News from Nowhere

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 )

At the last bookstall of the market, up by the bridge, there was a fine collection of English-language poetry. In among the Yeats, and the Rattle Bag, there was Ode to Bully Beef, a collection of unofficial poetry of the Second World War, edited by Rosie Serdiville and John Sadler; Rosie Serdiville is a friend of a friend of ours, whom we know well enough to stop and chat when we run into her, but we had not expected to run into her here. We were discussing this with sufficient animation for the stallholder to notice, and comment that we had come a long way to buy English poetry. We said nice things about her stock of English poetry, which deserved them, and she repeated them to her partner, who, it turned out, was English - and not just English but with roots in County Durham: his father was from Stanley and his mother from - Tow Law, I think it was. They had visited Durham a few years ago, and enjoyed Beamish .

What Durham and Ghent have in common is that they are small cities with big universities, but they were positive about this. The students, they said, kept the town lively: compare it Bruges, which is beautiful but closes down at 8.00 pm. Though I note that they don't live in the city, but just outside; we had heard Ghent's vibrant night life from our city center hotel, and were less enthusiastic. I'm not sure how far the similarities go, either - but interesting, all the same.

It rained overnight, and was still overcast and damp when we went out this morning, so we started the day with some indoor sightseeing: where else but the cathedral? For one thing, it's a cathedral, and for another it's the home of the painting which I have always thought of as the Ghent altarpiece, which we are now apparently to call 'The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb', which the tourist guides agree is one of the most important paintings of all time (I'm pretty sure I read someone claiming that it is the best painting of all time, but I can't track that down, and anyway what does it even mean?).

Somewhere inside all that baroque ornamentation is a gothic cathedral, but what caught my eye was all the black and white frills and furbelows, black wood and white marble (and, I suspect, a lot of paint, but I was reluctant to touch) like an ice cream sundae with licquorice sauce and billows of whipped cream. I don't have many pictures: a noticeboard as you enter greets you with illustrations of all the things you must not do, and of course photography is one (no, two - still and moving) of them. My initial reaction was "Must photograph that!" and then, of course, "Oh. No." In fact the prohibition was widely ignored, and once I had reached peak irritation, I too began sneaking shots. Here's one of them, showing a seriously over-the-top pulpit by Laurent Delvaux (thankyou, Routard guide, for this information). I'd love to have taken more details, but hope this gives some idea:



In contrast, the adoration of the Great Work is performed in a small side chapel (which will ultimately, when the renovation is complete, be a separate designated display space). You pay your money, or hand over your City Card, and go in past a desk where, for another euro you can have an audio guide, and then you join the crowd in front of the painting, whose multiple panels fill almost the whole height and width of the room; everyone else is also listening to the audio guide. I'm very bad at taking in information aurally, and after a bit I handed the listening task to Roger, who very kindly gave me edited highlights. I am also not good with crowds, but this process allowed me to squeeze through to the front and look for the details we had picked out as of interest (as far as my eyesight allows). What this preamble is saying, I think, is that I have gone through the motions of adoration, but somehow failed to adore. I saw details which were pleasing, but I never saw all those panels as a unity, the parts did not add up to more than their sum. Your mileage will probably vary, but I am generally a person who likes detail. who does not believe that less is more. Generally.

There's one thing, though. By chance we were there at midday, when the attendants close the wooden shutters of the triptych, so that you see the scenes painted on the outside, and the middle tier is a wonderful Annunciation, the angel Gabriel and Mary facing each other across a bare, wooden room, with a window looking out over the city, and a jug and towel ready for use - it's almost in trompe l'oeuil, and I loved it as I did not love the gem-like symbolism of the interior. But I did wonder what it would have been like to see the process in reverse, to arrive when the shutters were closed, and to see the lamb revealed?

After this we went for a much needed beer at the theatre bar.

We spent today in Bruges. After breakfast on board, it didn't take long to disembark and drive to a car park Roger had previously identified, next door to the railway station, not excessively expensive and whose price includes a bus ticket in to the centre. In fact it's close enough to walk, and we ended up walking back - but that's another story. Anyway, we had a splendid time not doing any of the deeply cultural things people had recommended to us, just admiring the streets and the buildings and the many, many chocolate shops... I hope there'll be a post that relives that walk, when I get home and can sort out the photos. But for the time being, just two silly pictures: ( oh, all right, then, under a cut )

After that - but no, I said I'd save 'after that' for another post. Eventually we returned to retrieve our car, and it wasn't a long drive to Ghent, where we will spend the next few days.