Filed under: France
Day 74, Friday 31st October 2008 (Cath)
After driving around it in an anticipation-building spiral for the last few weeks, we have reached our (well, really, the) ultimate French destination – Paris! We followed Dolores’ directions for the last time, dropped off our trusty Renault at the airport, and found our way to our comfortable Parisian digs, just down the hill from the Moulin Rouge in Montmarte.
It felt strange to see the old red windmill – it was the first place, since we left home in August, where Al and I were retracing our past steps. It looked a lot tackier in the light of day than it had on the night we first took photos outside it a few years ago, before we had headed down the hill to the only just slightly less famous cabaret, ‘La Nouvelle Eve’. After exploring a bit more of Montmarte today, we were shocked to realise that one of the boarded-up doors on our street was La Nouvelle Eve itself, looking a little bit worse for wear. It will always shine on in our memories (and possibly still reopen for the next tourist season).
(The magic seemed to come back after the sun went down)
Jenni’s guidebook led us on a walking tour of Montmarte, passing Renoir’s studio, an apartment where Van Gogh once lived, and the green-windmill-topped house where open air balls used to be held, the subject of Renoir’s painting Le Moulin de la Galette. The property is now private and surrounded by high fences, guard dogs, and some of the spikiest metal things I’ve ever seen. Okay, okay, we won’t come in!
Montmarte Cemetery (where we found the grave of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone)
Sacre Coeur (which has a spectacular location, but actually looked a bit clunky after we had seen so many intricately carved gothic facades)
View from the steps below Sacre Coeur
Pavement stencil further down the hill in Montmarte – I worry about penguins too
We celebrated our first night in Paris at a bar where the staff had made an impressive effort with Halloween costumes (Halloween is bigger here than we realised, with marzipan pumpkins for sale in most patisseries), and watched the French hope, Tsonga, knock Roddick out of the Paris Masters finals.
Filed under: France
Days 72 – 73, Wednesday 29th & Thursday 30th October 2008 (Cath)
Enough about the war – it was time for some bubbles.
Lots of bubbles! This is Hamish with just some of them, cellared in what were originally Roman chalk mines, so that the temperature is constant all year round.
Our first glass of real Champagne, at the Taittinger caves.
Moet et Chandon in Epernay.
Beneath this building is at least one bottle of champagne for every single resident of France. ‘Is this place insured?’, asked one American guy on our guided tour. Pause. ‘Yes, it is insured’, said our unamused French-Canadian guide. Later, an immaculately groomed German woman in jodphurs noticed a wire running along the 8-foot-high ceiling and interrupted the guide. ‘Is this 220 volts?’
‘I am not sure how many volts it is’, replied our very proper guide.
‘But it’s live?’, insisted the outraged visitor.
‘Madame, if you are considering touching it, that is not something I would recommend’, was the reply.
Vintage Moet ready for us to sample – very classy.
We had the Vintage 2003, which was released only a couple of weeks earlier. Most other Champagne houses didn’t produce a vintage that year, as it was the hottest European summer on record and hence gave a yield that was generally considered poor, but Moet et Chandon decided to take on the challenge and learn how to work with climate change to create unique wine. So, thankfully, although one may have to forgo many of modern life’s material luxuries if one wishes to continue living on this planet, one will still be able to sip some very posh champagne.
Dom Perignon, the monk who started it all.
Epernay’s entry in the ‘freaky child mannequins of Europe’ contest – actually sort of cute.
My little shop!
Actually, a little bit more about the war needed to be investigated, too. This is the school in Reims where the Nazis first signed a complete surrender, to end World War II in Europe (another one was later signed in Berlin to satisfy Stalin):
The museum here is almost perfect – not too big and not too small. It has a really interesting film, with footage of the signing; some personal stories, my favourite being about the young stenographer who received the message to be transmitted and realised what it meant; and most impressively the map room (from where Eisenhower commanded the Allies during the war), which has been left as it was when the war ended.
We didn’t go to this restaurant in Reims, but its hopeful-looking cow nearly pulled us in:
We had a couple of classy dinners in Reims, but its roads were almost harder to navigate than Luxembourg – it seemed like every third street turned into a dead end because of road works. At one stage in the centre of town, an older French man offered to help us, but when we explained where we needed to go (to the main road out of town), he shrugged and said ‘they changed all the signs on Monday. I live here and I have no idea how to get there now’. So for a quiet last night closer to where we were staying (near a very classy motorway interchange), we paid a last visit to Flunch.
The French version of Sizzler
No Moet here, but a great vegie bar (guess which end the French fries are at?)
Filed under: France
Day 71, Tuesday 28th October 2008 (Cath)
The extent of the conflict and the number of casualties of World War I in the areas we had visited so far were already unfathomable. Today, we were spending time in the place where the longest and one of the bloodiest battles of the war happened, with over 300,000 casualties on each side. It was where the greatly outnumbered French Army faced the Germans directly and alone, while the Allies launched the Battle of the Somme in part to try and pull some of the German troops away from Verdun and take some pressure off the French. Because of the ferocity of the fighting here, the French command used a rotating system to spare any one army division from being completely wiped out - as a result of this, about 70% of all French WWI soldiers fought in this battle. Verdun is still regarded as a symbol of French determination and resilience.
Before heading out to the battlefields, we visited the impressively named World Centre for Peace, Freedom and Human Rights, where the piece of art above sits in the garden. There was a good little exhibition called something like ‘Cartoons for Peace’, with some particularly great ones by cartoonists from Kenya and Japan (I wish we could remember their names). The rest of the museum, unfortunately, seemed to be made up of information pitched at the level of school kids (mainly posters showing the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but with probably not quite enough interactivity for them. The highlight was getting to walk through a wardrobe into a secret passage connecting the two main rooms!
Memorial in the city centre of Verdun
Trench of the bayonets, near Verdun – after the war, the tips of several bayonets in a row were discovered poking out of the ground along the line of a former trench. The bayonets were attached to rifles, and beneath each one was the corpse of a French soldier, who died in the battle in June 1916. It is not known whether they were buried (alive or already dead) on the impact of a shell, or by Germans who took over the position.
Fort Douaumont, above and below - built after the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth century, captured almost without a fight by the Germans in February 1916, then recaptured by the French in October the same year. It is still marked all over by shell holes.
The recently built (2006) memorial to the Muslims who died for France in World War I – it faces a similar Jewish memorial, which has been there somewhat longer, and in between the two is the main French National Cemetery Douaumont, full of the traditional military crosses.
Above the main cemetery at Douaumont is a huge monument, the Ossuary, where Nicolas Sarkozy is due to attend a Remembrance Day ceremony marking the 90th anniversary of Armistice this year. It holds the remains of 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers who died around Verdun – each niche coming off the long hallway corresponds to a different battlefield, so soldiers who were found together are buried here together.
Six of the villages around Verdun that were completely destroyed during the War have not been rebuilt. To get back to a more human and easily understood scale, we visited one of them, the village of Fleury. In a pretty little clearing in the woods, plaques mark where and what each street and building was - the school, the road mender, the baker, some small farms, the blacksmith, the haberdasher, the town hall, and the cafe-grocer.
Day 70, Monday 27th October 2008 (Cath)
Autobahns are FUN. I was lucky enough to be in the driver’s seat this morning when we decided to take a shortcut through Germany to Luxembourg.
On the way, we called in at the spooky Chateau Fleckenstein, carved atop cliffs, and then saw a part of the Maginot Line fortifications, which were built (but not entirely completed) by France leading up to World War II to keep Germany out. It could be considered a successful system in that, according to plan, it was never actually penetrated from the East – instead, the Nazis just went around the top, invading France via Belgium, where the defence infrastructure ran out because of incomplete funding.
Tank on display at the Maginot line – unfortunately the small museum was closed, as it is manned purely by volunteers who work only on weekends (the French Government still considers the Maginot line an embarrassment, so does not fund its maintenance)
Our first impression of Luxembourg City was tainted by road works, which were happening on literally almost every second street, rendering Dolores useless. Even our hotel was under renovation, but luckily it seemed like our rooms had already been done, because they were schmick. We stayed near the central railway station, and were somewhat surprised to find that to get into the old town centre, we had to cross a gorge! It was an easy twenty minute walk, and the conveniently located, tree-lined gorge made it quite a pretty one.
If anyone reading this has proud Luxembourgian heritage, please bear in mind that we only spent about six hours out and about in the country – not quite enough time to fully appreciate what I am sure is a beautiful and rich culture.
Some might regard a gorge striking through the very centre of a modern city as something that seems ‘not quite right’, even though it is unusual in a good way (and made a lot of defensive sense back in the day when the city was much smaller and constantly a target of conquerors). However, soon after entering the old town, Hamish began to point out various things about the city that seemed to him to be ‘not quite right’ (beginning with the various family portrait postcards of the Royal Family, which appeared to be taken in the mid-90s, with way too many awkward kids in matching white linen and denim). We began to believe him, and to spot further examples, and that is how Luxembourg gained its new unofficial motto – ‘NQR’.
Strange child mannequins made a comeback here, after not being seen on this trip since Eastern Europe. This may look like a normal display of baby clothes and accessories:
But look for a bit longer, and you will see:
The crazy spinning baby container – that can’t be healthy!
This statue looks just like any normal half-soldier, half-horse at first glance:
But it is holding both a spear (makes sense) and a giant compass (the trigonometric type, not navigational) – hmm
Apparently normal Christmas trees are so 2007. This year they have to be upside down, decorated with disco balls, and spinning.
A square in the old town – actually, this was just nice.
And although these butterflies looked like quite a cliche, the changing patterns of light being projected onto them were quite beautiful
Filed under: France
Day 68 & 69, Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th October 2008
We didn’t find any deli or lunch meats, so there were to be no stras and sauce sandwiches in Strasbourg, but the available food was still very satisfying and Germanic. And that is all I will write about food this time, just to mix things up a bit.
We drove to Strasbourg through and around the Vosges mountains, visiting the city of Nancy on the way, to see if we could spot some Nancy boys. The main square, named Place Stanislas after a Polish-born Duke of Lorraine, really looked like it could belong somewhere further East in Europe.
Golden gates
A Japanese garden exhibition had taken over the square, inspired by celebrations of 150 years of diplomatic relations between France and Japan
The regions of Alsace and Lorraine have been torn between France and Germany for centuries. After a few hundred years under French control, they were taken by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian war, and then returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. They were occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, and again became French after that war. As we drove into Alsace, winding up through the hills in search of a recently built memorial to the people of Alsace-Lorraine, we came across a sobering view as we rounded one bend. This was the Struthof concentration camp.
The atmosphere alone was enough for us to feel our awareness raised of the suffering and horrors that were dealt to innocent people here. We never did find the memorial we were looking for, but after this unplanned visit, we were ready to find a peaceful place.
Mount St Odile – the convent in the Vosges mountains
View from Mt St Odile (736m) – there seemed to be some great walking trails here
Strasbourg itself, the capital of Alsace, is officially French-speaking, but many of its TV channels are German, some of its signs and menus are bilingual, and there is a ready supply of sauerkraut (sorry, won’t mention food again).
Main square of Strasbourg, in front of the cathedral
The European Parliament building (Louise Weiss Building) – across the river, behind this building, is the European Court of Human Rights.
The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary arm of the European Union. This trip has confused me more about European organisations than I thought possible, but I now know that what we saw in Brussels was another seat of the European Parliament - its sessions are split between the two locations. Luxembourg, meanwhile, is home to the Secretariat (the administrative body) of the Parliament. Then there’s the Council of Europe…
‘Petit France’ and its pretty Alsatian houses, Strasbourg
The biggest Autumn leaves yet
Strasbourg cathedral, made of local red sandstone
Noice, different, unusual, but absolutely packed full of tourists (we’ve been spoilt in small towns)
