Cora’s Adventures at Iridescence, the 2026 Eastercon in Birmingham, Part 1: The Flight Out and Roaming Around Birmingham

Over the Easter weekend, I was at Iridescence, the 2026 Eastercon in Birmingham, UK.

I’ve been aware of Eastercon for many years now, but so far I’ve never attended, mostly because Eastercon happens at Easter, which is prime travel season in Germany, when airports are busy and flights expensive. Besides, Easter is also a family holiday and I didn’t really want to leave my elderly parents alone. Not to mention that we have lots of birthdays in my family in March and April, so Easter is often also someone’s birthday.

With my parents gone, I briefly considered attending Eastercon last year. But since it turned out that my birthday was actually on Good Friday, I decided against it.

So why did I decide to attend Eastercon this year. Well, that’s largely due to the Brisbane in 2028 Worldcon bid. They were planning to have a fan table at Iridescence, but needed someone to help staff it. And since I’ve been friends with Brisbane bid co-chair Jo Van for a long time now, she asked me, if I would be willing to do it. And that’s how I came to attend my first ever Eastercon.

An Early Morning Flight

Iridescence started on Good Friday, but my flight went on Holy Thursday, so I would be on time and well rested for the con. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to head into Birmingham proper (since the con venue is on the edge of the city) for some shopping, food and sightseeing.

There used to be a direct flight from Hannover to Birmingham, but that connection no longer exists, so I flew via Amsterdam Schiphol, which is the most convenient hub for me with four flights a day from Bremen to Amsterdam. I opted for the first of these, which departs at 6:05 from Bremen Airport, literally five minutes after the airport opens for business, since Bremen Airport must be closed from ten PM to six AM lest the people who bought large plots of cheap land near an airport that predates their homes be disturbed by planes taking off and landing.

Of course, if a plane takes off at 6:05 AM, that means I had to be at the airport at 4:30 AM at the latest. So I called a taxi for 4:00 AM.  Whenever I have to fly or drive somewhere at such an early hour, I go to sleep in the afternoon/early evening the day before, if possible, then get up around midnight, eat, pack, make final preparations, have a shower, etc… so I’ll be awake and alert rather than still half asleep, when I have to leave. This is also what I did on Thursday morning. Besides, it gave me the chance to watch Artemis II take off for the Moon.

I had my bags packed and was showered and dressed and just about to unload the dishwasher, when I spotted the taxi outside, some ten minutes early. So I hopped in and the taxi took me to Bremen Hans Koschnick Airport. Hans Koschnick was mayor of Bremen for eighteen years as well as a member of the German parliament and EU administrator in the city of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When he died in 2016, they named the airport, previously just known as Bremen Airport and in the very early years as Neuenlander Feld, after him.

I had already checked in online, so I only had to drop off my bag and go through security. The security insisted that I take my laptop out of its sleeve, because there was “other stuff” in there. The “other stuff” was underwear, in which I had wrapped the laptop for protection. In the end, lugging the laptop to Birmingham turned out to be a waste of time, since both my travel laptop and the hotel Wi-Fi were slow as molasses,

The coffee shop inside the security zone of the airport was already open, but I decided not to have a coffee, because I knew it would be overpriced and besides, they would give us something on the plane. So I set down at the gate and waited. I started chatting with an engineer who services industrial kilns and ovens and was on his way to northern Wales. When I mentioned that I was travelling to Birmingham to represent the Brisbane Worldcon bid at Eastercon (Okay, so what I really said is, “I’m going to a convention in Birmingham over the Easter weekend to represent an event in Brisbane, Australia, and to persuade people to travel there.”), the engineer promptly told me that Brisbane was wonderful and that he had serviced a kiln at a cement factory in a city called Gladstone north of Brisbane once. I also chatted with an elderly lady who was flying to Dublin. As I said before, Amsterdam Schiphol is the most convenient hub for people flying from Bremen, if you’re going to the UK or Ireland.

I had a window seat, so I snapped the photo below. As you can see, it was still dark, when the plane took off – the sun wouldn’t rise until 6:35.

The flight from Bremen to Amsterdam is short, only about 40 minutes. There actually was an in-flight meal, but it consisted of a small bottle of water and a coconut macaroon. What’s notable is that the sky was clear when we left Bremen, but by the time we reached Amsterdam, the plane had to descend through several layers of clouds, including very low hanging ones.

Doing the Schiphol Dash

My connection time at Amsterdam was one hour and twenty minutes, which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t, especially not for an airport as sprawling as Amsterdam Schiphol. Even a fairly small delay can easily mean that you miss your flight.

Luckily, my flight from Bremen was actually a few minutes early, did not land on the runway on the other side of the highway (which usually means fifteen to twenty minutes of taxi time) and did not dock on the furthest end of the terminal, so there was never any danger I’d miss my flight, so I still walked briskly to passport control. Thankyfully, the line at passport control wasn’t overly long either and so I even had approx. thirty minutes to sit down at the main terminal and check out the bookshop. There would have been enough time for a coffee or maybe even a sandwich, too, but once again I didn’t bother, because it would be expensive and KLM normally gives you a sandwich and a drink on UK flights.

However, it turns out that in the perpetual quest to save even more money, KLM has eliminated the sandwiches from the UK flights and also the little bottles of wine or beer (not that I would have had wine this early in the morning), so I only got a stroopwaffel and a cup of tea. Sigh, I remember when you’d get an actual meal even on the really short flight from Bremen to Amsterdam.

The plane landed at Birmingham Airport at 8:35 AM, i.e. the day was still beginning, though I’d been up for hours by that point. I went through passport control again, picked up my luggage and headed for the hotel.

Liminal Spaces and the Long and Winding Road to the Hilton Metropole

Birmingham Airport has a monorail, which will take you to Birmingham International railway station, i.e. the airport railway station. Birmingham International station is directly next to the NEC (National Exhibition Centre) and the Hilton Metropole is next to the NEC. So in theory, it should be easily possible to walk from the Birmingham Airport all the way to the hotel.

I said “in theory”, because in practice, the walk was much longer and more exhausting than expected, especially when pulling a suitcase and lugging a laptop bag. For starters, the NEC is huge. And since it was so early in the morning and there were no events scheduled, it was also eerily empty. I pulled my suitcase through deserted hallways populated only by the occasional cleaner and past closed shops and restaurants. The whole place had an extremely creepy vibe – like something out of a horror film.

Once I had made my way through the brutalist behemoth that is the NEC and stepped outside, I looked around for the Hilton. But while there were several large buildings in the vicinity, I didn’t know which one of them was the Hilton. The signposts weren’t very helpful either, since they only pointed out various car parks and something called Resorts World (more on them later). Nor was there anybody around to ask. The only people in sight were some workmen engaged in noisy construction work.

I found a bench, sat down and opened up Google Maps. According to Google Maps, the Hilton should be behind another hotel called the Moxy, which I could see across the plaza in front of the NEC.

So I walked across the plaza and past the Moxy, all the while pulling a suitcase and lugging a laptop bag. Behind the Moxy, there was a large car park. I pulled my suitcase across the car park towards where the Hilton should be, hidden behind the foliage of a small park. There was only one problem. Between the car park and the path that led to the Hilton there was a fence. And that fence had no opening anywhere.

So I had to go back, across the car park and around the Moxy to get to the path I’d seen earlier. And once I finally reached the path that led to the Hilton, I still had to walk through a park and past a campground to finally get to the Hilton. Alas, this was the back entrance of the Hilton, so I had to walk all the way through the hotel to finally make my way to reception. In short, it was a lot of walking – all while pulling a suitcase and lugging a laptop bag.

When I finally made it to reception, the person on duty told me that I would have to pay fifty quid to check in early. Nope, that’s not happening. Also, can I say that I hate being nickled and dimed for any- and everything by hotels and airlines? Anyway, I asked, if I could at least drop-off my bags, which I could.

So I left my suitcase, laptop bag and coat at the hotel and set off again, back through the park, past the Moxy, through the NEC to Birmingham International station. Even though I was no longer encumbered by my suitcase and laptop bag, it was still a long walk. I had also been up for several hours by now and was tired. Besides, I needed to pee.

Accomplishing the latter turned out more difficult than expected, for while there were plenty of toilets at the NEC, most of them were closed, though I finally found one that was open. As for being tired, while most of the restaurants and food stalls at the NEC were closed, I found a Starbucks that was open. Now I don’t like Starbucks very much, but I needed to sit down and I needed some caffeine to combat the creeping fatigue, so Starbucks it was. Even by Starbucks standards, this one was disappointing. Bassically, it was a small counter and worn furniture shoved in a corner of the NEC. But at least the coffee did the trick and I was feeling a lot more awake and alert.

Somewhat refreshed, I made my way through the creepy deserted hallways of the NEC with the buzzing neonlights towards Birmingham International station, where I got myself a day ticket for all public transport in greater Birmingham. I walked down to the platform, where some kind of long distance express train was waiting. I asked an attendant whether I could take that train with my ticket, cause in Germany I couldn’t go on a long distance train with a regional ticket. However, the attendant said I could take the train, so I stepped inside and rode the roughly ten minutes to Birmingham New Street station. On the plus, the low hanging clouds that had plagued my stopover in Amsterdam where dissipating by now and it was turning into a lovely sunny day.

Birmingham New Street

This wasn’t my first visit to Birmingham. I’ve been there several times before. The first time was in 1995, when I was a student at the University of Westminster in London and saw an advertisement for some kind of comic con in Birmingham in an early issue of SFX. At the time, I lived in Harlesden, my tube station was Willesden Junction and the best way to get to Central London and uni was either via the Bakerloo line or a mainline train to Euston station. So I was at Euston a lot and saw that all the trains there went to Birmingham New Street. So I figured I’d hop on the train at Euston, go to Birmingham New Street and then figure out how to get to the con (which was thankfully not at the NEC, but in the city center at what I think was the International Convention Centre). It wasn’t quite as smooth and easy as I imagined it, British trains being notoriously unpredictable. But that was my first visit to Birmingham. At the time, New Street Station was still an unremarkable 1960s structure, the Central Library was still the Brutalist inverted pyramid that Prince Charles had claimed looked like a place to incinerate books (I never thought it was all that bad) and the Bullring shopping centre was still in its 1960s form.

My next trip to Birmingham happened in the 2010s with my Mom and did not involve trains. The old Bullring was gone by that time and rebuilt, New Street Station was under construction with the 1960s interior still there, the Central Library had been replaced by a new building and the old one was on its last legs and they were building a tram, though the old Brutalist Birmingham I remembered from the 1990s was still mostly there. The last time I visited Birmingham prior to Eastercon was in 2015 (I’ve actually written a bit about that trip on this very blog, though it’s mostly about Doctor Who), which in retrospect was one of the last times my Mom was still well enough to travel (the Helsinki Worldcon was actually the last time). By that time, the shiny (in the most literal sense of the word) new New Street Station had just opened, the inverted pyramid was about to be torn down, the shops inside were all gone and the tram had just started running. Apparently, the Brutalist hotel just behind the inverted pyramid is also gone by now, as is the great Nyonya restaurant that used to be there. And yes, I checked if the Nyonya restaurant was still there, since Nyonya food is hard to come by in Europe, though I no longer remember the name.

So let’s take a look at what Birmingham New Street Station looks like today.

The Grand Central shopping centre had just opened the last time I was in Birmingham, though Ozzy the Bull was new to me. He is delightful, though, for how can you not love a giant Steampunk bull?

Birmingham has a thing for bulls and you will see several of them around the city. We’ll meet a few more of Birmingham’s bulls later on, but Ozzy is my favourite. Honestly, he looks like something a mad Steampunk inventor came up with.

New Street Station/Grand Central shopping centre also has several restaurants (and not just fast food stuff either) and shops, including a branch of Foyles. And since I will never pass up an opportunity to browse a bookshop, Foyles was the first place I visited after stepping out of the train into New Street Station. And yes, I bought books, though I was good and limited myself to only two, even though those British Library Tales of the Weird volumes are really tempting. But more on my haul later.

The Bullring

I had a mental list of places I wanted to visit, mostly book and comic shops as well as gothic/alternative fashion stores, the spice stalls at the Bull Ring Market (which is different from the Bullring shopping centre) and Marks & Spencer.

The latter felt a bit embarrassing, because when I was a student in London in 1995/96, Marks & Spencer was firmly “for old people”. The food was good, but the clothes? Nope, that was beige grandma stuff, since they sold some kind of camel hair coat at the time that apparently won a fashion award, but that I found incredibly ugly. Yet that ugly coat was seemingly everywhere. It was the time when they tried to sell Carolyn Bessette (to be Bessette-Kennedy) as a fashion icon to us, when I just found her look incredibly bland and boring and wouldn’t have been caught dead dressed like that.

So actually voluntarily going to Marks & Spencer is kind of embarrassing for me in an “OMG, I’m old” way, though I didn’t even buy anything for myself this time (though – full disclosure – I have in the past few years). Instead, I was headed for the children’s department, because I bought a sweater for the neighbour’s then-baby at Marks & Spencer during the Glasgow Worldcon and the baby’s Mom kept raving how wonderful that sweater was and how great the quality was and that he could wear it two years in a row. So I was planning to get another sweater for the now toddler, so he could hopefully wear it two years in a row again.

Well, it turns out that there was a Marks & Spencer store in the Bullring shopping centre which happens to be directly next to New Street Station. So that’s where I headed next.

Even though I did see the old Bullring shopping centre during my first visit to Birmingham in 1995 (here is a nice promotional film about the old Bullring centre), my memories of it are vague. To me, it was just another Brutalist slab of concrete, rather unremarkable and rundown (it would be torn down five years later). The new Bullring centre, however, is still nice and futuristic, though it is more than twenty years old by now.

I find it interesting that the Selfridges store in Birmingham got a mostly windowless, structured and tiled aluminium facade in 2004 and won awards for it, since in Germany, windowless department store facades that are covered in structured aluminium tiles such as the famous Horten tile are considered eyesores and hopelessly passé and are being torn down and destroyed one by one – often against the wishes of the local populations.

Bremen is set to lose its last tiled department store in 2027 (along with an always busy parking garage, because cars are bad, and a glass-roofed shopping arcade which is only 36 years old), even though many locals want to save the building with its iconic atrium and light sculpture (as well as the shopping arcade and parking garage). But then we have a lot of people, mostly those who vote for the Green Party, who hate that city centers are dominated by retail and have weird ideas about replacing parking garages and department stores with apartments, co-working spaces, repair cafés (really) and maybe some cafés, restaurants and select retail, but nothing overly consumerist and certainly no department stores. And no cars, of course, just bikes and pedestrians. Of course, they won’t have to worry about cars, since no one will want to come to their ideal city centers anyway, because there’s nothing to do. And in fact, I do go into Bremen’s city center less and less as it is, since many shops are closing or have closed, parking is difficult and using public transport if difficult, because the tram frequencies across the aging and crumbling bridges have been reduced. Of course, the people in the right neighbourhoods who voted the right way can’t possibly be inconvenienced by this, so frequencies of the tram lines serving poorer and immigrant neighbourhoods as well as the suburbs south of the river are affected. I never thought it would come to this, but I am disliking Bremen more and more and no, immigrants are not the reason, but white German yuppies.

But while the exterior of the Birmingham Selfridges department store is extremely cool, the store itself can’t hold a candle to the London original. It’s barely a department store at all, just a clothing store. I didn’t even bother to go there, but instead headed for the children’s department of Marks & Spencer to buy a woolly sweater for little Daniel. Then I went to the food hall and got some pre-cut celery sticks for Farah Mendlesohn who’d asked me to get her some. The Marks & Spencer food hall is consistently good and I hate that we don’t have anything like it in Germany.  But then, our department stores got rid of their food departments long ago.

I did get a little lost on the various levels of the Bullring. Birmingham is a hilly city and the Bullring actually stands on the edge of what appears to have been a cliff once and as a result, it’s not always clear where you will emerge. You may end up at the bottom of the cliff, at the top of the cliff or in front of a large glass plane looking down onto the street below. I finally did find the exit which led to the top of the cliff and took in the view.

Below the Bullring shopping center, at the bottom of the cliff next to St. Martin in the Bullring is the Bullring Market, a kind of market hall with lots of stalls where I bought some great Jamaican jerk spice years ago. I did want to check out the market, but first I spotted something else that attracted my attention, namely a Waterstones bookstore.

Since I can never pass a bookstore, I of course went in and took the lift up to the fourth floor of the multi-level bookstore, where the SFF section was. However, before I could get any further than some tables displaying bestselling romantasy (a genre I want to like more than I actually do), I suddenly started feeling faint. After all, I had been up for about twelve hours at this point, eaten very little and walked a lot – at the airport, to the hotel and back and now around Birmingham. And now I really needed to sit down, less I collapse face first onto the table with bestselling romantasy.

Now Waterstones used to have these lovely leather armchairs and couches all over the store where you could sit down with a book. However, these chairs have either been removed in the name of commerce – can’t have people sitting around and buying nothing – or maybe this particular store, located in a tall but narrow building, never had them in the first place. At any rate, there was not a single place to sit down to be found in the SFF department.

However, the bigger Waterstones stores usually have a café on site. This one did as well. The café was on the first floor, so I staggered down the stairs to the café, ordered a moccha at the counter and sat down. And yes, it is telling that I couldn’t just sit down somewhere in the store, but I had buy a coffee first. Nothing against the moccha – I needed a pick-me-up – but people should be able to sit down without buying anything.

Once I finished my moccha, I headed up to the fourth floor again to browse the SFF section. I also bought a book – Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell.

Lunch at New Street

By now, it was past twelve and high time for lunch, especially since I had eaten very little and walked a lot.

Now Birmingham is actually a great food city. It’s famous for its Balti, a specific type of curry that was invented here by Pakistani immigrants. The best place to get Balti is in the so-called Balti Triangle, a specific neighbourhood of Birmingham settled by Pakistani immigrants where – at least back in 1995 – you had lots of takeaways and restaurants offering the iconic curry. By the 2010s, there were a lot fewer restaurants thanks to a tornado which badly damaged the neighbourhood in 2005, though the area was still heavily Pakistani. But while the Balti Triangle is always worth a visit, it’s also quite a bit away from the city center and you need to take a bus to go there, which I really didn’t want to do today.

So I looked for food options in the city center, of which thankfully there are plenty. I knew that I wanted either Indian food – easier to come by in Germany by now, but usually not nearly as good as what you can find in the UK – or Carribbean food, which is pretty much impossible to find in Germany. It turned out that the nearest option was actually a restaurant called Mowgli Indian Street Food in the concourse of New Street Station. So back to New Street it was.

I found the Mowgli restaurant – I think they’re a chain of sorts, since I also saw one in Glasgow during the 2024 Worldcon – and had lunch. I ordered a dish called Diwali Cauliflower, which was delicious, and also had a non-alcoholic cocktail called a Mowgli Twister. I wasn’t driving, but considering how little I had eaten and slept, I didn’t think drinking alcohol was a good idea.

BTW, UK restaurants are really good about asking you rightaway whether you have any allergies. German restaurants will do their best to accommodate you, when you have an allergy (and my food allergy is extremely uncommon, though usually only a problem with desserts), but you have to tell them. The servers won’t ask you.

Forbidden Planet, the Great Western Arcade and the Unreliability of Public Transport

After lunch, I set out again. I decided to leave the Bullring Market for later and head to Forbidden Planet first. It is quite possible to walk from New Street Station to Forbidden Planet, but since I had already walked a lot, my feet were aching and I had a public transport day ticket, I took the tram instead.

There was a tram stop just outside New Street Station. The tram arrived after a few minutes, I got on and travelled two stops. What was more, Forbidden Planet was almost directly opposite the tram stop.

The Birmingham Forbidden Planet is the biggest I’ve seen outside London and extends over two floors. Back when I was at uni in London, the big Forbidden Planet store on New Oxford Street (they later moved to Shaftesbury Avenue) was a weekly pilgrimage site and they got a lot of my money over the years. At the time, there were comic stores in Germany and I patronised them regularly, but I’d literally never seen anything like Forbidden Planet.

Three decades later, Forbidden Planet is still good, they’ve still got a lot of comics, a lot of books, including US imports you can’t always easily find in the UK, and they’ve still got a lot of toys and collectibles.  But extensive as the selection of action figures and other collectibles was, Comic Cave in Hamburg actually has am even broader selection of action figures these days. And so I did not buy any action figures at Forbidden Planet this time around, though I did buy Conan: City of the Dead by John C. Hocking, which includes the elusive Conan and the Emerald Lotus, the most expensive and elusive (and allegedly the best) of all Conan pastiches for years, and the sequel Conan and the Living Plague. I also bought two geeky t-shirts, a Halo Jones shirt and a DC Comics one. The DC t-shirt was on sale for 2.50 GBP, which is a steal.

After I stepped out of Forbidden Planet, I wondered where to go next. There were two goth/alternative clothing shops fairly close by. However, by now I was lugging a lot of bags – since I had bought four books, a sweater for a toddler, two t-shirts and two packs of celery sticks – and didn’t want to buy any more clothes. And goth and steampunk jewellery would likely be available at the con anyway. So I decided to head back to the Bullring and go to the Bullring Market to look for spice stalls.

So I sat down at the tram stop and waited. And waited. After several minutes, I looked at the display and saw that the next tram wasn’t due for more than twenty minutes – on a Thursday afternoon. Now the Bremen tram system is far from great, but on a regular weekday at regular hours, you can expect a tram at least every ten minutes.

I was not going to wait at a tram stop for more than twenty minutes. So I picked up all my bags and decided I would walk back to New Street Station. However, I would first stop for a coffee somewhere, because I was tired, had been up for roughly fifteen hours or so and walked maybe ten kilometers, much more than I usually walk in a day.

So I set off in the direction of New Street Station and wandered into the Great Western Arcade, one of Birmingham’s beautiful Victorian shopping arcades, in search of coffee. But while there were restaurants at the Great Western Arcade, there was no coffee shop.

I had totake a photo of Mr. Simms Olde Sweet Shoppe, because a) it looks as if it has been here since the Great Western Arcade opened in 1876, though it most likely hasn’t, and b) they advertise “traditional boiled sweets” in the window. Cause I have a bit of history with that particular term.

In January 1978, when I was not quite five years old, my parents and I left to spend what was initially supposed to be a few months, but eventually turned into almost a year on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, while Dad was supervising the construction of the some oil platform supply ships there.

I was informed about this around Christmas 1977 and I’m not sure for how much longer my Mom had known. Dad had a way of springing these surprises on us. Now note that I was was four years old (I would turn five in April) and obviously didn’t speak any English.

My parents had procured some kind of educational toy that paired plastic alphabet blocks with green figurines that represented a specific letter. I actually found it on eBay, it was called Busy Blocks and produced by Tupperware of all companies. I certainly had no idea they ever made toys, though we have a lot of 1970s Tupperware, so it makes sense. This game taught me the English language alphabet and such useful words as “monkey”, “elephant”, “nurse”, “queen”, “zebra”, “whale”, “unicorn”, “camel”, “giraffe”, “xylophone”, “yacht”, etc… My parents also taught me to say “I would like to go to the restroom” and decided that was enough to drag me halfway across the world. I honestly sometimes wonder if my parents thought anything through.

However, my four-year-old self was quite worried, a) because I was not allowed to take along my brand-new dollhouse, which I had been given that Christmas, and b) because there was one very important English word I didn’t know and my game with the alphabet blocks and the green figurines couldn’t help me. I didn’t know what “candy” was called in English and that was obviously an incredibly important word. I asked my parents, but they didn’t know either and neither did the little yellow Langenscheidt pocket dictionary (which was bloody useless half the time anyway).

At Christmas, I asked my grandmother who had lived in what is now Thailand (then a British colony) as a kid and who spoke English and had actually worked at the international telephone exchange as an operator in the 1920s, when this was a highly desirable job. And lo and behold, grandma did know the word for “candy”. It’s called “boiled sweets”, she said.

A little later, we set off for Mississippi and I was quite confident about the whole expedition. After all, I could ask to go to the restroom, I knew important words like “zebra” or “unicorn” or “giraffe” (they were kind of useful in knowing what to call the rocking animals on the playground of the kindergarten – the zebra was my favourite BTW) and I knew the word for “candy”.

Now note that my grandmother was born in 1903, had been exposed solely to British English and had lived in Thailand before WWI. As far as she was concerned, “boiled sweets” was absolutely the correct term. However, the 1978 Mississippi, no one had any idea what boiled sweets even were. Luckily, some kids quickly told me that the correct term was candy and I did not have to suffer from candy deprivation.

After we were back home, I confronted my grandma and told her that she’d been wrong. The English word for candy was not “boiled sweets” but “candy”. Also, why would you boil candy? That made no sense at all.

So when I saw the Victorian term “boiled sweets” on the window of that sweet shop, I was immediately reminded of my grandmother and just had to take a photo. Of course, my grandmother died in 1985, but at least in this one shop in Birmingham, they’re still called “boiled sweets”.

After seeing my grandmother vindicated 48 years late, I wandered out of the Great Western Arcade and finally spotted a Costa Coffee Shop. On the square behind the coffee shop, there was also a railway station, Birmingham Snow Hill Station. In fact, the Great Western Arcade was built over the railroad tracks out of Snow Hill Station.

I ordered a moccha and asked the barrista if there was a connection from Snow Hill Station to Birmingham International Station, since that would save me the trek back to New Street Station. The barrista didn’t know and asked a colleague who said, “No, there is no direct from Snow Hill to Birmingham International.” I needed to go to New Street. “Well, is there is connection from Snow Hill to New Street Station?” I asked. The barristas weren’t sure, but said I should either take the tram or walk.

I was just around the corner from Birmingham Cathedral, but a) I have visited the cathedral before, and b) I was tired, my feet were aching and I had a bunch of heavy shopping bags. It was also past three PM by now, so I decided that Birmingham Cathedral, the Bullring Markets or any other sites be damned, I’d go back to the hotel.

I wandered back through the arcade to the tram stop and this time around, a tram showed up after maybe eight minutes or so. I returned to New Street Station and asked a guard from which platform trains to Birmingham International would depart. Then I went down to the platform, found a seat and waited. And waited, And waited.

Eventually, I looked up at the announcement board and saw that the next train wasn’t set to arrive until a whopping 35 minutes later. Of course, this was a regional train and I could probably have used a long distance train like I had on the way out, but I was done with unreliable public transport. I also wonder whether my issues with Birmingham’s unreliable public transport are a common issue – though British trains being somewhat unreliable to the point that you never know whether you’ll get a snazzy express train or an aging regional train that will stop at every milk bottle, as we say in Germany, has been in issue since the 1990s at least – or whether it was a special situation due to the holidays or maybe a strike or a wave of illness. But whatever the reason, I thought, “Screw this crap! I’ll take a taxi.”

Since New Street is a major railway station, it does have a taxi stand. There’s also one at the Bullring or maybe it’s the same taxi stand. At any rate, during my last visit to Birmingham, I dropped my Mom off at the Bullring, because I had something to do somewhere else and she was tired, and told her to find a coffee shop and wait for me. I also gave her ten or fifteen pounds – more than enough for coffee and maybe a snack. However, Mom spotted a taxi stand just outside the Bullring and decided to take a taxi back to the hotel, which was actually in walking distance and less accessible by car than on foot. At the time, I was quite cross, a) because Mom had unnecessarily wasted money on a taxi when she could have walked (though her sense of direction was terrible, so she probably wouldn’t have found the hotel anyway), b) I wandered all over the Bullring, checking out every coffee shop and looking for her, and c) she didn’t answer the phone, when I called her, because she didn’t recognise the ringtone of her phone as a ringtone and wasn’t very familiar with mobile phones anyway. “It played nice music,” she later told me, “And I was wondering where the music came from, until a woman at the hotel said it’s probably my phone.”

At the Hilton Metropole

So I took a taxi back to my hotel and in spite of rush hour traffic, the taxi still got me to the hotel well before the train would even have arrived at New Street. Of course, I also had to pay 25 pound or so for the privilege, but thankfully I can afford that now.

At the hotel, I retrieved my bags and got my room key. I also saw that Eastercon registration was open by now in the lobby of the Hilton, but there was a queue and I was thoroughly tired after almost seventeen hours awake and on my feet.  So I went up to my room, unpacked my bags to get to the toiletries and then took a much deserved nap.

Ninety minutes later, I awoke somewhat refreshed. Unfortunately, Iridescence registration was already closed by this point, so I thought, “I’ll register tomorrow,” and decided to go in search of dinner instead. Note that while Birmingham offers some excellent food options, most of them are either in the city center or the Balti Triangle. The Hilton Metropole, however, sits somewhat isolated on the edge of the city, surrounded by the NEC, Birmingham Airport, an arena, a couple of other hotels and Pendigo Lake. And considering how unreliable public transport had been earlier that day, I was not going to head back into the city center for dinner.

I had joined the Iridescence Discord and also a WhatsApp group for Eastercon participants organised by friend and fellow Galactic Journey member Fiona Moore. So I saw that several people were heading to Resorts World on the other side of Pendigo Lake. So that’s where I headed as well.

Resorts World or Las Vegas Style Tackiness in Birmingham

For those who don’t know (which included me until last weekend), Resorts World is a chain of casino/entertainment/leisure complexes run by the Genting Group of Malaysia. There are several in South East Asia – including one in Manila, which was the target of what was initially assumed to be a terrorist attack, but then just turned out to be a robbery gone terribly wrong in 2017. There are also several Resorts Worlds in the US, including one in Las Vegas, and exactly one in Europe, namely the Birmingham Resorts World.

But while I wasn’t very familiar with the Resorts World brand, I am familiar with the Genting Group and we here in Bremen don’t like them. Cause in 2015, Genting purchased the ailing Lloyd Shipyard to build ships for their cruise line. This sounded like a great deal for the Lloyd Yard, except that Genting also purchased three shipyards in former East Germany – in Rostock, Wismar and Stralsund. Genting then moved the lucrative building of new cruiseliners to the East German shipyards and left only auxiliary work for the Lloyd Yard and also laid off 400 people. Now note that Bremen’s shipyards, most notably the Vulkan Shipyard, have been screwed over in favour of saving former East German shipyards, including the bloody Volkswerft Stralsund, in the 1990s and 2000s and even earlier, the West German government flat out abandoned our shipyard industry and didn’t give a damn about jobs lost, while every single unprofitable coalmine in the Ruhrgebiet was deemed worth saving. So in short, Bremen shipyards have a long history of being screwed over and we also have long memories. I have only just forgiven the coalmines of the Ruhrgebiet (who really aren’t to blame for the shipyard crisis of the early 1980s) and I still haven’t forgiven Costa Crociere for driving the Vulkan Yard into bankruptcy and I will never forgive Volkswerft Stralsund for being deemed worth saving while the Vulkan Yard was not. Genting was just another company that came in and screwed over our shipyards in favour of those in East Germany. BTW, when covid severely impacted the cruise industry, they screwed over the East German shipyards, too, and actually dealt the killing blow to bloody Volkswerft Stralsund, while the Lloyd Yard is still around, now under different ownership. Just as there are no active coalmines in Germany anymore, but ships are still being built here. So in short, fuck Genting!

However, I needed to eat and unfortunately, Genting‘s tacky entertainment complex on Pendigo Lake did have plenty of restaurant, though most of them chain stuff. And yes, Resorts World is tacky in a weird Las Vegas way and not the cool Las Vegas of the mob era, but the overpriced Las Vegas of today.

If the NEC and surroundings had felt like an odd liminal space by daytime, the effect was even stronger by night, when everything was drenched in neon. Light pollution is apparently not something anybody in Birmingham is worried about, even though Pendigo Lake actually has Canada geese and other wildlife.

Though when I set out for Resorts World, it was still light and the area around Pendigo Lake still seemed pleasant and peaceful.

After dark, this is what the area looks like:

On the inside, Resorts World contains the Genting Hotel as well as several three levels of restaurants and bars, a bowling alley, a cinema and a casino which is supposedly the biggest in the UK. Supposedly, there are also retail shops, but I haven’t been able to find them. Everything is brightly lit and kind of tacky. And since Resorts World was pretty empty – in spite of two cons going on in the Hilton on the far side of the lake – the whole place also had this weird liminal quality.

But see for yourself:

Resorts World supposedly boasts a whopping eighteen restaurants and bars, which in theory means plenty of options. In practice, however, most of the options were international or British chain restaurants of questionable quality. There was a TGI Friday’s (Why, for goodness sake?), Nando’s, Five Guys burgers, Pizza Express, Costa Coffee and something called Dave’s Hot Chicken. There was also a steakhouse, a couple of bars and a pastry shop. As for places where I might actually want to eat, there was an Italian restaurant/pizzeria called Zizzi, a Mexican/Latin American place called Las Iguanas (I think they’re a chain, since I’ve seen Las Iguanas restaurants elsewhere in the UK), an Indian restaurant that looked promising, but was closed, a Vietnamese restaurant and a Japanese restaurant called Karaage. I opted for the latter, for while sushi is easy enough to find in Germany – usually in restaurants run by Vietnamese immigrants – other Japanese food isn’t that easy to come by.

I had vegetable gyoza and tofu yakisoba, both of which were fine. Chili sauce at Karaage is also actually hot.

Via WhatsApp, I learned that Fiona Moore and her party had ended up at Zizzi, the Italian restaurant opposite Karaage. However, we missed each other at Resorts World and made plans to meet up at the bar of the Hilton instead.

After dinner, I walked back to the Hilton and met Ingvar, the Swedish fan who writes the delightful Trigger Snowflake stories for File 770, and another fan called Sarah on route, which led to an extended discussion of the Red Army Fraction and why they were bloody idiots on the shores of Pendigo Lake by the neon lights of a tacky entertainment venue.

I finally did make it back to the Hilton Metropole and the bar, found Fiona and her party and had a pint of cider. There were people coming and going and among many others, I met German fan Constanze Hofmann, Australian fan S.J. Groenewegen, British fans Sue and Guy Dawson and many others.

I had a great time, but since it had been a very long day and I was coming up on more than twenty hours on my feet, interrupted only by a brief nap on the plane and another at the hotel, I went up to my room when I finished my cider and slept soundly, only once interrupted by a nasty cramp in my calf, an issue I’m unfortunately plagued with, even though I took magnesium before going to bed.

And that was the first day of my trip to Birmingham. For my adventures at the con itself, stay tuned.