The historic core of Rome is ravishing, but as soon as I saw a photo of Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, I knew my trip wouldn’t be complete with a visit there. We travelled there by Rome’s metro system, which could be described in one word: rickety. So remarkably shoddy is the system, that on entering, I didn’t think the ticket machine would work as nothing looked in working order. Lights were out, windows were missing the essential glass contingent and the station was empty. Astonishingly, a moving piece of graffiti came towards us and on closer inspection, it was a metro train. I can honestly say I have never been on a public transportation system in such disrepair and it lived up to my expectations. I loved it.
Moving graffiti
The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana a slice of Italian history, designed in 1938 for inclusion in the World Fair of 1942 and its entire purpose was to show off Italy and Fascism to the world. It was supposed to do this on the 20th anniversary of fascism in Italy, but clearly, things didn’t go to plan. The building was finally fully constructed in 1943, just in time to celebrate the fall of the fascist regime. The design of the building followed principles of fascist architecture, with a design that eschewed complex decoration but had echoes of the classic buildings of Rome. The Palazzo has been called the “Square Colosseum” due to the inspiration that building gave. For instance, the loggias of the Palazzo are similar to those of the Colosseum.
The exterior of the building looks like marble but the building was actually a concrete skeleton with a layer of travertine that gives it the appearance of being entirely made of stone. It’s an incredible achievement and the building looks astonishing from a distance and utterly transfixing from up close. Around the building are sculptures of horses, which seem to feature heavily in the world of fascism. But what I found most interesting were the 28 statues that represent different trades and industries of Italy. They perfectly complement the building, adding a touch of the ancient world to a building that feels like a perfect blend of the past and the future. I have since seen images of the building lit up at night and it looks perfect.
After walking around the building, alongside a tour group who all bought dogs with them (it was unclear why this was happening), we walked through some of the EUR district to see what else stood out. The Palazzo dei Congressi looks somewhat reminiscent of the Royal Festival Hall in London and was designed in 1938 to be ready for the World Fair, and remained incomplete until 1954. Another building that caught my eye was a mural that represented the history of Italy. Lots of triumphs, horses, death. That sort of thing. It’s enormous and in keeping with the glorified storytelling of the government.
All is glory – and horses
After a long walk in the district, I couldn’t help but feel just a little bit of dread being around these buildings. Beautiful, yes. But are they comforting and warm? No? They feel, at times, cold and clinical. They are designed to make people feel small and insignificant. Perhaps in that feeling lies a small part of the problem of these sorts of governments. They just don’t feel like they’re for the people, more like the people exist to beautify the government.
Our last stop in New York was the TWA terminal at JFK airport. Getting there was a testament to patience. At Rhinecliff station we arrived with plenty of time for our train only to find it was delayed, and delayed a bit more. Eventually, people at the station started muttering and working out what had happened. A handy Amtrak app showed the train was moving at 1mph and was 18 hours away, so we would be in for a wait. I foolishly assumed another train would come and rescue us but the entire line was buggered, so we got a taxi with a couple who were waiting at the station. They were very modern and suggested we Venmo them the cab fare. I still don’t know what a Venmo is. We took the cab to Poughkeepsie and got the “express” train to New York. It was described as the world’s slowest express train and that was true. It crawled through to Grand Central, sometimes going so slowly it felt like we might be moving backwards, but we got back to the city eventually.
Far later than planned, we got to our airport hotel and hot footed it to the TWA terminal, which I had become obsessed with. The terminal was built between 1959 and 1962, and had a Jetsons-era feel about it; a future full of grand curving lines and optimism for the future. The terminal’s roof was designed in the shape of a wing and corridors in the terminal were created as dramatic tubes. The terminal was dreamed up by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen with an economy that seems perfectly Scandinavian but also exciting enough to make flying from the terminal seem like an adventure in itself.
All the curves
Everything about the design was entirely perfect, save for one vital detail. The expectation was that the terminal would be used by just over a million people a year, but within a year of the terminal opening, one and a half million people a year used it, turning the flowing space into a jumble. The age of the jumbo jet also made the terminal seem obsolete soon after opening and gradually the terminal became less important, by 2001 it was closed entirely.
Everything in its right place
Turning the terminal into something magnificent again appeared to be an impossible task; since it closed, the Port Authority asked organisations for proposals to bring the building back to life. Many ideas for hotels, conference centres and the like were suggested, but they kept falling through. Eventually, in 2014 a plan was presented and accepted, and today there’s a 500-room hotel, conference centre and renewed architectural gem in place. Everywhere inside the terminal are references to TWA. Naturally the hotel rooms have branding everywhere, and they don’t come cheap, with the frugal guest shelling out $261 plus the ubiquitous fees and taxes, coming to $364 a night. For this, you do get a room filled with midcentury furniture, the second most soundproof glass in the world, and as many international and national calls as you can do. To make this feel like a bargain, I’d spend the entire time on the blower, whether the recipient of the call liked it or not.
The sunken lounge
Arriving at the terminal is wonderful, and the elegance of the building shines through the dreck of a busy modern airport. A mixture of people are milling about but my favourite sight of the visit was to see two women in dressing gowns, plastered with the TWA logo, strolling around the terminal, clearly staying at the hotel. They sat near us in the Sunken Lounge bar, reclining in a chair, closing their eyes as if in a spa while surrounded by people using up some spare time before their flight. To their right, a bored kid on his phone. To their left, a family eating food from a plastic container. It immediately showed up the best and most jarring aspects of the TWA terminal. It’s open to the public so anyone can show up but it’s also wildly expensive. And where these two meet up – the whole thing becomes a bit confusing. I am delighted that everything is open to all, but it loses some of the style I was expecting when there. It’s the same on the gorgeous Connie jet, which is now a cocktail bar. The chic style of the jet age, the atmosphere of a Wetherspoons.
The Connie – with cocktail bar inside
However, it’s an airport, and nobody goes to an airport for the vibes, and I will defend that belief as someone who wishes to spend the absolute minimum amount of time in an airport. I have endured many – far too many – exhausting runs in airports simply because I didn’t want to spend enough time in my personal vision of hell.
That being said, would I recommend the TWA terminal to a visitor to NYC? Yes. It’s a one of a kind marvel of travel architecture and I am so glad I got to experience it.
One of the reasons I was keen to go to Woodstock in October was for the leaf season, which I have read lots about and even checked out interactive maps of the best places to see the colours in New York state, most of which we’d missed by early November. In order to get to Woodstock, we needed to head to Penn Station, which is roughly the size of Europe and home to a thousand platforms. I loved seeing the names of where the trains were going. There are locations such as Elizabeth, Lancaster, but then names like Manasquan, Croton Harmon, Schenectady and Poughkeepsie which sound just exotic enough to warrant lots of exploring.
When we found our platform, I fell in love with how American the train looked. It was a sheet of aluminium with windows, or an Airstream caravan on rails. Much like the subway, it was brute and efficient. Whereas British trains are making attempts to look swish with the Azuma’s long nose looking a bit like a much slower bullet train, the Amtrak train just looked like a kid’s drawing of train. It was entirely charming as well as being comfortable.
Train
As we sped up to the giddy heights of not fast, about 40 minutes out of Penn Station, I wasn’t really prepared for just how bright and luminescent the remaining leaves would be. Some were so bursting with colour it felt that people had painted them with a neon marker. It was astonishing and means I need to visit the region again earlier in October to see the best of it. We slowly made our way up the Hudson river, opposite us an endless row of trees in all their glory. Eventually, we made it to Rhinecliff, the nearest station to Woodstock. It’s 18 miles away from the town, which tells you all you need to know about the railways in the US.
Arriving in Woodstock, where we were staying with friends for a few days, I was struck by the beautiful blue sky and how perfect the town looked. Everything was bustling and almost every shop was selling something mystic, vintage or Woodstock related. The festival – the 1969 one and not the disastrous ‘99 version – is important to the town even though it was actually held 40 miles away in Bethel. That’s probably a pub quiz answer.
The trees! The light!
We had lunch at Bread Alone, which says it is a values-driven bread maker and cafe. I can vouch that it was all delicious and didn’t seem evil. We had a stroll around the town, which has a population of 5000 people, so it didn’t take long to see most of it, then we decided to walk up a street which soon had no pavement and was just road, so we turned around and took lots of photos of the colours of the trees. Back in the centre, we found an equivalent of a pub, called Pearl Moon, which was one of the few places open for drinks in the late afternoon. Ah, the humble pub, much imitated but never bettered. It’s one of the few British institutions which can’t be beaten. The music in Pearl Moon was at a loud enough volume to make reading impractical, so I soon gave up.
In the evening, we all went to Cucina, a restaurant in an old farmhouse that just oozed atmosphere, with gorgeous low lighting and long tables designed for eating in groups. It also went hard on the pumpkin-mania that was sweeping the east coast of America. Every table had pumpkins on, of all glorious shapes and sizes. In a concerning development, even the toilets had little pumpkins dotted artfully around the room. I don’t know about you, but when I am doing toilet, I don’t need decorative pumpkins in the room with me. If you find yourself in Woodstock, then do try out Cucina as it was not only a great place to visit but the food was great, with very generous portions of excellent pasta.
Back at our friends, I spent some time on their porch looking at the stars, in a gentle state of wonder. The stars are always there, if you can see them. In London, a starry night consists of experiencing the very brightest stars breaking through the light pollution but here I could see all sorts of stars, such as all the stars whose names I don’t know. I just know there were loads of stars.
View from Overlook Mountain Trail
The next morning I was taken on a hike up the Overlook Mountain Trail, which rises 3,140 feet above the town and I suddenly felt like my city lifestyle had caught up with me. Going up a steep trail for a long time is not what I am used to, so I did what I could to keep up with the pace, but every so often I had to stop and look at a rock/catch my breath. As we progressed up the paths, we came across an abandoned hulk of what was a hotel, which burnt down twice and was under reconstruction in the 1930s when they decided not to finish it, what with the fires and the days of the Catskills grand hotels being over. Being constructed out of concrete let it remain in surprisingly good condition to this day. As a big fan of The Shining, I decided that this hotel was the Overlook Hotel and nobody can tell me otherwise.
Every so often we saw signs reminding us that rattlesnakes might pop out and enliven the morning but once we reached the top, we met a man who was taking the signs down. The rattlesnakes had gone back home, or to their nest, or whatever it is that they do that means they were no longer a threat to us. Still, it added a little bit of danger to the hike. Right at the top of the mountain is a fire tower, which offers sensational views from its vantage point. I made it halfway up and suddenly had to descend. It felt a little too wobbly for my liking and what if a rattlesnake had slithered up the top, just waiting to attack.
Rattlesnakes! Rattlesnakes!
After a long hike, it made perfect sense to walk back into Woodstock and have a sit down meal at Garden Cafe where I heard the same conversation quite a few times, which went along the lines of:
Customer: Do you have real milk?
Staff: We are a plant based cafe.
Customer: So, do you have real milk?
It didn’t matter, everything was great and Garden Cafe is a friendly reminder that vegan food is often much more inventive than meat options. How delicious do indian chickpea blinis sound, for goodness sake!
After this, we went for a stroll in the Comeau Property, which is a beautifully peaceful walk set out across 76 acres of meadows, river walks and woodland. The colours were, once more, glorious with deep blue skies and deep orange and russet tones on the trees. Standing still for a few minutes under a tree was enough for me to realise just how quickly the leaves were falling – and within a few days, all the remaining colour would be gone.
Throughout the day, we saw deer everywhere. Packs of them, just wandering around, looking serene for a split second before panicking and rushing off in every direction. Up in the sky, I enjoyed looking up and seeing all the birds whose names I did not know. However, I was able to take a ridiculously blurry shot of a bird to a keen ornithologist. He told me the bird was a Cardinal which is a gorgeous creature. It has a brilliant red body with a little outline of black around its face and the mix of the bird’s colour with the colour of the leaves was a sight to behold.
I came dressed as the leaves
Later that afternoon, we hurled some more money down a black hole at Early Terrible which was a sort of mystical cocktail bar, set in a cosy log cabin. One thing that American toilets like to do is keep the lighting so low that it’s almost impossible to see what you’re doing in there. You could be aiming at a bin or a startled deer. But the bar was a cool place in which to enjoy the afternoon light and sights of Woodstock.
On our last day in Woodstock, we ventured out of town to Sloan gorge Preserve, which is apparently home to bears, raccoons and so forth, but no bear was forthcoming. As much as I thought I’d like to see one, I do think I would have probably just fainted in panic before being eaten alive, so it was for the best that we didn’t see one. Sloan Gorge is a canyon formed from an old quarry which was in operation in the late 1800s as well as a gorge formed in the ice age. It was a wonderful walk with probably the best trail markings I have ever seen. Most places have a few signs dotted about, so you get lost for days in the wilderness, but getting lost here would take real effort. The paths go on for a mile or so before you’re back in the car park.
Early terrible
After this, we visited Opus 40 sculpture park, which was built over 37 years by a man called Harvey Fite. He dedicated much of his life, having a cracking time making all sorts of marvellous sculptures from the remains of another bluestone quarry. He was once an actor and then changed his mind rather dramatically, travelling to Florence to learn tricks of the trade from sculptors there. Later on, he moves to the site of Opus 40 and then builds a house without plumbing and electricity and sets to making his sculptures. Now it is a warren of different sculptures for everyone to look at and in the summer, the site turns into an open air cinema.
Opus 40
In the evening, we had a meal at Silvia, which was described as “bucks deluxe” by one of our friends. I ignored this ominous warning at my peril. Bread and whipped butter with honey (sweet butter!!) was $15 a portion, and we had two. But it tasted so sensational, it was impossible to not keep ordering. Likewise, the restaurant did Brussels sprouts and they tasted heavenly. The mains were works of art, as were the cocktails. And again, the restaurant was enticing, set in a beautiful building with a lovely wraparound terrace for dining. An amazing meal to end my time in beautiful Woodstock.
I was desperate to go on a ferry at some point, what with New York being a watery place, so we went to the East Ferry stop at Dumbo and we asked to buy a ticket. Buying a ticket in the queue is not possible, so a delightful man told us we could buy tickets “over there” as he wildly pointed in every direction, even the water. The ferry criss-crossed the river to Manhattan on another glorious day. Seeing the skyscrapers loom into view over the water was wonderful as there’s so much of it, though it does give you a chance to see how many of the skyscrapers look pretty rubbish. For every UN building, a symbol of architectural perfection, there are plenty of dusty and grey blocks that offer nothing to the skyline whatsoever.
I love you, UN building
An example of a truly awful building I will pick entirely at random is Trump World Tower, which is a big slap of blah. Totally ugly. We walked and walked through midtown, and it really is a boring part of the city with little in the way of diversion. As we made our way down to the East village, things livened up and the city started to look exciting again. We met some friends that live in New York and we celebrated with moreish apple sangrias and ate well for a small fee at David’s Cafe. Eating outside in the sunshine, in late October, felt quite magical but also a bit odd. After this, we explored Grand Central and I pretended I was in Carlito’s Way, but in a supporting role where I didn’t get killed. Other New York directors are available, but Brian De Palma does it for me.
Grand Central is indeed, grand and central
We tried to see the film Aftersun at the Lincoln Center but arrived a few minutes late. The cinema there doesn’t show trailers and ads so while that was sad for us, it’s a benefit for anyone in New York. The Lincoln Center and surroundings are beautiful and I wandered around trying to recall what the complex reminded me of, and it’s ever so slightly like Kim Il-Sung Square in glamorous Pyongyang. I am sure any Republicans reading this (the chance of that is close to zero) will be livid that I dare say an arts centre in New York looks a bit communist, but that’s free speech for you. Also, Republicans and arts centres doesn’t seem to make sense in a sentence.
In the absence of a film to watch, we walked to Central Park which we spent some time in but saw just a fraction of the park. It was remarkable to see the skyline wrap around the park but then a few minutes walk away you feel far away from the city but never far from Horse turd. The new pencil thin skyscrapers around 57th street are an odd bunch. They almost work but at the same time absolutely wreck the views of the older buildings such as Essex House and the elegant tower just by Grand Army Plaza. Here, the super rich live a life of luxury but also in a building that sways in the wind and regularly leaks. This is some minor compensation for the beautiful views that are no more.
Central Park is very central and is a park
After the park, we walked through theatreland. It was both impressive and oppressive; the sheer busyness and use of lights was overpowering and also struck me as a reminder that while Europe is turning off plenty of lights to conserve energy (though not the UK, because we don’t have a functioning government) America has no such need and if anything, was hurling light and energy in our faces. The sensory overload got a bit much and after a while we felt the need to escape and find a quieter street. Walking past the Radio City hall was somehow exciting just like the first time.
Broadway, overwhelming but gorgeous
We strolled to a cocktail bar I was really interested in visiting called The Campbell Apartment, nestled in Grand Central Station. It is a beautiful wood panelled bar that is the epitome of relaxation. It is a delight of candles and low lighting, with attentive staff just waiting to raid your wallet for an exceptional cocktail. I read up on the history of the room and it has had an interesting past. It was used initially as an office by John W Campbell who worked at New York Central railroad, then it was used as a gun store for the railway police and even a prison for a short period. As a prison, I suspect the cocktails were thin on the ground. It genuinely feels a part of the history of the city and a wonderful place to have a break from the hustle and bustle of the city. I’d say that The Campbell Apartment feels like a must-do in New York if you like cocktails and sinking into blissfully comfortable chairs, but book in advance.
The Campbell Apartment. Cocktail bar of dreams.
Day 4
Our fourth day was another busy one of sightseeing, with the New York public library being the architectural highlight. We joined a tour and a fast-talking-fast-sleeping (her words) New Yorker took us around the building she clearly adored. We were told that the building was created in a beaux arts style many times and was designed to be a genuine palace of the people. Much of the marble was of the highest quality from Vermont and some marble from the same quarry that brought you icons such as the Athens Parthenon. 60% of the marble was sent back, such was the architect’s obsession with luxury. They bought lights from Tiffany and even the waste paper baskets were made to order. It is a stunning building. The main reading room is sensational and one of the best I have ever seen. I am always a fan of great municipal architecture and seeing people researching and reading in such a refined space brought me great joy.
A little part of the magnificent reading room at New York Public Library
Bryant park, just outside the library, used to be known for drug users congregating there but now it’s full of food stalls and people playing chess, which shows you how much New York has changed over the years. After the library, we went to the High Line, old rail tracks converted to a panoramic elevated walkway through the city. It was a very busy tourist site with attendant coffee stalls but also the best value stall in all of the city; I bought 3 good quality fridge magnets for $5. I think it might be, alongside metro tickets, the only other good value in the city. We had planned on going into the Whitney museum but we were tired by all the walking about so we went to see the Oculus, designed by Calatrava. It looks like an incredible fish skeleton from the outside and on the inside, the vaulted ceiling is a modern take on a cathedral. And lo, Calatrava has squared the circle of turning shopping into a religion. In true Calatrava form, the floor already looks knackered but at least bits of the building didn’t fall on me. It was supposed to cost $2bn but it ended up costing $4bn, so it wasn’t the easiest of structures to build but it’s a sensational landmark whichever way you look at it. When standing by Oculus and being so close to Ground zero, it’s astonishing to see the changes that have happened to New York since 2001.
For our evening’s entertainment we went to Nitehawk cinema by Prospect Park. We wanted to experience an all-American cinema so naturally chose to see Aftersun, which is as quiet a film as you can imagine, with Paul Mescal being beautiful in Scottish. It’s a stunning film that requires you to give all your attention to the screen. Unfortunately, Nitekawk cinema does something absolutely mindboggling; you can order food at your seat and throughout the incredibly quiet and delicate movie patrons were bought giant plates of food that are designed to be eaten very sloppily. The staff, it being Halloween, were wearing massive pointy witch hats. So, the pointy hats shuffled along the rows of seats to take orders, then deliver food, then take plates and then, 30 minutes before the film, take payment and then come back with receipts and bits of paper to sign because America struggles with the ease and simplicity of contactless. I didn’t know where to start on my indignation. The near-constant interruption made me wonder if the cinema owners hate film. And yet, despite the trauma, the film was just the most gorgeous thing. Luckily for Nitehawk, the nearby Provini restaurant was an absolutely delightful Italian joint that helped me regain my composure and stop me writing an entirely devastating letter to the cinema owners.
New York, the city that has insomnia and forgets things so named itself twice. What an exciting place to visit after staying within the 80,000 square miles of Great Britain since February 2020. As you might imagine, I was feeling incredibly giddy about getting a chance to set foot into a different country, but one where people spoke the same language and some even carried weapons so as to be much safer.
Before leaving, I worked out all the disasters that might befall me. I expected the airport experience to be a form of torture as that seems to be the vibe of 2022, but it was all very simple. Even our flight was gloriously smooth, giving me the chance to half watch a few films on board and on landing in NY, with my tourist visa because I went to Syria, I wondered what passport control would be like. Would I be sent into a room and grilled or toasted, or waved through with cheery joy? A sort of halfway point is what happened; I was asked lots of questions. Who was I travelling with? My husband. Where is he? Er…he was behind me but now… he isn’t. How much money do I have? Nothing because it’s all on a card? Where am I staying? In Brooklyn!
Welcome to America, sir!! And on we went.
I want one of these in my home
Getting from JFK to our Air BnB in Brooklyn – a journey of about 20 miles – took forever and via a more-complicated-than-is-right route. We took an airport shuttle to Jamaica and then instead of exiting the station, we had to buy a ticket so that we could exit the station. However, we got to use the very glamorous ticket machines which just look gorgeous. Then, using MTA services, we were directed to a train platform. Or a subway platform? It’s unclear. We weren’t on London’s integrated TfL network anymore so it’s anyone’s guess if the MTA logo is simply a ruse. The travel card looks like the Weetabix logo so anything could happen. It turned out that we actually needed to buy a ticket for the Long Island Railroad from somewhere far from the platform. It was not the breeze I thought it would be. Once on the train, the carriage emitted a foul smell like hot vomit and on looking to my left, I saw the offending item dribbling down a seat. We moved on, and saw many people dressed up as ghosts, Scooby-Do, prisoners of some war. Oh yes, the extended Halloween weekend was in full flow.
New York does Halloween well
We arrived at our lovely Air BnB after trying to locate it using just brains and an offline map. Hurling our bags to the ground, we immediately headed out for food at Alta Calidad where it being something like 2am UK time and 9pm NY time, we were asked lots of chirpy questions by chirpy people, responding to them in grunts. The crispy tempura shrimp tacos and pea shoots and crispy chickpea tacos were both excellent but we remained in a slump. Then the crispy brussels sprouts, guajillo honey and lemon arrived. Loving sprouts, this was a genuine life-changing moment for me; these crispy brussels were astounding and drenched in flavour, with the bitterness of the sprouts matched perfectly with the sweetness of the honey and the deep flavours from being roasted just topping everything off. Their tacos were also wonderful and we left very happy people, who through the magic of air travel had eaten 5 times in a day.
We had thought that we could swan around town jumping from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot and not pay £6 a day for data but this failed within two hours. Asking for the wifi password that no one had felt somehow like Richard E Grant in Withnail and I repeating “we’re from London, we’ve come on holiday by mistake!” After a quick drink in a bar in Brooklyn, where we really just wanted to use wifi which didn’t work, it dawned on us that £6 really doesn’t get you much in New York and the people next to us were far too loud, so we went to bed, with their terrible cackles ringing in our ears.
Day 2
Brooklyn in Autumn
Brooklyn, in the intensely blue light and autumn colours, is really very gorgeous. When I first came to NY, ten years back, I thought Brooklyn was a scary place and avoided it. I was shepherding 30 students though, so everything is a risk on those trips. Nowadays, it’s very much a yoga-coffee-ceramics-small-plates-massive-houses sorta place. It’s built for long walks and photo taking but it also has lots of outlet stores so I dived into Banana Republic and Gap within moments, scouring the piles of goods for discounts. In Gap, a clearly ill man wanted my phone number in between coughing fits, so I could obtain some sort of discount. However, he didn’t really understand the whole +44 and take off the 0 bit about phone numbers from abroad, so he proceeded to invent a phone number, advising me to remember this fake number for the future. He then sweated a bit more while his boss fixed the calamity, and I saved $2.
As we explored Brooklyn, I craned my neck at the elegant buildings of which there are many, taking a million photos and sighing at the new builds, which look like LEGO but much more drab. Even so, the brownstones are stunning and give New York a special feeling of its own.
When we went to the Instagram pulsepoint of Dumbo (down under Manhattan bridge overpass) expecting endless hordes of tourists, we were pleasantly surprised to see that it was busy, but manageable. The view is just so glorious, that it was possible to forget the crowds. It’s a perfect slice of architecture that is a must-see in New York. Dumbo has appeared in countless film and TV shows, including Once upon a time in America and Bananarama filmed their song ‘Cruel Summer’ in the area so if it feels familiar, that’s because it is.
After looking at Dumbo and taking 1000+ photos, we headed to the subway towards Park Slope. The subway is ok, but it was like being hit by the 1980s or time travelling into a Brian De Palma thriller. My camera enhanced the garish oranges of the carriage interiors, much to my delight. There was a smattering of people muttering sinister sounding things to themselves but nothing too unnerving. The subway made me think about the Tube’s moquettes, which are charming but through time rub threadbare and will become a breeding ground for germs that will eventually kill everyone. Both systems are crummy in their own ways, but the subway works overtime to look brute.
We had lunch at Olmstead, because I forgot to check the prices beforehand and upon being seated, it felt a bit too late to run away screaming at the injustice of it all. I’m glad we didn’t run, as the food was magnificent. It was a procession of sharing plates and we were advised to have between 6 and 40 plates to get us started. There was beer battered delicata squash rings, more brussels sprouts, this time incinerated a few stops from ashes, some gorgeous mushrooms and shrimps on a plate with shiso, radish, pear and cashew satay. It looked sensational. It was at this point, two days in, that I started to wonder why nobody was congratulating me on my cute English accent and do I know the Queen? It felt weird, considering I travelled across an ocean to be complimented. Sure, lots of British people go to New York all the time, but it just felt unfair.
If a metro system could punch you, this one would
Back at the apartment, we had a restorative nap in the few moments that the drivers on the street below weren’t beeping their horns angrily. The beeping achieved nothing and the cars remained in a state of stationary rage. The only thing missing from this meleé was someone going “what’s the big idea?!” so I dragged myself out of bed, thoroughly unrested but excited at the prospect of more things to look at and more things to eat.
Our evening began with a promenade on the Brooklyn Heights promenade. We walked through street after street of incredible homes, all lit up for halloween. New York does halloween so well. If I am at home for halloween, I pull down the living room blinds and turn the doorbell off. In New York, it’s the total opposite where everyone celebrates wildly. My cynical heart secretly loved seeing the efforts people went to.
Turning the corner onto the promenade, we were struck by the grandeur and familiarity of the Manhattan skyline and bridges. It’s quite overwhelming but it feels like you’re somewhere very important and the lights of the city are hypnotic, even if you do wonder if the lights even need to be on. Are people really working up there?
After this, we were excited to walk to La Vara as the pudding menu looked incredible, and I don’t really care for pudding. It was another sharing plates restaurant, obviously. We were advised to have between 45 and 90 plates to get us started. But those spicy, crispy chickpeas were sent from the kitchen of heaven. The lentils and black eye peas salad was delicious and the star of the show was lobster in a creamy tomato and bomba rice gloop. The puddings were almond cake and chocolate flan with ice cream. We waddled back to our apartment, very content. Having not set foot in Manhattan, I realised that as much as I might heart NY, I hearted BKN a lot, too.
In the summer of 2021, in the wreckage of more postponed festivals, a friend and I decided to have an adventure to echo the insanity of the festival life. So, we went to Eastbourne. It’s famous for its old people, making up nearly a quarter of the population and it’s also really close to the Seven Sisters Country Park. I had wanted to visit the park for many years and so, I did. It was such a good walk from Eatsbourne to East Dean that I did it again in 2022.
Not long after the record breaking heatwave, where I spent a few days hiding from the heat, we headed off to the coast. The weather was incredible; a mix of fast rolling fog of the sort that seems to cancel out your ability to hear anything but the occasional squeal of a bird. It was even stranger that the day in London was all blue skies, yet we could only see tens of metres in front of us.
We started the walk in the centre of Eastbourne, which is a fairly standard south coast town with some great architecture and plenty of buildings that could do with a lick of paint. Along the front are lots of hotels that think they’re a bit grander than they are. The View hotel, has great views if you’re inside it. From the outside it’s a bleak blot on the landscape.
Eastbourne as you approach the climb
If you’re more interested in the walk, heading down the seafront towards Beachy Head gives you some excellent views of the hills you’ll soon start to climb. It’s a relatively gentle ascent to begin with but look behind you, as within minutes you will start to see panoramic views of Eastbourne, or as I think the tourist board should call it, EazyB. Beachy Head, famed mostly for being a suicide hotspot, offers gorgeous views and stands 162 metres above sea level. Nearby is The Beachy Head pub, which has views of the surrounding fields and on the foggy day this summer, you could watch the fog swiftly moving over the landscape. Just outside the pub is an RAF Bomber Command memorial. Beachy Head was the last patch of England the pilots would see before they headed over the channel.
Up the foggy cliffs
Keep walking and Beachy Head lighthouse will come into view. I hold the lighthouse responsible for making me want to become a lighthouse keeper. As a structure, it adds so much to the views and the cheery white and red colours really make it stand out beautifully among the blue-green of the sea and the sparkling white of the cliffs. The company that owns the lighthouse, Trinity House, recently said they wouldn’t repaint it, leading to a crowdfunding campaign that raised the quite remarkable £27,000 needed to complete the task. Who knew that a few tins of Dulux could cost so much?
There’s another lighthouse a little further on that precariously stands on the edge of the cliffs. Belle Tout lighthouse was erected in 1832 and decommissioned in 1902 to make way for the Beachy Head lighthouse. It is now a BnB with some of the best views going. Being close to the cliffs, it had to be moved 17 metres inland in 1999 to stop it tumbling into the sea, but if I were advertising it as somewhere to stay, I’d capitalise on the fear factor that any night you stay there could be your last. A recent cliff fall in 2021 cut off part of the footpath very close to the lighthouse.
Beachy Head
After all the lighthouse love, the walks continue and after a quick 15 minute walk, you’ll arrive at Birling gap. There’s a national trust café here as well as a staircase down to the beach. It’s at Birling gap where you make a turning to get to East Dean. Leaving the National Trust café, you’ll have three roads to follow, and taking the path to the left you will walk down a path lined with houses and at the end of the path, you take a right into farmland. Here you will most likely find yourself alone apart from plenty of sheep. Heading straight on, you will see a red shed to your right. Google Maps will suggest the way to East Dean is to veer left, but if you keep walking straight ahead, you will get there much quicker. There’s a break in the trees on your right, with a path that leads down towards the village, coming out onto Went Way.
Here’s my favourite bit of the walk. You will soon find yourself heading into the village and at the back of the village green. Laid out in front of you is The Tiger Inn, which is to my mind just a perfectly positioned pub. It’s a fairly low white building with a red roof which has a great outdoor section and is homely on the inside. Here you can treat yourself to a drink and some food after what is ultimately not a taxing walk but one full of glorious views. I can’t think of a much better way to spend the day.
The Tiger Inn in sunnier times
After the beauty of the cliffs, lighthouse and the village green, there’s a bus just a few minutes outside the pub that will take you back into Eastbourne. Even the bus route has great views over the town.
I visited Chernobyl and Ukraine in 2018 and had a fantastic time. I hope to go again as soon as I can.
The Ferris Wheel, that never got to be used
It could have been apocalyptic, a bang to set off a chain reaction of bangs that would shroud the world in a pall of radiation, poison the waters of Europe before leaching into the seas and oceans of the world. And yet, 32 years later it’s a tourist spot. Chernobyl is burned into the minds of people as a byword for disaster and as a child I was fascinated by what happened there. Even today it’s seen as a deadly place of silence and mutated creatures roaming the landscape. Having read a chunky history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhii, there were so many missteps and calamities that it’s a minor miracle I’m able to type this and perhaps a bigger miracle that I was able to have lunch in the power plant’s canteen, just a few hundred metres away from where the explosion happened. Recently, a gleaming containment unit was slid into place, soaring above the old reactor and hastily assembled concrete sarcophagus that stopped the radiation completely escaping.
People know about the event itself in the broadest of terms, but often it is the people that lived around the plant who are forgotten, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who worked tirelessly to lessen the effects of the disaster, potentially saving the world but subjecting themselves to personal catastrophes such as a lifetime of ill-health, or a swift but brutal death.
Reading Plokhii’s book, I could visualise a horrific image of the aftermath of the explosion. Chaos everywhere, chunks of radioactive graphite burning all around and people rapidly becoming sick. In a chain reaction, as one person got sick from the radiation, they’d struggle to tell someone coming in what had happened – perhaps also too terrified to even admit what they knew if they did know anything – and that new person would quickly get to work before they fell ill. Imagine that; it’d be like trying to evacuate a sinking ship while suffering from overwhelming sea sickness.
Booking a tour to the exclusion zone is easy; but to maintain the idea of danger, the tour company Go2Chernobyl plaster their website with radiation symbols and a strange promise to take you somewhere extreme, that’s also safe and comfortable. Which is true, I suppose, otherwise nearly 50,000 people wouldn’t have visited Pripyat in 2018. Hints that this isn’t a usual excursion come when you are required to book your trip in advance to obtain permits and the many email reminders that without passport details you won’t be allowed to enter the 30km exclusion and 10km exclusion zones.
We meet other intrepid adventurers on a gloomy day by Kyiv central train station. Nobody makes much of an effort to talk to one another, though that makes sense. We’re not exactly going bungee jumping. While we wait to go, we’re asked if we want to hire dosimeters but we choose not to. Some tours offer this and make the machines look rather scary, but I stick to the belief that this is just a money-making ploy; it’s safe enough to visit, so when the machine beeps a bit, it’s not going to reach a figure that’s meaningful. I absorbed more radiation in my flight to Ukraine from London than spending a day near the power plant and you don’t find the air stewards shoving dosimeters in your face the whole time. An idea for Ryanair, there.
On the journey to the exclusion zone, a video is put on with terrible CGI of the explosion and lots of people sounding earnest or sad, which is reasonable enough. Eventually, when we arrive, I step out and go to the toilet, which is just past the barrier that separates the normal world and the world of the exclusion zone. I witness a strange frisson of excitement as I pass through a little divide between everything being OK and things being not OK for hundreds of years and everything still looks exactly the same. A road leads forever deeper into the forest and nothing seems to be moving, so it certainly scored highly on the spooky atmosphere I thought would exist. We wait for an age at the checkpoint, seeing gorgeous dogs that I wanted to pet but thought better of.
We visit the town of Chernobyl and it looks like you might expect a run-down ex-soviet town to look but with some subtle differences. Utility pipes run above ground because the soil is contaminated so nothing can be buried underground. People still work here, but can only work 15 days in the zone and 15 off due to the build-up of radiation. Inside the town is a museum, filled with dolls and baby gas masks as well as information about what happened. In a side room there’s a large painting depicting the scene where the firefighters were attempting to put out the blazes at the plant. It’s strangely poignant to see it stored away from other items and there was also something very tragic about the painting knowing what we know now, seeing the effort and exertion in their faces. Despite the museum’s artefacts and modern installation, this painting was by far the most immediately shocking and arresting thing in there. Outside in the rain, the Wormwood Star memorial is a long line of names of abandoned towns and a large statue of an angel. Nearby is a statue of Lenin; it’s one of two that remain standing in Ukraine. The other is also in the exclusion zone, making this place feel even more like a timewarp.
Our second stop is the Duga radar station, which is a fascinating place I hadn’t heard about until I booked the tour. Our guides explained that the radar was designed to work out if the Americans had launched a missile, so the radar would bounce signals into the ionosphere, where it would have a look for anything to worry about, and messages would ping back. The scientists built the enormous station, over 100m high, 700m long, launched the system but never managed to get the signals to come back to Duga. It was doomed to fail, but was a colossal project that was so powerful, using up to 10 million watts, that it interfered with radio and TV signals around the world. So, it might not have stopped the Americans launching war, but it could make Coronation Street a bit fuzzy.
Duga radar station
It’s a beautiful sight though and I would have happily spent an afternoon photographing it from every angle. It’s such a cold war remnant; a huge installation that the Russians thought could be hidden. Even as the reactor burned, officials didn’t want anyone to see Duga, fretting over whether to let Hans Blix from the Atomic Energy Agency drive to Chernobyl and be confronted by clouds of radioactive dust which would let him know that the explosion at the plant was worse than they said or fly there, but see the secret installation. In the end he flew there, and I doubt that Duga, as massive as it is, was ever really a secret.
Naturally, being a tourist site, people have put up some radiation signs near Duga, which are fake but during the day we see plenty of real ones.
After Duga, we heard towards the power station itself and get an idea of just how enormous the site is with power lines and pylons stretching out across a great swathe of land. Impressively, a solar panel array has recently been installed and a plan for the future is for more solar farms to be put across the exclusion zone. We also stop by the red forest, so called because it soaked up huge levels of radiation after the explosion, altering the colours of the trees. Almost instantly, this became one of the most irradiated places on the planet and even today, the soil is so contaminated that radiation levels are thousands of times above the norm, so we didn’t stop there for lunch.
We stopped in the Chernobyl power plant canteen for a sloppy lunch of red and brown coloured food that is bought in from the capital and on entering, we needed to go through a radiation scanner, which is nerve-shredding. It’s never revealed what would happen if you were the cause of a terrifying alarm, so I assumed you’d just have to live in the exclusion zone forever, serving up sloppy food to tourists that haven’t set the alarms off. I don’t know how the machines work but mine didn’t beep and for that, I am thankful.
Scary radiation monitor. Didn’t beep.
Next up was Pripyat, the highlight of the trip, because for all the drama that happened at the nuclear plant, the town that has been left to nature is more interesting than the nuclear plant, where people still work. It was over 24 hours after the explosion at the plant that people started to be evacuated, some had spent the day after the explosion relaxing in the unusually pleasant weather. I read about a man who was sunbathing on the roof of his building, delighted at how easy it was to tan that day. He wasn’t aware that his tan was the beginning of radiation burns, which would slowly cause intense blistering across his body. Many people suffered the same fate and for the squeamish, looking up radiation burns is not for you.
Pripyat
Pripyat is not quite what it seems and I don’t think the experience could ever be genuine after such a long time and as it’s so famous. But as the minivan meets the guard in his checkpoint shack and enters the town, we immediately see the blocks of flats almost hidden behind thick stands of trees. Everything feels different, that this is not a town that bears relation to any you’ve seen before; it’s like an English garden city if the developers decided to build inside a wood and leave all the trees standing. Every so often the trees give way and a block rises up, stripped of any windows. If you were there at night, it’d be a terrifying place. Our first stop is the old swimming pool and our guide tells us that we can’t or aren’t supposed to go in, so advises us not to post anything on social media for a few days and takes us inside. It was hard to say if this was a trick to make us think we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be or they’re being a bit cheeky. We were told that the pool was still operating up until 1996, used by the liquidators but now you would easily think it was abandoned way before that. All the windows are gone, the pool long emptied and the structure is slowly decaying. Some of the group clamber up the diving board but I find myself interested in the large swimming pool sign on the floor that reminds me of the atomic logo with people swimming around it. There’s a clock still hanging on the wall but like everything here, it doesn’t work.
Later we visit and cross another group of tourists, armed with their dosimeters which aren’t making any noise. We head into a school that feels like it has been dressed for us, almost like a film set. Rows of windows frames are left open at the same angle for that pleasingly consistent look. Maybe for Instagram, a classroom floor is littered with children’s gas masks for the emotional sequence and school books are left open on pages with the benevolent face of Lenin staring out and others show soviet kids in the woods. It’s incredibly photogenic and I can’t stop snapping away. Late on, our guides show us before and after pictures, at one point showing us that a field we were in was once the town square. Nature has completely taken over much of the city with trees bursting through concrete, turning the old sports stadium into something more like a wood. We poke around the supermarket, which once was able to have signs for luxury foods and even have the food in stock, Pripyat being such an important town in the USSR. Near the supermarket the guides get their dosimeter out and poke it near a drain. There is distinct beeping, they explain that nobody knows what’s down the drain but nobody wants to find out.
Inside an abandoned building
Soon, our trip to Pripyat draws to a close and we pass the checkpoint back into the normal world. We wave goodbye to the atomic dogs and I wish I’d seen some atomic kittens for the comedy effect, but you can’t have everything. I think to the future, in my nuclear bunker/nursing home where I tell people that I visited Pripyat and think of what could have been.
I visited Ukraine in 2018, and had a brilliant time there. Naturally, some of the information in my diary will be out of date in 2022 but this is a reminder of what it was like to visit a young democracy and a wonderfully vibrant city.
After the Georgian feast and strolls around Kyiv on day one, my friend and I went back to Communist HQ Hotel to watch some baffling TV before sleeping fitfully all night. Top tip, try to eat before 10pm. Day two began with a leisurely breakfast followed by a food tour with a local, organised via http://tasty-kyiv.com. Putting the food tour early in the holiday is a great idea, so you have a much better idea of the Kyiv food scene.
Kyiv is full of gorgeous architecture
Our guide Tania was a delight, and our tour began by walking through the city centre, talking about what it was like to grow up at the end of the Soviet Union, living in Kyiv during the Maidan revolution and what it’s like to live in a country at war with Russia. From my British perspective, this was a war that had ended after the annexation of Crimea, because it’s not on rolling news. Tania politely rebuffed this, and of course she was right. Since my visit, I have found myself reading stories of a war that is just simmering away, grinding the people down. Take this story of men who can’t collect their pensions because the office they need to visit is through the front-lines. As ever, wars remain hideous in their delight at wrecking everything for no real purpose.
To get to our first stop, we have to pass a building right in the centre of the city that advertises a “Gentlemen’s Club” which is, I’m sure, full of fulfilled women dancing for pleasure and true gents there to support the arts. We arrive in the central food market where anything that can be pickled is there, in a jar. All this pickling makes for great photos and I sneak a few before a stall-holder tells me not to take photos in case the jars get upset, or some such reason. As we move through this palace of pickles, Tania tells us about the traditional methods of storing food that still hold sway today. I can’t say I have a great love of pickled foods, and I leave the market hall with great respect for my fridge. Further on, we see a staple of Ukrainian cuisine, Salo. It’s cold, white pork fat, often served with something pickled and while it looked appealing, I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it. Despite being an aspiring vegetarian, I tried a slice of deer and my friend had a slice of horse which was a no-no from me.
The second stop was a legendary site in Kyiv, the first place in the city to serve up fast food before the horrors of McDonalds arrived. Kyiv perepіchka is a tiny booth on the street that serves up sausage in deep fried dough. You can immediately tell it’s trash food, but it’s so tasty that even when the strip of paper they give you to clean up with simply moves the grease around your face, it doesn’t matter.
Fast food, Kyiv style
We continue our walk and learn more about the city and revolution, before Tania takes us to a restaurant and bar called The Last Barricade. It’s hidden within the discretely ugly Globus shopping centre, right in the middle of where the 2014 protests were. Part of its appeal is that you’ll need some local knowledge and a password to get in. The password is something suitably impossible to say. Tania tried to teach me the words, which I dutifully mangled and we were permitted behind the iron curtain. Symbolism is heavy here, where you pass through a wall to enter the bar and bricks in the building are designed to look like paving slabs pulled up during the most intense stage of the revolution. There are even sculptures of hands by the entrance, suggestive of people working together. We’re told at the bar that all the produce is proudly Ukrainian. It could be easy to think that a restaurant that’s also partly a museum celebrating Ukraine’s trio of revolutions since 1991 is going to be a political meal (our specials, empty promises and lies on buses) but the food is brilliant and it manages to be both a place that succeeds on novelty and on its own terms as a restaurant. We had varenyky, which is a little like ravioli with fillings. The cherry varenyky was worth a return trip alone.
Inside The Last Barricade
On foot once more, we headed to Kanapa for borscht and this walk showed off Kyiv’s unexpected beauty. Architecturally, large parts of the city are an eclectic mix of art nouveau, baroque, Soviet stylings and modern buildings often cheek to jowl so one photo can capture wildly different styles. Alongside this are the many beautiful churches that dot the northern end of the city, making a walk from the centre something worth doing that can easily eat up half a day. St Michael’s Golden-Domed monastery looked timeless in the sun, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it is ancient but the original monastery was demolished in the 1930s and is only twenty years old.
St Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral
Almost opposite is the equally stunning St Sophia’s Cathedral where you can climb the bell tower for far-reaching views. St Sophia managed to avoid destruction, becoming a museum rather than a place of worship. Both are topped by dramatic golden onion domes. Walk just another five minutes and you’ll spot St Andrew’s Church, which sits majestically atop a hill, but it is slowly falling apart so watch out for falling masonry or stressed out clergy.
St Andrew’s Church
The weather was the most perfect of Autumnal days, with the sun casting a glow on everything and the slight smells of wood-burning in the air making us all feel very enchanted with the city. Kanapa tipped us into cosy overload, set in a painstakingly restored 19th century wooden building on the very pretty, and pretty touristy, Andriivskyi descent. Somehow we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Outside was a terrace overlooking a heavily wooded park and I could have stayed there all afternoon. I was a bit worried about eating borscht, maintaining a lifelong distrust of beetroot, but it turns out that I was completely wrong. The borscht was served inside a hollowed out cabbage alongside some bread. The flavours were rich, with neither the sweetness nor the sour cream or dill taking over. I was so inspired by the food that I have since made it at home and it turns out in a past life I was a Ukrainian woman who made this stuff for her family every week. I mean, it tasted really good.
Kanapa
The food tour continued into its fifth hour, so it’s superb value for money. We end at Lviv Handmade Chocolate for a coffee and some of those handmade chocolates they keep banging on about. I bought chocs for my beloved, who is a bit like my mum in the “is it dangerous?” stakes, and one day I’ll let him know that the chocolate I bought, with its fancy packaging, is a delicious local blend of Chernobyl milk and Fukushima cocoa with just a hint of cinnamon. The rest of the shop was filled with all manner of delicious chocolate, which is an ideal mum-present shop. When I saw my bank statement a while later, my supposed largesse was exposed when I was charged under a fiver for the lot. This gives you an indication of just how affordable Ukraine is. I read that it’s the cheapest destination you can visit in Europe and while there are plenty of hipster hangouts that charge more, it’s still a great bargain. Let’s just hope that Ukraine doesn’t go the way of so many cheap destinations, with endless stag and hen do’s. The horror! We say goodbye to Tania, giving her €35 each, a real bargain to my mind when she was so engaging to speak to and made the whole day feel much more than what I had expected.
All of this food and talk of revolution got me thirsty for a beer and as luck had it, I had saved Craft vs Pub on Nyzhnii Val St into my maps and it was a stroll away. En route, we saw more grand buildings and a trolley bus terminus which I always love to see. I have never really understood these things; neither a bus nor a train or a tram. They were fit to bursting with people heading home from work and though tempted to get one somewhere, neither of us wanted to be getting out Google translate on our phones and showing the driver the Ukrainian translation of “how does this work, how do we pay, help us we’re English” so we didn’t bother. Using just our feet, we found Craft v Pub and had a pint of something lovely and cheap.
For our evening dinner, we had a long list of places to go to and were excited about the feast we would have. We hedged our bets on one restaurant, to find it closed so ended up at Kureni, which has many great reviews. Warning bells should have gone off when we saw that the restaurant is within a park, with nothing around it. When we saw the restaurant, we could see the lights were on, but nobody was eating there. It looked like a lair for a Bond villain who has no friends. We were getting hangry, so we tried to convince ourselves that an empty place was exactly where we wanted to eat. The confused-looking waiter quickly flicked more lights on, put on a tv and some music to try and create some atmosphere. In the end, the food was decent. My Chicken Kyiv (at some point, it was inevitable I’d order this) was solid but not spectacular. The Georgian wine was good and the meal was well priced. The tragedy was that we’d eaten so well all day, which meant that day three needed to include some of the best food the city could cook up. Back at the hotel/strip club I plotted for the morning; there would be more churches and a magical-looking soviet construct to visit.
I visited Ukraine in 2018, and had a brilliant time there. Naturally, some of the information in my diary will be out of date in 2022 but this is a reminder of what it was like to visit a young democracy and a wonderfully vibrant city.
At times, I like to stress my mum out. It’s a sort of bloodsport. Not content with worrying her in Algeria, where she shrieked things like “Won’t ISIS kill you? Will you be kidnapped? The Sahara desert?! I’ll stand in front of the aeroplane and stop you!!” I decided to delight with her my plans to visit the site of the Chernobyl disaster and the abandoned town of Pripyat. She was clearly less bothered with this, because she only said she’d block up the front door to stop me sending “radioactive postcards”. I’m grateful she didn’t know about the whole war with Russia thing. 32 years on from Chernobyl, there’s no consensus on Ukraine; you’re either crazy to go or you’d be crazy not to go. Honestly, I think there’s more chance of dying from boredom listening to people worry than there is in going to Pripyat for the day.
Needless to say, there’s much more than the world’s worst nuclear disaster and accompanying deformed animals (the ones I saw looked fine to me) to Ukraine and Kyiv is the ideal starting point to explore. After landing at the airport, where any traveller’s heart will get a little thrill from the unfamiliar language, a taxi ride will swiftly take you through endless Soviet blocks, some of which are atrocities to architecture and others endearingly insane. There are three blocks, reminiscent of giant futuristic hairdryers, by Pozniaky metro station that equally delighted and disgusted me.
Hotel of dreams
We were staying at a hotel that is simply one of the best slices of modernist architecture I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most stylish hotel I’ve stayed in, from the outside. Hotel Salute is a cylindrical beauty that reminds me of the Capitol Records building in LA, but with a slightly sinister edge, partly due to the circular windows at the top of the building that give a feeling of being spied upon. It should have been more akin to a skyscraper, but due to arguments during the design phase, it was cut in half. It remains a building that has a sirens call of “photograph me”, which I did at every opportunity.
The Salute’s lobby is a wonder of shiny metal panels that could be lifted from a sci-fi film, at the point when we meet the inhabitants of an evil alien ship. It’s a lobby entirely at odds with the exterior. In the evening, a cardboard cut-out of Marilyn Monroe gets brought out to invite us to see the sexy ladies performing in the room where breakfast is served; as I didn’t take advantage of this I couldn’t tell you if the sexy ladies were writhing over the cold cuts or not.
Hotel lobby of dreams
Our first stop after marvelling and photographing the hotel for hours was Syndicate Beer and Grill. Once again, I make a first stop on an exciting foreign holiday somewhere totally familiar and unexotic. When in Jordan, I took my friend to a bar that served Cottage Pie and young Jordanians danced to Rhianna. At Syndicate, there is no cottage pie, but there is heavy use of neon, bare brick walls and filament lightbulbs that could have you thinking you’re in Shoreditch in 2013. It feels in no way Ukrainian until we order an item on the menu called pickled fries, which sounded interesting. One slight mistranslation later and we received fried pickles which are much nicer than I’d have imagined. We also ordered a nano portion of parmesan fries – the staff should have served them with a magnifying glass, so measly was the offering. The beer was brewed on site and was fantastic. By the end of my second drink, it also struck me that this beer was strong. The steps leading up to the exit had “who’s going to be drunk” written on them. The answer was obvious.
Syndicate Bar and grill
After this, we went to Arsenla metro station, the world’s deepest underground station, which goes 105 metres beneath the surface. Heading down one very long escalator, my friend proclaimed the metro was deep but nothing special. Naturally, the second escalator was just around the corner and when we timed it, the journey from entrance to platform takes 4m 32s. I guess it had to stop at some point before we entered the bowels of hell.
Deep as it is, the Kyiv metro is a wonderful bargain at 22p a journey and it even takes contactless payments. It’s like some futuristic miracle. If you’re in any way interested in the architecture of travel, you’ll find yourself trapped in photograph loops in many of the stations, forgetting what you were supposed to be doing. While no Moscow metro, it’s still a superb system that puts many Western European metros to shame.
Metro
Eventually, our stomachs reminded us we were hungry so we head to a Georgian restaurant, home of my favourite cuisine. Having been to Tbilisi and Batumi, getting to eat this food first-hand, I had high expectations for Shoti, if only we could find it. My downloaded map of the neighbourhood directed me to a building site and then an alleyway. Lots of backtracking later we realise that Shoti is unhelpfully written to sort of look like WOTV with the Ukrainian for restaurant underneath. But once inside, the decor of the restaurant and the logo of the restaurant, in the shape of an Adjarian khachapuri, reassures you that all is well. Shoti feels swish and the staff are friendly and attentive.
We ordered our favourite Georgian dishes of badrijani, khachapuri and khinkali, washed down with wine. The badrijani, aubergine with walnuts and coriander, was as good as I’ve ever tasted it. The khachapuri, a bread made with a sort of pickled cheese, dripped gooey mess all over my plate and was clearly very bad for me but tasted magnificent. The main part of the meal, khinkali, a meat dumpling, was outstanding. By this point, we were too full for pudding. A shame, as Georgian puddings can be very good, but they’ll never eclipse the starters and mains. Former Soviet states seem to have Georgian restaurants all over the place and it’s easy to see why. The flavours couldn’t be any fresher, with heaps of coriander wrestling for your attention alongside cherries, garlic, pomegranate and walnut. The cuisine is far removed from the stodge people often think of when they think of eastern European food. Perhaps it’s simple geography that helps make Georgian food a blend of Mediterranean and Caucasian cooking. Either way, in Kyiv make sure you visit at least one of the many Georgian restaurants. You might realise it’s the food you’ve been missing all along.
There are times that my trip to Algeria felt totally thrown together. Flights were booked there and back, the internal flight was pre-booked, but getting from place to place seemed to just happen because we ended up in the right place, people told us where to go and we had money to get around. To this day, I don’t feel I was ever ripped off in Algeria when travelling around the country, but I can’t say I was shown a price list in advance. Our exit from Timimoun to Ghardaia by coach was arranged by the hotel and they were 110% relaxed about sorting this out, to the extent that I wasn’t even 60% sure they knew if such a coach existed. The moment of truth arrived and a member of the hotel staff suddenly yells at us that our coach is outside and we have to leg it down the street to get on it. Relaxed.
I am struck that we twice needed a police escort in Timimoun but there was also no problem getting on a coach to another town. We settle in for lots of desert landscapes but the sand storm that had been turning the sky orange since the previous night reduced visibility. As we got further into the endless expanse of nothingness, I drifted in and out of sleep and got gently covered in sand from the open window. The road was not wide enough for the coach so we had a few hours of driving on rocks, which was even less comfortable than it sounds.
Shades of orangeThe road was not wide enough
We pulled into a sort of Algerian Moto services for a bit and looking around at the less than salubrious surroundings, I dreaded the loo situation but needed it regardless. In one of those strange circumstances I often find myself in when abroad, the people at the toilet entrance who clearly collected money waved me through, not wanting one dinar. The toilet was clean as a whistle, so I luxuriated in my visit. There was real poverty in the service station; people praying not prayer mats but flattened cardboard, flies buzzing around rancid looking meat, bins that looked like they needed to be put in a bin.
There was no brochure, but if it existed, it wouldn’t include this image
We were headed for the town of Beni Isugen, in the M’Zab Valley. This part of Algeria interested us because it’s a UNESCO world heritage site due to the architecture of the towns, perfectly suited to the desert heat. I loved the buildings we saw as we got closer, which to me looked like little castles, with their crenellations and tiny windows to keep the searing heat out.
New Barratt homes, offering desert livingOur castle/home in Beni Isguen
When we arrived in the town, we had to call our guide who would take us to his place. He arrived in an incredibly old car that had a plank of wood in it to stop something falling off and took us on a high-speed chase through town to a home that was equal parts castle and Tataouine dwelling. He told us to settle in and that he’d be back soon with food. My friend and I are pretty patient people but after two hours, we started to wonder a) where we were b) did we give our passports to the right guy and c) when is the food coming. But the castle was incredible, unlike anywhere I’d ever stayed before. Eventually our guide returned with the biggest amount of food I’d ever seen and later I slept fitfully as dogs howled outside while I lay on 10 mattresses.
The towns of the M’Zab valley are tourist destinations so when we visited the old town of Beni Isguen and Ghardaia, we needed guides to show us round and tell us the rules. A rule they were really keen on was not to photograph the women. They wear a white haik, which is a large cloth wrapped around the body and the women only have one eye visible at any one time. When I saw the women, their hand was clutching at the cloth so that they could see and keep everything in place. It’s such a fascinating set of towns, and incredibly picturesque.
Style guide
Both Beni Isguen and Ghardaia were engrossing and it became clear that the structure of the towns followed a similar pattern. The buildings are tightly packed into a circular formation and at the centre is a mosque. The minaret is a watchtower. UNESCO estimate that these towns were built between 700 and 1000 years ago, with little changing in that time. I was so excited to be amongst all this history, but it all came crashing down when I first spotted some graffiti saying “hip-hop” and then heard a Samsung ringtone. So, it’s mostly an old way of living.
Ghardaia main market squareGhardaia from far away
In Beni Isguen, we walked through a square that was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. We arrived at the time of day where the light struck against the walls in such a way that everything glowed, with the sky a shade of blue that even photoshop couldn’t improve.
Beni Isguen square
In an unexpected turn of events, our guide told us we’d be popping by the celebrations of a wedding. It was split, so we never saw the bride or any women at all, but what struck me was the friendliness of everyone who acted as if two Brits turning up at the wedding was the most natural thing to occur. I loved seeing how the men fussed over kids and how efficient the serving of couscous, meat and veg was. Later, we went to a sort of after-party, where mint tea was served and I noticed that there was always enough for me and my friend – yet more friendliness from the hosts. They shot guns into the air and ground a couple of times, but I think I managed not to shriek and hurl my tea in the air.
Wedding
After a wonderful couple of days in Ghardaia, we made our way to Bou Saada, which is perhaps the least interesting town in existence. It could be that we didn’t arrange for a guide to show us the town or there was just nothing to do, but really, Bou Saada was a pitstop on the way back to Algiers. Our hotel was amazing, with beautiful gardens and a pool but there’s only so many circuits of the garden you can do before madness kicks in. An art gallery provided some relief for an hour or so, but there’s really not much to say.
The birds get a great viewChild. Running.Waterwheel of delights.
My friend told me recently that the reason we wanted to go to Algeria in the first place was because of Constantine, a city with incredible bridges going over a gorge. We never got to visit, but that only makes me more keen to go back to Algeria and explore even more of this fascinating country.
