I woke up feeling fed up again. The reason was self-evident: it was my birthday and I was going to be spending it alone in a foreign city. And not just any foreign city, but Charleroi, one I knew next to nothing about apart from that it was in Belgium. I opened my laptop to find out more. What is Charleroi all about? Charleroi, it turned out, was the fourth largest city in Belgium. It was, by most accounts, a dump, long past its heyday, with some of the highest unemployment rates in Belgium. The city was wallowing in its faded industrial past and only had one tourist site of note – a photography museum. In 2010, a Dutch newspaper described Charleroi as the ‘ugliest city in the world’. More recently, a reviewer of
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