Hannah Swithinbank

Some reasons why you shouldn’t go to Trier in winter

1. It will be COLD.  And Trier is a town where the things you want to see are largely outsidey things that involve wandering around. Apart from the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, which is obviously an inside thing, and the churches the main sights are the Roman ruins like the Kaiserthermen and the amphitheatre, and the town itself.

2. Cold itself isn’t too horrible, it’s when you start adding in wintery weather like rain, sleet or snow. ALL of which it did at some point on Friday when I was there.   This is what town looked like from the Porta Nigra on Friday afternoon.  ‘Twas lovely.  You could sort of see that Trier is actually a really lovely town, but by the time you’d got wet ankles a cold head and cold hands, you weren’t really in the mood to appreciate it.

3. There is an additional problem that arises when you add cold and wet winter weather to a collection of outside sights. It’s called ICE.   Apart from the Porta Nigra and the Viehmarktthermen (which is under a big glass box) all the Roman sites I wanted to see were shut due to icy surfaces.  So I stood outside them and whimpered, and took photos through the fence.

5. Photos. Aha, yes. Cameras and sleet are two unmixy things.  Snow, oddly, isn’t so bad, for it feels dryer (don’t ask, I have my own personal science going on, clearly) but sleet and rain don’t make my camera feel comfortable.  So on Friday I took few photos and fewer that I liked. Saturday was better as, although it had snowed overnight, it wasn’t whilst I was out and about, and there was even a smidgen of blue sky and sunlight, which made for better photography.

6. Other things indoorsy things will also be closed, because there is restauration work being done (the Liebfraukirche), or because it’s January (the Landesmuseum).  ‘Twas at the discovery of this last, on Saturday morning that I just starting laughing at my comedy of woe.  Trier in January FAIL.

That said, it wasn’t actually a complete bust.  Saturday morning, despite the snowy and icy conditions meaning that things were shut and that I kept trying to do the splits whilst walking on, well, pretty much every possible road surface (the GRAVEL in the park was frozen and slippy, seriously), the town looked really lovely in it’s snow dusting.  For example – the cloister behind the Dom and the Liebfraukirche.   There’s a lovely little coffee shop in the House of the Three Kings, which does amazing bagels and is open from seven am, which is great when your hostel doesn’t do breakfast.  The walk along the Mosel River past the windmills to the Römerbrücke is rather lovely.

There’s also a really really nice little wine cellar-restaurant across the road from the Liebfraukirche.  It’s called Weinstube Kesselstatt and is a really beautiful place with lovely wine and yummy food, and it totally made up for the fact that Friday was cold and wet and miserable and filled with shut things I wanted to see.

Slightly More Positive Reflectiveness.

Yes yes, the iPad.  No, no, I’m not an Apple Fanboy or Apple Evangelist.   After all, yesterday on the Twitters I did declare: “@Rage_DyingLight I just hate Apple Evangelists. I’m quite attached to my iPod touch, but it’s hardly curing world hunger.”   And later yesterday evening I did declare: “I have to say, I can see nothing that tempts me towards an iPad. Even the ‘ooooh shiny’ isn’t really working for me right now.” And then I got scolded and down I was a cold, heartless person, and I got cranky and yelled back – because that’s what I mean by Apple evangelism, the assumption that everyone should want an Apple product and if they don’t there’s something wrong with me.  And no, not everyone who owns Apple is an Apple Evangelist, it’s just that those who are are SO LOUD.  And that puts my back up, and I get stubborn and declare that ‘I don’t want anything Apple except my iPod.’

But here’s the thing, when I’m really honest that’s not entirely true, and I do get why people like Apple tech so much.  A few years ago my first iPod died.  I’d only had it 18 months, which was annoying, but then I had dropped it quite a lot so I wasn’t completely blaming the tech, and I wanted to buy a new one.  I was going to the States in the next couple of months, so I figured I’d survive a few weeks without one and pick up the new one on the other side of the Atlantic.  When I got there, I stopped into a general electronicsy store when I had some free time and asked if they stocked any. No, they said, insulted and proceeded to try and sell me a Zune instead. No, said I, I’ve actually thought about this, I want an iPod. But why, they said, and reeled off a bunch of flaws. But, says I, I know all that and I still want an iPod. I like the feel of them. And they laughed and said, “Feel?! What’re you going to do, stroke it?”  I blinked, slightly baffled, and  left, realising later that they just didn’t get the intuitiveness and sheer shiny appeal of the iPod, which, yes, you do actually stroke.

I like my iPod. The one I eventually bought that trip is still working, four years later, although it has largely been superseded by my iPod Touch.   When they first came out I said, ‘Oh I don’t want an iPhone’ – I didn’t want that kind of phone bill, or long contract, and I wouldn’t make use of all it could do. However, after six months with an iPod Touch I now do want an iPhone, because I will make use of all that it can do.  Or at least, I’m going to want a smartphone of some kind, and the iPhone is currently frontrunner because I like it’s iPoddy music playing skills (I like iTunes and the iPod, they work very well for me).

But this isn’t the opportunity for an Apple Evangelist to start cackling and rubbing their hands, and preparing to welcome me to the ‘light side’.  I don’t want an Apple computer. Not ‘not ever’.  Perhaps if I had a small fortune bundling up somewhere at some point I would consider it – they are pretty, and they do work well, and I’d like to try Aperture for my photography.  But I object to paying twice the price for the same specs of my current laptop, and I can’t afford to get all the software I use in Mac-friendly versions.  It would be the equivalent of a photographer moving from Canon to Nikon and having to re-buy all of their lenses.  It’s hardly financially sound.   I also like the fact that, with a little bit of learnin’, I can metaphorically hammer my Windows-7-running Dell into doing a many many different things.  If I had more learnin’, I’d go linux.  Apparently my dad’s installed linux on my old laptop, so I’m going to play with it when I go home and get some of this learnin’.   A Macbook is actually not what I want in my computing life right now.

So, here’s the thing with the iPad. Stephen Fry, bless his apple-labelled cotton socks, has reminded me of something – game changing importance isn’t always evidence on first appearance, and it’s what Apple do to the iPad from here that’s really going to mark out what it’s going to become.  It has to grow up and become a real boy. Or something.   It may be in time, the iPad becomes something I do find a use for in my life – or more likely, another company’s tablet will become something (although I am glad that the tablet is not so outrageously expensive as I find Apple’s laptops to be).   On closer examination, where the iPad looks less like a giant iPhone (whilst the rows of icons on the iPhone work for it, I like a clean screen on my computers, all the icons squirrelled away in docks and toolbars), the shiny begins to work for me. I can see the appeal a bit more than I could last night.   But right now, it is absolutely nothing I want.  I have no use for it.  If I want 24/7 information, I want it in my pocket, so I want an iPhone or iPod touch.  If I’m at home, I’m happy with my laptop and a bunch of external harddrives – and as an amateur photographer I want more than 64gigs of storage, thank you very much.  If I’m trekking my larger-than-an-iPod-Touch computer around with me, I want it to have a cover for the screen – preferably a lid, because I do drop stuff.  If I’m typing a lot, I actually want a keyboard, because I like the feel and sound of a keyboard buttons going up and down – it makes me feel like I’m writing.  And – and in a lot of ways this is what might keep me away from this tablet for a while – if I’m using it for photo editing and displaying them, I DON’T WANT greasy finger smudges all over the screen (or the screen protector, if you go in for them).  I hate having smudges on my laptop screen enough when I’m editing photos.  That’s going to get exponentially worse on a computer that is all about touching it – is it a bird, is it a cloud, is it a spot on the sensor, NO, it’s a bloody great finger smudge.

So, whilst I’m starting to get the sense of ‘Oh shiny’ and the fact that they might be joyously intuitive to use, I still have absolutely no use for an iPad, and I’m not yet ready to succumb to the marketing and rhetoric of ‘Oh but your life will be better if you have one.’  No it won’t. If for no other reason than that I’ll hate myself for falling for the rhetoric and spending money I could have put to good use somewhere else (seriously, that’s a return plane ticket to Kenya right there).  So go buy one and play with it and love it, but STOP trying to tell me I should want one.

Narcissism, Vanity, Selfies.

I promise, I’m not about to fall in a pond and drown or anything.  I got bored of just plotting further travel and decided to take some self-portraits.  At the moment I’m the only person who’ll pose for me, so I’m the only model I can practice on.   And right now, I like being curled up on the bed reading, so that’s my modelling location (also, right now I seem to only like photos with only bits of my face in – clearly full-frontal portraiture is not my thing).  I have Jasper Fforde’s newest, Shades of Grey, and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point on the go.    I’m also reading the Lonely Planet Encounter Guide to Berlin.

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. BERLIN.

OK. Shrieking done.

I have just over two months left in Germany before the lease on the apartment is up/the scholarship money stops coming in and I have to head back to the Cornwall (where I plan to carry on exactly the same way I am now – writing, job hunting, and taking photos, except with less wurst and more roskilly’s ice cream).  So I’m trying to make the most of it.  I’m going to Trier for a couple of days at the end of the week to see Roman stuff. Trier’s nearly three hours by train, so a day trip is pushing it, giving me an excuse to stay overnight, hurrah.   Then, before I finally head home the Maternal Unit is coming out to visit so that we can go down the Rhine to Mainz, the Loreley and Koblenz – and so that she can give me a hand yanking my hefty suitcase on and off the trains on the way home.  Aaaand, Berlin.

I’m going to Berlin for six days.   I’m a little nervous.  Berlin’s always scared me off a little – it always sounds like it’s Way Too Cool for the likes of little old me.  I don’t much go in for partying either, especially not when I’m travelling solo, so a bit of me feels like I’ll be wasting something big that Berlin has to offer.   Still, I *do* want to see all the historical stuff – after years of modern history in school and university I’m ready to put faces to names, as it were.  I’m itching to see the Pergamon Museum and the altar – even though it’s clearly only going to make me want to go to Turkey all the more and actually see the ruins of Pergamon.  I’m going to go up the Reichstag dome, and photograph the Brandenburg Gate at night.  I might go to Schloss Charlottenburg. Or I might go to Dessau to see Bauhas stuff.  I’m going to take a day trip to Sachsenhausen, because yes I am that kind of traveller.  And the nerves are starting to become excited nerves rather than slightly scaredy-cat nerves.  I’m reading the guidebook and thinking, ‘I want to see that, and that, and that.’ And this is why I like Lonely Planet’s Encounter guides – they work around neighbourhoods and atmospheres and sights that aren’t necessarily the big things that you go into and ’see’ (though they do cover those things), and I like to walk when I’m visiting cities. Rather than just going from highlight to highlight on buses and trains, I like to walk my little feet off (seriously, I think seeing Tokyo might have actually stress-fractured every bone in my feet, they hurt so much) seeing what the city looks like as a whole – and taking photos of course.

So, internet, tell me – what should I see in Berlin?   What areas should I explore (or not explore, y’know, if there are those)? What neighbourhoods have funky hidden away bits?  Where can I get a good cup of coffee and a cheap meal? What one piece of architecture will make my camera spin?  If I have to choose between Schloss Charlottenburg and Dessau, which should I choose?  Where can I get a truly fantastic bag?  Advise me!

back at work [cough]

I just came back from California, so I really need to be getting on with writing some stuff about the trip/editing photos/working on my article-in-progress.    However, I got back on Saturday and woke up jetlagged on Sunday to find that it had snowed in Cologne. I promptly put on the wrong pair of trainers and headed out to church, first getting my shoes, socks and feet wet and then sitting in an Anglican church for two hours. It goes without saying that church was cold. All Anglican churches are cold, thems the rules. I think you’re supposed to get so used to it that you become even more afraid of hellfire, because it would be Too Hot.   Anyway, I now have a streaming cold and I don’t feel like doing any of it, so I’m just faffing around, mainlining Fisherman’s Friends and working my way through a box of tissues and several lemons with a lot of honey.

For the time being, take it that I had a great  trip, the conferences was really good, and that exploring the snowy bank of the Merced looking for the spot from which a flickr contact of mine takes his killer El Capitan shots was a highlight.  I’m not sure if I found the right spot (yes, no, maybe they were his footprints from the previous weekend that Iwas stepping in) – but I did find snow, reflection and a good view of the rock, and got this, which I’m really really happy about.

Books and Films of 2010

As ever, if I don’t list ‘em, I don’t remember all of them.

Books
1. Manhood for Amateurs -Michael Chabon
2. Naked – David Sedaris
3. The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
4. When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
5. Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde

Films
1. The Princess and the Frog
2. Invictus
3. Sherlock Holmes
4. A Serious Man

Last Year’s Lists

Noughties lists…

I wanna join in! Lists of the year, PAH. Lists of the decade, HURRAH. Though, at the risk of turning into Toby Ziegler, why does the decade end this year, and not next year? Why is the  decade not 2001-2010, rather than 2000-2009?  Can we bring up the bit where there wasn’t a year nought, or is that all cliche and annoying? Anyway, moving on…  Lists! Lists are fun. Top Tens!  I can do books and TV and movies of the decade, although we should all bear in mind that I have not yet started watching The Wire.  I probably can’t do theatre, not sensibly, since I don’t go very often (as often as I’d like), though I can wave my arms up and down and talk about the few things I did see and the plays that really stuck with me, and music. Hmmm, I’ll try, but that might get quite random, and will essentially be ‘Ten records what I have loved with absolutely no critical or aesthetic thought behind it’. I think they’re going to be unordered lists, because, well, trying to rank things like The Assination of Jesse James, The Lord of the Rings, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind against each other is kinda daft. They’re also going to be lists that mix up the things that I think have been really really good with things that have become a part of my personal furniture. So the Eyre Affair may knock Fortress of Solitude out of the books list because it has been a bigger part of my decade.  Just be warned, it’s going to be a little bit bonkers, and pretty much all about me, with no real grounding in any theories of aesthetics.

Books. Ok, I give up. I’m having a fiction and a non-fiction list. No arguing from the back.
Fiction
Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Algebraist – Iain M. Banks
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
A Life’s Music – Andrei Makine
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K Rowling
Anathem – Neal Stephenson

Non-Fiction
Pedant in the Kitchen – Julian Barnes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
The Zanzibar Chest – Aidan Hartley
Code 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig (I haven’t read Remix yet, but I suspect it’s more important for the noughties and the future).
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism – Jonathan Lethem (yes, ok, it’s an essay, but do I care? no)
The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge – John O’Farrell (well, it’s not fiction…)
A History of Britain – Simon Schama
A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace

Movies
The Assassination of Jesse James
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Gosford Park
Infernal Affairs
In the Mood for Love
The Lord of the Rings (I will count three as one, but if you make me pick just one, I’ll go for Fellowship every time)
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Royal Tennenbaums
Shaun of the Dead
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

TV
Band of Brothers
Battlestar Galactica
Black Books
Bleak House
Doctor Who
Firefly
State of Play
The Thick of It
The West Wing
Veronica Mars
(plus a very honourable mention to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which is not strictly television, but which must go somewhere on the list for being ACE)

Music
Carastini: Story of a Castrato – Philippe Jaroussky
DZf – Guy Barker
The Eminem Show – Eminem
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
Gua – Emmanuel Jal and Abdel Gadir Salim
The Lord of the Rings Soundtracks – Howard Shore
The Orpheus Suite – Colin Towns’ Mask Orchestra
Raising Sand – Robert Plant and Alison Kraus
Savane – Ali Farka Toure
Smile – Brian Wilson

Theatre I’m willing to jump up and down and wave my arms about… and I include ballet.
The Bacchae – twice over, Kneehigh’s version at the Hall for Cornwall, and the Alan Cumming starring version at the Edinburgh Festival
Giselle – The Royal Opera House, with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg.
Jumpers – Tom Stoppard, at the National Theatre
Noises Off – Michael Frayn (I was in actual physical pain from laughing so hard), at the National Theatre
The Nutcracker Sweeties/Orpheus Suite/Shakespeare Suite Triple Bill – Birmingham Royal Ballet.
The Real Thing – Tom Stoppard (I saw it at the Albery in January 2000, ok, so it counts)
Tristan and Yseult – Kneehigh Theatre at the Minack
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett, in Edinburgh with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart
War Horse – Nick Stafford, at the National Theatre

Acknowledgements

So, yesterday I had my viva. I’m still quite out of it, and haven’t processed the fact that it’s done, I’ve fixed my typos and am about to go pick up the bound copy and submit it. Meantime, I wanted to post up my acknowledgements…
_____________________________

I owe a great deal more than gratitude to the many people who have supported my progress. My first thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of St Andrews’ School of Classics, the Thomas Wiedemann Fund and the Classical Association for their financial support and to St Andrews’ School of Classics for their administrative support, without which this project could not have been carried out.

Secondly to my supervisor, Jill Harries, who has been a font of wisdom and support, my heartfelt thanks. I owe much to her ability to encourage her students to follow their odder ideas whilst still keeping them on the right track, and to her understanding of when they need to be pushed and when they should be sent home to put their feet up. I am also indebted to Christopher Smith for his years of support, and to Jason König for encouraging me to read Foucault in the first place.

The School of Classics has been my second home over the past four years. It has been a pleasure to be a part of such a convivial postgraduate community; my thanks to Alexandra Albury, Jeremy Armstrong, Adam Bunni, Ralph Covino, Victoria Crook, Carmen Cvetkovic, Katie East, Susanne Gatzemeier, Joe Howley, Sarah Jordan, Trevor Mahy, Gwynaeth McIntyre, Jamie McIntyre, Daniel Mintz, Sam Moss, Andrew Neill, Mark Philippo, Julietta Steinhauer, Estelle Strazdins, Amos van Die, Allison Weir, Paula Whiscombe, Evan Williamson, Katie Wilson, and Laurie Wilson for making it so. I would also like to thank the staff in Classics their part in making the School such a supportive and vibrant environment in which to work, particularly Ralph Anderson, Emma Buckley, Jon Coulston, Adrian Gratwick, Alisdair Gibson, Emily Greenwood, Stephen Halliwell, Jon Hesk, Harry Hine, Dan Hogg, Sian Lewis, Alex Long, Rebecca Sweetman and Greg Woolf. Beyond the School I am grateful for the stimulating conversation and wide range of ideas provided by Michael Bentley and Anthony F. Lang, and by the members of Theoria, notably Sarah Dillon, Bettina Bildhauer, Christina Chandler Andrews, James A. Andrews, Ben Davies and James Stedman. I would also like to express my gratitude to Henriette van der Blom, Alison Rosenblitt, Malcolm Schofield and Kathryn Welch for their ideas about my work, and to my examiners, Roger Rees and Jonathan Prag.

Gratitude, affection, and a lifetime supply of cookies must go to my wonderful friends who have helped to keep me, if not exactly sane at least tolerably well balanced: Jessica Armstrong, Daniel Bigler, Naomi Brown, Fiona Byrne, Jenni Caldwell, Eleanor Carleton, James Davies, Katherine Davis, Emma Dollard, Krisz Echegoyan, Lisa Evans, Katherine Fletcher, Caroline Friggens, Danielle Gera, Laurence Goodwin, Melanie Hartley, Andy J, Robert Lamont, Zoe Lee, Tom Leppard, Naomi and Malcolm McCloud, Claire Newdick, Fiona Raffell, Hannah Stewart, George Swithinbank, Elizabeth Thomas, Pauline Tucknott, and Stacy Whitmore.

Finally, to my second families at Eden Fellowship and Hayle Methodist, and to my parents, for all their love and support, no thanks can ever be enough.

Philippe Jaroussky

To start with a random aside.  One of the problems with Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill (other than the widely reported facts of it not being workable, or in any way in touch with the modern world, and if you want a really good explanation of why, you should read Hannah Nicklin’s open letter to the man himself) is that it’s hard to say that it’s a deeply stupid idea, without actually admitting that you’ve broken it, and that puts you in an interesting legal position. Incidentally, does anyone know if this bill is going to be retroactive?

Anyway, the point of this is that without the internet and friends sending me music I’ve not heard by artists I’ve never heard of, I would never have heard of the French Countertenor Philippe Jaroussky.  And that would mean that his record company wouldn’t have made the money that they have off me for the two albums I’ve bought so far and the future albums I intend to buy in a month when Christmas isn’t imminent, and whoever makes money off concerts wouldn’t have made money off me buying a ticket to go see him at the Kölner Philharmonie, and no one would make money from me buying his albums to give to people for Christmas/birthdays.  I would almost certainly not have thought to pick up an album of Castrati songs by a singer I’d never heard of.  The only other way I might have come across it would have been if Jaroussky had been performing at the Proms and I’d happened to hear that particular concert on the radio or on iPlayer.   And then not only would people be losing out on making money off me, I would be missing out on some seriously gorgeous music.

On Thursday Philippe Jaroussky was performing Handel and J.C. Bach, with Nicolau de Figueiredo on Harpsichord and the Concerto Köln.  It was beautiful.  Gorgeous music, and such an engaging performance.  I’m normally fairly rubbish at sitting in a concert hall listening to a performance without fidgeting, but I was pretty much entranced.   He performed about four or five encores – after each round of applause people left the auditorium and then missed out on another song.   It was wonderful.   Can I have a tardis and go back in time to go hear it all again?

So music business, I hope you enjoy the money I have and shall continue to give you in order for me to carry on enjoying the work of Philippe Jaroussky, but please don’t forget, you’re only getting it because I was able to try it first to see if I liked it.

Hrrooommm Hmmm. GoogleWave.

A very nice person sent me an invite to GoogleWave, which I’ve been wanting to play with, ohhh, only since they announced it, pretty much. Not many people I know have it – and it is in many ways a kind of specific tool, so it’s not something you necessarily just sit and play with, especially not on your own, because that removes the point.

However, @Sunsetmog and I spent some time on Thursday playing with GoogleWave, trying to explore it’s possibilities and potential. The verdict so far is, as above, ‘Hrroomm, Hmmm’ – lots of potential, not quite there yet.

The first (and main) problem is that it is very slow. Typing into GoogleWave feels a lot like typing on a computer without enough RAM – your fingers go faster than the letters can come up on screen. I think this is mostly because of the live-type function that allows all the people on the wave to see exactly what you’re typing. I have to ask – why is this feature necessary or good? Is it just so that people can start responding to you as you go, without waiting you to finish your train of thought and absorb it before replying? Because I’m not convinced that that’s a good idea; much better to see your fellow-waver’s full thought before you reply to it. Additionally, the nature of GoogleWave means that a lot of people will probably end up using it for project work, quite often with people who are colleagues rather than friends. I don’t need or want the people I might end up working with to see that I am constitutionally unable to type ‘constitution’ fluidly and correctly with any regularity (all those ‘t’s confuse my fingers). They probably don’t want to see it either – it’s quite painful. Delete isn’t a bad in this situation. Making the text input the same as that of IM would make GoogleWave faster, I think, and also less embarrassing!

It’s also not that intuitive. I don’t think it helps that it has gone live without the ’settings’ wave being completed. At the moment I can’t get it to ‘ping’ me when a message comes through – meaning if I’ve gone to check something out in another tab, or in a book, I don’t know when my fellow waver has responded. I’m also annoyed by the scroll function, and I found the system of commenting, replying and editing fairly unintuitive for a lot of the time – I couldn’t always tell where the new bit of text was going to pop up.

Those are the main annoyances – once I found the paperclip, sharing files was easy (although we didn’t really play with text files, actually, which we should have since I suspect that’s what we’ll both be using it most of the time). There’s an extension called ‘trippy’ which involves Lonely Planet, and which allows you to plan joint trips, which I really like.  And I still really like the potential of the whole thing – I think it’s going to make joint projects easier to handle and keep track of, especially when more than more than two people are involved.   It’s just not there yet.  I really hope it gets there.

Mid-Week Skiving

I can’t remember exactly why I decided that skipping out on a day in the library to go to Aachen was better than waiting to the weekend, since there wasn’t any rugby to watch at the weekend (I’ve found an Irish pub in Cologne that shows rugby, and I’m very excited about the possibility of seeing the autumn internationals – or I was until practically the entire England squad ended up in the hospital).  I suspect it was to do with the weathe – that I decided that I didn’t see the point in day-tripping in the rain, and so picked the first not-rainy day to go hop on the train.

Aachen is a wee city (well, wee-er than Cologne) near the border, and it is where Charlemagne had his palace.   It’s busy developing a Charlemagne trail at the moment, which could be fun.   I mostly wanted to see the cathedral (which is home to Charlemagne’s throne) and go spa-ing.  I also fancied seeing the cathedral treasury, but in the end I passed up on it to go spa-ing, on the theory that I would be going back to Aachen, hopefully with the brilliant @Sunsetmog if she can make it out here, and could go to the Treasury then.   In the end result, I probably should have gone to the Treasury instead, spa-ing was fine, but just not quite as unwinding as it should have been, due to – well, cultural differences/personal hang-ups.  I just don’t do  mixed nekkid saunaing.  I find this not relaxing.   I also like my spa-baths to be not two flights of stairs away from my saunas. Carolus Thermen is big and swish and all, but it’s actually too big for my tastes.  Well now I know – next time I will go for Mediaeval Treasures.

The Cathedral was Made of Awesome, though.  FYI, the Treasury is open from 10am and the cathedral from 11am (there are services before, so you can pop in, but not really tourist).  Also, if you want to see Charlemagne’s throne, which is up in the gallery, you have to take a tour.   It’s about €3 and it also takes you into the cathedral Choir, which is otherwise gated off, so it’s worth it – even in German.  I did the German tour in the morning, ‘cos I wanted to go to the Spa, but there’s an English one at 2pm nowadays, which is a Good Thing, ‘cos I’m pretty sure, based on what I gleaned, that the tour guides are good and interesting.

It’s just the most gorgeous building.  If you come at it from the train station you sort of fall upon it, set in a wee square, all soaring lines and architectural wonder.  Then you go round a corner and find yourself in the small square in front of the cathedral.  The other side of the cathedral faces onto a large square between the cathedral and the Rathaus, but it’s a bit empty and not as nice.  Basically, the cathedral’s in two bits.  There’s the older two tier octagon, which Charlemagne’s original chapel, and which is a masterpiece of mosaic bling, and is home to the throne (a very simple set of marble blocks bound together, with a view down to the altar.  Then there’s the the later, gothic choir, which flies up straight and narrow, and seems to be made of stained glass windows (which were restored after the war).  It really is the original definition of awesome.  There was definitely awe involved as I stood with my neck craned looking up at the ceilings and windows.   Although it’s relatively small, it’s definitely one of the loveliest cathedrals I’ve been in – and I’ve now been in a fairly large number of European cathedrals.

Finally, in Aachen, there was Printen. Nom nom nom nom nom. Printen is Aachen’s own special kind of lebkuchen (german gingerbread) – a spicy, chewy biscuit, with crunchy rock candy bits. It comes in all shapes and sizes, and coatings – sugar glaze, chocolate, chocolate with bits – and it’s NUMMY. I came home with a stash at it.