Further impressions
So, after a few more days of wondering around...
This city is a very mixed bag. In parts, there are some beautiful buildings, many dilapidated but as many restored and clearly well-cared for. The suburb in which I'm currently staying with a generous couch-surfer, Otto, is atop one of the city's hills and is a gentrified area of tall rambling town-houses in tree-filled gardens, half way between tram lines 4 (uphill) and 3 (downhill). But today, he took me to see a house that he's renovating on the east side of the city – a place his great-grandfather built before WW1 and which after eight years of legal action, the family reclaimed from its post-Communist occupants, who had let it rot away to the point of falling down.
From the outside, it's extremely ramshackle, but if you look closely, one side of the second floor has new double glazing. Inside are two comfortable modern flats. The rest, though, is still a shell, with bare joists and walls in the course of being stripped back to the 1920s brick and re-plastered. He hopes to turn it into about five self-contained apartments one day, but it's a slow job – and then the garden needs clearing of the resultant rubble, the derelict lean-to shop erected against one end needs to be demolished – once he gets planning permission. It's an epic job.
Even the roof needs replacing; you can see sky through many of the tiles. To Otto's surprise, I noted that they have a maker's mark which includes the old German spelling of Brno - “Brunn”.
Much of the centre is now immaculate, with a pleasing mix of local shops and international ones. Visit the huge Vankova mall, though, and it's the usual bland homogeneous mix of shops in any mall. You could be in Westfield or the Mall of America. Disappointing.
One of the first areas a visitor will see is that around Hlavni Nadrazi – the main railway station. Apart from one or two renovated buildings, this is a drab, battered, ugly grey plaza, where many tramlines converge on the wide road in front of the (actually quite impressive under the grey paint) old main station. Of course, in proper 1970s fashion, the contemporary main entrance is a squat, bland formica affair off to one side.
Behind the station, only accessible via an underpass lined with market stalls selling colourful cheap tat, is a big modern shopping centre with the huge sign TESCO shining above the rooftops. It was oddly reassuring to see a familiar name and the shop has a fairly wide range of foodstuffs (and nothing but food), some under the “Value” and “Finest” brands, and a tiny handful of British imports with Czech/Slovakian ingredients lists stuck on. Lots of meat, very little cheese; fairly poor selection of vegetables. But I will be able to eat, at least. They even took my Clubcard. It's not a cheap place, though.
Upstairs is an entirely separate store offering clothing and cosmetics, shampoo etc. - and a separate, smaller selection of foodstuffs. Weird. The floor above that has yet another separate shop which, if I decode any of the sign aright, does electronics and stuff.
This mixture of old and new is pervasive. Some of the trams are old and somehow manage to look Soviet Bloc; some are gleaming new. Even the old ones have been retrofitted with talking signs that announce and display the next station, with legends in Czech, English and German – in that order. The machine voice sounds to me much like the one on the Stockholm T-bana.
Actually, there are a lot of resemblances between the more old-fashioned bits of Norwegian and Swedish life that I've seen and Slavic. It's hard to pin it down, but from the bread and the stuff they do with it, to the cheese, to the bathroom fittings, to the habit of removing shoes as one enters a home, many things have a distant but distinct Scandinavian feel to them. Perhaps if I had got familiar with Slavic countries earlier, Scandinavia would feel faintly Slavic to me. I think it's more that Scandinavia is closely allied with Western Europe, whereas Central Europe hasn't.
On that note, there are also a lot of little German influences – shops, products, companies. It's not so much a cultural thing, more the presence of a big, rich, powerful neighbour, I think. It's quite handy to me, though – I can decode German labelling more easily than Czech or Slovak, for instance. I think I'm spotting quite a lot of loanwords. Some are hard to identify until you learn the spelling conventions: I bet you won't guess what “čaje” is, but if I were to tell you that it's pronounced “chai” you might know. NOC BUS was uninformative until I remembered it's said “nots”. Think “nocturnal”. Any guesses for “cukr”? “Cibole”?
I am getting the feeling of a city working hard to pull itself up by its bootstraps from decades of extreme poverty and neglect. Bits seem prosperous now, but there are also a lot of drunk old men lounging around the main station all day, dogs on strings and all. There's a visible underclass of people wandering around the centre, dirty, in old clothes, with bad teeth and faces and voices wrecked by smoking and drinking and probably worse. There are some large Western companies with bases here – IBM, AT&T, Alstom, Siemens – but the money isn't trickling down to everyone, I suspect.
Oh, and people still smoke in bars now. It's been long enough that that seems really strange to me.
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