Name & location of the mess

In full rotten beauty

How it will bring you down

First aid if you wind up there

1. Neo nazis

To say that Zwickau has a neo-nazi problem would be a polite understatement. Zwickau is a neo-nazi problem.

When it came to light that several of unresolved killings and bombings in Germany were in fact the deeds of a neo-nazi terror cell it was also discovered that Zwickau had been the home base of the terrorists. If you now ask how a crew of nazi terrorists and their obvious network of supporters can operate so freely and unhindered then your question alone will tell you a lot about the political climate in the all too cozy town of Zwickau.

Namely that another city more right-winging than Zwickau would be something that has still to be invented, as the Germans say. German nazi terrorism emerged from the area around Zwickau and it perfectly blended in with the locals there. “A lovely person” was what a former neighbor had to say in court about the head of the nazi terrorist clique, a woman who blew up her house in order to destroy evidence (picture).

2. Snitches, penny pinchers and state-worshippers

And there is more. Located in the most ruthless state of the former ‘socialist looney bin of Eastern Germany, Zwickau is a posterboy for every negative cliché you have ever heard about Zee Germans. Penny-pinching stinginess, narrow-mindedness, state-worshipping like you haven’t seen and the famous dull vibe of Germans, all that is taken to the second and third power in Zwickau. Ask somebody from Western Germany about his last time in Zwickau and you have a 99% chance his answer will be: “Zwickau? Over my dead body”. Rightly so, I say.

3. Disgusting women

The “progressive” Germans of today think of the GDR, the German Democratic Republic aka the state that always wanted to know what you had for breakfast else you’d go to prison as the epicenter of patriarchy: no female ministers and male-only head of states serves as ‘proof’ for their laughable theory. In reality, the GDR was the epicenter of matriarchy: nowhere else in the world were as many judges, university students, lecturers, professors and union delegates female as in the Red Prussia, as I call it. Needless to say that the now 25 years of ‘Westernization’ had no effect on what had been engraved in people’s minds for exactly 40 years before that. In short, Eastern German women have a sense of feminist entitlement second to none in the world. Only difference is that their entitlement is not of the in-your-face type like you would find it in the US, it is way more structural than individual and thus manages to live on and on and on.

Need proof? Just look at the Eastern German couple in the picture above, stemming from the early 1980s. In case you wondered, that is her leaving him on sunday evening. She is becoming an engineer at the university in the next larger city during the week. The guy stays at home, cooks all meals and cleans the house. And he’s perfectly alright with his role as the stay-at-home pussyboy that he is.

Zwickau, Eastern Germany? Next!

1. Sticking your hand into a hornet’s nest

As already mentioned on the site, Prague during summer is suffering from a heavy tourist-overload, rendering the city useless to anyone who is averse to stag-parties or hordes of picture-happy Japanese tourists blocking your way every three seconds or so.

What could come more natural than to flee the city hassle in order to experience real Czech life in small town nearby? Exactly. Let’s take a break from the tourist-ridden buzz that is Prague during summer and spend a jolly afternoon in one of the picturesque small towns in the vicinity! And so it came that I pointed my finger at the nearest town on the map that was not a village, but also not a bigger city itself. That city happened to be the city of Kladno. I happily set up a plan for the perfect day trip to see the real life of the locals and Kladno seemed like the perfect blend of all I was looking for: mid-sized at about 80,000 people and conveniently located only a 30 minute train ride away. I just couldn’t go wrong with that city — at least so I thought.

2. “Dear sweet mother of god — we’re in Eastern Europe”

True colors started to come out once the slightly run-down commuters train came to a hold. What looked like two deserted railway tracks from the 1940s with an abandoned building next to it actually was the “main railway station” of a city of almost 100,000 people. Needless to say that this “railway station” was not even remotely located in the city center, but several kilometers away.

Walking away from the “railway station” in the hope of getting to the city center on foot brings you past soviet style housing blocks that resemble those in the 2004 movie Eurotrip. If you wanted to express ‘depression’ through architecture then the people of Kladno have done a wonderful job: everything is old, ill-maintained and gives off a deserted, hopeless and depressing vibe. The fact that gypsies who will be argueing loudly in front of the housing blocks make up for the majority of their inhabitants doesn’t add up to a feel-good atmosphere, either.

If you think that this is just me, then little do you know. Even Czechs call Kladno “ugly, dirty, illiterate, actually such a weird city” — I have nothing more to add.

3. Greedy looks and soliciting

Talking about a weird city: In Kladno I did not expect anyone to speak English. And unsurprisingly, no one did.

What some people did speak, however, was German. Considering how much the average Czech person hates Germans, and especially those Czechs who live in cities rather close to the German border — like Kladno —, this surprising occurrence was making things even weirder.

Two more anecdotes to make the point: Once I finally made it to the city center Kladno seemed like a total ghost town with virtually no one in the streets. Wandering around the deserted pedestrian zone I was beginning to think if some daytime curfew had been enacted or if Ebola had just demanded its deadly toll in the tiny city. The only two people I came across were:

1. Two girls who approached me.

At first I thought they were handing out flyers for their concert at the local youth club, but once they dropped the word ‘money’ in an askingly tone I knew something was off. It turned out they were looking for some kind of trade: the small paper sheets they had in their hands weren’t flyers, but food stamps that they were looking to convert into cash.

2. One guy lusting after my equipment.

I still remember the one guy I walked past in the center. Although I was just walking past him without any exchange of words I could sense how his eyes were glued to the used-up digital camera I carried in my hand. With a surpressed grin and a piercing look the guy pretty much resembled Robert De Niro in the famous smoking scene of Goodfellas. I mentally prepared myself for a full-on fist fight over a lousy camera, the least for a dispute. While his eyes were locked on my camera like a laser-guided bunker buster missile it became obvious that our second-long encounter would escalate had I been there at night time. — All that over a 35€ used digital camera I bought on ebay back in 2010, mind you.

I am officially flushing this city down the toilet.

Kladno, Czech Republic? Next!

1. Inner-city checkpoints

Joesph Town, or Józsefváros as that is its original Hungarian name, is not an actual stand-alone city. Moreover, Joseph Town is a district in the great city of Budapest, located in Budapest’s district number VIII.

As harmless as “Joseph Town” might sound, Budapest’s VIII district is anything but harmless. Named the undoubted king of crime in Hungary‘s capital one afternoon stroll through Józsefváros can have you experience more shenanigans than you would experience elsewhere in a whole year. In fact, the local crime rate has been going through the roof in a way that even called the cheap and ever-slacking clowns in uniform to action: in order to combat crime the police placed a mobile police station into Józsefváros’ residential streets (picture). Something that the picture (above, left) does not show you is that the 12 meter long container also comes with a massive 4 meter antenna on top of it, thus making the whole thing look like your average checkpoint in Afghanistan.

2. You are the outsider

Józsefváros is home to Budapest’s gypsy population who managed to create the absolute in-feeling for ‘their’ neighborhood. As if it was straight out Menace To Society the streets and house entrances are teeming with loud-mouthed people loitering and argueing as if they were on a movie set.

The thing is: when you are there it doesn’t feel as funny as it sounds. Why so? Let me give you a quote from an anecdote that you can find in my Budapest travel guide.  The anecdote stems from an afternoon in Józsefváros where I was walking together with a friend. After a heavy rain Józsefváros almost seemed deserted when we were walking to his new atelier that he had just bought in this rough part of town. The quote sets in the moment we walked past a couple of guys standing in front of porch:

“Being outnumbered by a half-dozen and looking completely different than that clique of guys made the whole scene seem like that one from Die Hard With A Vengeance where Bruce Willis is forced to walk around Harlem wearing nothing but a racist poster around his private parts. Only that this time everything was real.

The moment we got past them things changed. They seemed to have noticed us, meaning: they realized the fact that outsiders, e.g. non-gypsies, had walked past them. Their conversation stopped abruptly and their heads turned. “They would have ‘done something’ had it not rained and were they out on the streets for longer” my friend told me as we kept on walking to his studio.”

I can think of funnier ways to spend an afternoon.

3. An overall depressing sight

Here is one more observation from The Ultimate Budapest that really sums up what Józsefváros is about:

“Never in my life had I seen homeless people in such a bad state as I saw them in Józsefváros. Not only were they in a bad physical state compared to the homeless people you see in Western Europe, but what really made the biggest impression on me was that they cultivated the habit of public sleeping. Even especially during the daytime would they sleep practically everywhere. From park benches over the miniature-strip of lawn planted around a tree to outright sleeping on the side walk in a group of three, all cuddled together.

No sleeping bags, no cardboard, but dressed in a ripped apart T-shirt or worn out training suits. Often times they didn’t even wear shoes. If you asked me if I could always honestly tell whether one homeless was actually sleeping or whether he was passed out or perhaps not even alive anymore then the only honest answer to that would be no.”

In sum, you can walk around Józsefváros, take pictures, look at everything and have a jolly-holly time. But go there at the wrong time and one of Hungary’s worst places to live will become your personal nemesis.

Józsefváros, Budapest? Next!

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