29 street libraries

Two years ago, I wrote a blog entry about the 23 street libraries set up within the city limits of Düsseldorf. I embarked on a quest to visit them all, but didn't quite make it to Knittkuhl, which is not only remote but gloriously unconnected to the tram system. So that's 22 visited (marked in bold below).

This month, I checked the official website and discovered a whole bunch of new ones, including some in faraway parts of the city, so that will be another struggle.

If I have got my ducks in a row, there are new ones in Flingern, Garath, Heerdt, Lohausen, Oberbilk, and Rath, so that should make 29 overall. I did a small cycle trip to the new ones in Oberbilk and Flingern (Dorotheenplatz) already, bringing me to 24/29), but the others will need some strategic planning. This way, I will get to know all parts of the city, eventually!

City Centre:

• Mannesmannufer, next to KIT (Kunst im Tunnel), photo below
• Kö-Bogen

  Angermund (way out north, behind the airport!):

• Kreuzung Angermunder Straße, In den Blamüsen und Kirchweg

  Benrath:

• Marktplatz

  Bilk:

• Friedensplätzchen - this one is my local and the one that got me hooked. Both the range of offerings and the turnover rate are amazing. Without exaggeration, it's worth visiting every day.

  Derendorf and Pempelfort (north of the city centre) - these five are lined up very neatly:

• Frankenplatz
• Roßstraße, intersection with Klever Straße/Jülicher Straße
• Maria-und-Josef-Otten-Platz (Marschallstraße/Blücherstraße) - photo
• Rochusmarkt
• Berty-Albrecht-Park (near the centre of this lovely park which stretches a long way, more than 1 km)

  Flingern:

• Hermannsplatz near S-Bahn Flingern
• Dorotheenplatz (not far from Hermmansplatz, actually, but I'm not complaining. I'm sure the posh neighbourhoods of Flingern have lots of nice books to give away)

  Friedrichstadt:

• Fürstenplatz

  Garath (a suburb newly built in the 1960s, deep in the south, beyond Benrath even):

• Matthias-Erzberger-Straße/Carl-Severin-Straße

  Gerresheim:

• Apostelplatz
• Gerricusplatz (historic centre of the town, worth visiting)
• „Roter Platz“ on the corner Hatzfeld- and Heyestraße, near S-Bahn station

  Grafenberg:

• Staufenplatz near eponymous tram station

  Heerdt (out west, on the wrong side of the river, beyond Oberkassel):

• Nikolaus-Knopp-Platz

  Kaiserswerth:

• Markt

  Knittkuhl (way out east, not served by the otherwise perfect tram system!):

• In der Flieth

  Lohausen:

• Alte Flughafenstraße/Niederrheinstraße (between the airport and the river, so not on the side from which one would normally approach the airport with the S11 or regional express trains)

  Oberbilk:

• Oberbilker Markt (I knew the address as a horrid intersection of two major roads, but now discovered there is also a nice little square in one of the corners, which is where the street library is).

  Oberkassel:

• Werner-Pfingst-Platz

  Rath:

• Rather Kirchplatz (not on my map, but must be near one of the two churches at Rath, both of which are near the S Bahn station)

  Volmerswerth:

• Volmerswerther Straße (next to the loop where the tram turns around)

  Wersten:

• Liebfrauenstraße
• Ickerswarder Straße Ecke Kölner Landstraße

  Zooviertel:

• Brehmplatz

Update 6.5.2026: While I wasn't paying attention, six new ones have popped up, so the total now stands at 35. There's an additional one at Derendorf, and the other additions serve districts that didn't have one so far, namely: Eller (2), Golzheim, Hellerhof, and Lierenfeld. I'll try to visit at least some of these before revising the list.

Here is a recent photo I took of oldest of them all, on the river promenade near KIT (Kunst im Tunnel), showing that these are really popular. There are shelves on three sides, and it can happen that all three are occupied by people browsing:

Note that you can find books in all sorts of languages as well. On my first visit to the one at Oberbilk, I spotted at least five books in a language I really struggled to identify. After a while I spotted in one the section which gave the original title and the equivalent of translated to "language in question" and it said Shqip, so based on the "Skipetaren" in the title of a novel I read as a child, I guessed Albanian.

PS The things I discovered in these street libraries include:

• Die Meistergeige
• Ullsteinroman
• two books with kitchen songs
• High times
• the travelling hornplayer
• ... and lots of vintage rororo paperbacks - I collect the ones with the cloth around the spine - they are older than I am. Later reprints appeared without the cloth spine.

Street libraries elsewhere:

• Dresden
• Kiel
• Münster
• Strasbourg

cycling with cellos

Some thoughts on
Highway cello
by Kenneth Wilson
City Village Books 2023

This book found me because I am known for cycling around Oxford with a cello on my back, and this author cycled from Hadrian's Wall to Rome with a cello on the back of his bike, which he used for busking in various places along the way. I haven't done that yet, but yes we do seem to have a lot in common in the cycling and cello departments:

• Once upon a time I cycled a similar distance in a similar time (3500 km in 35 days), from Germany around five of the six sides of France's hexagon, and back into Germany, carrying camping equipment but no cello. In my defence, I was learning to play the double bass back then, and Heinrich, our family cello, hadn't been restored yet.
• Since ca. 2004, I have been cycling with cellos around Oxford on a regular basis, first carrying them for the young cellist in the family, and more recently for my own musical adventures. I reckon that those short journeys taken roughly once a week over 20 years must add up to a similar distance as Hadrian's Wall to Rome.
• I have played a very similar kind of repertoire on the cello, including obviously the easier ones of the Bach suites, as well as the Swan and some folk tunes such as Sally gardens. Haven't done busking as such but played some of that outdoors eg in Florence Park during the Plague years.
• I was travelling in France at the same time as he was, but sadly missed him. I went to Nimes and then to the Drome region (see my photos here), must have crossed his route travelling by train from Avignon to Strasbourg.

However, these aren't necessary qualifications for reading the book. As far as I can tell (despite being too close to the subject matter) it is a really charming travelogue and manages to convey aspects of cello and cycling cultures to a lay audience, with other bits like old churches thrown in as well. The author used to be a vicar before he lost his faith, so there are bits about religion and philosophy too. I am surprised that it is self published (with the publisher's name obviously made up for the occasion), as I would have thought that there are quite a few travel publishers out there that would have happily taken it on.

I was pleased to learn about things like warmshowers, crazyguyonabike, and the street performance festival at Chalon sur Saone, which happens annually in July (Chalon dans la rue). Although I had been aware of carbon fibre cellos, it was interesting to read the background story of how they were invented.

Given my parallel experience, there are bound to be things I disagree with. I would never put the cello directly on the bike. I like to think that using my soft body as a shock absorber, the instrument is quite safe on my back, and it's not nearly as heavy as it looks. I also like the fact that it makes me look like a giant on the bike, so hopefully drivers will stay clear of me. And the contraption the author used looks downright dangerous to me.

Also, being a lazy kind of person, I would have avoided all those mountains he's so keen on climbing. I would find myself a nice river and follow its course - there are suitable cycle paths along the Rhine and the Danube, for instance. I find it much more civilised to go with the flow than to sweat on the serpentines. On that note, if he had stayed with the river Saone beyond Chalon and then followed the Rhone, I might have seen him busking in Avignon. (Considering his interest in church history, he really should have gone via Avignon.) Too bad.

PS here's my little library of cello-related memoirs and biographies (listed alphabetically by the last name of the relevant cellist):

• Mercedes Cebrián: Cocido y violonchelo
• Jetta Marie Vasak: My bohemian heritage (about the family of Zdeňka Černý, portrayed as "the greatest Bohemian violoncellist" in a famous Mucha poster).
• Hilary and Piers DuPre: A genius in the family
• John Holt: Never too late
• Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: Inherit the truth / Die Wahrheit erben
• Gregor Piatigorsky: Cellist
• Eric Siblin: The cello suites: In search of a baroque masterpiece
• Kenneth Wilson: Highway cello

UPDATE 9.6.2025 Here's another carbon fibre cello going places, this time to the Arctic pack ice, with cellist Sarah Smout.

23 street libraries

Arriving in Dusseldorf this month, I visited the nearest three street libraries (offener Bücherschrank, I used to be unsure of the translation but now I think I'll go for street libraries!) and wondered whether there were any others that I wasn't aware of, beyond the six I had visited so far. The official website told me that they just opened the 23rd within the city boundaries. Looks like I have some work to do. Here is the list, and I'll mark in bold the ones I've visited. While I was writing up this entry, I managed to increase the count to 13, with tram excursions to Wersten and Benrath, Pempelfort and Derendorf.

City Centre:

• Mannesmannufer, next to KIT (Kunst im Tunnel)
• Kö-Bogen

  Angermund (way out north, behind the airport!):

• Kreuzung Angermunder Straße, In den Blamüsen und Kirchweg

  Benrath:

• Marktplatz

  Bilk:

• Friedensplätzchen (photo below) - this one is my local and the one that got me hooked. Both the range of offerings and the turnover rate are amazing. Without exaggeration, it's worth visiting every day.

  Derendorf and Pempelfort (north of the city centre) - these five are lined up very neatly:

• Frankenplatz
• Roßstraße, intersection with Klever Straße/Jülicher Straße
• Maria-und-Josef-Otten-Platz (Marschallstraße/Blücherstraße)
• Rochusmarkt
• Berty-Albrecht-Park (near the centre of this lovely park which stretches a long way, more than 1 km)

  Flingern:

• Hermannsplatz near S-Bahn Flingern

  Friedrichstadt:

• Fürstenplatz

  Gerresheim:

• Apostelplatz
• Gerricusplatz (historic centre of the town, worth visiting)
• „Roter Platz“ on the corner Hatzfeld- and Heyestraße, near S-Bahn station

  Grafenberg:

• Staufenplatz near eponymous tram station

  Kaiserswerth:

• Markt

  Knittkuhl (way out east, not served by the otherwise perfect tram system!):

• In der Flieth

  Oberkassel:

• Werner-Pfingst-Platz

  Volmerswerth:

• Volmerswerther Straße (next to the loop where the tram turns around)

  Wersten:

• Liebfrauenstraße
• Ickerswarder Straße Ecke Kölner Landstraße

  Zooviertel:

• Brehmplatz

Here is a historic photo I took of the one in Bilk back in 2014:

Might add a few fresh ones when I get home and process all my photos.

Note also that this is an actual gas light behind the book shelf. Obviously problematic in this day and age, but also very quaint and historic. On my quest for more libraries, I am discovering some lovely parks and squares, and also a lot more gas lights. Around the market square of Benrath I saw more than 20 of them.

PS Here's a book I took home from one of them during the August exploration (not sure which one, actually) and very much enjoyed reading. Typical for the random stuff I discover there in that I would never have thought to look for let alone pay for it but am very glad I found it.

UPDATE 24.9.2023 took the tram to Gerresheim today (and S-Bahn back) to explore another five libraries. They have 3 in Gerresheim, an adorable little town that became part of the city in 1909, but preserved its character, and anothr two were on my path there and back. So that should bring up my total to 18 (after correcting the previous total to 13). Five to go.

UPDATE 24.2.2024 Made the expedition to Angermund on the S1, and took in the library at Brehmplatz on the way there, three to go. Also starting a list with links to other cities below.

UPDATE 23.5.2024 Went to the Kunstpalast for an exhibition and realised that Oberkassel isn't all that far from there, just across the bridge. So I ticked that one off too. Two to go.

UPDATE 26.8.2024 Did another tram journey to Benrath and visited the library at Ickerswerder Strasse on the way which I overlooked on the previous trip. Now there's only the Knittkuhl one left - getting there is a bit of a challenge, will have to find something else in that direction to make it worth the journey.

UPDATE 6.5.2023 There also is a map for these - spotted this on Mastodon, then kept the tab open for months, now putting the link here so I can finally close that tab.

UPDATE 3.8.2025 checking up on the official website, I spotted several new ones, so now there are 29! The one in Oberbilk is easy for me to reach, but Garath, a new suburb in the far south, is a bit of a challenge. New ones are also in Flingern, Hassels and Lohausen (near the airport). The new blog entry with the revised list is now here.

Street libraries elsewhere:

• Kiel
• Münster
• Strasbourg

the great 9-euro adventure

From June through to August 2022, Germany offered a "flat rate" ticket for local and regional public transport for 9 Euros per calendar month. I used one in June, but was only there for a couple of days, so it didn't make much difference, although it did inspire me to revisit Wuppertal and travel the entire length of the Schwebebahn (suspension railway) up and down the valley. I think the Schwebebahn day pass alone would have cost something like 9 euros in normal times.

At the beginning of August, I was there for ten days and used the ticket to explore a few cities. There were three I hadn't seen before, namely Rheydt (featured in my lostcities series), Krefeld, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The latter I wouldn't have dared normally, as it is a globally famous tourist destination and I was kind of expecting it to be overrun, but on the day it turned out just fine, with fewer tourists than you'd see in Oxford on a normal summer day, and it was quite lovely. I also spent time in Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Würzburg, and Xanten. That's 9 cities for 9 euros.

It did take me some time to get my head round the fact that this thing really works, that I was really allowed to go anywhere. It does change the geography of a country significantly if you can just hop on a train without worrying whether it will be worth the expense. And after many years of routinely using the intercity and high-speed network, it was nice to rediscover some of the little train stations that the ICE doesn't serve. The Regional Express (RE) trains that you are allowed to use with the ticket cover considerable distances though, including one of the first long-distance rail lines in Germany, Cologne to Minden, or a 200km stretch of the river Rhine from Koblenz to Wesel. With air-conditioned electric double-decker trains, they often offer a level of comfort that compares favourably with what Great Western would call an intercity train. (There was also a heat wave going on, so the AC came in handy.)

Some trains were crowded (but mask discipline was good, so no covid worries), some were late or cancelled, but hey, if it's basically free, you can't complain, right? It's all part of the big 9-euro adventure. I read that 31 million tickets were sold for June, so it's kind of a one off nation-wide summer experience you just have to enjoy. Designed in haste as a counterweight to the very non-green fuel subsidy (Tankrabatt), it may not have moved the dial on car usage, but it certainly helped many who would otherwise have struggled to pay for travel by any means.

I took a zillion photos, some of which are slowly turning up in this new flickr album.

The regional railway station Düsseldorf-Bilk, where all my adventures started. It used to be an S-Bahn station with only the platform on the left, but has been expanded and upgraded to serve regional express trains of four separate lines. Basically every RE that crosses the river Rhine at Düsseldorf now stops at Bilk (plus three lines of the local S-Bahn trains). That's more trains and destinations than you get from Oxford main station, and they are electric.

Media coverage of the 9-euro ticket:

• a recent Guardian leader
• impact on air pollution: paper by Niklas Gohl, Philipp Schrauth, University of Potsdam
• Tourismus zieht Bilanz zum 9-Euro-Ticket (photo story, Deutsche Welle 30.8.2022)
• As of 12.10.2022, negotiations re a follow-up flatrate ticket, likely to be priced at 49 euros, are still ongoing, reports Der Spiegel.
• 26.12.2022: FAQs for the new Deutschland ticket are now here. For one-off visits, the important point is that getting out of the subscription in the first year costs €30, so if you just want it for one calendar month, it will be €79. Still a good price for a whole month, but if I travel for ten days, it may not be worth it. - ooops. according to this source, the bit about the €30 fee is wrong. In any case, no start date yet, so watch this space.
• 28.4.2023: Deutschlandticket is available now and valid from 1.5. The cancellation fee mentioned above has been scrapped so it is 49 euros per month regardless of how many months you take. More details from Deutsche Welle (in German).

wnbr comeback

World Naked Bike Rides are definitely back to normal this year, as the photos from last weekend's rides at London and Brighton demonstrate (eg here and here). (Some rides may also have happened last year as well, not sure what went ahead and what was cancelled, and in any case I wasn't ready to attend any mass events last summer.) See this blog entry for my pre-Covid WNBR ravings.

So if like me you missed the big rides that have already been and gone (London and Brighton clashed with my travel plans), here's the schedule for the rest of this naked cycling season in the UK and neighbouring countries (once the rides have happened, I'm adding flickr links):

18.6. Edinburgh - Brussels
19.6. Bristol
25.6. Chelmsford
2.7. Portsmouth, Eastbourne - Amsterdam
9.7. Ipswich
16.7. Cardiff, Colchester The DiffWNBR had ideal weather and I was meaning to go, but had committed to play music that day and the timing didn't work. I can't find a flickr group for this one but there are flickr albums here and here.
23.7. Clacton
30.7. Folkestone
6.8. Romford
20.8. Cambridge
27.8. Cork

(I got the dates from here and sorted them chronologically rather than alphabetically, and threw in a few international dates too.)

As the weather forecast looks a bit unpromising this weekend, I'll skip the much-loved Bristol ride. I am speculating that it will be better by the time the Cardiff ride rolls along. In the past, Bristol and Cardiff were often on the same weekend, which is no use, if one has bad weather the other has too, and if not, it's awkward to travel to both. So anyhow, fingers crossed, and here's the lovely poster for Cardiff:

Nicked from their twitter feed. I love their twitter handle @DiffWNBR - it took me years to figure out that they took the Car out of Cardiff. Oh, and the source illustration of their cyclist is here.

Special shoutout for Tony Grimes's amazing album of London 2022, with 200+ pics, many of which are portraits of individual riders. They are also in the group WNBR London 2022.

PS On one ride, I saw a guy who had the dates of his WNBR adventures tattooed on his back (maybe a dozen or so?). I'm not quite as crazy (yet) but here's my modest list of seven rides:

2015 Bristol
2016 Bristol, London
2017 Bristol, Brighton
2018 London
2019 London

I just discovered that Flickr user "Sunny days6" has albums with lots of crowd photos from four of these rides (the London and Brighton ones), so I need to go through and play Where is Wally? Might be tricky to find pics I'm in as I don't even remember what hat I wore on which ride.

At Oxford, there has only been one ride, in 2014, and I only found out about it when it whizzed past me.

I mentioned the WNBRs in my 2016 feature A planet with two billion cars and used one of my photos of the ride - one of the occasions when fun magically turns into research. That two billion figure was an extrapolation made for 2030 - I should probably check up on that some time and write an update. Even if electric vehicles get a lot of press coverage these days, the growth that leads us to two billions will happen in the developing world, and it will comprehensively be fuelled by with diesel.

no flights (almost)

(PSA: didn't get the Eurekalert email today, so no science news)

As the media were discussing "flight shame" and how Greta Thunberg travelled from Sweden to London by train, I realised that I made my second-last air journey in mid-June 2009, so more than 10 years ago now. That one led me to Copenhagen, for an invited talk at a two-day event. While I would be happy to go there by train, the long journey didn't make much sense for this very short stay. Similar situation for the only other flight I've made since then: a workshop where I was signed up to make a contribution was supposed to be held in Hamburg or Barcelona, but ended up being in Bucharest, which was maybe just a little bit outside the range I was happy to travel by train.

Other than that, since the opening of High Speed 1 and the St. Pancras International terminus in 2007, which made Eurostar much more convenient than it was in the times of the Waterloo terminus, I have done all my other European travel by rail, going as far as Barcelona, Prague, Budapest and Rostock in separate rail journeys (links point to the relevant flickr albums).

The other factor that made not flying easier was the insight that my initial plan of making science in Latin America a part of my business model wasn't really working, so Cuba in April 2005 has remained my last intercontinental flight. I wouldn't say no if there were several good reasons to make a specific journey, but just one reason wouldn't suffice.

This year, all my travels lead me to Germany for family reasons, which has now become a routine rail trip - much less trouble than trying to get to the remoter parts of the UK, for instance. Further ahead, new challenges await. I'll need to figure out flightless ways of getting to Galicia, Morocco and Sweden.



St. Pancras International (own photo, 2018)

Updates (some press reports appearing ahead of no-flight 2020):

Suzanne Bearne, The Guardian, 10.8.2019 - some case studies and handy hints.

Science magazine of 27.9.2019 carries an editorial urging scientists to fly less.

armchair and time travels

A few months ago, I found the booklet about Colombia in a charity shop - but they didn’t have any other countries I was interested in.

Colombia - a booklet from the “Around the World Program” from the American Geographical Society. Copyright 1959, 1964.

printed in greyscale with green as additional colour throughout. At least 29 colour photos are glued in manually (numbered but not in order, so I may have overlooked one).

Now, at a fleas market, I’ve found a few more to start a collection. At the moment, I’m not quite sure if I’m collecting countries I’ve visited (neither Paraguay nor Uruguay) or Latin American ones, in which case Algeria would be the odd one out. Climate zones also vary - looks like I'll just have to schedule a trip to the 'guays.

I’ve actually read the Colombian one (a few more pics of it inside and out are here). I found it touching how the 1950s perspective is blissfully unaware of essentially all problems the country would face in the following decades. Will also read the other ones at some point.

I was wondering if this was based on some kind of subscription / collection model. Somebody on tumblr suggested they came as sets in slip cases, possibly a set for each of the continents that have several countries (wouldn't quite work for Australia, Antarctica).

how Romanian lost its romance

I taught a workshop at Bucharest recently and just before the trip I discovered an old French book about the Romanian language at an Oxfam store, so I read much of it on the way there, and found it really intriguing. As the book is probably out of print, I’ll summarise some of the points I found interesting.

Latin heritage: The area was only under Roman control for a century and a half (106-275) – and the Latin derived language only became prevalent after the Romans left. The invasion of the Huns in 375 and destruction of the towns drove the Latin-speaking townsfolk out to the countryside, where they mingled with the peasants who spoke a Thracian language related to modern Albanian, and from this encounter Romanian was born. Then, the language was fairly isolated from the other Romance languages, and thus kept old-fashioned terms when medieval Latin changed and passed those changes on to Italian and French. Intriguingly, the Iberian languages, on the other end of the continent, retain some of the same old-style expressions, so they sometimes resemble Romanian more than the geographically closer languages Italian and French. For instance, when Latin, French and Italian switched from mensa to tabula for table, the peripheral Romance languages in Iberia and Romania didn’t get the memo, so we have mesa in Spanish and Portuguese and masӑ in Romanian.

German influences include cartof (Kartoffel) for potato, and halba (Halbe) for half a measure of beer, and a word derived from “Schmecker” for their argot. The name of the region around Bucharest, Wallachia, derives from the Germanic word for non-Germanic people, as in Welsch, Wallon, Welsh, etc.

Alphabet: Romanian used the Cyrillic alphabet until 1860, which it had originally adopted from Bulgarian for complex reasons linked to the shared orthodox religion.

Romance language that lost the romance: Again as a consequence of being isolated from the Romance languages in central Europe, Romanian lost Latinate terms from the area of love, romance, relationships. While most areas of Western Europe got their romantic ideas from the troubadours, Romanian lost the words derived from Latin amor, amare, carus and sponsa, and replaced them with the Slav words iubi, dragoste, drag and nevasta, respectively. So it became a Romance language that loves in Slav terms.

Later however, Romanian reconnected with French and got many words from modern French (eg bej, ruj, coafor, creion …), as well as lexical and grammatical influences from Hungarian, Turkish, and Slav languages, often even within the same word. So it ended up as a unique mixture not just of several language influences but also of languages from unrelated families, and with connections all across Europe.

Source:

Gilbert Fabre: Parlons roumain, langue et culture Editions L’Harmattan 1991

PS - a quick check on French amazon revealed that it is available as an e-book as well as second-hand. Plus, from the same series there are books about dozens of other languages, mainly those not so commonly taught, so this is a huge temptation. (Lots of them have the same title with only the name of the language exchanged, so you find them easily with the search terms: parlons langue culture. However, there are also recent deviations from the pattern, eg Parlons slovaque, une langue slave, from 2009)

evolution of allergy

In December, I attended the Cell Symposium on type 2 immunity (i.e. our adaptive immune system as opposed to innate defence mechanims) and learned a lot about the big two questions in the field of allergy, namely why did allergies evolve, and why are they becoming more prevalent in industrialised societies?

It's been a steep learning curve not helped by immunologists' habit of speaking in acronyms, but I believe I discovered some meaningful connections to evolution and ecology - it's really all about snakes and parasitic worms. So I wrote a feature summarising what I think I understood, which is out today:

Why did evolution give us allergies?
Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 2, pR53–R55, 19 January 2015

Open access

The Cell Symposium in session (this was a reception in the town hall though, not part of the scientific programme). Own photo.

whatever happened to the Orient Express?

The EuCheMS chemistry congress will take place in Istanbul next year, so I was wondering whether I could go there by train. The SNCF website says it doesn’t sell tickets to that destination. Deutsche Bahn can’t tell the price, but at least it gives me a connection.

Travelling from Frankfurt, it would take three nights, two days (55 h 50 mins total duration), and five changes to get there:

• Night train Frankfurt to Vienna (EN421)
• Vienna to Budapest
• Budapest to Beograd
• Night train Beograd to Sofia
• 10 hours wait in Sofia
• Sofia to Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria
• Night train Dimitrovgrad to Istanbul

The first train, EN421 comes from Cologne, so the connection also works from there, as well as from other German stations including Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz, Würzburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Passau.

Deutsche Bahn very kindly gives me a connection from Paris as well, although it doesn’t even cross German territory. I could take a TGV Paris to Zurich, direct night train Zurich to Budapest, and then it’s the same as above for the rest of the journey (total: 60 hours). From London it recommends going via Brussels and Cologne, 63 hours.

I think the last change in Dimitrovgrad is where they lost me. I wouldn’t actually mind travelling three nights in a row and having some time to look at the cities in between. But Dimitrovgrad, population 38,015, not to be confused with the eponymous town in Russia, sounds random and a bit scary.

Whatever happened to the Orient Express? (I looked it up, the short answer is, it ceased to exist, the long answer is on Wikipedia.) Shouldn’t there be a direct line across Europe, linking all those new member states?

So, well, maybe I’ll skip this conference. Unless somebody has a bright idea? Are there any prospects for improvements in Bulgarian railways?

image source: wikipedia

control freakery

Each time I’m taking the Eurostar to continental Europe I am left wondering, why is a single passport check ok to travel out, but two or three are done on the way back?

Coming back from Germany via Brussels last Sunday (on the Eurostar departing Brussels at 19:52) we had our passports checked three times (by Belgian and UK authorities in Brussels, and then by UK people again in St. Pancras). The ticket was also checked three times, by the machine at checkin, by the UK passport control in Brussels and by a train manager on the train.

I don’t really see the need for any passport controls within the EU. If I can fly from Madrid to Helsinki or Athens under the Schengen agreement without border control, what’s so special about the UK and Ireland that they can’t join? I’m really not buying the argument that these countries are so attractive they need extra protection.

Then, if you do need passport controls, why not do them once in the right place, and be done with it? If I’m a legal traveller on the first contol, I’ll surely still be legal on the third one. To me, the third passport control on the same leg of the journey really is where security measures end and harassment begins. It didn’t improve my mood that a steward, as I was stepping up to the counter with my son who has autism and needs constant supervision and assistance, shouted at us “one at a time”. If he had actually looked at us before, he could have figured out why we went ahead together.

My personal gripes apart, surely, it can’t be good for the UK economy if people who may be travelling to London on business get harassed this way?

New art work suspended from the roof of St. Pancras station.

how the croc got its teeth

Last month, en route to a family visit, I stopped by at the Institut de Genomique Fonctionelle de Lyon (IGFL) and learned lots of exciting things about the research they're doing there, connecting physiology, evolution and development with the help of genomics. Essentially, how does a string of DNA turn into a living breathing animal? How did the leopard get its spots, and the croc its teeth? (Disclaimer: they don't do leopards in Lyon, as far as I know, but they have got answers for the croc question!)

There was too much to mention everything but I tried to make a meaningful story out of this, which is out in today's issue of Current Biology:

How does an animal work?

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 22, R933-R935, 20 November 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.11.002

For the next two weeks (and then again after a year), the text will be freely accessible:

HTML text

PDF file

Note the lovely species portraits by photographers Vincent & Caroline Moncorgé, commissioned by the institute.

Lyon by night - photo from my previous visit ...

no trains going nowhere

It’s Boxing Day, I hear the sales are on and Oxford United play at Wimbledon today, or somewhere, yet if anybody wants to go shopping or watching football by rail, they’ll have a hard time, as there are no trains going anywhere:



And there won’t be any trains London-bound tomorrow either, nor for the rest of the week, nor next Monday in fact.

I understand that Network Rail (the one part of the railways still controlled by the government) need to do some work on the tracks from time to time, but I seem to remember from elsewhere that between major cities there are often two or more tracks running in parallel, so you can still use one while you repair the other. I also have a vague memory that other places have power cables above the lines so they can run trains with electricity and don’t have to transport all that Diesel around, and they can also reuse the brake energy. I’m wondering whether these innovations will ever reach this area …

PS: The Guardian reports that only 5 of the 25 rail companies around the country are running any service at all today. Very depressing.

budapest globalised

The next thing I noticed about Budapest (after the red trolleybuses) was how thoroughly Western brands have taken over the place. It's not just the fast food outlets and coffee shops that you find everywhere in the world. The supermarkets are called Tesco and Spar, the banks are German, the phone booths (rusty and red, like the trolleybuses) were decorated in the livery of German Telekom (of T mobile fame) and had their trademark pinky-purple receivers:



Add to that the German-built cars that block the roads (traffic is a bit of a nightmare on the main routes through the city, but amazingly, drivers very willingly stop to let pedestrians cross), and you'll come to the conclusion that the profits of virtually every economic activity that goes on around there (with the possible exception of haircuts) will be skimmed off by somebody in the west. Oh well.

Funny that after 18 years in the UK, finding the German logos in Hungary is just mildly amusing. It's the Tesco branches, ranging from "expressz" to "hipermarket" that really annoyed me. From our experience here we know that these spread like Japanese knotweed.

budapest's red trolleybuses

Third stop on the recent trip, Budapest. I soon realised I love the city to bits, all the crumbling splendour (as in Havana, Venice), plus you can walk along the Danube for miles (easier on the Pest side than on the other one, but also nice on the island). Love the falling plaster and the art nouveau villas, and the red and rusting trolleybuses (electrical buses with overhead cables):



They kept reminding me of a lovely song by Bulat Okudzhava (1924-1997):



I actually saw Okudzhava playing live many years ago, when we lived in Regensburg. I knew his work as I was learning Russian at the time. There was a cultural centre on the opposite side of the square where we lived and one day I just walked past the door of that centre and spotted a plain A4 sheet of paper taped to the door, saying Bulat Okudzhava will be playing here on (date, time), which happened to be the day after I saw the notice. That was the only announcement there was, and accordingly it was a very intimate event. I seem to remember there was a translator who read out German versions of the lyrics before each song.

Well, anyhow, more about Budapest to follow.

walking in Vienna

Second stop on our Main/Danube tour was Vienna – though it turns out that the Danube only touches the city rather peripherally. From the hotel near the Westbahnhof we had to walk across the entire city to find the river, taking in an interesting cross section from the Parisian style boulevard Mariahilfer Str. that leads from the station down to the historic city centre, through the Burggarten, past the disneyfied tourist spots with their horse-drawn carriages and people in Mozart costumes trying to sell concert tickets, and then through some outer districts with crumbling industrial sites between the Danube canal and the Danube river itself.

Clearly, the city turned its back on the river, and the idea that anyone might walk down to the river never occurred to anybody involved with its planning. Parallel to the river on the city side there is a little used railway line, but to cross it there are only the motorway bridges crossing over the river as well. Walking along the rail line, we eventually found an old station with a level crossing where we could sneak through and on to the river bank. Which was, of course, blocked up entirely with several Titanic-sized cruise ships.


The city’s other river, the Wien, is also disappointing, as it is completely walled in (see photo, left) and over long stretches even covered up.

A bit of a history lesson, we saw the spectacular Flakturm in the Augarten, and the one in Esterhazy Park, which hosts an aquarium/terrarium. These WWII upright bunkers with walls 5 metres thick are apparently so strong that it wasn’t economically feasible to demolish them, so they are still sitting around. The Lonely Planet guide of Vienna offers a half-page explanation of these monstrosities, while the German Baedeker chooses to ignore them, a case of “Don’t mention the war”?

On the Northeast side of the Burggarten there is a tropical greenhouse specially for exotic butterflies, the Schmetterlingshaus:




More photos

Frankfurt

Just came back from a rail trip to Budapest, visiting a few cities on the Danube and Frankfurt which happens to be on the wrong river (Main) but is as far as you can safely travel in a day starting from Oxford at a sensible time.

We stayed at a hotel close to the European Central Bank, so were close to one of the epicentres of world events when the markets took a nosedive on Monday 8.8. Didn't notice any suspicious activity in the banking quarter of the city, but then again we were busy dodging the torrential showers that swept by in half-hour intervals.

Only in the evening, watching CNN in the hotel room with the Dow Jones shown in a corner of the screen and losing dozens of points every few seconds, did we find out there was trouble.

So here's the peaceful scene outside the ECB after the markets closed:



Banks aside, Frankfurt also has a very lovely promenade where you can walk (or jog, cycle, rollerskate) along the river Main for miles. Such an obvious boost to quality of life, but not all cities get it right.

Additional photos from F. in my flickr set Germany, and further riverside adventures to follow ...

eleven minutes late

review of:

Eleven minutes late
Matthew Engel
Macmillan 2009 / Pan paperback 2010


This month it’s 18 years since I moved to the UK, so I’m coming of age as a UK resident, but one of the things that still puzzle me to this day is why the railways aren’t working. The symptoms are familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to travel by train here – half an hour after the start of your journey, the train may stop because of a “signal failure” or something similarly unconvincing, sit on the same spot for any time between ten minutes and two hours, and then crawl onward to your destination. Or you try travelling on a Sunday, and find that all trains have been replaced by buses, due to scheduled engineering work. And as most of the network (including the lines out of Oxford) isn’t even electrified, the trains aren’t much better than buses anyway, and not much better for the environment, as they burn diesel like the buses do.

But why? With my anti-corporate instincts, I might have put the blame on privatisation, which happened soon after I arrived here, so I don’t have as many bad memories of British Rail as I have of the privatised mess that came after its demise. Engel’s book, part travelogue, part amateur history of the railways in the UK, reassures me that privatisation isn’t where things started going wrong. Apparently, they have been going wrong from the start, or at least from the point when speculative building of railways in random places led to a bubble and the inevitable implosion.

Since then, the railways have always been under the control of people who didn’t care about their passengers or services, and who made every conceivable error and a few inconceivable ones on top of that. All this makes for a fascinating read and would be really funny if it was fiction, but sadly it happens to be history and current affairs, and it continues to bring real misery to real people.

I like to spend my holidays in continental Europe and typically travel by train, so I get regular reminders of the fact that it is actually physically possible to run a rail network that gets people from A to B at the advertised time, in comfort, and at a fraction of the price one would pay in the UK (see my praise of ICE and TGV). However, Engel suffocates any nationalist pride I might develop when thinking of the German railways too much by reminding me that the efficiency of their infrastructure is largely due to the fact that it was planned strategically by the Prussian rulers. They didn’t care about the travelling public either, but they did care a lot about moving troops across the country as efficiently as possible.

Amazingly, their warmongering motivation has produced an invaluable asset for peaceful travellers using the network more than 1.5 centuries later. Come to think of it, the Bundesbahn network is strongest in north-south directions, transporting holiday makers to the Alps or the North Sea, while military aggression was typically directed in eastern or western direction, so maybe somebody secretly did think of the travelling public after all.

Engel starts out by describing his own exploration of Britain’s rail network with the benefit of a rover card, then slips into chronological history mode, and only returns to his exploits at the end. Given the sheer mindboggling madness of his subject matter, however, even the chronological core of the book is never at risk of becoming tedious. It reads like Alice in Wonderland, you fully expect to see the Mad Hatter turning up any time.

The title of the book refers to one of the many symptoms of systemic madness. Up to and including ten minutes after the advertised arrival time, a long-distance train is still recorded as “on time.” (In fact, I have seen trains listed as on time on departure boards half an hour after their scheduled departure time had gone by.) Thus, the author hoped on his exploratory travels to catch a train that was more than ten minutes late. In a freak coincidence, none of his trains was.

Engel also offers explanations for the trials and tribulations we suffer locally. I knew that the absence of a line linking Oxford to Cambridge is because this line was closed down in the 60s. What I didn’t know was that this happened within months of the same government’s decision to build a new city adjacent to this doomed line: Milton Keynes. Britain’s largest new town was actually built on land belonging to the village of Bletchley, which had a station on the so-called Varsity line. Oxford-MK-Cambridge would have been a valuable link saving thousands of unnecessary rail travels through London and road trips through the Chilterns every year. The author’s comment, concise and to the point: “Crazy.”

As for the line leading north from Oxford, to Worcester and Hereford, Engel says “much of the route was single-tracked to save money.” They actually paid people to rip out tracks from an operating double track railway line to convert it back to single track? Why don’t we single-track a couple of A roads as well? That would save money on fixing those potholes. And does the M40 really need four lanes between Oxford and London, in these cash-strapped times?

Engel also examines the political short-termism that is partially to blame for all this. Obviously, people who only think as far as the next election won’t be spending much time planning a railway system for the next decades. Maybe France has the TGV because its presidents served for seven years at the time when that kicked off? I’m not quite convinced yet, but it might be an explanation.

For all his brilliant (yet amateur, thus accessible) analysis, Engel can’t offer any remedies to fix this mess. Personally, when the pain gets too strong, I take a coach to London, and the Eurostar from there.



A freight carriage rotting away at Oxford station - I presume it is being used as a storage shed.

Shakira at Paris

Shakira live at the Bercy, Paris, 6.12.2010

concert report / review

As I take every conceivable excuse to travel to Paris, and as I can’t do the London gig of the current tour because it falls in the school hols and I have kids to look after, I went down to the Bercy to see the Sale El Sol Tour for the second time (first time was Lyon, see here).

The queuing was slightly less mad than in Lyon (which was the first concert in Europe and has therefore surely attracted a few hundred hardcore front row people from across the continent), but still quite crazy. I joined the end of a very long and winding queue at 6pm, when the doors opened, and it was 7 before I got in.

This time I heeded my own advice which I gave out after the last concert, and went for a place close to the “end of the pier”, with just four or five rows between me and the synapse of the stage axon (I like this neurological terminology for the stage layout, will stick with it!). It’s not just that much of the show is actually happening there, it’s also that you don’t have to crane your neck back and forth when the action moves from the main stage to the synapse and back. And the view of the main stage is still good from this distance, plus one gets an impression of the whole light show as it is intended to be seen. So, best standing place in the house, really.

Just after “Bonsoir Paris” I noticed she actually addressed the criticism I expressed after the Lyon concert, switching her “tonight I’m all yours” introduction into French. Later on she also spoke more French during the bellydance course with four girls from the audience. Sweet. My other criticism after Lyon was that the DJ was a bit rubbish and blatantly only there to artificially pump up the adrenaline, and wouldn’t it be better to give a new act the chance to play to a big audience. As the announcement in Lyon said the DJ was booked for the entire European tour (and he was still there in Paris), I am now officially spooked to hear that at the Manchester Gig (14.12.) he has been replaced with a girl group called Parade. Damn I should have gone to Manchester as well.

So, next on my wishlist is a full-length recording of the Arabic song A'tini al-Nay. Oh, and another MTV unplugged concert.

Where were we? Oh yes, Paris. So, from my vantage point at the end of the axon the whole show made a lot more sense, and I really loved the little unplugged session at the synapse.

Some random observations that I hadn’t noticed or recorded last time:
The Sale El Sol announcement already confused me at Lyon. She started with something along the lines of “over the last few months I’ve been feeling a bit different” which seemed to lead very clearly towards something involving eggs and sperms, except that it didn’t. Identical text in Paris, but still no baby at the end of it.

I really loved the violin intro for Ojos Asi. I think the violinist who also plays a range of other instruments is a great addition to the band. Still have to find out her name. I think she was introduced as British in Lyon but as Irish in Paris. Never mind.

I’m not a huge fan of Gipsy but loved the dance intro and the acoustic version of that, and the throwaway line at the end: “soy gitana de ciudad”.

Two days after Paris I was due to see the show again at Frankfurt, but come 9pm (and after the DJ had already played 30 mins too long and in a suspiciously calm mood) it was announced that due to the inclement weather conditions her plane couldn’t land at Frankfurt, so the show had to be postponed. Oh well. Next time take the train – I really enjoyed my train rides through the snow from Paris to Frankfurt and back. Now I hope that the replacement show in Frankfurt will be Monday –Wednesday during term time, hope that can be arranged … Oh, and don’t forget A'tini al-Nay.

ICE and snow

My ICE train from Frankfurt to Paris had just left Saarbrücken and entered the snowy landscapes of Lorraine, when the announcement came: Due to the difficult weather conditions, the train manager told us in very apologetic tones (I was half expecting we had to stop the train and walk the rest of the distance), they were obliged to limit the travel speed to 230 km/h (144 mph). Whizzing through the winter wonderland at only 230 km/h (at one point the train seemed to outpace a plane that came in to land at Charles de Gaulle airport) I had time to reflect on the wonders of modern technology which we in the UK can only dream of. It also helped that there was an audio socket where I could plug in my headphones to listen to Bryan Adams’ bare bones acoustic live CD, which I really enjoyed and hadn’t known before, rather than having to listen to the two very talkative blokes on the other side of the aisle. Oh, and the general comfort and space available was comparable to first class carriages in the UK. So I didn’t mind at all that the marginally slower high-speed train would take half an hour longer to get to Paris Est (in the event, it turned out to be only a delay of 25 minutes, of which 8 minutes were already picked up between Frankfurt and Mannheim).

A week earlier I had travelled from London Paddington to Oxford in similar weather conditions. Never mind that the Diesel-guzzling trains on this route would probably disintegrate if they tried to run faster than 120 km/h, but my train spent a full hour sitting on the same spot outside Reading station, where the points had packed up due to the mild frost. Trains from Surrey into London had stopped working altogether the day before my travel, and I had read reports about passengers who had to spend the night on stranded trains.

And I’m not waving the German flag here or advertising the services of Deutsche Bahn and Siemens (who build the ICE trains). In fact, on the way out (Paris to Frankfurt) I had a TGV (run by SNCF and built by Alstom) which catapulted me through the snowy landscapes just as comfortably and without speed limit (Alstom hold the world record for rail engines, as they very helpfully explain in German (!) on the sides of at least some of their TGV engines, so that their competitors in Munich get the message). And on the whole I think the TGVs have a better record on reliability than the ICEs which have had some technical troubles in recent years. (But, of course, TGV and snow wouldn’t have worked as a title.) I’m just wondering why the UK has taken such a spectacularly wrong turn, wrecking its railways at the time when other countries invested in the future of theirs. Here in Oxford, half way between the capital and the second largest city, we’re still waiting for the railway line to be electrified. And not content with being one of the worst rail systems in Europe, ours is also among the most expensive ones (and is set to get more expensive under the pretext of having to finance improvements). Oh, and after yesterday’s political events, we can look forward to higher education following the tracks of the UK’s railways. Comfort and joy, indeed.




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