Impressions in order of recall... let's map the way my memory patterns these events rather than try to imitate a video recording...
Just back from finding the local pub serves beer at 6.70 Kcs/0.5 l, 12p a pint. We're in a posh suburb - several embassies down the street - but most of the customers looked working class: could have been a pub in the East End of Glasgow. Marion met a Czech woman in the loo who was trying to assemble a water-squirting plastic flower... between them they got it working successfully... the Czech woman prattled on at us and never seemed to catch on that we had no idea what she was saying.
Postcards. Writing obligatory postcards is so boring that even writing about it
Prague considered as Glasgow: somewhat bigger amd the main city of a country not much bigger than Scotland. Same sort of scruffy grime; nothing like Glasgow's wastelands; much better public transport; far less pubs; similar mass housing, but better built and landscaped. The bus from Ostend left us at the edge of the city after a trip through Prague's answer to Motherwell and Coatbridge... big new coal-fired power station nearly completed.
/* We came with a charter group - the rest of the passengers were staying in Prague for their holidays. The courier passed on two warnings to everyone staying in Prague: watch out for thieves and watch out for moneychangers. The warning about thieves was in the usual racist terms you get all over Eastern Europe - those responsible are usually Gypsies and always from somewhere else. He warned against both private moneychangers - who will use conjuring tricks, Polish money, or colour xeroxed money to swindle the unwary - and the new rash of private cash exchange booths, 'Chequepoint' and 'Exact Change' that have sprung up recently. These places advertise a good rate but then charge 9% commission. He suggested using conventional banks: we used a MasterCard ATM and CEDOK, the state tourist agency, with terms nearly as good and open longer. */
Mild attack of herpes. Slight cold. Grey cloud all over Europe from London on Sunday night to here and now. I am not in a mood to be thrilled. Even the Old City seems more like a stage set than something alive and exciting - perhaps it might as well be a stage set. All the people selling earrings and pop-up clowns in cones and peculiar brands of (mock?-) Western cigarettes seem just like comic-opera characters acting in front of canvas flats - it's nothing like Istanbul where every cranny in every crumbling Ottoman ruin exposes termite-like activity in constant communication with the street. This is the Christian urban order: walled-in power with what goes on beyond the walls a vast triviality of ice-cream vending.
/* Tour parties were everywhere, usually led by a guide holding up either an umbrella or a car aerial with a bundle of ribbons on the top for the entourage to follow like sheep. Tourist tat had invaded everywhere; the Charles Bridge was completely lined on both sides by hawkers, and in one of the most surreal window displays I have ever seen, a bookshop near the Charles University was advertising Czech translations of Wittgenstein and stuffed toys on the same shelf. */
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bus Budapest-Istanbul. Full of loud Hungarian chain-smokers and playing Hungarian radio; mostly nondescript Western rock music.
Spent the day in Budapest: too hassled to see much and trying to save money. Very hot and Marion frequently tired. My toes blistered by the end of the day. We came across Gerbeaud's (Vorosmarty's) by accident and only later realized we'd had coffee in the poshest joint in Budapest. (Marion said the ladies' loo was worth every penny). Bought the bus tickets, then went over to Buda, up the funicular, through the castle (amazing volumes of tourist tat - Edinburgh High Street has nothing to teach this lot) then up the cogwheel railway into the Buda hills.
Marion nearly got her daysac pocket rifled in the arches on Rakoczi Boulevard - three guys following us rather unsubtly. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, Marion felt a bump, the guys dropped back and we found the zip open. They didn't get anything (she had her pocket dictaphone in there).
Keleti Station - where we left our rucksacks - was crawling with fishylooking characters - I spotted one man who was loitering near the entrance doing nothing in particular when we left the bags at 11am and was still there when we got them at 6.30pm. Several other blokes wholooked like they were waiting to strike. I've never had that feeling as strongly anywhere else. Turkey is going to be one hell of relief after all this paranoia.
More on Prague: had a pint in U Fleku - bloody expensive (60p for 0.5 l) and horribly crowded at peak times - the only pub I've ever been in that had a currency exchange office by the front door. All the customers seemed to be foreigners - on our first look in (far too crowded to go in) we spotted the same Dutch computer scientist we'd met in U Koucoura the night we arrived. Flek is bloody nice beer, though.
The Hungarians have haggis! We had that (along with a paprika sausage, mustard, pickles, bread, chips and beer - 250 Ft for 2 people, about 1 pound 70) in the beer garden at the end of the cogwheel railway.
This coach feels exactly like the stereotype of a British tour party on its way to Benidorm. Nobody's stripped to their Hungarian flag underpants yet, anyway. If this is what Sampiyon Hersekli buses on this run are usually like, AVOID THEM. I think we'll try to find a bus to Bratislava or Prague on the way back - anything to avoid being choked with smoke in a mob of yammering loudmouths. The one Turkish family on the bus are at the back, totally silent, and not looking happy. The Hungarians have enough spirits with them to reduce them all to coma: let's hope it happens sooner rather than later.
Two things I've forgotten on this trip: my earplugs and my damiana tablets. God knows when I get to sleep. Infected toe (started when walking round Budapest).
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going through Bulgaria. We got here through Serbia. The border check as we entered from Hungary consisted of a Serbian official getting on the bus, shouting a three-word question 'Hrvatski ??? ???' and leaving after nobody spoke up. So, back to before we got to Budapest, I wasn't sure I wanted to have this bit in writing before now...
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train Praha-Wien-Rijeka. I've been carrying an ex-Yugoslav Army kitbag full of clothes and books that... let's call her Silvija... left behind in my flat in Glasgow. Also 200 pounds worth of high-quality multivitamin/mineral tablets intended from the refugees from BiH, paid for largely by donors from the net.
Couldn't sleep from Prague to Vienna. Left at midnight, arrived early in the morning. Worried about being robbed on the train - some rather unpleasant characters hanging around the central station in Prague and thought them quite capable of an Italian-style train bagsnatching.
/* The southbound Vienna station was about the most expensive hour I've spent anywhere - prices far higher than even Heathrow Airport. Marion spotted a man cruising the gents' loo, this at 8 in the morning; I found this a lot more bizarre than she did. */
[continued Monday on a bus from Istanbul to Samsun] Rijeka is a port city - container terminal, floating dry docks, dozens of ships of all sizes in port. The river that it gets its name from is a trickle that goes the town centre where it's a marina for small boats - Silvija showed us the one her father had built a few years ago. There's a paper mill inside Rijeka just upstream that changes the river's colour depending on what dyes they're using at the time; people can still fish in it, though.
Silvija has a child nearly 2 years old - call her Zora - and lives with her half-Italian half-Serbian boyfriend (call him Milan) in a tiny flat overlooking the container terminal. I happen to like industrial landscapes and this one was spectacular, with the Adriatic islands in the background. /* very much as I remember the view from hill behind the railway station in Auckland */ Silvija says there'll be a whole lot of UN military gear coming in a few days, more or less directly under the window. The flat was confiscated from a fascist collaborator after the war; the rent is about ten pounds a month. Now the new regime wants to hand it back to the collaborator's family and evict everyone in the building.
Silvija tells us, in general terms, all the horror stories about Bosnia I've heard before: the Chetniks castrating prisoners, impaling them on stakes, draining all their blood out... I'm a bit skeptical about some of these but the basic story seems plausible: that the Serbs are systematically trying to drive all other peoples out of Bosnia, just as they have been Serbianizing the Vojvodina for decades and have done something similar in eastern Croata; and that the UN is colluding in the process. The UN embargo is in effect one-sided: all the Yugoslav armaments factories were in Serbia, so an arms embargo only affects the Croats and Muslims, and the UN's 'peacekeeping' forces simply rubber-stamp existing partitions; they will do nothing to help the Muslim and Croat refugees to return.
/* Note: this was written in early July. It was September before the Western media finally got round to noticing the existence of an 'ethnic cleansing' policy. And I doubt if Silvija had access to any very special sources of information they couldn't have found for themselves. As I write this the Tories are refusing to permit even a group of 200 Muslim refugees to enter the UK. Germany is accepting 230,000. */
Rijeka has tens of thousands of refugees, and we see almost none of them. The nearby Adriatic resorts, like Opatija, have all been converted to refugee accommodation. Silvija says they - especially the children - are bitter, contemptuous of the minimal help they've had, intensely hostile, and she doesn't blame them one bit.
The party Silvija and Milan support - Silvija not all that enthusiastically, in that she respects some of their people but has anarchist leanings that would prevent her signing up for anything - is the HNS, Hrvatski Narodna Stranka, or Croatan People's Party. From the volume of flyposting around Rijeka, it looks headed for a walkover in the August election: the other parties are hardly bothering to campaign here. Rijeka returned a Communist majority in the election that put Tudjman into power. |
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