First stop: Waitaki Waters

We haven't been on a tenting holiday since 2007, when we camped in a number of place in the UK.   At that time I blogged about the trip day by day (pretty much); this time, on a trip around some of the South Island, I kept notes on an iPad, and will use these as a basis for posts relating to this most recent holiday.   We were trying to do the holiday as economically as possible, since neither of us are earning anything, and mostly survive on the superannuation.  I'm not sure that we entirely succeeded in this, but in general we kept expenses down.  Part of our expense-reducing process was reverting to the use of the tent for accommodation.  This was only partly successful, as you'll discover as you read on through these posts.

Many of the places mentioned won't be familiar to some readers, so I'll try and put links in to assist.


6.11.12 First day of the holiday.

The tent up, and ready for business with
the power cord attached to its pole. 

We'd decided to head for Waitaki Waters camp as our first port of call on the way to Christchurch (where we were due to attend a 60th birthday a few days later), and left home about 1.30 after a couple of false starts.  We stopped off at Waikouaiti beach where it was very sunny but there was a nasty chilly wind coming off the sea.  However it was good to have a break and I dozed for a few minutes, which I needed - I'd had quite a busy morning taking someone to the Eye Department at the Hospital.  I don't know that we've ever been to that part of the beach before, only the part down by the racetrack.  It's certainly lovely and would be a good spot when the wind wasn't so fierce.

The manager/owner at Waitaki Waters is Australian though he sounds English; seemingly a lot of people have commented on this.  His father is Australian born but his mother was Eastern European, which maybe has given his speech a bit of a tang.  The camp-site is beautifully clean and tidy; probably one of the best I've seen in this regard.  We camped on a fairly spacious bit of ground - there weren't many people staying - and got the tent up fairly easily, considering we're rather out of practice.  It was very hot by this stage and I thought it was going to be stuffy sleeping in the tent but in fact even with sleeping bags and a blanket each we were both cold on and off during the night.

We met a German couple while they were making their dinner.  The man's English was very good, and we talked about places we'd been in Germany, though I had to think hard to remember which ones they were!  Celia was very tired and was in bed by 8.30 at least.  I read for a while until the moths attacking the tent trying to get at the light got too annoying.  We'd walked the 800 metres down to the beach and found that an enormous bank of river pebbles had been deposited there. Our assumption was that they were to keep the sea from swamping the place.  There must have been tens of millions of them and we presumed they'd all been brought in a truckload at a time.  The tide was high and crashed up against them.

However, I discovered later, in Geraldine, that these pebbles are natural and have always been there. They may have been shored up a bit to keep the tides at bay, but otherwise that's a naturally pebbly beach.  The person who told me this, a volunteer working on the riverside garden in Geraldine, said he was originally from a place further south where they had sandy beaches (as we do in Dunedin, of course), which he much preferred. He also made the interesting remark, in relation the flooding of the river in Geraldine – which was what he was helping to clean up – that every town with a river has a history.  I can believe it, especially if the river is only metres away from the shops and other buildings.

Back in our own bed

My rough calculations as to how many beds we slept in while we were away from home comes to just under thirty, some of which we slept in more than once.
Some were drastic, most were okay. Probably the best one was at my sister-in-law's place in Northampton. They'd bought a new bed before we came (I think for us, in fact), and it was very good to sleep in.
Perhaps the worst was in a room above a cafe we stayed at in West London. The middle leg was broken, and had to be propped back in place. Consequently sleeping on it was a bit of a ‘take care’ situation, in case it suddenly collapsed.
On the Continent we found that in Germany and Switzerland, they don’t have pillows the same shape as those at home. They’re large and almost square, and virtually flat, and it’s hard to know how they’re supposed to function. We never quite found out.
Some Continental hotels put two single beds together as though they were a double. You discovered the gap fairly quickly. Others were double beds, but they had separate covers on them. This worked quite well, except when Celia threw her cover over on mine. Still, it’s something she does at home anyway, so what’s the difference?
Many places don’t use a top sheet any more, including many of the places we stayed at in England. And they use duvets almost everywhere. I found the problem with these was they were often too heavy for the summertime, and I’ve lost count of the number of nights I woke up sweating.
The great thing about it all, I suppose, is that we became more flexible about just getting on and sleeping, whether it was in our tent with airbeds, or in a king size double bed in Valencia. Many places don’t have curtains heavy enough to keep out the light – many places, especially in Spain, don’t have curtains at all. So sleeping under these conditions is a test of how tired you are and whether you’re going to make a fuss about it.
Anyway, we’re home, and we’re back in the bed we belong in – and it’s great.

Rethink and Rules

The Metro in Valencia isn’t just a tram. It’s also an underground. Ah, well, we’ll get it right eventually.
The Spanish don’t seem to have a sense of personal space: they’ll bump into you in the street and make no comment, and if you ask them something, they’ll often seem to ignore you. On the other hand, when they do respond, they’re just lovely and friendly. Well, apart from the bus driver we got last night, who wouldn’t let two old people off the bus (he’d missed opening the door for them) until they shouted at him - and then he wouldn’t let a woman on at the same place! There have to be exceptions everywhere, I guess.

I’m going to start compiling a list of tourist ‘rules.’

1. If you see a toilet, use it, even if you don’t want to go at that point. Toilets are hard to come by. (Curiously, toilets in Spain are called the WC.)
2. Words like ‘hola!’ in Spain, ‘prego’ in Italy, and ‘bitte’ in Germany may mean anything the speaker wants them to mean. But they’re handy words, all the same.
3. It is inevitable that you will lose things while travelling. Don’t fuss. So far we’ve lost the cover to Celia’s knife, maybe even the knife itself, possibly a pair of my underpants, a piece off Celia’s Swiss Army Knife, and maybe some things we haven’t noticed so far. I got all the way home today before I noticed I’d left my jersey somewhere - probably in a café where I stopped for a cup of very milky coffee. Trouble is, I probably can’t find the place again - I got completely lost on the way home as it was.
4. The main thing is, Don’t lose each other. And be nice to each other - this makes a big difference under stress.
5. Never assume that you know everything about the city just because you’ve found your way from the railway station to your place of abode. Usually the city is a hundred times bigger than you thought.

The picture is of a toilet in Spain - not one we've used though.

Some notes about Rome

Rome has been interesting, but because our hotel has been so far away from the tourist areas, we’ve had to do a lot of travelling. It’s cheap enough to do so, because the three day tickets are very reasonable and you can go on the Metro too, but the buses leave something to be desired. They have very few seats (so more people can cram onto them) and with everyone hanging on - and sometimes almost falling over - it’s quite an experience in human contact! The trams seem to have gone from the Roman streets - Celia says it was trams we used last time. The streets aren’t really built for vehicles: rattling over the cobblestones in a bus is bone-wrenching and this morning I couldn’t get words out to Celia because my teeth rattling around in my mouth.
Italian is a language I think I’d get tired of soonish: the way the words are overloaded with vowel sounds gets a bit tedious. German, by comparison, was actually a lot more varied on the ear. And the Italians, some of them, race through the words at a speed that’s quite phenomenal - again it must be something to do with the excess of vowels. It produces a kind of sing-song effect after a while. Furthermore, they all talk at full bore - there’s no kind of quietness about their conversation. Everything has to be done as though the whole world wanted to hear.
ATM machines in Germany are called Geldautomats. In Italy they’re Bancomats. Geld of course is the word for money in German - and has links with our ‘gold.’ Banco is the Italian ‘bank.’ Occasionally you come across a Postomat in Italy; the Post Office has its own system, seemingly.

On the Eurostar

14 October 2007

On the Eurostar, going from Bologna to Firenze. We’ve just come from Milan on a train on which we had to pay a reservation charge of eighteen euros. We were told about this when before we got on the train by the guards, and thought perhaps it only applied to first class, so we sat in second class, which was certainly comfortable enough anyway. But the charge applied to second class as well! Worse was to come: the guard on that train told us that we’d need to book on the train to Firenze, so we did - at a cost of thirty euros! This is because it’s the Eurostar apparently. We’re sitting in first class, not even with each other (across the aisle) and it’s not even particularly roomy. Hmm. Not that impressed with the Italian trains. The toilet on the previous one could only be described as grotty: you could see straight down through the toilet onto the tracks beneath! There didn’t seem to be anyway to flush anything (not that that mattered much since it was already dispersed along the line) and the tap wouldn’t work. The two compartments that should have been shut were both hanging open, and I couldn’t find anywhere to put the paper towel. Oh, dear. And we paid an extra eighteen euros for that.

Celia worked out this morning on one of her little machines how much I lost in NZ dollars when I had the wallet stolen. She claimed it was close to $500. Good grief. I’ll have to get a ‘man bag,’ as they’re nicknamed, so that I can keep all the bits close to me. Forgot to say that the pillows in Germany and Switzerland are virtually flat. And square rather than diagonal. Not sure how you’re supposed to use them; Celia folded hers up. Amazingly I’ve been sleeping comfortably on them without doing so. Maybe coming away is making me more flexible after all!

On language

12th Oct, 2007 again..

The language situation in Luxembourg was intriguing, you might remember. It‘s equally so in Switzerland, where German, French and Romany all exist - as well as Swiss German. The latter is their ‘native‘ language, but is so different in pronunciation from German itself that I found it impossible to recognise words when people were speaking. And yet they read and write ‘High’ German as their language, because it‘s the common denominator. Very confusing. Swiss German is even more gutteral than ordinary German, which sounds relatively soft by comparison. Celia reckons if she goes along making gggghhhh noises with her throat, she’s doing a pretty good version of the language.
She’s also discovered that the word, Migros, means supermarket in Swiss - it’s obviously a brand name but it helps to know what sort of shop it is. In some Migros stores there is a great range, but in the one we went to the other night on the way home from Thun, we went round and round struggling to find any sauces to use with the chicken we were going to buy. In the end we bought yet another couple of packets of Pelican filets - I don’t know they were filets of, apart from being fish (and they certainly weren’t Pelican; that’s the brand name) - which we’d already tried before and found quite tasty, if a bit salty and buttery. But to buy fruit and veges in this particular store you had to sort out the price ticket yourself, which meant getting the number from above the item you were buying, taking the goods to a weighing machine, pressing the number on the screen and waiting for a ticket. We’d already got to the check-out before we discovered this and had four items needing prices, which flustered the woman at the counter not a little. Rather too much in the way of self-service, to my way of thinking. Though in England, in some of the big stores like Asda and Sainsbury’s, you can check out all your items yourself. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s quite fun in the end.

We watch the World Cup

Last night we had a donor kebap at a narrow shop around the corner from our hostel; the proprietor’s daughter (about five or six, maybe) was playing with her ‘pinguin’, after she‘d had a go at cracking some nuts by bashing them on the marble counter top.
We strolled down the Hauptstrasse, looking at the shops - it seems that German shops must stay open till all sorts of hours as a matter of course, but they’re closed on Sundays - and were just checking something out when Celia said, with some excitement, They’re playing the NZ national anthem. And they were. An ‘Irish’ pub had just begun showing the NZ v France quarter-final game on a huge screen. We bundled ourselves into the pub, found some space near the back with three friendly young Americans, and made ourselves at home. A female bartender kept coming around to get drinks for people, so that everyone could stay in place and not have to lose their spot.
The Americans had never seen rugby before and were surprised at the energy and brutality. Even the way one of the players is hoisted up in the air during a line-out gave them a thrill. It was a great game which NZ should have won: a couple of moments undermined their chances. One, when there was an ongoing ruck towards the try line by the NZeders, they lost the ball at the very last moment. And Dan Carter’s replacement missed a goal kick. Either of those would have kept them in the game.
Back at the hotel, the bed turned out to be fairly hard, but not impossible. (It still doesn’t beat our hardest hotel bed ever which was in Roxburgh.) Celia still has a cold, and needs to rest a lot, so we didn‘t get up till fairly late. Even then we were up long before the place downstairs where we were supposed to get our hot drink and croissant (the ‘breakfast’ part of our hotel bill). They finally opened about 11.00, so we had the coffee and croissant as a morning tea instead, having made ourselves breakfast in the hotel room.

Onto Köln

We went on our first train trip today, from Hamburg to Köln. We had seats in first class, in a carriage that was virtually empty - it was the first carriage behind the driver. There was only one other person in our compartment (six to a compartment), so we had plenty of room. The second class part of the train was much fuller, as I found when I went for a walk from one end of the train to the other. At the back of the train was half a carriage reserved for large luggage and bikes - there was none of either - and a few let-down seats. So I sat in the space for a while and watched the world go by.
The trip took four hours, but it didn’t seem long. Apparently this was the ‘slow’ train, if you can call anything that goes at a normal speed of 163 kph, slow.
It was just beginning to rain when we left Hamburg (after a beautiful day yesterday) and it had obviously been raining over most of the country we passed through. However, by the time we got to Köln the sun had come out and it was hot enough to change back into short sleeves and my faithful sandals - which I’ve worn most of the time we’ve been away. The pair of waterproof shoes I bought in Oswestry a couple of weeks ago are great, and have been useful during the rainy days we’ve had recently.
Which reminds me: we’re back in the land of toilets you have to pay for. England has pretty much got rid of this archaic notion - Oswestry was the only place in England where we had to pay - but Germany still regards it as the norm. At the railway station yesterday I went down into the gents and Celia went down into the ladies opposite. I put my money in the machine, went through the turnstyle, and then heard her speaking in the ladies, which was open to the men’s! Weird.
Our hotel in Köln is near the Cathedral, and the railway station. Which is convenient, except that the railway line runs along the back of the building, and the rumble of the trains is fairly loud. But the Cathedral (or Dom, as they call it here) is superb. How it survived the bombing in the War God alone knows: the surrounding area was mostly destroyed.
Furthermore, the Dom is free: you don’t have to pay to go inside. And it was packed with visitors, of course. It’s awe-inspiring: the vaulting soars forever above your head, the stained-glass varies from detailed 19th century pictorial to wonderfully mosaic-like modern. And it’s just vast. You could walk around in it for days, so it feels. We might go back tomorrow!
Just around the corner from the Cathedral is a street that leads into the shopping area, which goes off in several directions and was also packed with people. I don’t know whether it’s a late shopping night or what, but the people were out in droves, even though it was getting on for 5.30 by the time we went looking. We bought a few odds and ends for tea (we’d had a very late Thai lunch) and a new flask, since the one Celia bought only a month or so ago has gone kaput. And we were both struggling yesterday in not having a cup of tea/coffee handy. I had to go and borrow an electric kettle for our hotel room otherwise Celia would have gone home, I think. Fortunately they were happy to lend us one.
The holiday Germany was celebrating yesterday, I found out, was Reunification Day.

A few notes

When we were flying into Germany we could see several wind farms. From the air they looked like crosses in a military cemetery.
I forgot to mention yesterday that Johannes Brahms, the composer, has great links with Hamburg. He’s one of Hamburg’s beloved sons. And alongside the dedication to him in St Michael’s Church is one to Teleman and another to Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, both of whom were Music Directors there.
Tagging - the art of painting on walls alongside railway lines, must be an international thing: there was mile after mile of tagging between Hamburg and Köln, today.
And tv advertising in Germany is just as silly as it is in England - or NZ.

First day in Hamburg

....and exhausted. We came home about 4.30 and slept.
Most of the day we’d spent in doing the hop on hop off thing on one of the double-decker buses that tour around Hamburg city. They take about an hour and a half to do this, and we got off twice. The bus we’d started out on was the 100, but the one we went back onto was the 200, and it takes a somewhat different route - in fact we wound up going over much of the route we’d already taken but approaching it from the opposite direction. Finally, somewhat desperate that we were never going to get back to point A, we got off in Rathaus Square (Rathaus is just the Town Hall - I suppose the ‘rat’ part has some links with ratification), and walked back along Monckebergerstrasse to the Hauptbahnhof - the main railway station - which is just near the hotel.
Doesn’t sound like an exhausting day, you say?
Well, our first hop off was at St Michael’s Church, and instead of going into the church proper, as we’d thought, we found ourselves climbing up the tower. At least 25 flights of stairs, if not more. By the time we’d got to the point where we’d both have preferred to have given up, we thought we might as well carry on. Certainly the view from the tower was amazing, but it took a while to get the breath back. We got the lift back down (yup, this is a church with a lift to the tower), and none of the passengers had quite figured out, when we got to the bottom, how to get the door to open. So we all went up to the top of the tower again, before coming down.
After this we finally got into the church itself, and it’s an amazing building. Wonderful curves everywhere to offset the usual straight lines of the architecture. It’s been thoroughly restored, so all the golds and whites are as they would have been. It just glistens. And because it’s Harvest Festival (here as in England) the church was full of decorations related to food: wreaths made of vegetables and stalks hanging from the balcony; breads in all sorts of shapes (such as a mouse and a snake); an enormous canopy affair hanging in the sanctuary made out of corn sheaves, and various statements such as Our Father (in German, of course) made out of bread on a baked backing.
Hamburg is an extensive city, with a large port and waterfront. We went past areas with houses that are worth several million euros - wonderful places on the street that’s closest to the large lake that’s within the city. There are embassies everywhere, and of course these are all large and imposing - and no doubt costing their home country a large amount of money. The buildings vary in their materials, but there are many that are made out of bricks, vast structures rising way above the street. The whole place has a very permanent air about it, an air of having survived a cluttered history. It’s going full steam ahead at present: there are acres of building going on, both office space and apartments, down by the water.
It was a holiday today (not sure what holiday) and the crowds were out in full force, but most of the shops were shut. Restaurants were doing an enormous trade. We went into the railway station first thing this morning to get our Eurail pass sorted out. We were hoping that they actually knew what it was all about, and of course they did. We’ve booked ourselves a couple of seats to Cologne for tomorrow - booked seats because of the holiday today, which apparently might affect tomorrow‘s travellers.
The railway station is large, as you’d expect, full of shops. There’s one area that’s given over to food shops, all within a kind of mall. You just wander from one food group to another. And there are plenty of other shops - including the ubiquitous McDonald’s where we went and had a milkshake (again) tonight, and watched while a couple of teenagers spent almost all the time we were there in a long, long kiss. A long kiss.
There was also a kind of large mini-market (if that makes sense) and Celia was in her element. I’ve come to the conclusion that English or Continental supermarkets are a kind of art gallery or museum to her. When I proposed this new theory, she smiled enigmatically.

Wir sind in Hamburg

Today was a day of chunks of travel. Two hours from Attleborough to Stansted Airport, by bus, with the weather becoming increasingly overcast (and the toilet on the bus, which we’d chosen to sit beside, giving off incredibly unpleasant whiffs every so often). The obligatory two hours at Stansted waiting for the flight to take off (decreased somewhat by the fact that we were late getting there, and there were queues for everything (but for some reason we were given priority tickets so that helped to get us on board a bit faster). They took my laptop off in the security area, and gave it a looking-over. Poor Alphonse! - the laptop - he was appalled to be considered a security risk. But at least we didn’t have to take off our shoes. Not sure what they’re expecting to find in shoes.
An hour and a half on the plane (virtually) with the usual Ryanair minimalist approach to service - not enough coin change when you bought something, no sick bags, no string bags on the backs of the seats to put your magazine in, no room to spread out in any direction.
And then an hour and a quarter or so from Lubeck airport into Hamburg city, again by bus - a very quiet bus, it must be said, so quiet that you weren‘t really aware of the speed you were doing.
And into Hamburg BusPort. Which is only a little way from our hotel. We had to go to the Hotel Keiler Hof to pick up our key from a very grumpy receptionist. She was friendly really, just liked to do the grumpy thing. The reception desk was on the first floor - I have no idea what was on the ground floor, but it wasn’t part of the hotel. And then we had to take our three keys to the building next door, Luebecker Hof, use the large key to open the building door, go up to the first floor again, use the blue key to open the door to that floor, and then use the third key for our room. I thought our room number was 213 until I realised that the label actually read Zi3 - or zimmer 3. (Zimmer being ‘room’.)
The room is quite large, with a private shower. The shower isn’t exactly en suite, as it’s in the room itself, next to the wardrobe. The toilet is across the hall, and serves all the people staying in rooms 2-6. (Room 1 seems to have vanished). We’re going to have our breakfasts in the Keiler Hof. On the first floor. This idea of having hotels on the first floors and upwards seems to be a European thing. It was the same in both the hotels I stayed in, in Rome. The ground floor is usually occupied by some other business altogether.
After settling ourselves in we went out again to get something to eat - it now being around 9 pm. Found a kebap place around the corner (yup, kebap), and had a very nice meal in the open air. It's been a very warm day in general. The area we're in seems a bit less than salubrious - ladies of the night are very visible, as is the sex sho (not sure whether it's meant to be shop or show) just around the corner.

Luxembourg 2

More travelling around Luxembourg today. This time we walked down to the Place de la Constitution and caught one of the green buses that do a continual loop around the city - the hop on hop off fellers. Near the Philharmonie (a wonderful round building where concerts and such are presented) we got off and went into the Musée d’Arte Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. This has been built partly over old city walls and battlements - the originals are still there, but they’ve been built up again with modern stones and plaster. It’s a large glass and stone building, very light and airy, and with a very open feeling. And, after yesterday’s trials, it was great to find that not only did they have free lockers for our bags, but free toilets! (So we both went twice.)
The exhibitions are another story. At present there is a great deal on Science Fiction and Modern Life scattered around the place. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is very strange, and some of it is more philosophy than art. It was worth going to, but we might have felt more aesthetically satisfied if we’d made it to the Gallery that we keep missing out on seeing, which is in the older town.
The photo is of a house that was to have been the prototype of many similar places - until the 1973 oil crisis caused problems. The houses were to be made in plastic. Curiously enough, there’s a house constructed on exactly the same lines near Warrington, close to Dunedin. I think in fact that that house is bigger - and I don’t think it’s made of plastic.
After the Musée we got the bus again and went to the building which has a name that sounds like Ocean, but isn’t. It’s a large mall with an enormous supermarket on the first two floors (Celia was in her element in the supermarket: the choice!), and then up above are offices, in one of which our host actually works.
We had waited at the bus stop with a woman from Belgium. She’d been to Luxembourg a number of years ago and was astonished by the rapid rate of building along the area where the Musée and the Ocean are. The place has been taken over by Banks - Luxembourg has some 200, apparently - and not all of them are squeaky clean, according to what she was saying. There has been some scandal with Clearstream Banking and the French Government and others, for starters. But the EU also came in for some criticism: a man from one of the EU countries wanted to retire to Greece (I can’t remember at the moment where he came from). This should be perfectly acceptable under EU terms, but he’s been blocked from doing so. Not being the sort of person to take this lying down, he has made aggressive protest in the EU Justice System (which is in Luxembourg), talking in terms of dictatorship and other such pleasantries. He’s now been in Luxembourg for 250 days, fighting his case.
Luxembourgers are losing their own status in the face of thousands of workers who stream into the place daily from nearby countries, and through the many foreigners who live there permanently. I was asked by a German tourist how to get to the autobahn while I was waiting at the bus stop - of course I didn’t know, and neither did a young couple who came along, and neither did someone else. ‘Luxembourg is a city of strangers,’ I said to a woman standing by, and she agreed. No one really lives there, so no one knows anything about it.

Luxembourgish

Just to clarify a note I made a couple of posts ago. Luxembourgish is an old language, dating back a thousand years or more. I’d thought that it hadn’t ever been written down properly until the last few years, but that’s a mistake. There were plenty of books in the language in the 19th century alone. But its spelling has been revised, and only as recently as 1976 when a new spelling system was adopted. You can read some Luxembourgish in the street names (Nie Wee has to New Way, surely), but you don’t see it written much around the city. In the suburb we’re staying in, Senningerberg (which is spelt differently on a sign just along the road!) the street names are all Luxembourgish. There are several streets with Gaass as part of the name. I assume it’s something like the English word, Close, though these Gaass aren’t cul-de-sacs. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear in the only Luxembourgeois (see what I mean?) dictionary I could find on the Net.
And something else about the language here: the children are taught in German in primary school, and in French in secondary school. (Not all subjects, but several.) So they don’t just learn these languages; they’re immersed in them. I gather that German got its foothold during the War, when the Germans occupied all sorts of European states. And then French took over after that.
There's a curiosity just along the road: Charly's Gare. A Gare, as I mentioned in the last post, is a railway station (although the airport is also called a Gare!). Charly's Gare is a former railway station that's now a restaurant. But where did the possessive apostrophe come from? The French don't use apostrophes in that way: for them it's always the railway station of the Charly. (I don't think Charly was a person, by the way; more likely the place.) So how come this looks like an English possessive apostrophe?

Luxembourg

A view of William III Square with the Cathedral in the background.

Today was our first full day in Luxembourg. It started somewhat late, as we were both very tired, and slept in - Celia more than me, in fact. And it was raining quite heavily. However, in spite of the rain we donned the raincoats we’d bought in the market at Norwich, and walked to the bus stop. Found the right bus just coming along, and twenty minutes or so later we were in the centre of Luxembourg.
Much of our day was spent in getting orientated and finding our way around the main streets. It’s the end of some sort of retail period when all the old stock is got rid of, so, even though it was raining (and raining heavily at some points) the retailers all had stalls outside their shops and were selling off stuff. I wish I’d had my camera with me, because the site of all the streets filled with umbrellas and stalls was quite delightful to the eye.
We found all sorts of interesting things: the old fish market which has several narrow lanes and odd street levels, and interconnections between buildings and lanes, and spiral staircases and about a dozen restaurants all crammed on top of each other. We found the Cathedral later in the day, a splendid building with wonderful modern stained glass fabulously coloured, and a display (I think) on the original altar of various gold monstrances and thurifers. The altar area just shimmered with colour. I’ve written elsewhere about the exhibition that was on.
The modern art museum was closed today, so we’ll have to catch up with it another time. It’s apparently well worth a look.
The day improved as we went on and was quite sunny by the time we were worn out. We still bought a couple of fold-up umbrellas for future use - they were going out at 50% off. We also found a supermarket hidden away inside another building - Celia was pleased. After all, what is a shopping area without a supermarket (or a DIY store)?
In the market we came across a stall where they were warning of the dangers of the Internet to children, and the need to be vigilant. But as a crowd eye catcher, there were two Sony model dogs on display, electronic machines that would sit, and beg, and take a ‘bone’ in their mouths, and walk, and wag their tails, and flick their ears - and in general be remarkable. But they only understood English!
In the next day or so we’ll go on one of the sightseeing trips and see what the rest of the place looks like.
Luxembourg is a curious place: the basic language spoken by children at home is Luxembourgish, which, according to Stephen (whom we’re staying with) has only begun to be written down in the last three years! The children then learn German very early on in their school careers, and then French a bit later. English comes fourth on the list. But when you go to a shop you can find the staff speaking both French and German (and English). Librairies (bookshops) have a mix of French and German books - and a very few English ones, but there are still many familiar faces and names on the covers. The street signage is in both German and French - but not necessarily both at the same time, or seemingly in any consistent approach. For all that Luxembourg is a very organised place: the environment is very important, and recycling is a big thing. Yet, there are very few shops where you can buy secondhand stuff. (Though Kim, our host’s wife, is going to take us to a large one at some point.)
We hadn’t realised that with the European Union in force, borders are no longer places where you have to present passports and be inspected. You sail through. The border between Germany and Luxembourg is halfway across a bridge, as far as the road is concerned, but the passport inspection offices are all derelict and closed. My host works for the European Union as a statistician, and he says that things are becoming more uniform throughout the Union (something that he, as a statistician, would appreciate I suspect!). Countries still retain their own identity, but things have more similarity than they used to have. They’re even similar to England: the parking ticket machine at the airport was an exact model of the ones we’ve been using in Norwich.