Monday, October 07, 2002

 
Good morning to me! Yesterday was my first day at home without having to play host, so instead I decided to play hookie and sat around the house all day eating my way through my entire pantry and reading comic books and silly magazines and being disgustingly lazy. I got in pretty late on Saturday, so I used that as an excuse (like I need one) for being a complete lazy slob. I did do my laundry though, so that's something.

Anyway, to take this in chronological order:

My dad arrived on Wednesday September 25 and then promptly took a nap. He came to work with me later, only to discover that he wasn't going to get to see the opening of the glamorous Milosevic trial as it had finished for the day, and instead had to sit through a really boring status conference. That night I took him out for Greek food.

Thursday, I had the day off so we went to Amsterdam. I was pretty pleased because I discovered a book market on the Spui as well as a wierd little corridor in the university that had a whole bunch of used book sellers. My dad? Not so pleased.

The next day, since I was off until late the next week, we decided to take a trip. We left in the morning and spent the afternoon in Brussels having a wander and then that night we took the train to Luxembourg. Sadly it was late by the time we got there, so we weren't able to ooh and aah over the Luxembourgeois scenery along the way. But, we woke up early the next morning and took a look around and all I can say is, it may be smaller than the greater Toronto area, but Luxembourg rocks.

We were staying near the train station, which is a short walk away from the city centre, which is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. Unlike the Netherlands and most of Belgium, Luxembourg is not flat, and in fact has some pretty wicked and pretty bizarre rock formation. The city has a great big gorge in the middle of it, spanned by several bridges, and exists on many levels (literally--there is actually an elevator from one part of the city to the other which is considered public transport and is free). It used to be a fortified city until it disarmed in the mid-1800s, but the remains of the fortifying walls still surround the city and make for a pretty fun walk if you're ambitious. Dad is not much of a walker so we couldn't go, but it was otherwise really amazing.

The lower part of the city is pretty old and hasn't seen much in the way of new development, it being tiny and completely contained. But it's got a cute little river in the middle of it (probably the one which at some point made the gorge) and charming little cafes and flowers everywhere. The upper part of the old city is pretty cool too, with all sorts of neat old churches and buildings and winding, up and down, streets. There are almost no bicyclists here, but when they do show, they're in full protective gear, sporting fancy mountain bikes. Definitely not Dutch.

After a while, we decided to take a tour of the countryside (a 3 hour tour!), which took us through the Luxembourg highway system (which looks like the kind of place where incompetent motorists go to die - teeny signs, lack of lights, hairpin turns, tight corners) to a really neat castle near the German border called Vianden. Upon arrival at Vianden, we discovered that Vianden was way at the top of a cliff and the only way up really was to walk (later on I discovered that there was some sort of tourist train, but that it came infrequently and showed up too late for the people on our bus to take it and be back in time). This caused something of an argument between me and my non-walker of a father who decided that he would rather look at the place from a distance and that I should join him in this amusing exercise.

So I went up to the castle up a really winding and steep road through the village, passing many a boozing biker on the way. Apparently Luxembourg, and especially Vianden, are really big with the bikers. Who knew?

The village was really pretty, the kind of place that Debbie Travis goes to to get inspiration for her cheesier painting projects. At the top, the castle was spectacular, though I did discover that there was heavy construction and restoration going on on the side that you can't see from the bottom. I especially enjoyed the way the fortifcations looked completely haphazard, and how the building appeared to have been built with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. The outer wall spreads out pretty far from the castle, and if I'd had more time I would have walked it too because it was really beautiful. The inside of the castle was pretty cool too, though not as impressive as the outside. it had your basic typical medieval rooms and some exhibits on the history of the castle, which I have to say were no match for the parts outdoors. Vianden is pretty old, but they've excavated even older bits underneath, which was also fun to look at.

On the way back, we stopped at another castle, whose name unfortunately escapes me right now. I took lots of pictures though, as it was more ruinous than Vianden, which is, in general, in pretty good shape.

That night, we left for Strasbourg. Strasbourg is in the Alsace region of France, which, for those who know their history, was traded back and forth between Germany and France many times. Not only does Strasbourg have a pretty Renaissance city centre, but it also houses the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. Built at the intersection of many rivers, Strasbourg also has a lot of cool waterways as well, making it almost as wet as Amsterdam or Venice, though not quite. One of the really cool things about Strasbourg is that a lot of the buildings are still in their more or less original form, many of them arrayed around the central cathedral, a pink sandstone monstrosity with many entrances, flying buttresses all over the place, and the ubiquitous scaffolding all over the tower. The place is almost ridiculously huge, prompting me to make a crack about how if that was the house of god, you might have trouble finding him, which my dad didn't find so funny.

We took a city tour here, which turned out to be not worth it as most of the points of interest are within walking distance, though we got more information than we would have bothered to dig up ourselves. Strasbourg's old city also has a wicked covered bridge and four watchtowers still standing. They also have a bridge called Pont Des Corbeaux, so named because it used to be where criminals were punished by being put in a cage and drowned, then left for the crows. It used to be called the bridge of punishment or something clever like that, but I guess they thought the crow thing was less threatening. The city centre has a whole ton of half-timber houses, most of which are now used for restaurants and tourists shops, though still incredibly pretty. I'm fairly certain that Debbie Travis did have a painting project based on similar buildings (she does love the look of trompe l'oeil wood), though I don't know if she was inspired by Strasbourg.

As our train was not due to depart until around 3pm, we spent the next morning at the European parliament buildings followed by the council of europe, where I got the dubious pleasure of having hulking guards point semi-automatic weapons at me. My dad followed this up by taking my picture in front of everything in sight including a line of flagpoles.

We left for Antwerp that afternoon and arrived around 8 or 9pm. We spent the night in the most ghetto hotel on the face of the earth where we were first assigned to rooms where people were actually staying, then assigned to rooms that smelled, which upon opening the window, turned into rooms with a serious mosquito problem. The next morning, I was covered in bug bites, which was unsurprising but unpleasant.

The famous story about Antwerp involves a giant named Druon Antigon, who used to cut off the hand of everyone who passed his castle (some kind of bizarre tax I guess) and throw it into the river. One day, an intrepid young Roman centurion named Brabo killed him, and then cut off his hand and threw it into the river. The name Antwerp comes from the Flemish "handwerpen," which means hand throwing. The best part of this is that there is a fountain (the Brabo fountain, in fact), depicting this scene on the Grote Markt, in front of the city hall. The fountain has several levels, the first being where the dead giant is lying, his stump spurting water. Next to him are some dragons and some fish which are spurting water out of their mouths. Above that are what seem to be two distressed women, who are also spurting water out of their mouths. But, the piece de resistance is Brabo, at the top of the fountian, getting ready to throw the severed hand, which is also spurting water. I didn't take pictures because it's difficult to capture the true wierdness of the fountain. You really have to see it and walk around it to understand. The fountain is also at ground level, which means that you can look at all this stuff up close, if you don't mind getting a little moist. There's a picture of it here, but it doesn't really do it justice.

After this we went to the Antwerp Cathedral of Our Lady, a Gothic monster that's a little hard to see as, at some point, people took to sticking buildings right up against it. Antwerp is a town that has spent lots of money on its churches (maybe in a futile bid to be known for something other than severed hands) and there are many spectacular churches all over. We say two, one of which may or may not have been St Carolus Borromeus Church (I'm not sure) and the other of which was the Cathedral of Our Lady.

The first church was pretty spectacular, all little chapels and flagstone floors and huge vaulted ceilings and baroque decorations. The other was Antwerp's major cathedral, and probably the most amusing because we arrived just in time for a free guided tour in English. Our tour guide, a transplanted British lady whose main joy in life seemed to be the cathedral, was the funnest part, as she got into an argument with another tour guide and was entirely full of bizarre facts. Rubens has two altar pieces in this church, one of which was commissioned for the now-defunct church of St. Walburga. You can have a look at them here. One fun thing that the tour guide pointed out was that the painting for St. Walburga's church actually forms a large W. The cathedral has several smaller chapels surrounding the nave, most of which are in the process of restoration, all of which are worth a look as they are particularly medieval looking and kind of fun as. They have these wicked painted walls, which is a little unexpected in a stone cathedral, but is apparently quite legitimate as the whole thing might have been painted at one point. There was one chapel, painted a really excellent shade of red, that I could have just moved into.

The nutty tour guide also explained to us the origin of the phrase stinking rich, which I will now share, because even though I don't know if it's true, it's pretty gross and funny anyway. The thing with the cathedral is that when you walk around it, you'll notice that there are a whole bunch of stones on the ground with writing on them. These are markers for family crypts. However, only the rich got to be buried in the family crypts inside the church, whereas the poor had to make do with the churchyard outside. Antwerp is, like the Netherlands and most of Belgium, below the water table and also given to extremely damp weather. Which means that whenever the family crypts were opened, an almost unholy stench would come out of them, hence the phrase stinking rich.

I don't know. Maybe you had to be there.

Anyway, after a bit more wandering, we left Antwerp and came home.

My dad left on Saturday and I will admit that while it was nice to see him, it was also nice to see him go home. Probably because I had to sleep on the couch.
posted by Alleen at 10:48:13 AM

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