No more theatre

Here is a wide (currently under renovation) plaza in Targu Mures - real 'place for the people' stuff, or at least that was my outsider's feeling. Fluid borders are here: not just in the Hungarian-Romanian dual identity and the clash between Communism and capitalism, but in the border between past and present, men and women and the tourist and its target. Borders are wet, permeable, and always handled by women who are adept with a hose.

Apold

This place is a 'Saxon' village in Romania. We went here to hunt for one of our biggest friend's roots (I don't mean a fat lady with hair-dying problems) and ended up talking to some Roma and climbing up a church tower to take this picture (it's in arty black and white mode - how louche).

If you click on it to blow the picture up you can see people on bikes!

Magic City - Monty Part 2

This is a massive mural (painted on concrete) in Montgomery metro - painted by Jean Folon (that's a man's name just in case you were wondering) in the 1970s. The official site for the metro says it's about having a faintly sinister sun indoors (hence my post just now about the yellow). I like it though as it seems happy yet stylized. In AA300 terms the metro is a border zone - we're facing in the direction of the forest where Flanders starts, as well as a bump in price because you've crossed the border.

Borderlands

Here we are just going through into France from Adinkerke - those clouds in the distance aren't tobacco.

As ever, click on the picture to make it bigger.

European Identities on ice

Here in OUSA Belgium we believe in wooing possible converts to our cause at every opportunity. Here though a delegate from the Netherlands remains unimpressed by one of our traditional tactics known as 'Operation Sorbet' (pear on the left, strawberry on the right).

Not gravy, but browning

or whatever that Stevie Smith poem says.

This is the Belgian coast last Thursday - we went to a place called De Haan (Le-Coq-Sur-Mer it says in our 1901 Baedecker's guide along with telling you the times of the steam trains).

The houses are in what is called the 'Style Normand' which basically is posh yet rustic - so we preferred the beach.

I guess if this were an AA300 artefact we'd need to discuss whether the rather eclectic mix of imported architectural styles, multi-lingualism was in opposition to the apparently culturally neutral element of the sea. But if you look at the waves in this picture, they're definitely speaking in a West Flanders accent.

Eurovision

........has come and gone. Until a couple of years ago we used to spend it on the Belgian coast in a flat overlooking the sea at Oostduinkerke, near the French border. You can walk to the border (turn left in the picture above), but ever since the French gave us 0 points for everything, we have walked to the right.

In the picture above, you can see on their way to the polling booth the three Flemish people who thought Scooch's Flying The Flag was a good song. It's strange to think that if you go seventy miles or so straight ahead into the North Sea you end up in somewhere glamorous like Margate.

Just North

This is near the point where you pass the sign saying all river water flows to the North Sea rather the Mediterranean.

In a nice touch of globalisation, we were listening to a Belarus Eurovision song.

High on a hill

Here is the view from our hotel in Lausanne. You're actually (in the evening dwimmer) looking towards France (the border runs through the centre of the lake) and also towards Nyon, the site of Julius Caesar's veterans garrison designed to keep the Helvetii firmly under the yoke in this part of Gallia Belgica. Lausanne had the Roman name Lausodunum which sounds like it should mean 'praise on a hill' but doesn't.

Cherry trees are best by night

This isn't the best road for cherry trees in Brussels, but lit up by streetlamps this white cherry tree looked pretty funky (I'm lying on my back).

The main cherry tree area in Brussels (see here http://mikeinbrussels.blogspot.com/2009/04/schaerbeek.html) has a joint Belgo-Japanese celebration every April. The commune Schaerbeek produced cherries for the famous Kriek beer and so I guess that's why they planted loads. This road Avenue des Cerisiers is split between two communes one of which is Schaerbeek - you can tell the border because the street signs change.

Presumptive stuff

Here is a café in the Avenue Livingstone in Brussels, just down the hill from the main EU buildings, appropriately called the Livingstone. Livingstone has a connection with Brussels via Stanley and the Congo, so there's a kind of colonial echo and reflection here. The café though is in competition with a big Irish bar called the Wild Geese (that has its own resonance I guess), a Tesco metro type supermarket, and used to be near a couple of German beer bars that have closed down. Now if you want to have a German beer and ambience you have to go out to Wezembeek-Oppem, near the German School.

Eutopia.........

........is the ironic title of an exhibition in Brussels all about deconstructing, reconstructing and maybe even re-instructing Europe. http://www.rhiz.eu/artefact-23765-en.html gives you one or two photos.

What happens is go into the gallery (a converted power station, but only a baby one, not like Tate Modern), try not to get told off for taking photos, and then look at a few watercolours, some videos and the main bit of the exhibition, which is a kind of mock European landscape you enter through a kind of Checkpoint Charlie place. You can also vote and comment on the Lisbon treaty.

I haven't described that very well, but that's partly because of the unsettling effect of the exhibition - if things like the EU flag lit up by a flashing police lamp or a blank white aeroplane revolving over a bleak black landscape appeal, you should like this. It was the price of a cup of coffee to get in - just off the Place Sainte Catherine. You can peek into the exhibition if you go up the Rue Dansaert - it's just next to an oversized underwear shop. A good antidote to the saccharine excesses of Europe Day.

Fluid borders again

Marianske Laszne (Marienbad, and sorry about the accents) is one of the first towns you get to once through the Czech border near Bayreuth. Fluid? Maybe not, unless you mean the spa water. It's kind of a show town (very nice beer and food as well as parks), and when we went it was really really really peaceful.

Fluid borders

Today a tutor posted a link to photos of East Germany in 1990 http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-41629.html which basically celebrates perceived dilapidated difference. By way of contrast, here's how the city of Erfurt looked just under a year ago - not sure if it is still recognisably the East, or if the Cuban (?) band symbolizes globalization, but there's lots to decode, not least the eye of the Western tourist.

It shouldn't be here!

This is a forget-me-not that really is not supposed to be in our garden, but I like it.

Spookily enough, our poetry group was delving into the past today. There was a great poem about the remains of a Tudor banquet, another one about the ghost of Jacqueline du Pré and I came up with this poem about borders.

ON FIRST CROSSING THE IRON CURTAIN

One eighties morning, we and our coachload
went through the few metres of road and,
feeling young and tanked up on Weissbier,
decided to wave to the guard, just before
she boarded the coach, and looked at
our faces and passes and lives.

Having processed that look, now, some
thirty years later, much closer to
that town next door called death, the place
where we'll be picked up by the thing
we're trying to fence out and fleece,
our bounded humanity,

I want to set off along a line, stroll
along the cheeks and the eyes and
the tomato-rouged lips of Frau Whatever,
all of a sudden smiling and then
darkening as the alsations barked.

Memories: strange-toned streetlamps
beside a moving walkway, where
distance is hard to judge and
we half-panic as we turn the bend.

Borders

Today I have to write something about the borders of Europe (not sure why gardening is relevant to European studies though) and tonight we are out for dinner.