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!!
:)