News from Nowhere

The missing link in the account of our European adventures last Easter is the day we spent in Utrecht. That's a day in the sense of 24 hours: our strategy is to give ourselves one last stopover reasonably close to the ferry, and we had chosen Utrecht as the place to do this. As it turned out, the drive from Aachen to Utrecht, and the following day from Utrecht to Amsterdam were both quite straightforward, giving us the afternoon of our first day to explore, and the following morning for a return visit.

Our hotel was on the edge of the town, but next to a bus stop. We arrived on a Sunday, which meant that a single bus ticket was valid for the return journey, and the bus driver stamped the date on our tickets by hand. We stayed on the bus a stop too far, and were carried off into a wilderness of shopping malls, building sites and bike parks. We alighted at the railway station, which was all three of those things, and navigated our way back. The bike parks were spectacular, as big as car parks with the bicycles stacked two or even three deep. It would take a very special kind of photograph to do them justice. But here's a photo with a few token bikes in it, for politeness sake:



( Sunday afternoon: the Alleyway Round )

( Monday morning: the cathedral, mostly )

And that was that. Ready for another holiday now.

While we were in Aachen last Easter, I wrote about the cathedral and treasury there, but I posted only the bare minimum of pictures. So this is the same again, but illustrated. I'll start with just one exterior view:



It isn't the greatest photograph, but it does show that very distinctive silhouette (also available as a ginger biscuit). On the left is the Gothic choir, then the original Carolingian octagon, the Palace Chapel. The spire is nineteenth century, I think, on an older base. The real fun, though, is inside.

( Come and have a look... )

They are not long, though you'd never guess that from how long this post has been in the writing. In fact, not counting the evening of our arrival, which was Easter Monday (and yes, my birthday), we had two days to explore Trier, and one of them was earmarked for the museum.

( Day One: with many photos )

( Day Two: with no photos at all )

And before we left, there was just time to spend an evening at a winery.

And, speaking of holidays...

I enjoyed writing that post about what we did on my birthday, and making pretty patterns out of words and ideas. But if it weren't for sorting through my photos, seeing those patterns would have stopped me seeing things that didn't fit the pattern, our walk around Bouillon the previous evening, and the fact that we started our exploration of Trier that same day, still my birthday. I could have told you that I lunched on excellent chips, sitting on the steps of the fountain in the marketplace, enjoying the sunshine - but it took my photos to remind me that we also visited the cathedral. What can I say? My memory has its priorities.

It's a perfectly good cathedral. Living in Durham, I'm a bit spoilt for cathedrals, and after Trier we visited Aachen, about whose cathedral there will be much more, in due course. Also, in Trier the Cathedral has to compete with the Basilica. But it's a good cathedral. Here's how it looked from our bathroom window:



( More pictures under the cut )

Of the places we visited on our spring holiday, Bouillon was the odd one out: a small town rather than the 'city break' centres of the rest of the trip, which makes it a much more typical stop for us. My Routard guide says it is one of the major tourist centres of Wallonia, a boast whose modesty delights me. But - again, according to Routard - it has the biggest castle in Belgium, and the history to go with it:



( want to know more? )

Time to take the road to Germany.

Our first evening in Ghent had given us a taste of the city. Now we had to decide whether to buy the much-advertised City Cards. Our reasoning was that this was unlikely to save us money, but it might encourage us to do things we would not otherwise have done - and this turned out to be the case. I'm particularly glad we took the boat trip, which was worth doing for its own sake, and doubly so because it gave us angles from which to approach things, as well as ideas of things we wouldn't have known we wanted to see. It also made traveling by bus much less daunting (no need to ask for a destination, just show your card). So while the card isn't necessarily the cheapest option, it worked very well for us.

All our explorations of Ghent started with the same view: turn left out of the hotel, and this is what you see from the end of the street:



This is the classic view, in evening light, but feel free to imagine it as we set off on an overcast Good Friday morning to visit the Tourist Office and purchase our cards.

( It turns out you can see quite a lot in 48 hours - and take a lot of photos, too. So much so that I've decided to split this post in two! )

And that was Good Friday.

I was feeling that I had not completed as much work, both work work and domestic, as I should have, until I realised that it's only a week since we returned from holiday - precisely this time last week we were in the process of disembarking at North Shields. I feel better about it now.

We had been delayed by head winds overnight, and the captain apologised for our late arrival in three languages. I was delighted to spot that in English we were to arrive at "eleven o' clock, ship's time." In German this became "Central European Time." Only in Dutch was it "Netherlands time."

Or, more accurately, five hotels in Northern Europe. But this is going to be a dull enough post (unless you're actually contemplating a trip to one or more of these locations) so indulge me in my immodest header. Five hotels, booked through Booking.com, which I find reliable and transparently easy to use: I didn't actually set out to pick five completely different hotels, but if I had, I couldn't have done it better.

( NH Gent Belfort )

( Hotel de la Poste - Relais Napoleon III )

( Zum Christophel, Trier )

( Pallazzo Alfonso, Aachen )

( Star Lodge Hotel )

tl;dr version: no disasters, one disappointment, two perfectly OK, two strong recommendations (Trier and Utrecht).

We visited the cathedral again today, having decided that joining a guided tour was a price worth paying for access to the parts of the building only accessible on those terms (the "throne of Charlemagne" - not actually the throne of Charlemagne - in the first gallery, and the gothic choir which houses the remains of Charlemagne - probably). There's too much of a crowd - both our own group, and others - to allow the sort of access I'd really like, but as an unexpected bonus our guide (Oliver) was excellent, good-humoured under stress and full of information.



This is an end view of the coffin / reliquary (picture it as shaped like a house) which is believed to contain the bones - most of them - of Charlemagne (he was declared a saint in the twelfth century by the antipope). And unlike just about every reliquary you've ever come across, there is good reason to believe that it contains what it is claimed to contain: the bones of a man of 60 or 70, of exceptional height. I don't know whether these were dated, but there is a continuous record back to Charlemagne's original interment in a rather fine classical marble sarcophagus depicting the rape of Proserpina.

I was so grateful that our tour had allowed even this brief approach to this glittering artifact, but we had seen plenty of bling in the Cathedral Treasury yesterday. No-one before Oliver had been prepared to talk intelligently about relics as a phenomenon, what they really are and what they tell us about the people who cared about them (I wrote at some length about this in the context of the Books of Outremer, of which desperance promises us a new edition soonest, hooray!). The audioguide to the Treasury talked not only about the relics of Charlemagne, and the random fragments of the Crown of Thorns and splinters of the cross, not to mention teeth of various saints, in the collection, but also explained - without batting an eyelid - the four great relics in the possession of the cathedral. These are:

• the gown worn by the Virgin Mary (to whom the cathedral is dedicated) when she gave birth to the Christ child


• the swaddling clothes of the baby Jesus


• the loin cloth worn by Jesus during His Crucifixion


• and the cloth on which the severed head of St. John the Baptist was placed

I don't think we are expected to take this literally for one moment - because, seriously? But in that case, what are these objects? And they do seem to be genuinely old - really old - textiles (some information about that dress). It would be interesting to know more.

In Trier we had seen (sort of - through glass, and darkly) their relic, the Holy Robe, which is supposed to be a tunic worn by Jesus, and brought to Trier by St Helena (which is pretty weak provenance, but at least it goes through the motions). They don't try to claim much in the way of authenticity, either, but argue that the seamless robe symbolises Christian unity (possibly because both are getting a bit tattered). The city was gearing up for one of its periodic celebrations of the robe, when it will be displayed to pilgrims, so here's a silly story from a previous event.

We are in Aachen, and I am reunited with my keyboard, since our hotel room here has a convenient spot for me to sit and type. So that's good. It's quite a splendid room, with lots of space and a huge window leading onto a balcony. In other respects our arrival in Aachen has been complicated, and I'm not ready to post about that yet. Fortunately, there's plenty to catch up with! So here's how we spent yesterday evening:

Roger had found a tour advertised on the Tourist Office website, offering a combination of tour of the city in a vintage bus, and wine tasting at the winery in the neighbouring village - so that, give or take, is what we did. Let me clear up the 'take' aspect of that first, because all my criticisms are to do with the mismatch between the advance information and what actually happened: the package itself was fine. The vintage coach is a lovely creature (you can smell her coming from several yards away, but that's only to be expected) but a city tour ought to mean more than passing the several impressive landmarks along the route between the Porta Nigra and the winery in Olewig. This was fine by us, as we had by this time visited all the promised sights already, and were more disappointed not to return via the viewpoint on the Petrisberg above the vineyards. Well, it would have been dark anyway... And I wish they had told us that there was a restaurant at the winery, and we would be able to eat there while we tasted the wines (the restaurant actually appears elsewhere on the Tourist Office website, but isn't mentioned in this context). We vhad discussed this, and eaten a late lunch at the museum, rather than risk a wine tasting while fasting, which in hindsight was a wasted opportunity.



Other than that, though, it was great fun. The winery was founded in 1804, and our guide was the eighth generation to run it and make the wine. He gave a great performance in explaining how he does this, and since we were the only non-Germans in a group of about a dozen, a lot of this was completely lost on me. When he slowed down to explain something to the five year old in the group, I was in with a chance, but most of the time I was lucky to catch one word in three or four, which was exhilarating but bewildering: wait, what was that about the full moon? He took care to check at the end of each stage that we were to some extent following, and I learned some things I hadn't known before (sweet wines are made by stopping the fermentation, and this is done by filtering out the yeast). One thing I loved was that apparently Moselle wines must spend some time in barrels, and when I asked whether he used French oak, or American, he looked very pleased with himself, and said, "Own oak!" One of the advantages of a firm founded in 1804 is that you can source your barrels from your own oak forest.

One other way in which the advance publicity erred is that we were promised a tasting of four wines, and in the event we tasted six. They were: ( behind a cut to spare the uninterested )