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It's a glorious day and I have herbs to plant. But... last holiday post, I'm still blogging!

Mum and I arrived to a lovely huggy welcome. A. was chaffeur and had bought groceries for his Gran; V. shed a few happy tears and admitted to unwashed dishes (excused - she's solved the lounge layout problem); the cat gave me wet kisses and is still following me round 3 days later.

We had a good time. Saw everything and everyone we wanted to and more. I'd like to go back to Europe - as independent of commerce and choreography as I can be! There's some things I won't need to 'do' again, and a continent of possibilities.

Haven't said much about the art - I'm not the most visually literate person. It was uniformly amazing, however. Some of you will understand when I say that I spent time absorbed in the gilt framing around the Rembrandts. 

What I've brought home are these contemporary pieces. The mixed media work, 'Shed No. 493' is by an Eton drawing master, Alex Forsyth, and features an old spray can top. The little raku pot is by Bryony Rich, from south-west Britain. Glen and I bought a number of ceramic pieces to remind us of where we'd been.

 
Aroha nui.

Antidotes & reality checks

• Graffiti in Zurich - what, the Swiss???
• The Jesuitkirche in Heidelberg - white interiors setting off provocative contemporary art exploring spiritual and human themes, a meditative cottage garden along the outside wall and evidence of a living congregation. Tranquillity. What, the Jesuits??? [I think it may be in the hands of others, actually]
• Extremely run down houseboats in Amsterdam on the last 'cruise' morning. Rotting, mouldy, paint peeling - slum housing really. Wouldn't like to think of the inhabitants' health in winter... Silence on the canal excursion! What, a world outside our bubble?
• The Eden Project. Plenty to praise; you could also find fault, but they're being educative. What, real food for lunch???

 

• Ordinary people going about their days. Amsterdam, once disembarked; St Nicks Market in Bristol (big tick); odd glimpses elsewhere. 
• The British didn't start the Industrial Revolution after all. It was the Dutch, much earlier - some guy invented the crankshaft, which transformed windmill technology. What, my general knowledge is ethnocentric?
• Family and friends. Unsurprisingly. Always! Daily txts (well almost) from A&V. 

 

• Nature. Wind in my hair, the sea! (yaay, Cornish coasts). I noticed minerals more than usual: limestone and sandstone buildings - pink and otherwise; marble, granite, slate and brick. I seem to like photographing human constructions with vegetation, too. Look at the angles of the slate in this Polruan wall!

Bubble Tourism

Warning: bit of a rant!

I hadn't done the package tour thing before, and being a cruise as well... there've been a few realisations and reinforced prejudices about mass market holidays which I'll admit to:

• it's all about getting you to spend money rather than experiencing real places and people
• usually on expensive junk, probably manufactured in early-industrial-age conditions
• it's easy to eat too much food
• Jesus could  throw thousands of voyeurs out of cathedrals and churches, any day
• despite being privileged myself I felt exploited; there were times when I wanted to break out
• caricatures of Florida retirees are fairly well deserved

Ok, there were some pleasant Western Australians on the boat, a pair of Canadians who mostly eschewed the 'excursions' and did their own thing, and an interesting couple from Alaska who were embarrassed about Sarah! You can also have quite decent conversations with caricatures when you get them on their own e.g. the Oil Man who dropped his persona somewhat to suggest his industry needed more regulation...

But I was embarrassed and perturbed by the underlying ethos and the waste. Heck, what are we doing? One architecturally lovely town, Rudesheim, appeared to be entirely devoted to The Tourist. There was an interesting museum of mechanical musical instruments which we were processed through, and another of instruments of torture, which we weren't. Otherwise: cafes, bars, and souvenir shops - at least one of which required you to pay cash unless you spent $60NZ on their bits and bobs. While there, 11 other similar cruise boats were docked = a minimum of 1700 people packing out a couple of blocks of cobbled alleys. Imagine August. Awful!

I came across a bit of a challenge while musing in the midst of it all. "Be the change you want to see  in the world" - Mahatma Ghandi.

I've a way to go...

Countervailing forces

No, not more armies. Subversion, reason, evidence, and intellect!

Subversion. Best example of revenge of the underclasses...

© Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 & GFDL. Retrieved 24th Oct, 2010.

 The central figure represents Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden, who laid the foundation stone of the immense and justifiably renowned gothic cathedral at Cologne in 1248. The stonemasons had something permanent to say about the person, the Church, the project, and/or the burden on the populace for financing it. The design of the pedestal can't be obvious from ground-level!

Reason. I was delighted with this chronological masterpiece in Strasbourg Cathedral; an astronomical clock which tracks the passing of time in different ways. From memory: annually, by season, by lunar and calendar months, daily; hourly, by quarter and minutes; astrologically; and the four ages of mankind. It even tracks eclipses! The interconnected timepieces feature automata, so if you wait for a bit various figures and objects from mythical, religious and early scientific paradigms appear and move about. The wonderfully OTT 'case' dates from the 16th century, but the workings were rebuilt in the 19th.  A triumph of cosmological thinking and mechanical engineering that survived hundreds of years of religious politics!

Taxiarchos228 at the German language Wikipedia . Retrieved 24th Oct, 2010.

Evidence. Having already admitted to Romantic susceptibilities, you won't be surprised to hear that, being in Cornwall, I had to visit Tintagel! Mythically inclined Liz was just happy to be there; so was nature-loving moi. It's a fabulous bit of coastline. Historical-scientific Liz was also very content with the archaelogical and inter-textual evidence - had a solid lot to say about Saxon and Medieval occupants, and their pre-occupations, which stand behind the insubstantial Arthurian stuff. Glad to know the British heritage industry can bravely take on more prosaic explanations! Not so the retailers up the road - Tintagel village is a mini Glastonbury for New Agers, I reckon. And the souvenir places play Camelot and the Round Table game to the hilt!

Remains of main keep, Tintagel. The land is a great deal more eroded than when built upon in Medieval days.

Intellect. I spent my last five days with friends at Eton College, that bastion of... well, you can all probably insert something appropriate. Linda and Murray are Kiwis who've been in residence for 5 years - teaching and pastoral roles. Being who they are, I had a really good time catching up and satisfying my curiosity about the place. Saw the sights (Windsor Castle nearby; Eton's chapel dates from the 15th century, with contemporaneous wall paintings concealed and revealed by the ebbs and flows of history) and participated at the margins of routine in the quintessential public school. Served tea and coffee after Communion, went to a school play, and watched the mutually expressed warmth and relaxed good humour of my hosts interactions with adolescent boys in various situations.

Yes, despite the topcoat uniforms - worn all day - Eton is a village inhabited by humans: adolescents and adults living, working, playing and studying side by side 24/7. The boys are mostly, but not all, from privileged  families (think cosmopolitan and well-off as much as connected and aristocratic), and very bright as well. So it was great to discover that all pupils are challenged to think carefully about moral, environmental, religious and ethical issues by their chaplain-teachers. One of the examples I came across involved considering Western and African thinking around genital mutiliation... [Value-loaded terminology noted]. Some of you may be able to construct an answer to the question 'what is conscience?' Not having formal philosophical frameworks, I'd find that pretty difficult, but from their first year (3rd form), Eton boys are wrestling with this stuff, and expectations are high that they will provide considered responses. In later years so-called Divinity/Theology classes are optional - but they're so popular that nearly 25% of senior students choose to take them for A levels.

So, we have intellect and thoughtfulness - not to mention the influence of a few down-to-earth colonials on staff! Should make a difference.

 

One of three tailors in Eton's shortish High Street, who not only sell said topcoats (far right), but dryclean them fortnightly. School staff are also uniformly attired - suits, white tied ties. Another universe!

Power and privilege

This is your historian speaking! Ok, you find yourself on an expensive package tour down the Rhine for a week - expect castles, cathedrals, merchant houses and city halls. The easily accessible physical and narrative fragments of our pasts are so often those constructed, kept and handed on by the strong and resource-full. That said, I'm not immune to Romanticism, and fully savoured the architecture, the craftsmanship, the artefacts and the stories...
Images: Strasbourg's cathedral towering; Heidelberg castle - a misty time!

Our guides mostly began their tales of European cities with Roman military settlement. [ If  you're interested in artefacts and archaeology the Romisch-Germanisches (Romano-German) Museum next to Cologne Cathedral is definitely worth a visit.] Unsurprisingly for a region where borders have been very moveable, politics, religion and shifts in the balance of power figured strongly in the guide-talk. And who was nominally responsible for the push at the time: Caesars, generals and popes; Louis XVI, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler. All of interest, but made even more so by comparison - easy to pick underlying national loyalties by which despoiler was or wasn't mentioned!

To be fair, the guides were well informed in the heritage genre, and intelligent. The most balanced recounting came from our guides in the centre of European governance, Strasbourg. The morning was memorable for a personal family history told by a woman whose great grandmother, grandmother and mother had lived through a club sandwich of regimes in the 19th and 20th centuries: French, German, French, German, French. You can imagine the strength of feeling of earlier generations, but this person was a proud resident of a city at work on peaceful resolutions, and her children call themselves European.

Tantalising tastes. I'm very keen to go back to Europe, independently, and spend considerably more than a week feasting from a wider menu!

Printed words

How could I not??

Guide Erika at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, demonstrating Johannes' innovations - moveable type and a press based on those used to crush grapes. She's holding dogskin inking pads (no pores) and found a place in my recollections by taking librarian me back later to look at some very early books: incunabula. Of course, 'mass' production of texts powered both the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Felt a tad pilgrimatic!

We did make it to Hay-on-Wye, which was a bookshop mecca for me as much as a bookish experience. So I enjoyed conversing with the manager/proprietors (an early employment role of mine), asked a Dickens specialist about Glen's Dad's 1930s set, and wandered happily with Mum, Chris and Steph amongst second-hand, new and antiquarian emporiums - large, small and quirky.  Favourite shop-name: 'Murder and Mayhem'!  'Mostly Maps' was fascinating for the cartographic artistry.

I was delighted last week to realise that Fowey Harbour/River and environs are du Maurier country, and with a little determined imagining (too much sun, people and boats) you can conjure Manderley and Frenchman's Creek. I marked the holiday by buying 'Jamaica Inn' in paper format. btw, I'm finding the  Kobo is great for travelling and bed-time reading, but I definitely still want to live with books on shelves!

Conveyances

have been many and varied!! Setting aside the airborne ones...

Mum has been wheelchair queen now and then, notably at Hong Kong airport, with a plane to taxi service that included regal treatment by Customs - no queuing and a wave-through for both of us! Thought I'd discovered the perfect way to transit until we hit Heathrow and Zurich :( However, Eden Project lets those providing propulsion in for free - mitigating the youngish ticket person's assumption that I was a senior citizen. Instant indignation!

The river boat was plain luxurious, and the trip downstream not so much sailing as gliding. The Rhine is very obviously a major highway for freight and tourism - numerous wide shallow craft shared the waterway all the way to Amsterdam: cycle city. There are an astonishing 750,000 old bikes there - about one per person. Of course it's flat, which helps. We were justifiably warned to watch out, as cyclists rule the pathways, which segue into cycle, road and tramlines with little distinction. All the drivers are mad. Bikes in this zigzag parking area come and go daily with city workers.

We've just been in Cornwall for a week, with it's own vehicular highlights! Getting lost in the flooded and narrow night-time streets of Fowey was a bit of an adventure. We narrowly escaped the angular maze and caught the last car-ferry to our destination, Polruan. Our excursions along single-vehicle Cornish lanes have featured notable encounters with two container-laden trucks,  a bus, several huge tractors (huh?), and numerous cordial reversals for up to three vehicles in a line. Driving here necessitates possessing an excellent spatial sense and a clear recollection of the last gateway or shallow widening between thickly hedged banks. Everyone was very polite!

The thematic approach: Food

There's been quite a lot of chocolate... even today in Bristol, I was seduced by the idea of an espresso chocolate 'shot' flavoured with essence of rhubarb. Yes, rhubarb. I'm very fond of it! Verdict? Subtle, velvety, gorgeous.
So, in brief: chocolate and cheese in Zurich; chocolate, wine and cheese in Strasbourg; chocolate and berries in Germany, and apfel strudel; cheese in the Netherlands; Welsh cheese tasting (dairy, goat, sheep) today at St Nicholas in Bristol, near the chocolate shop.
Mum and I have needed to stop quite often for  rest and refreshments. This patisserie is in Obernai, France, which is a very pretty town. The food fulfilled all the promise of the window display!

Shipboard for 7 days, the food was, well, very good indeed. Buffet breakfasts and lunches catered to all tastes, although dishes for the American palate were quite evident. I've never been able to handle eating Danish for breakfast! The evening meals (6 courses; sensibly portioned) were delightfully presented and the service was extremely attentive. Interestingly, most of the wait staff were from Indonesia [the Dutch connection?], and the shine went off for me when some fellow guests reported on their work hours - 17 hour days, 6 day weeks, for 8 months of the year. Hmm.
I ate too much that week, and am about to compound the calorie count with a restaurant dinner - which I will still enjoy :)

Laggard blogger

Ok, not so much a blog as a retrospective... circumstances have conspired, and I baulked at the cost of access on the boat! Anyway, here I am in England, getting used to a different keyboard and looking back on two weeks of holiday in motion.
After fond farewells [ yes, Kiki, you fitted nicely in the lid compartment ] we had an uneventful flight to HongKong; time enough for a bus-based city tour of key tourist spots - a Tao monastery smokily heavy with incense, fantastic views from the Peak - albeit with too much commentary about rich people and their houses - the remnants of a sampan fishing community and a market notable for the absence of local shoppers. In the process we drove halfway round the island. I was surprised by the proportion of steep, scrubby land in Hong Kong - there's a lot of it, and I'd been expecting coast to coast buildings.
Our taxi trip from Kowloon back to the hotel near the airport was a memorable one - our local taxi driver became lost! There was the hotel, neon sign glowing larger than life on one side of the motorway, and we were on the other. Half an hour later I managed to convince our embarrassed chauffeur [who had quite rightly stopped the clock] to cease listening to Dispatch and pay attention to my directions. Fortunately he understood 'left', 'right', 'yes' and 'no'. Yaay for iPhone and Google maps!!
:)