Green days

This hotel corridor in Madrid looks like it is made out of recycled i-Macs, but was quite a good way of waking up in the morning (it was on the way to the breakfast room).

Other corridors had different colours - we were in red. AA300 students will want to ask whether the hotel is a globalized product or celebration of Spanish identity - you could get an omelette, if that helps.

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!

This old house

AN OLD HOUSE IN SIBIU
Not for nothing does
one layer of brick grow thicker
carrying a need
not to budge at all.


Then another,
small, mouldy
slips into the frame.

The bastards who lived here;
elements - the hydrogen and helium,
iron and uranium of the human soul -
trace tourists' started eyes.

That rather poncey poem was written when I was musing on the relationship between poetry and science as conceived in Eastern Europe, which of course is not a poncey thing to think about at all.

The above house in Sibiu is four hundred years old and probably going to end up as a shop selling amber or mobile phones or something.

I have no doughnuts but I have dumplings

So said the waitress one night in Sinaia. In Sighisoara (hope I've spelt that right) all our dreams came true.

Sinaia sense of security?

ALPINE HOTEL

You can safely sleep here...
all is made of wood...
those dog-barks are far off.

PS - it's not really the Alps, but Transylvania

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.

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.

Melting

This is the Greek restaurant (Omiros, Rue des Deux Eglises) in Saint Josse, Belgium's most cosmopolitan commune www.meltingshopping.be - download the leaflet about a guided walk and make your Eurostar break in Brussels more interesting!

Before we went in to eat, we sat outside drinking ouzo watching (and you can see them if you click on the photo) the Turkish community arrive for a fund-raising event for a mosque. I remember particularly talking to a woman carrying a bag mentioning a particular European Institution and its slogan 'a bridge between Europe and an organised civilised society' who was complaining about feeling like a member of a white minority. By and large though, people get on.

Synedoche

If this were the sixties I'd call this rather cheap (I mean Warholesque) shot of the Forêt de Soignes tree canopy today (reprocessed via a swirl filter) 'Green' or 'Prevarication' or something like that, but I'm calling it Synedoche because the green is part of the greater whole (and looks like it's a hole as well as a cover). It makes a good desktop background for working on TMA03, particularly that poem set in the Caribbean (briefly). I guess you could play with it and do a sequence in pretty colours. In a million years time, when the forest is gone, a Belgian will look at this and say 'Blogging couldn't stop logging'.

May Day!

Happy May Day - nothing to do with help or workers - but a Bank Holiday here.

I've danced round a pole or two in my time, but Belgium, or at least Brussels and Leuven, do it differently. You get lily of the valley (above) but have to wait until August for the actual tree to be planted (in commemoration of a battle) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_F080YRb0E&feature=related

The lithograph in the background dates from 1900 and is by Marc-Henri Meunier, nephew of Constantin Meunier the famous Belgian painter of workers' struggles. It's Symbolist but so is everything.

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.

Bucharest fast food

This chicken outlet in the centre of Bucharest is fairly hard not to miss.

In identity terms, it testifies I suppose to Romanian humour (in the light of bird flu), which I also saw in an exhibition (can't put photos on here for fear of copyright) of cartoons, for example showing Romanians taking over Covent Garden with big stars on stages and Roma beggars at the door. We were talking in our tutorial the other day about whether minorities use humour as a kind of strategy - I think Romania isn't really a minority, but it maybe feels kind of on the edge or something (as far as one can generalise).

Two alternative takes on Killer Chicken - this one http://viapontica.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/hilarious-name-killer-chicken-bucharest-fast-food-outlet/ from an ex-LSE man turned property market analyst, contrasts with the more sybaritic http://therockmother.blogspot.com/2007/06/you-say-roumania-i-say-romania.html

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.

Tourism tropes

We were talking about this in connection with my European Studies course - different views of countries as expressed through tourism literature.

This is a poster in Bucharest two and a half years ago - note how the concept of the grand tour is still with us, how more expensive the UK is, and how Tower Bridge is an enduring icon (also used in Eurovision 1999 by Israel).

As always, click on the picture to make it larger.

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.