The city that forgot tourism

Krakow may have had the culture, the ancient and prestigious university, the tourists and the stunning castle but residents of Lodz could always note that their city, in fact, was bigger. No more, while the manufacturers of Lodz struggled towards the 21st century, Krakow raced ahead, becoming a tourist and student mecca.

We are in Lodz again this week, visiting Magda’s family. The city is often compared to Manchester; a gritty past focused on clothes manufacturing having given way to an identity crisis in the post-industrial world. And while Manchester has recently taken great strides towards developing a tourist and shopping-oriented economy, Lodz is just starting to take baby steps.

There are posters everywhere touting Lodz as the best choice to be named the 2016 European culture capital and the Manufaktura, a huge shopping and entertainment complex, seeks to use the city’s past to move forward. Piotrkowska Street, meanwhile, is a large shopping stretch with many good pubs. Still, it’s hard to visit and not see untapped potential everywhere.

In many places, sides of buildings never meant to see the light of day lay bare and windowless, the structures on which they used to hug gone. On the above mentioned Piotrkowska Street many buildings have magnificent facades that nevertheless have been neglected. In a Vienna or a Dresden or a Warsaw the columns and the architecture flourishes would be lit up. Here they aren’t even cleaned.

It could be better, but it also allows one to take a look back in time and, like in Lokrum, revel in a tourist attraction without all the polish (no pun intended.)

Cold, red Torun (photos)

Having sufficiently de-thawed my once blue fingers, I can now finally post photos from our recent skull-chattering trip to Torun, a historic city a couple hours west of Warsaw notable for its brick architecture.

A common observation of the trip was how, when you’re travelling in the middle of January, taking photos becomes less like part of the trip and more like the focus. You walk out of your hostel, shiver and bee-line your way towards the attractions, quickly snap some photos, go to the next attraction then try and find somewhere to warm up, be it a restaurant or museum.

Torun boasts its own leaning tower. Literally, that’s what this is called:

And did I mention it was cold?

No winter cruisin’ for us.

Dresden worthy of a return…

The following story appeared in the Jan. 11 edition of the Vernon Morning Star:

by Tyler Olsen

When one thinks of a skyline today, the mind inevitably turns to cities like New York, Chicago, Calgary and Toronto; places where giant steel and glass boxes rise out of the land to preside over their surrounding domain. But pass over the Elbe river on a clear October afternoon with the sun descending upon Dresden’s rival church towers and the Semper Opera dominating the foreground and you’ll start to question a lot of things.

Having seen Dresden (twice) during a European backpacking trip three years ago, the city had solidified its place in my heart before my girlfriend and I looked at a map while in Prague and decided to hop a train three hours north to Dresden.

“You have to see Dresden!” I proclaimed, repeating a phrase I had used many times since first stopping in the city once known as Florence-on-the-Elbe. And so we did, although, like many people on the well worn tourist trail between Berlin and Prague (between which Dresden sits about half-way) we characteristically underestimated the amount of time needed to truly enjoy the city.

With just two nights booked at a hostel in Dresden’s hip Neustadt district on the west bank of the Elbe, we arrived at Dresden’s train station with the sun-dipping behind us, making our way with much too much luggage in tow, towards our hostel. We didn’t have far to walk but our journey took us past enough youth about which one says “They listen to way too much Bob Dylan/Marilyn Manson/Nirvana/Bob Marley/Sex Pistols” that it quickly became clear that Dresden has blossomed into something of a larger version of Nelson, except here people say Gutentag and read Der Spiegel.

The next morning we rose early, bought a pair of tram tickets, lost my credit card and headed east across the Elbe River. For those without much knowledge of Dresden – or those under the impression the city was destroyed sixty years ago – the view from the river must be a shock. From the Semper Opera in the north down to the sandstone dome of the Frauenkirche in the south, Dresden’s skyline is a monumental achievement of baroque and neoclassical architecture and post-war and post-communist determination.

In one of the most controversial allied actions of the Second World War, British and American bombers laid Dresden’s core to waste, destroying nearly every building and killing tens of thousands. Among those in the city at the time of the bombing was Kurt Vonnegut, an American POW and future author who would go on to write about the attack in his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. While historians debate whether the action was necessary or not, one thing is clear: the city has been masterfully reconstructed.

After hopping off our tram, we ducked into a tourist shop, bought a handy guide and started our mad rush to see everything in a day. Standing in the shadow of the Catholic Hofkirche, which was once the family church of the King of Saxony, we looked across theatre square, past the equestrian statue of King Johann of Saxony, towards the Semper Opera house, a Dresden jewel and one of the most famous opera houses in the world. Evaluating our options and the huge line leading into the Semper, we snapped a few photos, made the requisite reverent noises and headed into Dresden’s old town.

On our right we passed the Furstenzug Mosaic, a hundred-metre long mosaic of 35 Saxon kings and their rapper-sized entourage. The mosaic opens up to a square, at the centre of which sits the very new looking Frauenkirche, a stunning product of Protestant one-upmanship (it was built to top the older Hofkiche) – featuring a one-of-a-kind sandstone dome. The church was destroyed in the 1945 bombing and only recently completed. Dark black bricks, recovered from the original church, now contrast dramatically with the sheen of the new sandstone building materials. That’s not a bad thing, however, and the history behind the church and its reconstruction arguably makes the Frauenkirche even more interesting.

From the Frauenkirche we looped back towards Dresden Castle, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but which, inside, boasts a formidable array of museums, including the Grunes Gewolbe (in English, the Green Vault). Dresden’s museums may be gorgeous and boast an array of treasures, but they have a couple other things going for them. First, the price. At less than $20, one ticket covers 11 separate museums making it a joyous challenge to cram as much sightseeing as possible into one day. Which is where we get to the other handy circumstance; most of Dresden’s museums are crammed within two main buildings, the Zwinger and the Castle, which are, conveniently, a five minute walk from each other.

So with ticket in hand, we commenced dashing from museum to museum, quickly coming to the realization that one day is about three too few to appreciate everything Dresden has to offer. We started at the Green Vault, the most stunning of the museums, which contains a plethora of ivory, crystal, wooden, golden and silver treasures, all crafted in minute detail and mind-numbing in their extravagance. Dresden has to thank a 19th century King Albert for most of the treasures. We just called him “The Shopaholic.”

From the Green Vault we proceeded to the castle tower, which dramatically overlooks the theatre square and the statues that line the top of the Hofkirche. The Semper Opera commands the square below, where a few dozen tourists milled about, posing for photos. The tower also housed the coin collection itself, the importance of which, while being more than 500 years old, was lost on my loonie- and toonie- obsessed coin consciousness.

From the castle it is a couple minutes’ walk to the magnificent neo-classical Zwinger. We ducked into the porcelain collection, being housed in the Zwinger wing (Zwing?) closest to the castle. And while I couldn’t tell a Tschirnhaus from a Gottner, it quickly became obvious that the collection houses one of the more impressive porcelain collections in the world. That’s not surprising, given Dresden gave its name to an entire movement of porcelain design. Unfortunately given our time constraints and complete lack of knowledge, there was no way we could give it the attention it deserves, with this realization, we made sure to look at, if not appreciate, every piece and left the collection to more knowledgeable visitors.

It’s worth noting that somewhere we had lost that handy guide we bought at the start of the day.

Thankfully, we entered one museum that requires no special knowledge, background or learning to fully appreciate its collection: the Rustkammer, or armoury. With a collection of medieval weapons, armour and other instruments of self-plumage and enemy-destruction lavish and extravagant enough to send a nine-year-old into convulsive shocks, the museum is one of the most distinctive in Zwinger. From a fully-assembled mock jousting event (with stand-in, fully-armoured riders and horses) to 10-foot pikes and early guns, the museum offers an insight into how Europeans (or at least European nobles) went to war hundreds of years ago.

By the time we were done with the armoury and had moved on to the Old Master’s Picture Gallery, which boasts enough information to please English visitors, enough paintings to keep visitors dry on a rainy day and enough big names (Rubens, Raphael, Canaletto) to please those who may have recently visited Berlin or Paris our feet were numb.

After paying our respects to the masters, we mustered our remaining energy and dragged ourselves into the Zwinger’s massive and breathtaking courtyard, a work of concrete art worthy of the treasures housed inside the building’s museums.

Our day was hardly finished – we would later experience, but fail to understand, the Museum Fur Volkerkunde and would cap the day with a biere in a chic Neustadt lounge – but sitting on the edge of a fountain, the mist cooling my sheeks, the sun dancing a rainbow across a fountain and the Zwinger looking like it had never been destroyed, I was re-evaluating my advice.

“You have to see Dresden,” I will say when I return, “but please, please, please, give yourself more than a day.”

Dubrovnik story

You may have heard we traveled to Dubrovnik, Croatia this summer. It was warm, sunny and there was no snow on the ground. Not that I’m bitter now. Not at all. If you want to read more about it, I’m told The Morning Star ran a story of mine in this Sunday’s edition. It’s not online though so I’m going to invoke author’s privilege and paste it below. The real thing has a funky newsprint crispness to it along with delightful photos all beautifully laid out by Morning Star travel editor (and Coldstream’s biggest fan) Richard Rolke. It may have also had any typos fixed, so don’t blame me if there are a few below.

George Bernard Shaw, the acclaimed early 20th century playwright, once called Dubrovnik, in a round-about fashion, “paradise on earth.” Ever since, it seems, the Croatian city has been milking the praise, using it in tourism brochures and every other sort of promotional material.

It really doesn’t need to. Dubrovnik, where my girlfriend and I started a week of travel in Croatia in late-September, can stand on its own as one of Europe’s premier tourist destinations.

Perched on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea – Italy lies on the opposite side and has strongly influenced Croatia’s coast – Dubrovnik boasts more than a thousands years of history. For much of that time, Ragusa, as Dubrovnik was then known, was an important Mediterranean city state, ranking just below Venice in terms of sea-faring power.

The powers that be of those days of yore did more than build one of the largest fleets of ships the world had seen, they built one heck of a fortress too.

Like millions before us, we entered Dubrovnik’s UNESCO inscribed old city at the majestic Gates of Pile. At the drawbridge the Adriatic Sea swirled to our right watched over from above by Fort Lovrijenac. It’s walls rise 100 feet above the sea and are separated from Dubrovnik’s city walls by a  small inlet

To our left the walls followed a rocky outcrop up, way up, to a circular watchtower that commands Dubrovnik’s skyline. The walk across the drawbridge, down a series of wide concrete steps and through another arched gate into the city’s interior is one of the best 30 seconds of pure tourism and sightseeing the world has to offer.

Standing just inside the gates, with the walls extending up the hillside to our left, the large round Onofrio’s Fountain to our right and, ahead of me, Placa the city’s main drag, it became instantly obvious why Dubrovnik is becoming one of Europe’s fastest growing destinations.

A boulevard before boulevards were made famous by the French, the street is the hub of activity in Dubrovnik and, even off-season in late-September, was clogged with tourists when we visited. Boasting a clock towers at both ends and lined with four-storey tall buildings, the marble road (it like the rest of old Dubrovnik is barred to cars) actually shines.

As we slowly toured the main road, the sun began to beat down on our necks and we began to be grateful that it was not the middle of July. For a couple hours we just cruised, revelling in the splendor of St. Blaise Church and perusing the shops of the city’s main shopping street Od Puca.
Every now and then we’d hang a left when everyone else went straight and it was on these random ventures that we found Ragusa.

The old city of Dubrovnik lies in a sort of a trough with the terrain rising north and south of the main street. To call the paths between homes roads, or even lanes, in this day and age is misleading, but that’s exactly what they were when Dubrovnik was being built. The lanes, no more than 10-feet wide, climb towards the walls. We climbed one small staircase after another, and each step seemed to take us further away from modern day Dubrovnik back towards 15th century Ragusa, when this town was, if not king, then at least a mighty strong prince of the seas.

While we didn’t run into many locals, traces of the thousands who still make their home within the walls were everywhere. Laundry hung between buildings, plants lined streets and kittens poked their heads around doorways and taunted neighbourhood dogs.

Heading back into the tourist fray, we charted a course towards the city walls, which offer prime vistas of the Dubrovnik and it’s surrounding area. They are, by far, Dubrovnik’s must see attraction, the walk ways along their length interrupted every 50 metres by open terraces atop fortresses that once functioned as keystones in the defence of Dubrovnik and Ragusa and from where cannons were aimed towards any ne’er do wells that threatened the city.

Ancient colossuses of stone and cement, the fortresses were built during the days of galleons and gallows. But with Croatia experiencing its own war in the early 1990s and with Dubrovnik under siege from the Serbs, who shelled the city from their commanding position on the hill overlooking the city, the largest fortress of the bunch became sanctuary for civillians fleeing the onslaught.

Several hundred roofs were damaged in the siege, which lasted from October 1991 to May the following year, and its effects can be seen in the glimmering new orange tiles that line many houses built hundreds of years earlier. Still, for a city that has experienced war in recent times, Dubrovnik’s soul emerged unscathed – especially compared to other eastern European cities ravaged during the Second World War.

Back in the city we made our way for the old harbour, which was replaced in recent centuries by a larger harbour on Dubrovnik’s northeastern end and  where huge cruise ships regularly cast anchor. Today the harbour is home to a large marina of private vessels, as well as serving smaller boats that ferry tourists around the area and to several of the nearby islands.

It was aboard one of those vessels that we hopped a suttle boat to Lokrum, a small island spitting distance from Dubronik’s old city. The island may have been among the wierdest places I’ve ever ventured but it ranks as a highlight of our Croatian excursion.

The island is likely an entirely different beast during mid-summer when tourists and locals likely crowd its rocky beaches to soak up the rays and bask in the warm sea. But during a late-September blustery afternoon, Lokrum was more like the anti-tourist trap. Sure a cobbled walkway led to a monastery and a restaurant.

But turning away from the monastery and following the tiny map on the flip side of our boat ticket, we headed towards the island’s botanical garden. We found piles of leaves raked long ago and an array of frankly boring plants seemingly cobbled from someone’s backyard.

It was enough to make us depart before exploring further and we haphazardly wandered the interior of the island, which boasts the skeleton of walls used who knows when. I sure didn’t – there was nary a sign to be found.

After checking out the blustery beach – more a collection of exposed rocks – we made a beeline for Fort Royale the most-promising sounding locale on our map/ticket. A mixture of the creepy and the beautiful, the cylindrical fort was built by the French and now overseen by no one in particular. From atop the fortress we enjoyed the sublime views of Dubrovnik and its environs. Someone, obviously, wasn’t satisfied and placed a cheap reclining plastic chair on top of the stone cylinder that houses the fort’s internal staircase. Nobody had felt the need to remove it, apparently. Within the fortress, stairs lead into it’s basement and  down to a pitch black room that would work nicely in a horror movie.

Over this very interesting and somewhat creepy location watched…nobody. There may be a couple tourists up here, and it may be on a map, but a tourist trap Fort Royal is definitely not.

In fact, that can apply to all of Lokrum on a fall afternoon. We headed down from Fort Royale and discovered a back entrance to the aforementioned botanical gardens and an unmarked array of colourful cacti, Joshua trees and other decidedly interesting fauna. After taking photos and revelling in the sub-tropical, un-Vernon-like atmosphere, we made a bee-line towards the north end of the island and a popular beach area. On the way we passed what seemed to be a camping complex shuttered for the off-season. To our left a small soccer field was populated by a dozen or so peacocks, the males ineffectively strutting their stuff for disinterested females. And nearby a playground sat vacant.

I’ll let someone else make horny peacock jokes now but the temptation was too hard to pass up at the time. The scene seemed to weird, in a slightly-creepy but very un-touristy type of way that it was a perfect cap to an unforgettable day of contrasts in Dubrovnik.

Baltic-tock (with photos)

That isn’t a skyscraper behind those quaint little row houses. That’s the scaffolded bell tower of the largest brick church in the world, St. Mary’s Church, which can apparantly hold 25,000 people within its bowels (there was a Polish Independence Day event going on when we visited so we didn’t have free reign to wander.)

While in Gdansk we took a short, 20-minute train ride up to Sopot, a resort town on the sea that was once the centre of a bustling health and spa industry and now is the focus of tourists from around Poland and the world. It boasts a heck of a beach with fine sand and an English-y pier.

And yes, Gdansk was the starting point for the Solidarity movement that eventually helped bring down communism in Poland and, depending who you talk to, the entire Soviet Bloc. We checked out the Roads to Freedom museum on the movement and it was quite cool. But no photos made the cut so tough luck. You can see the massive Dr. Octopus-style cranes of the Gdansk shipyard from the city centre but, from reading about another traveler’s efforts to get into the shipyard, I figured it would take a little too much sneaking to get into the yards.