Füssen

W e spent five nights in Füssen. We chose to go to Füssen because previous short stops there had shown it to be an area of good walking with lakes and hills and forests. What we did not expect was . . . the Spanish Inquisition – no worse than that, what we did not expect was . . . the hordes of Japanese and American tourists. Why do Americans and Japanese flock to Füssen, rather than, say, Sedbergh? It is because Füssen has – tarran-taraaah: fairy-tale castles, notably Neuschwanstein.

On our first day whole day in Füssen we walked to Neuschwanstein, about forty minutes on a good forest path, over a bridge across a waterfall, through woods, alongside a lake and then having seen next-to no one on our pleasant undulating country walk we came to: the Neuschwanstein car park, or one of them, which was pretty-well full, in addition to which were the coaches, and the service bus from Füssen which runs every half-hour of so, is a concertina bus, and is full to standing with what seems to be entirely Japanese, though actually it isn’t entirely, just seems that way. All this activity is at the foot of the hill upon which Neuschwanstein Castle is located, and to get up the hill you can walk, take a horse-drawn carriage, or go on a shuttle bus. Each of these methods was crowded with people. We chose to walk up the hill, alongside groups of people of all manner of nationalities, and against the flow of an equal number of people coming down.

The road you walk up the hill is the same road as is taken by the horse-drawn carts, which means of course that as well as people it collects rather considerable piles of horse shit, for the carts are numerous. But this is Germany. Germany is efficient, so there is a small tractor which drives up and down the hill, towing a horse-shit collection machine. Someone’s job it is, to spend his working day hoovering up horse shit.

We did not go into the castle. It’s not that old, it was built in the late 19th century for King Ludwig II of Bavaria and has been quite heavily renovated and so is not particularly interesting, but it is a fairytale castle, see, so the people, they flock to see it. And us, we flock to see the people, and are far more amazed by what we see, than they are, I expect, by what they see.

One of the things that the Japanese do when in Füssen, in addition to visiting a clutch of castles and a cable-car, is to sample the local dishes. That’s what you do, if you are Japanese, you sample the local dishes. One local dish of southern Bavaria is a kind of pork shank, or hock. It’ll be the top of the lower leg of a smallish pig, the shank is roasted in the oven and should, to be genuine, have plenty of crackling – not that different in many respects from a British Sunday roast pork though with redder, somewhat juicier, or greasier, meat. It’s very good if you get a well-cooked one. It can be served with potatoes or noodles or cabbage but to be truly rustically traditional you have it with Bavarian dumplings, which are OK, but heavy and bready, a bit like eating stale bread that has been ground up and pressed into a ball somewhat bigger than a tennis ball and cooked with onions and herbs, and you’d normally get two or three of these served with your pork. Very filling.

So what the discerning traveller does is, to hang around the restaurants in Füssen on a sunny evening, when there are lots of people eating at the outside tables, and the I-Spy book 100 points is awarded when you spot a group of Japanese struggling with the pork shank and dumplings, blowing out their cheeks and sweating and mopping their brows and saying ooh, aargh, in an attempt to get the dumplings down their throats. Highly amusing, much more rewarding that some tarted-up castle.

Town mayor tries Country and Western to make gypsies say: Oh no, not that, anything but that!

Belgian town tries out music to drive out gipsies – Daily Telegraph 17 July 2014

T own mayor tries Country and Western to make gypsies say: Oh no, not that, anything but that!

No not really C&W. He slipped up on the genre. Elementary mistake.

There’s a serious problem in France, Belgium and Italy around the issue of gypsy camps. So not funny really.

Fuller report in Italian here: Here’s the Itinerant Bancomat – Il Messaggero, 17 July 2014. This report contains two Italian expressions I especially like, both in the penultimate para – ‘storcere il naso’ is to turn up the nose, but sounds much more expressive, and ‘twittato’ is the past perfect of the verb ‘twittare’, guess what: to twitter (or tweet, if you prefer).

The gypsies were eventually moved on to somewhere else, no one knows where, but it's really just pushing the problem around.

The Itinerant Bancomat

Here’ the Itinerant bancomat – Il Messaggero 17 July 2014 (article in Italian)

I s’pose it had to happen. Some of the (illegal) African beach traders on Italian beaches are now accepting payments by credit card.

This is particularly poignant because, as the article says, many legitimate shops still don’t.

The article also talks of murmurings about articles costing €11,000 for sale on the beach, bought mainly by Russians, who prefer to pay though, in cash.

The Rome Ticket Machine Scam

Il Messaggero 22 May 2014

Women from the Roma camps on the outskirts of Roma – ah, well this is Roma as in gypsy and Roma as in capital city of Italy – have taken to standing by the self-service ticket machines in the metro and asking for a bunce as custodian of the machine. In this way they are collecting a lot of euros per day.

When the railway police try to move them on, the Roma girls kick them and scratch their faces, thus causing the security men to withdraw.

There does seem to be a policing problem in Rome. I think that part of it is that when the people behaving illegally are arrested, there isn’t much clue as to what to do with them. Britain has been much, much better at integration of people from other cultures than Italy has, and seems to get fewer problems as a result.

The Forces of Order – Rome-Style

Il Messaggero 22 May 2014

The illegal street traders outside the Colosseum in Rome are becoming abusive, that’s what comes of calling them abusivi ambulante in Italian. People live up to their name, see.

The story concerns some off-duty policemen who tried to prevent a Bangladeshi trader from blocking the pavement and he told them to piss off. As it says so delicately in the article: ‘To make his point more convincing he lifted up a paving stone and tried lobbing it at the forces of order’. In this interaction one of the policemen was injured.

This is the ‘nth’ incident. To find another you have to go back just twenty-four hours ‘Just one day after the visit of Prince Harry’ Oh no! (I love reading the Italian press). In this incident two municipal policemen were attacked by illegal traders carrying metal bars and sticks, and would have come off very badly had the carabinieri not been on hand to intervene.

At the moment, it seems the illegal traders are winning this particular battle.

Something Truly Precious Holds Its Beauty Forever

SOMETHING WEIRD ABOUT THIS PHOTO:

I scanned this in from the back page of The Economist, 19 April 2014. It’s part of an expensive full-page ad for Patek Philippe expensive designer watches.

Notice what’s odd? The two women have exactly identical teeth.

This sounds like it’ll make a Music Hall song about glamour models:

They went and Photoshopped me choppers,

Now I look even more like a freak,

. . .

At the foot of the ad it says, Something truly precious holds its beauty forever.

Which reminds me . . .

Your beautiful teeth they are most unkind,

Never bit me before but they bit me behind,

ref: Don’t Do It Again Matilda

The full page from which the crop was taken:

The Authorities Upset My Dinner

We went to Patricia’s birthday party last Saturday (22nd). Arriving at the Indian restaurant in smart West Jesmond in Newcastle at shortly after 7pm we found that in addition to our party of fifty-odd people the restaurant was full at its remaining tables on two floors and there was a constant milling around the bar area of people coming to collect takeaways. It was busy.

And coming and going through and among this multitude, eight or ten po-faced people in blue onesies and bovver boots with a label on their jacket saying ‘Immigration and Border Control’, repeatedly walking up and down the stairs and asking things at the bar, giving the evening a kind of Gestapo flavour. It turned out that this was not a jolly wheeze organised by Patricia, this was the authorities seeking out illegal immigrants.

Patricia found a moment to ask the owner of the restaurant, whom she knows, about it. They had been there since five o’clock, he said, opening every cupboard and fridge door, wanting to see into everything. It was difficult when the restaurant is so busy and he was having to apologise to everyone for slow service and what is more if they find anyone who is working there illegally he could be fined £10,000. ‘I do my best, but how can I know whether what someone tells me is true? How do I know if papers they show me are genuine or not?’ He seemed to be taking the stance that if you get caught then it’ll be a business expense of the type that is out of your control, a bit like something getting broken and er. . . would he be able to claim tax relief on the expense? Looking this up it seems that he might, though I guess he would have to argue the case. And of course Ahmed the restaurant boss is right, if someone gives him a dodgy NI number he would not find out it was a made up one or one belonging to someone else for quite some time.

Anyway the Gestapo all marched out at around 9pm, having found no Bangladeshis hiding in the fridge, and Ahmed shrugged his shoulders, it seems these days to be one of the things that, if you are of Bangladeshi origin and running a restaurant, you have to put up with periodically.

I felt outraged. There is a French restaurant next door and an Italian one next door to that. Do they get raided? Admittedly French and Italian people can work here without needing anything more than an ID card, but the staff waiting on and in the kitchen – they could just as easily be Australian. Could it be the black faces that are the ones that get hassled?

It may be that the immigration officers raid Indian restaurants because there is a greater chance of finding illegal immigrants there than there would be in an Italian restaurant, but then Ahmed is well known in the area, people will know that he is running a successful business and wants to stay on the side of the law and get on with running his business.

Patricia somewhat disagreed with my rantings, arguing that immigration needs to be controlled and by raiding a restaurant when it is busy they are more likely to find someone as all hands will be on deck. Which may well be so, but British policing has a tradition of being low-key, of using intelligence and focusing on identification of where the problems are, before charging in with truncheons flying (metaphorically). It all seems a bit too foreign for my liking.

And there is the cost-effectiveness. Eight people for four hours on a Saturday night – to arrest at most a cook and a waiter. And in reality no one at all. Taxpayers’ money. There may be a problem of illegal immigration but this sort of behaviour by the authorities gives the distinct impression that whatever problem it is they think they are tackling, it isn’t that one. Or perhaps I am wrong there, perhaps the intention is to give the impression that the problem is being dealt with through visible presence, a kind of sop to what the authorities believe the people want to see, but if it is that then they are misjudging that too, as follows:

In Nazi Germany, when this sort of thing was more widespread, nastier and more extreme, one reads that the ordinary people mostly said: but what could we do? We did not see this most of the time! And curiously this event is an example of that. Apart from Patricia and the staff of the restaurant, I did not find anyone who had seen any immigration officers. They just didn’t notice them! One man, when I pointed out who they were, said he had half registered them and guessed they might be VAT inspectors. He is a retired vet.

If you happen to bump into the Home Secretary, perhaps you would suggest to her that there’s a problem with illegal immigration out there that needs dealing with. A number of them!