Slovakia - Košice

I nearly left my winter coat at home. How cold could Slovakia be? In the end it was colder than Antarctica; minus eight, and my rucksack was as light as a feather as I needed to wear all my clothes at once.

Things didn’t start too well in Košice. I opened the door to my pension and the handle came off. The room faced an internal courtyard where a wedding reception was in full swing. Wind of Change bellowed from the speakers and shook the cabinets by my bed.

The filmy rain and cold made for an uninviting perception of the city as I walked around later that night. I heard shouting behind me and saw a man running in my direction. My heart jumped but he quickly smiled, returning my umbrella from the pizzeria where I’d eaten dinner. A musical fountain played the Beatles’ Yesterday and the gothic cathedral looked sinister as I hurried back to my pension with its noisy revelers and handleless door.

The following morning brought blue skies and what had appeared threatening in the dark now looked imposing and elegant in the sunshine.

Cantabria, Spain

Santander was full of places to eat. Even vegetarians could dine in public. It reminded me a little of Brighton; the royal-patronised seafront shielding lanes of bars and cafes. In front of the town hall was a shock though; a large statue of Franco astride a horse [admittedly Brighton doesn’t have one of these]. Red paint splattered the horse’s flank, so perhaps not everyone was happy with it. I only stayed a single night because Santander didn’t have the atmosphere I was looking for. Instead I headed west through rural Cantabria, and back in time, to medieval Spain.

The bus dipped among hills of snooker-baize green to Santillana del Mar. Jean-Paul Sartre thought Santillana the loveliest village in Spain. He wasn’t alone; coachloads swarmed through the cobbled streets and perhaps Sartre’s hell is other people quote was also formulated here. I walked to the caves at Altamira; an expertly presented recreation of the original, yet minus the thrill of walking through ancient history.

I stayed in Santillana’s honey-stone Parador [my tenth!]. Across the plaza an English wedding was in full flow and later that night the Parador’s lounge was full of sloshed relatives. I headed to a local bar to watch the Madrid derby; drinking Asturian sidra with the aid of a small pump-barrel to oxidize the bubbles. It looked daft and tasted great.

West of Santillana lies Comillas, a seaside town full of outrageous architecture. The Casa Capricho had an extensive menu, quickly whittled down to a single vegetarian option. The waiter seated me out the back and round a corner just in case my vegetable dish frightened other diners. In any case, I didn’t really come for the food. The Casa Capricho is an early Antoni Gaudi building; swarmed in tiles and turrets, and topped by a minaret.

I walked off lunch along the beach, rolling up my trousers and dipping my toes into the ocean. Cantabria is heavily promoted as Green Spain but today the autumn skies were blue and the sun hung in a haze over the coast. I fell in love with Spain all over again.

Albania - Gjirokaster

From Sarande we folded ourselves into a stuffy bus for the journey to Gjirokaster, high in the hills. Our hotel was a restored Ottoman house, full of charm and cheap as chips. Stone arches, carved wooden ceilings and lacy white covers ran throughout. Our room, unfortunately, had none of these things, so we moved our books and music into the lounge and made ourselves comfortable.

The old town had a brooding presence, swamped in mist and rain. Steep cobbled streets plus sharp corners equaled exhausting walks and juddering taxi rides. The call to prayer drifted over the wind from a rare surviving mosque squeezed among houses. In Enver Hoxha’s time Albania was officially atheist and the country’s brand of nutty communism had its origins in Gjirokaster. A huge statue of the dictator has been toppled, replaced by a restaurant car park, but fresh pro-Hoxha graffiti was sprayed in the streets.

Perched above the old town sat an Ottoman castle. The silver shell of a US fighter jet was on display in the courtyard, ‘shot down’ in the cold war and left as rusting propaganda. Beside the plane but tucked inside the castle was a bar selling Turkish coffee in espresso cups.

There’s no clearer proof of Hoxha’s paranoia than the thousands of concrete bunkers which freckle the landscape. Regimented lines of these grey domes strike across the valley floor between Sarande and Gjirokaster, ready to repel invasion from Albania’s enemies [of which there were plenty]. Yugoslavia, Russia and China were Albania’s only cold war mates. Hoxha then fell out with all of them. Shops in Gjirokaster sold miniature bunkers converted to paperweights and ashtrays; the whole surreal spectacle reborn as tourist tat.

Albania - Sarandë & Butrint

A wiry old man latched onto me as I pulled my rucksack from the bus in Sarandë. “Hotel?” he asked. “No,” I said and shook my head. Ten steps down the road he was hot on my tail, “Hotel?” “No!” I said again and shook my head with more vigour. Still he followed.

For my whole life I’ve been conditioned to nod my head for yes and shake it for no. Unfortunately a shake of the head in Albania is a confirmation and the poor Albanian whose only English word was ‘hotel’ was clearly confused. I walked quicker and he dropped back, no doubt reassured that all foreigners were stupid.

Albania is barely a mile from Corfu at its narrowest and was once part of the same landmass. However, isolationist politics and economic madness have pushed it down an alternative path and looking across the narrow stretch of Ionian Sea, it even looks different; the bald hills devoid of the cypress trees that shade Corfu in green.

There’s an undercurrent of Italian culture in Sarandë but it’s tempered with a third world feel. There are pizzas, gelataries and a passeggiata but there are holes in the roads and cows in the plaza. Our hotel was even named after Mussolini’s daughter, Eda, a throwback to an era when the whole town bore her name. The town also suffers from a cruise ship trade which passes through to the ruined city of Butrint but rarely sticks around in Sarandë.

Butrint is a fascinating place, a vast collection of ruins featuring all the notable European empires. Roman, Greek, Byzantine and Venetian all had a build here and the city is now protected by UNESCO in case anyone else should fancy a go. Even in Summer it was empty of people but full of white butterflies. I think we timed it well; in the distance the ominous orange of the EasyCruise boat was slipping into port at Sarandë.

Coventry

I headed through a typical British shopping center full of tracksuited teens and concrete canopies. Lady Godiva sat outside Burger King and Peeping Tom craned his neck for a sneaky eyeful. I ignored them both and, spotting a priest, followed him into the old cathedral.

Coventry’s cathedral was flattened in the second world war. The Allies revenged its destruction by pointlessly razing Dresden to the ground. Both cities have dealt with their ruins in different ways; Dresden rebuilt her Frauenkirche whereas Coventry has left its church open to the heavens and built another next door. Both are symbols of their respective skylines and the cities are formally twinned.

On a blue-sky August day the bombed-out interior was popular with lunchtime office workers. Linked to the old church was the new one; designed postwar by Basil Spence in bricky modernist style. Inside, the windows trapped the midday sun and I had to look up just to make sure it had a roof. Most churches ask you not to use a camera flash but in Coventry you didn’t need one at all; one cathedral was open to the sky and the other full of sunlight.

Spon Street is an attempt to cluster the city’s medieval architecture into one area. St John’s Church, the source of the Sent to Coventry phrase sits at one end but several of the timber-framed cottages have been relocated from elsewhere in the city and fast food signs have been tacked onto many of the fronts. One of the more sympathetic conversions housed the Tin Angel. It was both record shop and café, all mismatched furniture and paper flyers. 60s garage rock filtered through from the adjoining space and it reminded me of my student days and how much I miss places like these.

Folkestone Triennial

The Triennial is an interesting idea; a rich businessman gathers together a collection of modern art, throws it up in the air over Folkestone and sees where it lands.

Mark Wallinger focused on the Somme. Folkestone was the main departure point for many of the 19240 killed on the first day of the battle and the artist numbered a stone for each soldier. Kids clambered over the stones while their parents wondered if they should show more respect. But hang on; was this even a war memorial?

Further along the clifftop, I sat on a bench overlooking the sea as a loudspeaker hummed into life sharing poignant letters between lovers and Somme-bound soldiers. I looked across the channel to Normandy on a hot summer’s day and couldn’t begin to imagine the trenches.

Tracey Emin’s bronze baby accessories were a popular quest. They’re tucked away under benches and over railings; a tiny sock or a dropped teddy bear. They were harder to find than the mobiles of plastic sunglasses in the Metropole ballroom or the illuminated talking head of a sign stating “HEAVEN IS A PLACE WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.”

I initially picked up a false impression of the town with its Creative Quarter, neon installations and wholefood cafes. Behind this façade lay the prosaic Folkestone; a working-class port with plenty of chip shops and chintzy b&bs. There was too much wasted space serving as overspill car parks. Two communities were here; a young art crowd in the cafes and the families drinking tinned beer on the beaches.

People talked to me as I studied my Triennial map. “Do you know where you’re going?” asked a lady on a bench, noting my hesitant walk. “Yes”, I lied. I just couldn’t bring myself to ask an octogenerian, “where is the mobile science fiction library?”

Frinton-on-Sea

This was my first visit to Frinton since childhood and I headed straight to the beach. I lay my towel by a groyne and propped my Agatha Christie book in the sand. Groups of lads arrived around midday, drinking Red Bull and playing keepy-uppy. Plastic footballs soon homed-in on me [“sorry mate”] and once the barbecues began to fire up, I surrendered and took my pinking limbs into town.

A tiny low church sat on the headland, the smallest in Essex and the first-built of many in the town. At the back stood a small remembrance garden cloaked in shadow and buzzing with bumble bees; a sunken haven of plaques on benches and respite from the May sunshine.

Frinton was the scene of an interesting modernist architectural experiment in the 1930s. It was never fully realized and so the remaining houses stand out amid the bungalows and bricks. Its legacy is a microcosm of the English attitude to housing. Some owners have bought-in to the wider idea, adding art-deco furnishings and striking ornaments. Others seem to have reacted against the whole movement, attaching porches and slate roofs. Why buy a striking white-cube box and then plonk a pitched roof on top? Why not just buy a house with a pitched roof?

Frinton's chip shop & pub are no longer seen as proof of the apocalypse. I stopped at a cafe promoting herbal teas and asked what they had. “Calamine” said the young waitress but luckily it turned out to be Camomile.