14.11.10

best of.....!

so the lonely planet publishes a random book of "best ofs" every year. they used to be called the Blue Lists, but for some reason that title was dumped a few years ago in favour of the more generic "Best of Travel in 2011". I go through the book every year (or rather, i helped myself to it when i was still working in the bookshop) and have always enjoyed going through it. as readers of this blog know, i have also frequently written my own "best of" lists here, so i was quite amused to see that one of the lists the lonely planet came up with for their 2011 book was my old favourite "best bookshops in the world". i have been to just about all the bookshops on their list, and predictably, there is a fair amount of overlapping, both of us agreeing that liberia el Aq1teneo in Buenos Aires is probably the best bookshop in the world. they rated Shakespeare and company in Paris higher than i would have, and left out my favourite in Academic bookshop in Helsinki. In London, they gave the nod to Daunt books, which is really great- but out of brand loyalty i would have gone for the Waterstones at Gower Street myself.
another flip through the book highlights how much there is left to see and do in the world.- there are so many places yet to explore and discover!

13.11.10

on Cardiff

My job entails visiting lots of odd places. In continental Europe, I generally attend meetings in or at least near major capitals : Paris, Moscow, Madrid, etc.
For some reason however (tax cuts would be my guess) in Britain, these events inevitably seem to take place in odd places far from London, where no one would ever go unless they had, as I do, a specific meeting to attend. In such a way I have come to spend time in places I didn’t even know existed, and have accordingly seen many parts of the United Kingdom I never would have ventured to otherwise. I have to say that many of these destinations (Slough, Basingstoke, Solihull) have been rather grim industrial places filled with chavs in track suits and seemingly endless call centres. But none of the random places I have been to in England and Scotland prepared me for Wales!
If I have time, I generally google the place I am headed to before I get on the train, normally for practical reasons: taxi drivers don’t always know where places are and I like to have a map ready to show them just in case. So the weekend before I headed off to Cardiff, I typed the name of the place in to the search bar on Flickr. This brought up the excellent, albeit highly disturbing collection of photos by X X, which seems to present Cardiff as a hard living place of people vomiting into fountains and pissing in the middle of the road as cops looked on. It made my ancestral hometown of Glasgow, normally known for its alcoholism and violence, as a calm and peace loving place. I was a bit suspicious. In my ignorant mind, Wales conjured up images of sheep and harsh waves hitting jagged rocks in sheeting rain. But stereotypes can be deceiving, clearly. I innocently asked a couple of colleagues who had been there what there impressions were. One described it as “the wild West” and another said it was one of the scariest places he had ever been. I remained unimpressed and waited to see some sheep.
Upon arrival however, there was little mystery as to what led to the graphic images on Flickr. The main street in Cardiff (and there really only is one, with a lovely view of the Castle at the end) featured several pubs offering pints for 75p, which is the cheapest beer I have ever seen in Britain. For £1.99 you could even get ham and chips to go with your drink. By afternoon, people were bottling each other in the middle of the street, drunk out of their senses. This was a Wednesday, I shutter to image what Friday night must look like. My colleague and I wandered around the town centre somewhat baffled. We stopped to look at the jobs being advertised in the window of a recruitment agency (lots of call centres paying £7 per hour). We then looked at the weekend away tours on offer in a travel agency, which featured three types of holidays: 1) Eurodisney 2) all you can drink weekends away to Belgium 3) follow the Welsh rugby team around Europe!
I suppose that says a lot.

7.11.10

i hate it when the clocks change

so once again we have gone through this ridiculous clock changing business in Britain, with the result that eternal night has set in for the next five months. i really hate this time of year, and the light just makes it worse. it is meant to be lighter earlier, but that does me no good as i still end up going to work/ Heathrow in the dark. and the night setting in around 4 just makes the day seem to disappear. at least during the work week it doesnt seem to matter so much (i leave work as i arrive- in the dark) but at the weekend it is lethal. On Saturday i headed to the West End to meet some friends for a drink in Soho followed by a meal in Chinatown. by the time we got to the bar, it was pitch black. we had a couple of drinks and everyone seemed to be tired and yawning. it was 6pm. by the time we left the restaurant, it felt like the middle of the night, but it wasnt. time seemed to be evaporating in front of us...and yet it was still dark again when i got up the next day.
i get up, log on to british airways's web site, and book tickets to the Caribbean. i can feel that winter urge to escape Europe approaching.

on zurich and berlin

some months ago i wrote about the horrors of germany, having spent an absolutely terrifying trip to Dusseldorf, surrounded by people who obey traffic lights, designer offices and disturbingly automated coffee machines. i have now been forced to spend time in a place even more horrifying: Zurich. it is like Dusseldorf, but somehow even worse, even more automated and efficient. after some hours, i start to twitch with a burning desire to do something "bad" like ask for a diet coke at breakfast or something, spurning the absurd "nespresso" machines in the my room and the breakfast area. my room is of course, immaculate. it has a huge working area, with a massive granite desk, so that i can even have my colleagues down to finish our presentation. the shower is disgustingly well ventilated. it really annoys me. i have a very expensive tailored Thomas Pink white blouse with me, and the problem with these expensive shirts is that they are impossible to iron and really need dry cleaning. i didnt have time to run to the dry cleaner before the trip, and the hotel doesnt have one. the shirt is clean of course, but it needs ironing, and the hotel iron just doesnt manage it. so i try my old trick of blasting hot water in the shower, hanging the shirt on a nearby rack and closing the door for some minutes. but to my utter disappointment, after nearly 10 minutes, i open the bathroom door to find not a drop of steam in sight. the bloody thing was so well ventilated that my shirt was still dry!
the rest of the trip was suitably well planned and well organised. drivers arrived on time, meetings started and ended according to schedule and everyone was polite and attentive, leaving me feeling vaguely ill and desperate to get back to the comparative civilisation of east london.
shortly after my return however, i found myself headed with the same team to Berlin. whilst my general dislike for the German lands has been well vented on these pages, i have to confess that Berlin is at least somewhat tolerable. unusually for a German city, it has just enough moments of poor urban planning to make it somewhat human. Tegel, the airport we arrived in, is actually one of the most underdeveloped airports i think you can find in Western Europe, and it is run worse than many third world ones. the city itself is quite mixed. no doubt partly-but only partly- due to the artificial divisions of the cold war, the city lacks architectural coherence. By all accounts, Unter den Linden is meant to be the main historic avenue of the city, and it certainly ends nice and dramatically with the Brandenburg gates, but it is a far cry from the Champs Elysees, Andrassy Ut, or even Tverskaia. the buildings dont seem aligned, and it is unclear why many of them are even there. Similarly, the Reichstag is a magnificent structure with its ultra modern dome, but it too seems to be at a weird angle facing nothing. yet these features seem to be what ultimately saves Berlin from being as stylised and soulless as Dusseldorf or Frankfurt. its lack of order means you can wander the streets and still potentially be surprised as you turn a corner. plus, the locals are suitably sinful to be able to construct and operate at least tolerable bars and night spots...the food is atrocious, but then it is still in Germany after all and one should not be too demanding. and unlike other German cities, Berlin does at least seem somehow liveable- it has an excellent standard of living at a low cost, and endless amounts of seemingly underinhabited spaces. and herein no doubt lies the secret to its tolerable feel, as well as its problems. Berlin is broke. it is a city of cool students and the unemployed. it would be a great place to live if you had a well paid job, but there are almost none to be found. so it thrives on its own bohemian poverty, catering to its student culture, combined with tolerable art and endless fascinating history for the tourists and generally curious. it is no doubt this poverty as well which prevents the inhabitants from developing the smarmy self satisfaction of other German cities. which makes me wonder- if Berlin ever does recover economically and prosper- will it still be a decent place to visit?