airline used for its aggressive press adverts along the lines of ‘Pissed off with Sabena’s high fares?’ There’s a deal on offer I cannot refuse: a bus ticket and a train ticket to anywhere in Belgium for ten euros. I approach the ticket office in the airport terminal and ask the bored guy inside for a return ticket.
He stares back at me. ‘To where?’
I too stare. ‘Why, back here of course.’
There are three buses outside. One goes to Brussels, one to Charleroi and one to the car park. There is much confusion. Folks who really want to go to Gare du Midi will be deposited in the long-term. Irrespective of my primary issue with going to Brussels (it’s full of Belgians), I am not taking the Brussels bus because I have flown here. I will go to cosmopolitan Charleroi, first metropolis of Wallonia, third city of Belgium, located in the province of Hainaut. Population seventeen, including one dog, in peak season. The glamorous Line A bus takes me to Charleroi in ten minutes. The landscape looks like one of those roadside signs you see for industrial estates, the ones with rows of warehouses and plumes. Chimney stacks here belch smoke into the grey sky. There are many small hills, each perfectly formed with neat peaks, unnaturally so. They are covered with trees, hiding something dirty. Slag heaps.
I am aware Charleroi has suffered from depression and it’s starting to have the same effect on me. This is the Black Country, with important steel, glass and coal mining industries in the nineteenth century. You know the sort of place from Monty Python and the Hovis adverts. Folks here had to get up before they went to bed, walk twenty miles to work barefoot, and eat rough gravel rather than muesli for breakfast. Times here are still hard. Unemployment here is 20 per cent, twice the Belgian national average. I alight at the train station and receive funny looks from the puzzled locals. Yes, we are the people who choose to come here for our annual holidays rather than risk a sunny sandy beach with talented top tottie in southern Spain.
Charleroi was founded in 1666, built as a fort by the Spanish King Charles II and later abbreviated to Charle-Roy. Charles II was a four-year-old child placed on the throne after the death of his father Philip IV. I bet he made some inspired decisions in the first few years of his reign. Free Farley’s rusks and late bedtime for all. It takes some time to get my bearings and orientation in the city. Okay, so I get lost. It reminds me of the time a friend went on a motoring holiday in the UK’S South-East and he and his wife got lost on the roundabouts of Poole. He eventually pulled over and asked a local how to get out of Poole. To which the bemused local paused for thought and replied that first he would have to be in Poole. And don’t ever ask anyone in Ireland for directions. Their response will be, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here if I was you.’ This is a derivation of what is known as Irish Logic, another example being the guy who drinks in one Dublin pub because the pints are so cheap and tells his mates, ‘Sure the more I drink, the more I save.’
The population of Charleroi is 200,000 and all of them drive their lead-spewing cars around the city’s ring roundabouts in a 5pm rush-hour frenzy. I am not sure where they all come from since there is nowhere to leave. There is one office tower block in the city and it’s an incomplete eyesore with scaffolding. The refurbishment is half-finished and it’s so ugly I’m not sure which is the new half and which is the old half. I don’t know what people do around here, apart from engaging in an ongoing competition for the worst parked car in the city centre. I attempt to cross the teeming Boulevard Tirou at the zebra crossing. This is an important test in a new city. Either they will allow pedestrians to cross or run us over. I step onto the first white marks and a local almost takes off my lower leg. Drivers take aim for pedestrians in these parts.
Place Charles II is the heart of the old city and is quite a climb. I recognise the square immediately. The last time I saw it chairs were being thrown through bar windows and the police were spraying water cannon jets over the tourists. It was Euro 2000, when soccer supporters came to play hardball. I sit and wait until an enterprising beggar speaks to me and asks for a few euros. I decline his request but admire his excellent French. Rue de la Montagne is a cobbled pedestrian thoroughfare which links the upper city to the lower city, otherwise known as a sheer vertical drop disguised as a shopping street. I come to rest at Le Pieton café at Rue de Dampremy, the oldest street in the city. The café name is appropriate because I have been walking for miles. I wonder perhaps if there is a sister café a few streets away called Le Pieton Mort, near a zebra crossing. I have a coffee and a big crêpe. A bloke always feels better after a decent crêpe.
Along the way back to my hotel, important sites are marked with monoliths in the shape of upturned oars with text. Near the back of the train station I see a few more local oars, plying their trade. Please do not go to Charleroi solely for the nightlife. It’s Tuesday and 8pm but everywhere is closed or empty. I think the government organised a civil defence exercise for a simulated germ warfare attack and perhaps asked the population to stay indoors for the duration of my stay. Chez Walters bar only has one drinker inside and it looks like Walter himself. A trendy Italian bar I saw open at 4pm is closed as darkness settles. The one and only cinema is doing a roaring business so this is conclusive proof. The highlight of my evening is watching a driver parking his car illegally on a curb. A crowd gathers wherever I stop in the street. I have a paranoid fear of dining in empty restaurants. Either I get poisoned or ripped off. In absolute desperation I dropped into the McDonalds. They do a good Big Mac but they made me wait ten minutes for fries. I suggest if you go there you telephone in advance so they have the fries ready when you arrive.
In a few hours I have done Charleroi. Or rather it’s done me. Next morning I check out and cross the Sambre to the train station. I have a train ticket and I’m not afraid to use it. The next inter-city train to Brussels is due to leave at 10.07am. At 09.52 an IC train arrives at the correct platform. It looks like my train but it cannot be because it’s so early. This is not Germany. I ask the guard, who confirms it is my train. I tell her it’s fifteen minutes early. She shrugs, ‘C’est normale.’ Not where I live, dear. When we depart in the opposite direction, I am the only passenger facing the wrong way. Charleroi is the end of the line.
In Brussels in the mid-afternoon I go to Gare du Midi to catch the bus back to Charleroi airport. The timetable advises this bus serves two flights, one to Dublin and one to Rome Ciampino. I am anxious since this bus can hold a maximum of a hundred people and a Boeing 737 holds 189 people. There seems to be some imbalance here. I make sure to get to the bus on time, to get a seat, to just be on it. I am very early. Low fares airlines love anxious passengers. They are on time. The bus journey takes an hour. It takes an hour to get from Heathrow to Central London by tube, reinforcing the fact that the only airport actually in London is the City Airport in London’s Docklands, used exclusively by suited City Blackberry users. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about the location of this airport. Within a minute I exit the bus and check in.
At the departure gate a couple of Belgian teenage girls study an Irland guidebook excitedly. They are the frequent-flyer Generation Y’ers who fly, not because they want to, but because they can. They are young, young enough never to have lived without Vodafone and DVDS, email and IMS, Playstation and Gameboy, Yahoo! and Google, and pan-European low fares air travel courtesy of Ruinair. But I am from a different generation, where only wealthy adults had mobile telephones and nobody outside of academic and research laboratories possessed an email address. A URL was a really exotic address. Amazon was a river in South America. Orange was a bright colour. A googol was the technical term for an enormous number, a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. XBox, eBay and iPod were typographical errors. An instant message was something you sent via a bloke on a motorbike. No one wanted to drive a Mini. There were little shops on the High Street called travel agents and Ruinair was a small Irish airline which lost money annually and which most Irish people were sure would never amount to much more than an embarrassment.
17.17. A Ruinair Boeing 737 lands and flashes by the huge plate glass window at speed. Such relief.
