europe

They Do Things Differently in Helsinki

/ Richard Senior / 1 Comment

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Whole sides of salmon sizzle on the grill at a stall in the marketplace down by the harbour. There are stalls with baskets of lingonberries, bilberries, cloudberries and cranberries under brightly-coloured awnings. There is reindeer meat and handicrafts from Lapland and fur hats for epic winters.

The sun sparkles on the waves in the harbour where a woman sells freshly-caught fish from her boat and a full-rigged sailing ship rocks at its moorings and a deckhand monkeys up the mast and guffawing young men putter off in a motorboat and the Soumenlinna ferry backs out of its berth and a yacht glides in with its staysail pregnant with wind.

Old Detroit cars throb down the North Esplanade past the rattling trams. It is rare to see them in Europe, at least in any number, but they do things differently in Helsinki.

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Senate Square, a block from the harbour, was supposedly modelled on St Petersburg, by a German architect, in the familiar neo-classical style. Yet its confident simplicity seems quintessentially Finnish.

Helsinki’s architects have drawn from established international schools, but interpreted them in their own way. Bold statements are rare. Helsinki is not Riga, nor Barcelona. But clean lines, smooth curves and clever details are commonplace. Everything, moreover, seems harmonious, as if the city had been planned all at once instead of evolving over two centuries.

The ethos extends beyond architecture. Design is to Helsinki what fashion is to Milan. The design district, spread over twenty-five streets north and west of the harbour, has something like 200 shops selling deceptively simple, often revolutionary, furniture, homeware, lighting and glass.

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On almost any street, you can find a store selling chairs so radical and yet so practical, it is as if centuries of chair designers have been going about it all wrong. You can find gastropubs selling craft beers and salmon and harissa burgers with pimientón-dusted fries, and restaurants with cool white walls and blonde wood tables and sautéed reindeer with lingonberries on the menu. Yet you can walk several blocks before you find an ATM. They do things differently in Helsinki.

Wherever you are in the city, you are never more than a few blocks from a park. They are not so much ring-fenced from urban development as blended seamlessly into it. You can cycle round the headland, stroll along the water’s edge watching the paddle-boarders, use the outdoor gyms, or sit with a picnic and gaze at whimsical sculptures. There are public saunas dotted about the centre and even the cheapest hotels, even backpacker hostels, have their own; many Finns have them at home.

Across the bridge from the city centre, past the iconic Hakaniemi Market Hall, the traditionally working-class Kallio district is now full of character cafes, organic food shops and hipsters. The boys wear Breton jerseys and Romanov beards, the girls vintage dresses and brogues; everyone wears hats and tatts. There was a guy swanking round in jackboots and an officer’s cap worn at an unmilitary angle, and another in the trousers and waistcoat of a three-piece suit and nothing underneath but tattoos.

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They do things differently in Helsinki, the capital of the nation which gave us the jollity of Sibelius and the irritating Nokia Tune, and Angry Birds and the Egg chair, a historically progressive state which had universal suffrage before anyone else but New Zealand, and which – in the Nordic social democratic tradition – built a comprehensive welfare state in parallel with a robust economy and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.

Some say that it is the most liveable city in the world. I saw no reason to disagree with them.

© Richard Senior 2015

Forget the Cuckoo Clock

/ Richard Senior / 3 Comments

 

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I blame Orson Welles. Him and Graham Greene. That monologue from The Third Man lodged in my mind:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I had been all over Italy, and I had been to Vienna and ridden the Wiener Riesenrad, the 1897 Ferris wheel beside which Welles’s character made his speech. But Switzerland had never appealed enough when I had to shoehorn my travelling into a corporate holiday allowance. I imagined it as a dull, pursed-lipped, fur-coated place full of banks and insurance companies.

But this trip was more about the journey than the destinations and Switzerland was on the way home.

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I was not expecting to like Zurich much. I envisaged bloated, smirk-faced men who do something important in banks snarling around town in Ferraris; and haughty women striding between luxury shops. They were there, all right. But so they are in London. There is a lot more to Zurich too.

Narrow lanes, cobbles and city walls; buildings painted in faded pastels, dazzling sgraffito, wooden shutters, ornate carriage lamps; a tinkling fountain in every square; shiny black shop signs with the names picked out in gold leaf; a charming deli, a bierhaus, a coffee shop. Sonorous bells, clanking trams, the 6.2 burble of an SLS AMG. A river cutting through the middle of the Aldstadt, emptying into a lake, bordered by a park, reaching out to snow-dusted mountains.

It is far more relaxed than I thought it would be. Bearded hipsters everywhere, funky bars, abstract art, a bedroom DJ mixing EDM above a fusty old whisky shop. There was a man in white tie and tails playing something tragic on a violin in front of a Henry Moore; and another parading outside an optician’s dressed as Charlie Chaplin, for reasons of his own. There was Cabaret Voltaire, where Dadaism started in 1916.

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I sat at an outside table by the river, where the cheesy smell of tourist fondues hung in the air, idly watching as the trams rattled past. I had a fleeting image of passengers facing each other across tables, as at a restaurant, sipping glasses of wine. Surely not? I paid more attention to the next dozen trams and, in each, the passengers were sitting as they would in any other tram anywhere else in the world, and I began to wonder if I was hallucinating, and why. But I saw it again at the stop in the morning. The Fondue Tram, they call it. They serve up cured meats, fondue and wine as the tramcar circuits the city.

I liked Zurich a lot but I was running short of time and had to move on so I took the train to Lucerne; and that was lovely as well. Another river and lake, more distant mountains, cobbled streets and ancient walls. Half-timbered shops, Belle Epoque hotels, the sharp spires of the Hofkirche, a covered wooden bridge from 1333 with its octagonal pitched-roof tower. And, in a country reckoned to be ultra-conservative, a couple in their forties snogging like teenagers in a square in the middle of town.

There are chocolates, Swatches and Swiss Army knives in every third shop; but not so many cuckoo clocks, because they are actually a German tradition. Switzerland, too, was a belligerent, expansive power at the time of the Borgias, and not at all democratic until late in the nineteenth century. Orson Welles was wrong.

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I asked in the station about trains to Berne. “On the hour, every hour, takes an hour,” the lady said. At least one of the popular ideas about Switzerland seemed to hold up.

© Richard Senior 2015

Another Day in Dresden

/ Richard Senior / 4 Comments

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There was a rail strike across Germany and I was stuck in Dresden until after the weekend. It is a lovely city, despite the things it has been in the news for of late; but I thought I had seen as much as I wanted to see.

I borrowed a bike from the hostel and cycled downtown as the lights were flickering on in the stores in the mall which shadows St Petersburger Strasse. Burger King, McDonalds, Ibis, Starbucks, TK Maxx and Fitness First, then across the road an apartment block from another age, another country. Just under the roofline, there is still a trace of the words which used to be there: der socializmus siegt, socialism is winning.

I cycled over the c-c-c-c-c-cobbles in the A-a-a-a-a-lstdat, between the grimly beautiful buildings – towers, spires, domes, statues, blackened sandstone, opaque glass – then crossed the Augustus Bridge and rattled down a flight of steps to the path along the bank of the Elbe, which I followed to see where it went.

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Away from the city, it meandered inland and brought me out in the middle of a suburb and ushered me over a bridge and back onto the opposite bank, where I picked up the path and followed it again.

The autumn sun brought out the crowds and I dodged strolling couples and scooting children and overtook giggly teenagers cycling at walking speed. But I was overtaken in turn by serious men on serious bikes with sprayed-on lycra, and others with panniers and maps and more fluorescence than a motorway maintenance team. There were castles high in the hills on the opposite bank. A steamboat chuffed sedately down the river. Here and there were clusters of half-timbered houses, and once a middle-aged couple ballroom dancing alone in an empty car park.

The path undulated through the countryside, past old industrial buildings and through a park, and ended up in Pirna. A Sunday lunch crowd sat outside restaurants with hefty lager glasses; an old man stood on a corner by a bierhaus grilling bratwursts and stuffing them into buns. I cycled up and down the narrow lanes, between pastel-painted buildings with Gothic arches and Baroque spires, in the shadow of the castle at the top of the town. It seemed that neither guidebooks nor town planners had heard of the place.

These are the best days, sometimes: the days which should not have happened, the days when nothing has gone to plan and you are still somewhere you should have left, or are somewhere you should never have been; the days when you have already seen the sights and eaten at the restaurants and done the activities and are just wandering aimlessly to fill the time.

© Richard Senior 2015

Seeing Berlin by Trabant

/ Richard Senior / 1 Comment

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A man in the old East Germany went to the showroom to buy a Trabant.

“Come back in thirteen years,” the salesman said, “it’ll be ready for you then”.

“Can we make it the afternoon?”

“Certainly, comrade. But why?”

“The plumber’s coming in the morning.”

The VEB Sachsenring Trabant was a gift for anti-communist propaganda. It looked like something from a 1950’s cartoon and had an engine better suited to a lawnmower: 600cc, 26 brake horse, 0-60 on seven day’s notice. It was not really made of cardboard, as rumoured in the West, but some panels were made of a plastic reinforced with old wool and other sweepings-up. It appears in most lists of the worst cars ever built.

I had always wanted to drive one.

I was in Berlin and poking about near Checkpoint Charlie when I happened on an outfit which ran self-drive Trabant tours.

Mine had been pimped up with a soft top conversation, electric windows and a metallic pink paintjob. But it still had the skinny original wheels, and the little engine was standard. It was as Spartan inside as a race car. The speedo went up to 140kph, which was as ambitious as any of the DDR’s production targets.  Next to it was what might have been a rev counter, but did not seem to do very much.

There was a hefty rocker switch for the lights and a few knobs which I think were just there to fill space. A flimsy stalk protruded from the steering column: up and down to indicate and forward for the horn, which worked one time in four. There was a sturdier lever on the other side for the gear change: forward and down for first, then up for second, back and down for third and up for fourth.

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I knew that the engine was two-stroke, but I still laughed when I started it up and it ring-ting-tinged like a moped. Then a cloud of blue smoke engulfed me. The gearbox growled and struggled against me as I tried to wrestle it into first, but I overcame it with the sort of brute force the Stasi might have used on a prisoner.

There were six of us in convoy, following a guide who called out instructions on a one-way radio as we made for Potsdamer Platz. It was the Piccadilly Circus, the Times Square of the Weimar Republic, but was all but levelled in World War II, then bisected by the Wall and left as a vacant plot. Now it is ringed by skyscrapers designed by an aristocracy of architects.

It was busy with commuters on their way home when we ring-ting-tinged past; and in my pink Trabant with the roof down and my arm draped over the door, I hammed the self-satisfied look of the bankers you see snarling round in Ferraris. They looked at me as if I was being serious.

We drove on towards the Brandenburg gate, a symbol of partition, then of reunification, now gorgeously lit with video projections for the Festival of Lights.

As we headed towards and over the river, some of the Trabants got stuck at the traffic lights and Audis and Volkswagens slipped in between them, incongruous as bungling spies. “We have some capitalist cars in our convoy,” the guide warned over the radio.

He set off from the lights and turned left across traffic, and I slammed it into first, then second and scuttled across after him and forced a corpulent Mercedes to stop. PARRRRP! went his big bourgeois horn. Neep-neep went mine in response.

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We stopped and got out on Unter den Linden to look at the light shows on the cathedral, university and opera; then set off again, heading deep into the old East Berlin. We screamed through Alexanderplatz, past the TV tower, and on past the East Side Gallery, through Friedrichshain with its legendary nightlife.

I had fought my way up to fourth gear by then, and with my foot flat down and the engine howling, I must have been doing at least 30. Yet I was having more fun than I have had in much faster, pricier cars.

We met another Trabant tour going the other way and everyone waved and cheered and neep-neeped at once. It might have been a scene from a propaganda film in the days of the DDR.

(c) Richard Senior 2014