next week, the brothers spend their days showing off the island. I pant along behind, no longer without smell. Gift introduces his friends and we spend idyllic afternoons as the boys coach me in dialect and I teach them chess.

One blue-sky morning we walk across to a neighbouring village and wait in the dusty square. Slowly villagers drift in from the fields and we head into a large adobe hall. A squat man, bearded and grey walks to the front. Dressed in dirty whites covered by an ornate robe, he looks impressive and the hum from the crowd cuts to silence. He introduces himself as the Likoma Witchdoctor.

The ceremony begins with song, a lilting prayer sung in harmony. Patients come forward and describe their symptoms. The maladies are often emotional and alien to western prognosis. Spells and omens play a central role and the doctor removes the evil spirits using thick cleansing potions or by slaughtering cockerels.

There’s a small hospital on the island, set up by a Christian charity, but pills and injections are viewed with suspicion and locals prefer the less orthodox prescriptions of the witch doctor. After closing song, I’m asked to say a few words and shuffle embarrassingly to my feet, thanking everyone for allowing me to witness the ceremony. The doctor requests I tell my friends at home to visit. I think of them in their suits & offices and smile.

Outside, I thank the brothers and we retire to a bar to continue our chess game. The Doctor unwinds in the corner, wiping blood from his knife and drinking Carlsberg. Advice is young and restless, but Gift is keen on chess and soon has my king backed into a corner. My pawns are overrun one by one. I swear in Chichewa and my opponent laughs at the pronunciation. Gift is several years my junior, but we share a sense of humour and an obsession with football. A friendship grows between us.

The night before the mainland ferry docks, we travel to Gift’s home village. He introduces his mother and an endless stream of relatives. Overlooking the lake, we sip thin tea from cracked china cups. The air is still and darkening towards twilight. I feel happy, part of the scene and a long way from home.

One of the villagers walks down to the lake to wash. Wrapped to her back a baby squeals. Mother and child slip into the water. I watch with detachment, chatting to family, framing it as background. But then the woman screams and ducks beneath the water. She re-emerges in a whirlpool of blood amid the thrashing tail of a crocodile. She is only six feet from the shore in waist deep water. A couple of men wade in, but mother and baby are gone. Gift’s mother screams and rushes to the shore.

The wake begins at once. At the top of the valley is a wooden Anglican cathedral. On this island of Christians and witch doctors, crosses and offerings, the church becomes the focus of grief. The women begin to wail and the noise is incessant. The dead woman is Gift’s cousin. I drink my tea, say a million sorrys and slip away. I am invisible anyway.

The brothers catch me up the following morning, as I board the ferry back to mainland Malawi. I hug them both and smile weakly. Gift senses my discomfort and says, “it happens, it happens;” but it doesn’t happen where I’m from and I don’t know what to say.

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Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain

April 11th, 2008

In 1997 a strange thing happened to the Basque city of Bilbao. Amid the industrial gloom of its docks, an apparition was reported. The man behind the apparition was Frank Gehry, a Canadian with a unique eye for architecture.

The apparition is known colloquially as The Goog and it sits on the harbour-side like a melted collision between the Sydney Opera House and the Thames Barrier. A marriage of glacial cubes and tumbling angles, the Guggenheim appears to the eye like a mathematics puzzle wrapped in silver paper.

Once you catch a glimpse of the building, it tags along as you wander the streets of Bilbao. Just when you think you’ve shaken it off by turning a corner it suddenly confronts you again, peering out from behind a bank or lounging patiently at the end of a boulevard.

Inside, the permanent collection has been carefully curated to accommodate an eclectic mix from Chinese artefacts to popular abstract. Directly across from the Guggenheim is the provincial arts museum, standing subdued in the shadow of its smart new neighbour, like a cynical older relative catering for an earlier generation.

Bilbao has welcomed this addition to the skyline with genuine enthusiasm and the ensuing publicity has had positive effects in raising the cultural and touristic appeal of the city. Although the filthy river washing through the city makes the Thames look like bottled Evian, the knock-on regeneration is obvious as gloomy crane-squatted docklands once again become inhabitable.

Gehry’s Los Angeles Concert Hall is the latest in a string of Guggenheim inspired buildings, but Bilbao was the catalyst. An exceptional backdrop to a gritty industrial port with more refined aspirations.

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