4 Bs: Bhopal, Bars, Brno, Book

This week two new blog posts went up, the first on Wednesday to mark the 36th anniversary of the beginning of the Bhopal disaster in India on 2/3 December 1984. It still stands as the worst accident in the chemical industry in history. Some 40 tons of the pesticide methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from the city’s Union Carbide plant creating a deadly ground-hugging cloud that soon reached the residential areas adjacent to the complex. Over 2000 people died a gruesome death during that night, many thousands more died later from the after-effects.

I visited Bhopal as part of my trip to India in December 2016/January 2017. In fact I was in Bhopal at Christmas. I had a guided tour on Christmas Day which included the Remember Bhopal Museum and a visit to the memorial next to the plant, but the guide would not let me enter the compound, even though that would have been easy, physically speaking. There were huge holes in the wall surrounding it through which a person could comfortably pass – and locals do this all the time. The site is abandoned, but not completely deserted. Kids play in it, men sit around in informal gatherings – and all that despite the fact that the plant has only half-heartedly been cleaned up. In the museum there are photos on display of dusty labs with vats and jars clearly marked with the “toxic” symbol. Of course I would have stayed clear of such obvious hazards, but would have liked to get closer to the rusting MIC-production facility. But my guide kept insisting that it’s illegal and that there were guards and if you try to bribe them (not uncommon in India) they’d get into trouble. Why this rule did not apply to the locals was not explained.

Since I couldn’t get into the compound, I had to make to with zooming in from the outside from a couple of good vantage points. And the blog post featured a few examples of the photos I took that day. Thinking about it now, even though I couldn’t get into the perimeter of the plant, I think this was still probably one of the darkest things I’ve ever done at Christmas (although visiting the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng on Christmas Day 2008 and going to three genocide memorials in a row on Christmas Eve 2010 may have been even more extreme).
  

Then on Friday it was finally time for the themed post decided on in our latest poll, the result of which I reported in the previous newsletter. The winner, by a comfortable margin, was “dark tourism & bars”. The outcome was another rather long post featuring 18 photos!

Of course, the word ‘bar’ is ambiguous, as a few commentators also pointed out in their votes, and I had actually factored that in from the start. So the post had two parts, the first about bars as in those steel bars that inmates are behind in prisons. A few examples were given, from Robben Island, Alcatraz, the EL-DE Haus with its basement Gestapo cells located in Cologne, the Stasi prison at Bautzner Straße in Dresden and the former KGB prison in Potsdam. Plus it featured the barred access to the staircase to the former Platterhof at Obersalzberg, the mountain resort of the Nazis’ inner circles, in particular Adolf Hitler.

Then the post moved on to the second, and longer part about ‘bars’ in the other sense, as in places to drink in/at. So this section occasionally took on a somewhat lighter tone but still all places featured were linked to some dark aspects. It started with a sign to the bar in Barentsburg on Svalbard, a place that is quite an oddity: a Soviet (now Russian) coal-mining settlement in a territory that belongs to Norway – so during the Cold War two enemy countries peacefully shared the island! The second bar was the Kentucky Bar in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. At the time of my visit Juarez had the very dark reputation as the world’s “murder capital” (but on a Sunday early afternoon it felt safe enough and I didn’t spend long there). This was followed by the Goldene Bar in Munich, whose golden decoration and wall paintings go back to the Nazi era, though no Nazi symbolism features in them; instead they feigned an internationalism that the Nazi ideology never had in actual fact. Staying with Nazis for another example, the next bar featured was Ernst Udet’s private on-board bar cabinet from his plane, which is now on display in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin. The photo was the one reproduced here as the lead image above. Udet, a former World-War-One flying ace like Hermann Göring, was persuaded by the latter to join the Nazi party in 1933 and help develop the Luftwaffe. He did so but hated the bureaucracy, increasingly fell out with his superiors and took to alcohol abuse. He committed suicide in 1941 after the Nazis had invaded the USSR, which Udet believed was a big mistake. Rarely had a Nazi had such prophetic foresight – or drawn such drastic conclusions from it.

Switching sides, as it were, the next bar shown was from Britain, namely a reconstruction of a wartime bar at Bletchley Park, the place, now a vast museum, where Alan Turing and his team of code-breakers managed to decipher the legendary Enigma machine, which significantly contributed to the Allies’ victory in WWII. This was followed by a Soviet bar, namely the mock Georgian wine tavern that forms part of the Stalin bunker in Moscow. Another Soviet-related bar followed, namely the Valuta Bar at the Viru Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, which used to be the city’s Intourist Hotel, built specifically for foreign visitors to the USSR. After the end of the Soviet era it was discovered that the entire hotel was bugged and had been constantly under surveillance by the KGB. Somewhat lighter, but still related to the communist era, there was a photo taken in the bar of the guest house on the Croatian island of Brioni, which used to be the private summer resort of Yugoslavia’s long-time leader, Tito.

This was contrasted with a photo involving the other end of the historical-political spectrum, namely a right-wing dictatorship, more specifically that of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The featured photo was taken in the bar of a (now closed-down) German restaurant in Santiago de Chile, which amongst its OTT decorations had a veritable Pinochet shrine in one corner. Another cult-of-personality-celebrating bar came next, namely The Pub in Valletta, Malta. This was the place where legendary actor, heavy-drinker and hellraiser Oliver Reed had the final binge session of his life during which he collapsed and then died en route to hospital. The bar is still full of Ollie-Reed memorabilia and they even sell a T-shirt listing his long “last order” of that day. Before you ask: yes, I couldn’t resist the temptation and bought one – but I avoid wearing it in public. Btw.: “dark tourism and dodgy souvenirs” should be a topic for a blog post here at some point – I have quite a collection of items eligible for that theme.

The penultimate bar featured took us back to Spitsbergen, Svalbard, this time to the hotel bar of Pyramiden, another former Soviet (then Russian) coal-mining settlement that is now mostly a ghost town. This bar is in fact the world’s northernmost! I went there on my birthday back in 2012, and the Russian barmaid even gave me a small bar (!) of Russian chocolate as a present when they found out it was my birthday (hey, here’s a third meaning of ‘bar’ that I hadn’t thought of when composing the post!). And to drink in style in such a Soviet time bubble we ordered two shots of ice-cold vodka – which cost a fraction of what you’d pay on mainland Norway even for a small beer. I don’t normally drink vodka, but on this occasion we thought: when in (de facto) Russia, do as the Russians do.

And the slightly cheeky finale eventually brought both meanings of the word ‘bar’ together within one single photo. It was taken at an S&M-themed bar in Budapest, Hungary, many years ago (the bar probably doesn’t exist any more). It showed a teddy bear in bondage gear behind bars, namely in a cage standing in one corner! And before you get the wrong end of the stick: no, I’m not into S&M, but my wife and I found it so quirky a theme for a cafe/bar that when we found it by chance we just had to spontaneously pop in for one drink and take a look (and that photo).
  

Also this week I finally got back to augmenting my main website again. So the latest new chapters freshly uploaded to that site are those I’ve just written about Brno, which has four subchapters, all about underground sites – an ossuary, a Capuchin Crypt, a former prison in the castle’s casemates and a Cold-War-era fallout bunker. Do go and take a look.
  

I also have to do some more work for my book. I was given permission by the publishers to update/rewrite the chapters for places affected by the recent dramatic developments that I also reported here on the blog/newsletter, namely in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Ethiopia.

The former seems more peaceful now, and displaced Azeris are returning to the recaptured lands while in turn the previous ethnic Armenian inhabitants of those lands have now become displaced. For them and for the Armenian side in general, the latest peace deal, overseen by Russia, is hardly a satisfying solution. So whether the peace will hold remains to be seen.

Far worse is the situation in Ethiopia where government troops appear to have captured the Tigrayan capital Mekele, but tens of thousands of civilians have fled into neighbouring Sudan and there are reports of atrocities and of a looming famine. The Tigrayan leadership seems to have retreated to the mountains, presumably with their arms and ammunition. So I wouldn’t be surprised if a long-drawn-out conflict of guerilla warfare follows next. It’s a dangerous situation in which multi-ethnic Ethiopia may break apart and neighbouring players could also be drawn into the whole quagmire.

Also for the book, I have to rewrite parts of the introduction as well, as the publishers would like to have a more attention-grabbing and personal opener for the book, and found my submitted initial draft a little too “academic” (i.e. “dry”). They have a point, I guess, so I will rethink the opener and the structure of the text. I knew all along that this would be the most difficult part of the entire book to get right. So I’ll mainly be busy with this task for the next coming week or three. I will also try to slot in the odd blog post, though. But maybe not so many and perhaps shorter ones. One post that I really should do in this (restrictedly) festive season, though, is one on the theme of “dark tourism & Christmas”. I have already collected some suitable photos from my archives. So I’ll probably post that just before or even right on Christmas Eve/Day. We’ll see.

For now this is all. Have a good remaining Sunday and a decent enough week (difficult for many, I know, under the current circumstances).

Best wishes

Peter