Week 41: London Birthday Treat!

We had decided a month or so ago to take a trip to London for Jason's birthday. This idea was precipitated by hearing that one of the comics on a podcast we listen to regularly, was doing a set of shows in London which overlapped with Jason's 34th birthday. We decided to make it a long weekend and flew into London from Luxembourg on Friday.

After finding our apartment--booked through AirBandB, though this time not over a yoga studio--we dropped our stuff and went out for a walk around the city. Our first stop was at the Handle House Museum, as it was in the general direction of our evening activities and was open a bit later than some of the other museums. Handle was born in Germany, but lived for about 30 years in London, where he did a fair amount of composing. The museum was small, but had a number of nice touches, including a actual harpsichordist practicing in Handle's practice room. We were informed by the docent that she would be playing in Bucharest the following weekend. Ah, the life of an international harpsichordist!

That evening, after a fantastic dinner at a Malaysian restaurant, we saw the comic who spurred our trip: Andy Zaltzman. And I even got in a heckle (frankly, he should have known better, he asked how much we paid for the tickets and I yelled out "too much"), which resulted in a short conversation with him from our seat during the show. After the show, he hung around and we shook his hand and chatted a bit...no hard feelings that we could tell!

On Saturday morning, we spent some time walking around the city, following a walk suggested in our Lonely Planet guide through the "Square Mile"--the oldest part of London, which was the location of the first Roman settlement. The walk started near St. Paul's Cathedral, who's font yard is the location of an Occupy encampment. An interesting item regarding this encampment: the cannon chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral had resigned late last fall because he refused to be involved in any actions to remove the protesters, saying that to evict protesters would lead to "violence in the name of the Church". 

Occupy London encampment in front of St. Paul's

We did take a step inside the cathedral, but the admission price was a bit steep, so we decided to enjoy the view from the outside. Our walk continued to the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which you can climb to the top of and see some great views of the city, including St. Paul's. The fire had started in a bakery--a royal bakery, nonetheless--close by to the location of the Monument. The view from the top was quite good--we had clear weather as you can see--though hazy. 

The Monument to the Great Fire of London

View of London toward St.Paul's from the top of the Monument

The remainder of the walk took us through a number of market areas (unfortunately, not open at the time of our walk) and at the end we found ourselves in Whitechapel, home to Jack the Ripper's murders. For the afternoon, we headed over to the British Museum. When we were last in London a few years ago, we had really wanted to see the Lindow Man, a body found in a bog in England back in the mid-80s. Unfortunately at the time, his area of the museum was under renovations, so we were unable to see it. This time we were more fortunate, and made our way straight to the exhibit. And it was pretty cool--the body is about 2000 years.

Bog Man!

We also visited the Elgin Marbles, which are part of a set of marbles that were formerly part of the Parthenon in Greece. They were taken (with permission of the Ottomans) from Athens by the British ambassador around the year 1800 and given to the British Museum for display. There has been an on-going debate between the UK and Greece on where these sculptures should be, with each side saying, "we deserve to have them". The British Museum has a little pamphlet describing their position, which is available for reading in the gallery where the marbles are displayed--I personally think their claims of displaying them in context with the history (supported by other plundered artifacts) of the rest of the world are a bit dubious, but due to Greece's current financial status, the return of the marbles does not seem likely in the near future.

Elgin Marbles

We needed to kill a bit of time before our evening activity and dinner, so we stopped by the National Gallery,  and looked through their collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. Highlights include the forth version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Manet's Execution of Maximilian, which had been cut up into pieces (partially by Manet, for unexplained reasons) and then reassembled later by Degas. For you Bostonians, I just found in searching for the link above, that another version of this painting is on display at the MFA.

For our evening entertainment, we saw Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the longest running stage play, with over 24,500 performances. It was a good show--and a thing to see when in London. Due to tradition, I can't tell you who-done-it, but it is in the Wikipedia article I linked to above, so, for those of you who wish not to know--Spoiler Alert!

Jason was headed out on Sunday, while I was headed north in England for work. We decided to get dim sum for brunch in London's Chinatown--and it was rather fantastic. I had not eaten such good Chinese since I was last in Boston. 

Week 40: A Weekend at Home

Since we had some some adventures the preceding week and more to come in following weekends, we decided to spend a weekend home to relax. This was during the cold snap here in Europe. Our winter had been incredibly mild for a couple of New Englanders up to that point--then familiar icy grip of winter set in. We didn't get much in the way of snow, but we did have about two weeks of the low-to-mid teens (degrees F) and I had to start wearing my ski jacket around instead of my normal wool outer layer.

Due to the cold, we spent much of our weekend inside, catching up on laundry, lounging and otherwise relaxing. Of course, one does get cabin fever after being inside for a number of days, so we ventured out for a walk in the cold late in the day on Sunday. We took our usual walk through the fields near our apartment. There were no cows out, but we did pass at least two or three people out walking their dogs. Fun fact: you must play with your dog in Germany at least two times a day for at least one hour each time. (I see our downstairs neighbor doing this in the form of a walk at least twice a day. They have a cute little beagle named Joe.)

Jason doing his best to keep warm--check out our long shadows

The sun was setting as we came back from our walk. Though it was nice to get out and stretch our legs for a bit in the cold, it was even nicer to come back inside, warm those legs up and hunker down on the couch for the remainder of the evening. Luckily, it has warmed up, though it was nice to get a reminder--in retrospect--that it is indeed winter.

Sun setting over our neighborhood

Week 39: Munich

We spent the last weekend in January in Munich. I was in the area for work for the end of the week, then headed out to Austria on Sunday late in the day, so it was a convenient trip. Jason flew down from the Luxembourg airport (he, like me, is now converted to flying Luxair--you get a sandwich, a real, good, sandwich, and a drink on a one hour flight in economy--the only way to fly!) and we met up at the apartment that we rented through AirBnB (if you aren't familiar with AirBnB, it is a site where people can put their extra rooms or even their whole apartment up for rent for a day or a month--we've used it a number of times here in Europe and it is pretty great). The apartment happened to be over a yoga studio. This was our second apartment rented through AirBnB that was over a yoga studio...the lasts one being in France. I wonder if that is a hint from the universe...

For our first evening, we walked around Munich near the Marienplatz and came across a rather good group of street musicians. More of a street quintet. It is hard to see in the video but the flute player appeared to have a broken finger. Talk about suffering for art. After we watched the group for a bit, we found some food that is hard for us to find in our hinterland: Japanese noodle soup. It was good and hit the spot on the chilly night.

The next day we walked over to the Bavarian National Museum, which is one of my favorite types of museums: those with rambling halls and a wide variety of a stuff that is well curated. We spent about 3 hours checking our the wide variety of stuff: from a Tiffany lamp to the statue of Death shown in the photo below. Death, here, is from a clock tower and the bone in his right hand rang the bell. I kinda want this in my living room.

Death Rings for his Supper

We took a walk from the museum to the downtown area, passing by one of Munich's larger parks. I had remembered reading briefly in our guidebook about the fact that you could go surfing at one of the parks. They have an artificial wave built up on one of the streams, and people grab their little surfboards and go at it. I was not expecting, though, for anyone to be out this time of year, especially in the 20-25 degree F weather that Munich was seeing that weekend. Well, as you can see in the video below, my expectations were wrong. These guys were out in their full-body wet suits, many with hoods, to surf in weather that was only borderline-good for being outdoors.

We spent a couple hours on Sunday at the Deutsches Museum, which is another museum of my ilk, with a huge amount of exhibit space and well curated collections. I was reminded of the Henry Ford Museum, which Jason and I had visited about a year ago in Dearborn, MI, but the Deutsches Museum was organized far better than the Henry Ford and did not have a vague smell of hot dogs from the Wienermobile permeating all the exhibits.

For those of you who are a fan of the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science in Boston, the Deutsches Museum had a bit of a smaller venue, but a similar show. We walked in in the middle, just as the host was getting his last shock in his Faraday cage (the ball on the left in the linked photo). Don't worry folks! He was fine--the Faraday cage protects you from the shocks. Once the host climbed out of the cage, there were a series of high voltage demos, that went as follows:

Host: "Achtung!"

Crowd: (Covers ears)

Electricity: "ZAP! POP!"

Displayed Item that was Just Hit by the Electricity: (Catches on fire)

which is always a good time. 

Week 38: Saarbruecken

Our travels a couple weeks ago took us to Saarbruecken, Germany, about 90 minutes south of us. Our plan was to visit the Saarland museum, which our Lonely Planet guide told us has a nice collection of Modern and Contemporary art, but when we arrived, we found that it was under renovations and, as a result, closed. A sign at the door mentioned that the museums located here the castle were open, so we took a walk to the castle.

Saarbruecken was heavily bombed during WWII, so the castle was more a modern interpretation or rebuilding of a castle rather than others that we have shown. As you can see in the picture below, between the more classic castle shape on the edges, there is a more modern design of glass. It did look pretty cool, I have to say.

Saarbruecken Castle

By the castle, we found that there was an exhibit (link in German) of James Ensor's works. Our only knowledge of James Ensor comes from a song by They Might Be Giants, which, really only tell us that he is from Belgium and is a painter. The exhibit was free, so there was no hesitation on our part.

Meeting James Ensor

The exhibit focused on his pen and ink drawings, including those covering the life of Christ. Here is one representative example. Another, which both Jason and I really liked, was called "Mon Portrait en 1960" (My Portrait in 1960) and featured a drawing of a skeleton (Ensor was born in 1860). Artists are funny.

Coming away from the exhibit, we had expanded our knowledge of Mr. Ensor. We now know he did more than just paintings, had a bit of a humorous streak in him and we will be likely to recognize his work if we happen to come across it again. A nice accidental find.

Much like Dortmund and other mid-size European cities, Saarbruecken has a very nice shopping district. We spent some time walking through and stepping into stores here and there. We made one purchase: a ream A4 paper, which we should have purchased closer to the end of our shopping trip, but ended up carrying around with us for about an hour. Nothing like lugging around a pile of blank paper.

Saarbruecken is located in German state of Saarland. Saarland has been a bit of an industrial powerhouse for much of it's history, so following every war that Germany lost to France in the 20th century, France has taken the state as part of the spoils of war. On an equal number of occasions, the citizens of Saarland have later voted to rejoin Germany. Despite that, as you can see on the sign above for the Ensor exhibit, there is still a lot of French seen and heard as you walk through the streets. So, while no longer a part of France, the influence is still felt by the general proximity and the historical situation.