Still in London

Another day in London. We met up with an old friend, Cathy, and had lunch with her, then walked down the road to the Science Museum and checked it out. It’s a massive place - five storeys - and full of quite remarkable things. Unfortunately, like so many of these places, you can’t take it all in at one go, and it gets tiring trying to absorb all the info and exhibits. There are lots of hands-on items, and both the adults and kids were having fun with these.
Later on we went to Hamley’s, the huge toy shop - and another five storeys. It was absolutely packed with shoppers, and toys, and lots of happy faces and people - adults and kids - having fun and enjoying themselves. Quite a few of the staff were demonstrating toys and having a ball playing with them: a tiny helicopter that actually flew around people’s heads, cardboard planes that would invariably return to the person who’d set them off, racing cars with front wheels that could go into a 360 degree turn and so would never get upset by any angle, a wipe-off board which a young guy was drawing coloured pictures on with great ease, three or four guys playing with a more update version of the yo-yo. One boy of about seven or eight was having a great time clapping his hands and making a whole rack of teddy bears shake - clapping was what set them off. Occasionally adults would join in the fun. Around the store were waist-high boxes with walking fluffy toys in them - little dogs that yapped, a drummer boy, a giraffe that moved its long neck up and down. I was very tempted to get the giraffe, I must admit.
We were out of our hotel room by eleven this morning and didn’t get back till around 8.30, so both of us were whacked. I’ve been reading the Hitchcock book while Celia snores.

An arty morning

For the first time since we’ve been in Europe, Celia went in one direction this morning and I went in another. We arranged to be home by three o’clock. I had the cellphone, and Celia had the number (and the street address). It felt quite strange, as we’ve hardly been apart for more than half an hour since we arrived in Hamburg at the beginning of the month.
Anyway, Celia went off to the mall/supermarket (I hardly need to remind you that these are her museums), and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts, which is in easy walking distance. And it was free.
What a dream of a place! In the large foyer, there are paintings that would barely fit on the walls of our apartment. As you go in beyond this there are rooms and rooms of wondrous religious art, some of it huge. Upstairs is a mixture of later art works, with more portraits, and then upstairs again are more modern works, though nothing seems to date much beyond the beginning of the twentieth century.
It was exhausting just trying to take it all in, what with Goya and El Greco and various other great Spanish painters on display. And then there were two courtyards: one is a wonderful fresh garden, with palm trees, and green, green plants. The other is bare apart from a statue of Martin de Tours and the beggar. However, around the windows on the first floor is a wondrous blue colour.
It’s interesting how limited the range of subject matter is in religious art. While the Spanish paint St Francis a good deal more than other countries, there are dozens of versions of the Crucifixion and the events surrounding it. Curiously there aren’t many Nativity scenes in this museum. But there is one vital and energetic picture of the Holy Family (plus John the Baptist). Unusually the two boys are grown men in this picture and along with Joseph they’re hammering away at something not very obvious in the centre in a very muscular fashion. Mary is stuck on one side.
St Sebastian comes in for several portraits. [That's him in the picture.] Here in Spain he’s always shown in his dying agony with just one arrow in him. (Usually in other countries there’s a welter of arrows). It’s a puzzle why he’s such a choice subject for artists. I’ve just had a look at the interesting Wikipedia article on him, and seemingly even though he was shot full of arrows he survived, was nursed back to health, and went on to bring more people to Christ. So it’s interesting that the Spanish versions have him with only one arrow, and obviously dead. The other curious thing is that he’s always virtually naked in whatever country he’s painted, and his body is always romanticised as being a fine specimen of young manhood. (The Spanish tend to make him a youth, in fact, which he wasn’t when he was shot.)
In the museum there are few examples of mythical art, though the Rape of the Sabines makes its usual appearance. It’s curious that this is another motif that’s so common in art of this time. Is it because we lean towards certain themes, or is it because of something altogether different? It’d be interesting to know.
After this I made my way into town (which is when I discovered that the Metro is both underground and tram) and finally found a place to post the postcards we’ve been carrying around for days. At the Post Office, of course. Post boxes are a rare thing in Valencia, as far as we can make out.
Celia finally arrived home half an hour after our arranged time, absolutely exhausted, of course, but still fairly cheerful. Her foot had stood up to the pace, apparently.

Need to correct a recent post

The riverbed in Valencia, the one that’s dry, is now called the Gardens of Turia, Turia being the river’s name. It has been diverted to the south of the city in a specially made canal and the great flood that brought this about happened only in 1957 not 1907. Besides the playing fields we saw there are actual gardens, and at the other end from where we’re staying the Science Museum, the something else museum and the Aquarium (about which more later) are all built on the former river.

More on Milan

Amongst other things today we wandered down the Corso Buenos Aries, claimed by the Milanese to be the best shopping street in Europe. Well, by day, it looks like one of the more scruffy shopping streets to be honest, but by night (we were back in it tonight) it’s very sparkly and glitzy and certainly everybody and their brother was out. Along with a million cars.
We also went to the Duomo, a wondrous cathedral with its own Metro station and an immense Piazza, While we were there, we watched a Liturgy being conducted by a Cardinal - we think it might have been some sort of Harvest Festival equivalent, but can’t be sure. Anyway it was being relayed onto big screens around the immense church, while the voices of the speakers echoed and boomed. We couldn’t actually ‘attend’ it - they were keeping touristi out, but we watched it for some time, and, because we were handed a booklet with all the text in it, actually spoke along with the congregation - and sang. All in Italian, of course, at which we’re becoming very proficient. (As we did with German!)
Outside the church is a huge kind of 18th/19th century mall - a huge covered-in gallery with shops all down each side, and apartments up above. All of it in wonderful stone, with carvings and paintings. And as you come out the end of that, you run into one of the most famous opera houses in the world: La Scala. I’d completely forgotten it’s in Milan.
After some debate over how to get there - because Celia wanted to go on the buses in preference to the underground (not just because of yesterday’s incident, but to see more) - we found our way to the Castle. What a whopper! It puts most of the castles we’ve seen to shame, though it doesn’t have the antiquity of many of them. It’s as wide as it’s long, and though I would have thought it’s two or three hundred metres each side, Celia seems to think it’s only about one hundred. Not being able to get on the Net I can’t check. It has three moats because there are three walls, the second inside the first and so on. It’s thirty or forty feet high, and the tower at the front rises up way above that again. There are huge turrets on each corner. Inside it has cloister-like walls, and arched windows, and because it’s not made of the grey stone most other castles are made of, but rather a more reddish stone, it’s somehow more imposing. Very impressive, anyway.
By the time we finished with the Castello, it was getting on for half past five or nearly six. Celia wanted to go on a bus to find an area where there were restaurants, but we couldn’t in the end figure out which part of the loop the bus we’d caught to the Castello was on, and so we gave up and got on the Metro. We got out at Lima Station, which turned out to be back on the Corso Buenos Airies again. (We’d earlier found ourselves back on the street with the main police station in it while heading towards the Castello. It goes by the delightful name of Via Fatebenefrattelli.)
After we’d wandered up and down the Corso for nearly an hour we still hadn’t been able to find an actual restaurant. They were all bars, or pizza places. No spaghetti, no ravioli, no nothing - and no Asian or Indian restaurants either. Celia was getting exhausted by this time and proposed coming back to the hotel. We’d check on what was able at the Loreto Station area, and go from there. There was nothing. Not a thing. Even the McDonald’s was back down the Corso!
She couldn’t take walking around any more and we came back ‘home.’ And rustled up a perfectly good meal of wholemeal bread and cheese (she had the Gorgonzola, I had the Gruyere), apple, the remains of a salad we’d bought at lunchtime, and apricot jam. The bread and cheese we’d acquired during the course of the day, the former at an Arab bread shop, and the latter at Celia’s most favourite ‘museum.’ It’s a wonderful shop underground in the Loreto station. When we were in there today, around ten assistants were talking loudly to each other and the customers, and the customers talking loudly back, and there were cheeses galore, and all sorts of meats, and whole hams hanging up, and it all looked more like something out of the movies than real life. ‘My kind of shop,’ says Celia.

A proper look at Thun

Another trip into Thun yesterday, to check out booking a ferry from Rome to Barcelona. When we got on the bus, I asked the driver if we could purchase a return ticket. No, we couldn’t, but did we have a Eurail Pass? !! Of course we did, and we got on [for] free. Strange, but good.
Had a much better look at Thun, especially the main street shops (!) and the Castle. Thun has two rivers/streams running through the middle of it, so that its main street is divided from the next section which is then divided from the part that the Castle is on. Bridges everywhere, of course, and what looks to our eyes to be a very cluttered set of buildings along the riverbank. I’m not sure that they’re actually a rivers/streams, having said that. The two arms of water seem to flow off the Lake itself. Where they go from there I don’t know, and why the Lake doesn’t empty out rapidly I don’t know either.
Anyway, we climbed to the Castle. Celia had got to about 107 steps when she lost count. And there were a lot more to go. Anyway, the Castle looms above the town so that by the time you’re standing in one of its top towers the buildings below are miniatures.
The Castle contains a museum, some of which seemed to be in a state of shuffling about, as there were displays with nothing in them, and others that didn’t seem relevant. Nevertheless, by the time we’d seen about four floors of museum, we were well acquainted with some of the wonderful craft work done by the Thun people: beautifully decorated plates, and fine miniature pottery to name but two. And then there was the very impressive sleigh, with a full-sized dog carved onto the front of it. Not your poodle-sized dog: this was a fiercesome large creature. It would have gone well in the production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Castle itself is fairly well preserved. The wooden beams, great chunky things, that hold up the roof of the Knights’ Hall, date back to the original building. A lot of it has been renovated at different times, however, so it’s not easy to tell what was there from the beginning, but I guess the basic structure, with its wonderful four pinnacled towers, and its two round prison cells, is all original.
We were standing waiting for a couple of people to come up the stairs at one point (because most of the stairs inside are circular and not negotiable by people going up and down simultaneously) when we heard this distinct Australian accent. ‘Come on, you Australians!’ cries Celia, and next minute is in full conversation with an Australian woman who was pleased to hear an accent close to her own.
As you come back down to the town, the houses are all clustered together on the hillside, with winding lanes, and steps, and tiny gardens with fountains, and a general sense of beauty. The Swiss delight in decoration: there’s one house near where we’re staying that has its front covered with pots and pans. And another that has a model of the house itself parked outside. And another where there’s both a live parrot and a model one.

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.

Museum of History and Art

Friday was a big day, in terms of walking anyway. We were going to be meeting our host and hostess and their daughter for an evening meal and to catch up with a free jazz concert, but during the day we’d planned to go the Museum of History and Art, which we’d tried to get into on Monday, but it was closed.
This is an amazing building, quite apart from the exhibits. When you go in on the ground level, you think the building will just go upwards from there. In fact there are four lower levels going deep into the ground, and the new foundations are mixed with the old walls of much earlier buildings - and you can actually touch these wall, which date back to who knows when. (Someone will; I don’t.)
On level -2 or thereabouts is the recreation of an actual Roman mosaic floor - almost complete. And on the walls down there are the pieces that have been found of some murals from Roman times. Down in this area are items from thousands of years ago, long before Christ, little items that probably were of no great significance in their day but which take on great significance because of their age and the fact that they’ve survived.
As you work your way up the building you progressively come closer to your own times, although there’s a sudden lurch from the mediaeval period to the 19th century. And what’s there from the 19th century is mostly military material: guns, portraits of famous soldiers and battles.
And then another leap forward into the 20th century, which is where most of the art is. One painter, Joseph Kutter is very well-represented; he’s a Luxembourg painter who uses colours somewhat akin to Chagall but his subject matter and style is different. I liked his paintings, especially his portraits (including two or three autoportraits, as they’re known.
Of course there’s plenty of other art, but more in the area of sculpted works from the Romans and from churches - huge lumps of stone sometimes with carvings intact, sometimes not. Or metalwork and the like from all eras. It’s a great place, though its focus is a little diffuse…!

Joseph Kutter is considered one of Luxembourg's most important painters. He lived from 1894 to 1941 and was greatly influenced by the Impressionists.

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.

Norwich Cathedral

I only realised after my brother-in-law queried it, that the dates on these posts are in NZ time, not British. Consequently we’re sometimes managing to do things eleven hours before they’ve happened.
Yesterday we finally went and had a look at Norwich Cathedral. It dwarfs all the other churches, even the big ones, that we’ve been to so far. Not only that, it’s like a collage: piece after piece and layer after layer has been added on. Other pieces have become hidden under Time, pillaging, spires falling, the Dissolution and so on. People who existed and died in one century lie cheek by jowl with those who died two centuries later. Brasses have been removed from most gravestones now, as seems the custom generally in England because they were getting rubbed away. Splendid art work from three or four centuries ago rubs shoulders with something done in the last few decades. A glittering museum of gold and silver plate is reached by a narrow spiral staircase inside stone, and there’s a rope, grimed with thousands of hands, to haul yourself up by.
We discovered that the innumerable bosses on the ceiling (not those sort of bosses – even in England they don’t banish bosses to the ceiling) are not all the same, but highly individualised. This discovery came about because each boss has been photographed and put on a CD Rom. It’s the only way you can see them clearly at all, since the Cathedral is virtually three storeys high.
It’s also like two separate churches. Half way down the centre is a kind of narrowing, a bottleneck almost between wooden structurings, and then the church opens out again into a second section as big as the first. I suppose you could have two separate services going on at once – quite apart from the services that could be going on in the Jesus Chapel and the Mary Chapel and the who knows what other chapel. All around the edge of the Cathedral is a kind of walkway, where there are doors and passageways and rooms. It would take a year to become familiar with the place. We were there for maybe an hour all up – and that included having tea in the Refectory: the name of the café but also the real name for the area that used to exist there where the priests and monks would have had their meals. It’s now a modern structure hung between the walls of the Cathedral on one side and the old Refectory wall on the other. A theological library sits up along the end of this section (this is all on a first floor level) and in the middle of the library is a piece of the original wall, about three foot by one foot in size.
It’s a church we’ll have to go back to. For starters we didn’t have the camera with us, so it just exists (barely) in memory at the moment.
We came out of there into Tombland, a street presumably named after an area that was once where graves were. Each shop in the street is called Tombland something (newsagent, bookshop, hairdresser). We went into the secondhand bookshop, but it was very expensive overall. Certainly there were some good books there, but it was geared for those with plenty of money in their pockets, like the old man who was buying up large and handing over wads of notes as he did so. We found a copy of one of the two boEllis Peters’ Brother Cadfael books we’re missing out of the series but at £10 it was just a bit pricey. Celia said, ‘Phew…!’ and that confirmed my feeling about the price!

Footnote: Norwich Cathedral is apparently named The Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. And I forgot to mention that it has proper cloisters, in very good condition. Obviously Henry VIII didn't manage to get his nasty hands on those.