Once upon a time, a long time ago, I used to make scrapbooks of holidays I went on. I’m pretty sure that somewhere in my parents’ house are various 20-year old ringbound paper scrapbooks from WHSmiths full of postcards, entry tickets and sellotaped-in foreign coinage, and poorly written diary entries that I moaned about having to keep up-to-date. Still, it started a habit. It translated to keeping diaries in notebooks and photos in photoalbums, and entry tickets in large piles in places where you’re going to kick them over every other day whilst you work out what you’re going to do with them (I kid you not – I had a pile of tickets and leaflets from Japan stashed under my computer desk for a year and every other day they flew all across the room. Currently I have a pile of Germany touristy stuff piling up on a bookshelf).
Travel
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński
I’m having a moment of interested consideration about the new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński which claims that much of his reporting was heavily fictionalised and about some of the outrage about this. As outrage goes, it’s fairly mild and seems mostly confined to those working in journalism (for example in Jon Snow’s latest blog post) – but then Kapuściński is hardly a household name in the UK, and I’d be prepared to bet that the majority of people here who have read his work have come to it as travel literature, where the line between ‘truth’ and ‘atmosphere’ is more easily, and perhaps more legitimately, blurred than in journalistic reportage. I came to him through his collection of essays/reportage, The Shadow of the Sun, which I thought sounded interesting based on a review I read and which I then bought with some Christmas money and enjoyed immensely. It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m still inclined to think that it’s one of the best collections of writing about Africa that I’ve read – not necessarily factually, but in terms of painting a picture and capturing an atmosphere.
Water from melting snow drips down one of the stelae in the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
I think the fact that I don’t really understand the Holocaust Memorial’s artistic/architectural nature and yet was still affected by it speaks to how well done the memorial is. I don’t get how or why a field of concrete stelae is supposed to or can memorialise the Holocaust – but it *does*. You walk between the rows of these blocks, which are of various heights – in the middle you are completely dwarfed by them – taking turns as and when you want to turn to find your own way through the field. If it is a metaphor for history, then it’s almost scarily effective – each turn has its own impact on the trail you leave behind you, and can cause you to end up emerging somewhere else around the edge of the field – and with no distinguishing features on the blocks there is very little to aid you in picking out a very specific path as you go through or reaching a specific destination. You could walk through in a straight line and miss a lot. You could very deliberately count your way through, taking certain rows, and still miss a lot. You could aim for an exit point and wander as vaguely as you liked towards that goal. Or you could wander at will, and end up anywhere, or get completely lost. It’s dislocating and chilling – especially in the snow.
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.
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 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.
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.
I have finally finished my photobook of Tanzania. It’s mostly photos and just a little bit of travelogue (as the vast majority of the travelogue was either me listing all the different animals and birds, or spitting about Kennedy, and that’s no fun for anyone) – but I am proud of the photos. Have a look.
Point 1: It has art in it that I understand, unlike the Museum Ludwig, which I went to on Thursday. I do *try* with modern art nowadays, I really do, but honestly at some point my mind just reaches a breaking point and it normally involves random objects being scattered on the floor of the art gallery.
So, that gets the modern art bashing out of the way up front. I’m just more comfortable with art up to the early C20th, and definitely with stuff that involves a canvas or something similar hung on a wall (and sculpture, more generally). But also the Wallraf-Richartz is nicely laid out, with a broad collection and really good introductionary panels to each room in German and English, plus little computer screens and headphones installed in the seats in each room that give you more information on specific works – they’re in German only, but you know what – I was good with the wall signage. Hurrah for explaining the context of the works and all that.
They’ve also got a couple of really good exhibitions on at the moment – they started yesterday and run to January, which is why I waited till today to go to this museum. The first is called ‘Mit Napoleon in Ägypten, and showcases the Museum’s collection of sketches of Egypt’s temples by Jean-Baptiste Lepère, who was a French architect and egyptologist who went on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 (y’know, the one where they found the Rosetta Stone).
The exhibition showcases the (fanatastically stunning)sketches and their reproduction as engravings for publication, and discusses the beginnings of Egyptology as a scholarly pursuit and the French expedition as a whole. And it’s really really good.
Today I did actual sightseeing stuff. I went to the Römisch-Germanische Museum, which is home to all the fun ancient things that have been dug up around here. Mostly it’s too late for my tastes, being AD – although I have learnt to identify a bust of Augustus at 20 paces. Teaching archaeology and running around Roman museums has done that much for me. I really need to take a tame archaeologist with me to the museum, in order to properly appreciate all the stuff that’s in there – because it is clearly a really good collection that properly illustrates Roman life in the Germanic provinces. I just don’t know anything, really, about that (except that some of the Imperial family hung around up here fighting battles), and I can’t properly read the explanations, as my German isn’t that good (and my imperial archaeology isn’t good enough to guess). Then I think I will get much more out of it. That said, the two big mosaics (the Dionysus and the Philosophers) and the reconstructed Tomb of Poblicius can’t fail to impress even *this* Republican philistine. They really are stunning – and beautifully displayed. I invested in a year’s pass to the Cologne Museums (it covers all the major beasts), which at €50 for students was an absolute steal. You’d comfortably spent €20 visiting three of the eight or nine covered, as a student, and I have plans to go to all of the ‘big three’ (the Römisch-Germanische, the Ludwig, and the Wallraf-Richartz) more than once. And I’m only here for six months. Even if you’re not a student, the year’s pass is only about €68, which is still worth it.
