The night before going, we all met up for a drink, and he handed us a list of things to do for the day. Visiting the ghost (i.e. abandoned or never finished) metro stations, views of the slag heap (coal mine waste) and steel plant, seeing the former house of a famous European pedophile... I think you're getting the picture.
Earlier the next morning, we crossed Valenciennes for our 6:30 departure time! Talk about early. We were dropped off at about 7:30am with our friend J. driving off into the steel plant horizon while barely controlling his sinister laughter. Denise and I not at all discouraged managed to find an (almost) open cafe and woke ourselves up with some coffee and waited for the sun to actually rise.
Once light, we set off to explore the city. While not completely desolate, Charleroi does live up to its name. We were in fits of laughter as we took photos with the steel plant and/or the slag heap in the background. We walked past many abandoned buildings and the like. And scurried out of some areas as fast as we could. However, the shopping district of the town wasn't too bad with a few pedestrian only streets and some decent shops (hello, huge Hema!).
After we had enough exploring (and another hour and some odd minute coffee stop), we started on what we had predicted all along. Drinking. Denise and I have made a list of things we want to do before our time here is over. One of the things on this list was to try five new beers. We joked that we'd have this accomplished (and then some) by the end of this day. Well, we weren't too wrong. We had three slightly strong new ones by the time we met back up with J. We bemused him with our hilarious stories of our adventures in Charleroi over yet another - you guessed it - beer.
After downing our beers and Denise and I having a much warmer welcome than J (better to not be French when in Belgium), we went off on a driving exploration of Charleroi. We saw the steel factory at night, a memorial to pedophile victims (no comment), a metro stop with what seemed to be no actual metro, a church on a barge, and other random sites. One thing is for sure, we couldn't stop laughing.
Finally, we decided that we had enough, and we had actually survived 12 hours, so we decided to head home. What a day! We have gone down in Valenciennes history as the girls willingly spending a day in Charleroi just for fun.
Just to give you an idea of the sites of Charleroi...
The steel plant
The slag heap (terril in French)
You make it sound not so bad! I guess having a friend along makes it fun though, I bet all alone it's pretty boring. And the beer probably helped too!
ReplyDeleteThat's an impressive slag heap! Ha ha! That reminds me of doing "Le tours des tours de Calais" with a friend one time. We basically walked to every tower we could see on the horizon in Calais. All of them were churches that were closed on a Sunday. Man, Calais is a dump (well, between the hideous ugly port and the hideous ugly residential areas, I do remember some quite nice gardens, to be fair). Ah, Ch'Nord, you are so beautiful.
ReplyDeleteSo funny! I've had that experience here in France when I did that American "thing" of making plans with the intention of not actually following through!
ReplyDeleteI've put myself in some boring and weird situations but nothing as entertaining as your tour of the "ugliest city in the world"! LOL!
PS - Love that you're blogging again! :)
@Andromeda, that's what we kept telling people! It's not actually that bad. That said, I don't think I'd actually ever want to live there.
ReplyDelete@Gwan, haha. Love it! It seems there are a lot of "gems" in this area.
@Ella, more like drunkening making plans and then realizing how much of a bad idea it actually is, but it was fun especially after a few beers in the system. And I have some more posts planned for the next few days.