Castellane, Gorges de Verdon, Goult

Day 3. We left Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey with a destination already set - we'd booked a hotel online the previous night, in Goult. We got there in the end, but it was really too far for one day - or rather, there was too much in the way of winding mountain road in the first half of the journey.

We set out intending to see the Gorges du Verdon on the way; and the man in the Préjoly advised us to drive north as far as Castellane and take the road across from there so that we'd be following the gorges along. It was good advice - without it, we'd have missed Castellane, one of the nicest stops on the whole trip.

The road from Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey took us quickly into dramatic chalky-looking cliffs, with low cloud just beginning to lift. This first part was quite dramatic, but the hills became more rolling as we went on. It got particularly dramatic again when we got our first glimpse of Castellane from a hillside overlooking the valley - we could see the distinctive outcropping that towers over the town, and the tiny toy chapel perched on top of it.

I was instantly seized with the desire to climb up to the top and the anxiety that we might not do it and that my life would thus be forever incomplete. Happily I was saved from that fate. The path up (like other chapel-topped hills in the area, as I discovered later in the journey) was marked at intervals with the Stations of the Cross. The chapel at the top was full of placards thanking Our Lady of the Rock for everything imaginable - bringing back lost people, saving the town of Castellane from cholera and influenza, and so on. This is one of the strangest things about religion for me. The next town loses dozens of residents through sickness, and yours doesn't - so, it's because they didn't pray as hard, or don't have their own special protector? It seems somewhat hubristic. Anyway, if your protector is so reliable and effective, shouldn't you have prayed to them to save all of the people in the next town too... and even further afield? Did those people die because you didn't care enough to mention them? And if you invoke protection by your town goes down with cholera anyway, should you consider yourselves to be in deep disfavor, or abandoned, or... wrong? No, you presumably pray harder because your mind is only open to things that seem to support the view you've already fixed upon. It's an odd system. But it helps maintain some nice chapels, I suppose.

Here's the view of the town from above:

And the outcropping cropping out...

And the bridge bridging, with a view back to where we'd come from:

We didn't stay in the town for long - just a quick walk through and a visit to the boulangerie and minimarket to get some lunch materials, which we ate by the side of the road after we'd driven on for a while. It was a nice town, though - and it seemed to have some balance between normal town and tourist destination.

From Castellane we turned westward and started along the Gorges du Verdon. Many beautiful views, indeed, but this is where we started to make such slow progress on the map that we began to doubt making it to Goult before nightfall. This was the most dramatic view, at the Point Sublime:

We stopped briefly at Moustiers Ste. Marie, famous for its pottery, and a town clearly worth spending a little time in (at the same time, clearly a town with no tourism/normality balance at all). Unfortunately we were too tired and anxious by this time, so we merely glanced at it, grabbed a couple of highly expensive drinks and went on our way.

The rest of the drive was easier, however, and we made it to Goult before dinner. After searching in vain for our hotel for some time, we discovered that it was actually in Lumières, a hamlet attached to the village. It was the Hôtellerie Notre Dame de Lumières, which is on the grounds of a former convent, and still attached to a "sanctuary" that now belongs to some missionary sect. The hotel was great - the room (in an annex) was quite small but very clean and modern; the grounds were extensive, with an outdoor pool and a tiny chapel up a hill (complete with Stations, of course) where I communed with bats on the second evening. It had more of an air of a resort than a standard hotel, and it had the best breakfast of the trip, a sumptuous buffet with multiple mini pastries, brioche, bowls of yoghurt and conserves, and even moon cheese (well, a mysterious kind of cheese with a yellow-green flaky rind. I have no idea what it was really called).

Tourettes-sur-Loup and Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey

On our second morning we left Nice intending to drive northwest. I'd picked out a route on the map, but it didn't take long before we were regretting not renting a GPS along with the car. Easy enough to see the route on paper, more difficult to trace it in reality. We drove along the coast, missed our turning, muddled around, spent money on petrol we didn't need (confusing display on the dashboard), accidentally ended up on the toll road heading back towards Nice, got off the toll road, and then headed north on the first road that seemed to go that way just for the sake of escaping from the busy horrors of the Côte d'Azur.

And it turned out to be all for the best (putting aside that tiny winding road we ended up on along the way, and the head-on collision narrowly avoided at the next big town). We ended up in Tourettes-sur-Loup, a beautiful little mediaeval hill town, just in time for lunch.

It was the first of many mediaeval towns perched on the edge of a hill, but it was also one of the best: for being so unexpected; for the relief at having got somewhere at last; for the lunch it provided; and also for the fact that it calls itself "cité des violettes" and has its own violet heritage centre (not greatly exciting in itself, but as a violet lover it was enough that such a thing existed and that outside it hovered a scent of violet coming even from the flowerless greens).

We only walked briefly around, then settled on the terrace of the clearly popular Café des Sports on the square where had mountainous salads - one Niçoise, one prosciutto and goats cheese.

This is the view on leaving from the other side of town:

From there we briefly visited Pont-du-Loup, nestled at the bottom of the gorge. You can see the remains of a viaduct that crossed the gorge above the village, that was destroyed in the Second World War. It must have been spectacular both to ride across and to stand under. There was a tiny open museum-room in the village with a few historical photos and a little information. I've found historical photos on YouTube too, at this link. It was somehow particularly odd to think of the Germans who may have been stationed somewhere so idyllic and so apparently cut off from everything. It would have been hard to believe in a war going on, or your part in it.

We drove on, finally stopping for the night in Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey, not from any particular attraction there but more because we were tired of driving (especially after navigating our way through the northern edges of Grasse) and there was a Logis hotel there - with no rooms free, as it turned out, but we were able to stay in the Préjoly opposite it. It certainly wasn't the most modern hotel, but it was reasonable, and we had a huge balcony that we had our dinner of bread and cheese on, overlooking the town fields. The man running the hotel was great - with a kind of goofy charm, continually joking. I'd recommend the hotel just for him, in fact.

Nice

Day 1 - We flew from Frankfurt to Nice on an early flight. As soon as we arrived and took the shuttle to the car rental, it became clear that we'd packed all wrong. I knew it was going to be warmer than Frankfurt - which had just dipped into a wintry spell - but I wasn't prepared for it being quite so hot. Here's the Promenade d'Anglais looking all tropical:

I've wanted to see Nice for a long time, more for its being one of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English destinations that pops up in literature than out of any expectation of finding it as I imagined or wanted it to be. And indeed it wasn't. The front, even from the plane, was more built up than I expected - as far as the eye could see. I hoped to be more excited by the view of the sea - after all, I've been living land-locked for many years now - but it was somehow a bit flat and undramatic, and I was surprised to find that the beach in front of the Promenade was composed of big stones, like Brighton. It was full of orangey-brown near-naked people sunbathing, an activity I find hard to fathom, especially if it involves lying around on rocks and not sand. It must take some dedication.

We were staying in a hotel (Le Panoramic) on a hill behind the town, with a good view over the whole. The picture below sums up the whole, built high and narrow, and somehow giving a sense of everything being scraped together and far from affluent.

The hotel was nice and friendly, rooms a little small and old-fashioned, but somehow appropriate to Nice. We got good advice on driving down the hill and leaving our car in one of the free lots at the bottom, to take the new tram line into town. What we didn't, unfortunately, realize was that the "solo" (single) tickets we travelled either way on were the only tickets that didn't work for the park-and-ride lot that we were in, leading to a bit of drama when we couldn't get out of it in the evening and thought with horror that we were going to have to pay the 48 Euro "adjustment" listed on the machines. We got around it in the end somewhat more cheaply by buying some kind of transfer tickets for 3 Euros, then travelling one stop out and back (tickets are validated in machines on the trams).

We visited the old town and had a disappointing lunch at a kind of corner snack bar - a silly mistake driven by the lateness of the hour by the time we got there. I could have had the chick-pea flour pancake I'd been looking forward to trying, but instead we ordered some kind of pizza-like slices and some little dim-sum-like things that I thought had anchovies in them (they were labelled as Niçoise) but were actually full of pork. The old town was full of narrow streets and satisfyingly pretty, even though quite touristy.

After the old town, we walked a little along the front - where a man tried the gold ring scam on us. Not that we knew that there was such a thing as the gold ring scam in advance, but his behaviour was very strange, and luckily we're not the kind of people to take a gold ring that some stranger is holding out to us anyway - myself, I'd be far too concerned about what I should do with it and where I should best hand it in.

Once we'd walked through the market area and into the main part of town looking (unsuccessfully) for a bookshop (Smollett said there were none in 1764 - perhaps it's still true?), we were overcome by the heat and sunshine and took refuge in a cinema where we saw the first film showing in English that afternoon, My Life with Liberace. It was a good way to spend the afternoon. We haven't been to the cinema since arriving in Frankfurt, where it takes some effort to find anything showing without German dubbing. It was a good film too - less a biopic about Liberace than an interesting and uncomfortable portrait of bad relationship.

France 2013

My parents very kindly looked after the cats for a few days, while we took a trip to the south of France.

We flew from Frankfurt to Nice on 24th September, hired a car, and drove through Provence for just over a week, returning from Nice on 2nd October. Below is an outline of our trip, which I'll try to flesh out in the coming days.

Tuesday - arrived Nice (Hôtel le Panoramic).

Wednesday - to Saint Valliers-de-Thiey (Hôtel Préjoly), via Tourettes-sur-Loup.

Thursday - to Goult (Hôtellerie Notre-Dame de Lumieres), via Castellane, Gorges du Verdon, Moustiers-Saint-Marie.

Friday - remained in Goult. Visited Gordes.

Saturday - Orange (Hôtel Kyriad Orange Centre), via Avignon.

Sunday - remained in Orange. Visited Pont du Gard.

Monday - Oraison (Hôtel La Grande Bastide), via L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire, Forcalquier).

Tuesday - Annot (Hôtel Le Beauséjour), via Forcalquier, Ganagobie monastery.

Wednesday - Nice (to fly out), via Entrevaux, Touët-sur-Var, and an unfortunate late digression via Colomars.

Heidelberg

We went on our first proper day trip yesterday, to Heidelberg - a place I associated only with dueling scars, an old university, and study abroad students. Knowing it had a mediaeval old town, I somehow thought it would all look like a Dürer print - at once austere and decorative, perhaps - but it turns out that the old town is full of lovely baroque buildings... and, perhaps, Georgian, whatever that ma, all tasteful and symmetrical and airy with the breath of enlightenment and reason.

Here is the old town, with the ruined rebuilt and re-ruined castle above it, apparently a key site for German romanticism:

We rode up to the castle on the funicular railway - though if we'd known it just went up inside a tunnel for a short distance, we'd probably have walked. The view from the castle over the town was impressive, and all Christmas-sy with the snow:

There were Christmas market stalls in the various squares of the old town, and next to the castle too. A cone of seasoned chips with mayonnaise to dip them in fortified us there; then we looked round the "inside" of the castle, where the sun on the light stone reminded me of Edinburgh. The mixture of designs is interesting, but we didn't have any information on it (unlike the people wandering round who had somewhere got hold of laminated information sheets); anyway, we didn't really go to see the castle but to see the town, so we'll go back another time after learning a bit more about it. There was also an unexpected little pharmacy museum within the remaining buildings, and also an equally unexpected giant barrel in which wine from various communities used to be collected. The photograph below is the only one taken by me - I've abdicated my photographing responsibilities to someone with a smartphone.

We went back down to the Altstadt, the old town, and wandered around looking at buildings - including the university, and a lovely baroque church near it, the Jesuitenkirche. In the university square, we enjoyed some Glühwein. Then we found a nice little falafel place in which to shelter from the biting cold for a while.

 Finally, getting tired, we went to look at the Old Bridge:

Then it was time to go home again, though not without seeing dusk fall, so that all the Christmas market  stalls the little shops on the main street could start to glow in the darkness.

We went there and back by IC (inter city) train. Two different colleagues had told me to buy a Shönes Wochenende ticket, something you can get on the weekend for up to 5 people, that makes travel on Deutsche Bahn  trains much cheaper. So we did, from the red machines in the station - only to discover (from me reading the ticket once we were already seated on the train) that it isn't valid on IC or other higher speed trains, but only for local services - you can get to Heidelberg on a local train, in fact, but it takes an hour and a half or so instead of just 50 minutes, and stops everywhere. Luckily I worked this out before our IC train departed, and we got off again, went to the DB counter and got our ticket changed (albeit losing an hour in the process). The lady at the counter confirmed that if we'd gone with it and the guard had come through the train, we'd have had to pay the full fare over again. The lesson is, don't go believing your colleagues too quickly even if they have been here for much longer than you.

Frankfurt Museums

One of the best things about Frankfurt - other than the plentiful bakeries and endless supply of flaky pastries  - is the number of museums. I started off intending to visit a new one every weekend when I had time, but I have got stuck of late on the Städel Museum. It's a world-class art museum, and I've been three times already and not yet seen it all.

Once I had a permanent address I bought a "MuseumsuferCard" from the Tourist Information office at Dom-Römer. "Museumsufer" is the name given to the south bank of the Main which is lined with museums - "Museums Embankment" (until just now I thought it was Museum + Sufer, but I've just discovered from a dictionary check that it is Museums + Ufer). The card costs €75 for a year, with entry to 34 museums. It currently costs €14 to get into the Städelmuseum on the weekends, so it really seems like a good deal. I wouldn't have been swanning in and out of that museum for the last three weekends if I didn't have the card - instead I'd have expired somewhere in there on my first visit, probably surrounded by all those pictures of Christian martyrdom and suffering in the Old Masters galleries.

The following are the museums I have visited so far.

1. The Natural History Museum (Senckenberg Naturmuseum Frankfurt)

€6 to enter. Open all week, and until 20:00 on Wednesdays.

I went here not long after I arrived, and it's high time I went back. It was one of the better natural history museums I've visited - not visually spectacular like the one in Paris, but with good, broad collections on display of the things that interest me - fish, mammals, a good room on insects, and so on. There were dioramas of German/European wildlife that were really nicely done, with none of that faded moth-eaten and forgotten look you often find in such displays. It helps when your scenery is rich mossy forest, I suppose.

There wasn't much information in English in there, so I worked my way round with the dictionary on my iPad and used it as an opportunity to learn words like der Affe (ape), die Libelle (dragonfly) and der Kugelfisch (puffer fish), that are nice to know but admittedly difficult to slip into everyday conversation.

2. The Museum for Applied Art (Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt)

€8 to enter. (It took some effort to find that out - they have a shockingly bad museum website.)

I didn't see too much of the permanent collection when I visited, since I went to see the Entdeckung Korea! (Discover Korea) exhibition, now moved on to Stuttgart. The exhibition was pretty good - it gathered Korean artworks from around Germany, and though the collection was slightly disjointed feeling, the blown up photographs and short film from the late 19th century added a lot.

I looked very briefly around the permanent Asian collection and some of the European collection, mediaeval and later. It also felt a bit disjointed - like the website, maybe needs a bit more work on presentation - but it will be worth going back to look around some more. I didn't look through the Villa Metzler that is attached to the museum, either.

3. The Goethe House (Frankfurter Goethe-Haus)

€7 to enter.

Perhaps more interesting as a preserved late 18th century house of a well-to-do Frankfurt family than specifically as Goethe's house, since it's the one that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe grew up in rather than the one he lived in as an adult (there's one of those in Weimar). It's a nice house - sparsely furnished and without much in the way of contemporary objects, but enough to give you some sense of the aesthetics of the time. The decoration has been nicely restored. As often, I found myself wishing I could have their kitchen, though of course it would be even better if it came with their cooks and servants. It seems like an interesting and enlightened family, valuing education for the daughter as well as the son. The audio guide tells you a little about the individual rooms, and something about the individual objects, and adds something to the visit - though in the style of such things, it's nice when you can cast it off at the end.

4. The Museum of Ethnology (Weltkulturen Museum)

€5 to enter.

This was my only completely disappointing visit so far. I went here on a Sunday, having checked the opening times, and arrived at the museum building (the one signposted as the Weltkuturen Museum) to find it closed up with no sign of life. After circling around it for a while along with an equally confused looking French man, I finally found the building two along open - the Welkulturen Labor, apparently the image archive (the building between them was the Weltkulturen Library, also closed up). In it there were two small special exhibitions to go along with the New Zealand theme of this year's book fair. The first was, according to the museum's website:

FACE TO FACE / KANOHI KI TE KANOHI / FA'AFESAGA'I
Graphic artworks from Francis Pesamino... on display with artefacts from the Polynesian collection of the Weltkulturen museum. 

 My New Zealand colleague tells me that Pesamino is very well known, and I'm sure it would be good to know more about his work - but the exhibition did nothing for me. It seemed like a very random collection of objects just put there to give the most basic understanding of the kind of design tradition Pesamino was working on top of. As to his works, they consisted of six or so large posters stapled casually to each end of the room - big faces, writing on them. The whole thing was just a bit hard to connect with. It needed some further context, or a completely different set of surrounding objects and artworks (comparable or contrasting graphic artworks, perhaps).

Not as hard to connect with as what awaited one floor up, though. This was the INCREDIBLY HOT SEX WITH HIDEOUS PEOPLE exhibition that is currently advertised all over Frankfurt. This is the title of a "zine" self-published over a number of years by somebody in New Zealand, and distributed in pubs. At least, that's what I understood. We're talking about black and white, hand drawn & often hand-written copied rags of the kind you'd use as beermats in the pub and that you'd expect were done by layabout male university students who never cleaned their flats or took a shower. The exhibition had them all strung up on the walls like a home display of Christmas cards. I got nothing at all out of this exhibition. I didn't even understand what I was supposed to be getting out of it, though looking back at the museum site I find it tells me that it "presents New Zealand's Zine Culture with Underground Literature and Comics."

Soon, I'll write up my visits to the Städelmuseum, including to its current major exhibition "Schwarze Romantik - von Goya bis Max Ernst."

Feed a cold, starve a fever.

I'm sitting at home on this rainy Sunday using the faint cold I picked up at work as an excuse to feel sorry for myself and sit around and eat pastries and cheese and crisps and drink tea. I've been really lucky in the last few years to hardly ever catch a cold - but my new job is a hotbed of germ activity, and it's surprising it's taken me two and a half months to catch anything. I work in an enormous open room like field (but without any fresh air), with I suppose somewhere between 60 and 80 people. To get in and out there are two heavy security doors that can only be opened by use of the door handles; then there are the buttons on the lifts and time-tracking machines, and so on - all shared by my roomful of people and many, many more (the company covers several floors). On top of that, we have lots of shared equipment. If bird flu or SARS or ebola hits Frankfurt, we'll be the first to go.

As I was indulging myself in unhealthy food just now, I remembered the saying, "Feed a cold, starve a fever." When I was young I thought it was hard to remember whether it was that or "Starve a cold, feed a fever" - nor did I really know what it meant. I thought it meant that if you ate lots when you had a cold, you wouldn't get a fever (because, mysteriously, fevers would feed off you if you didn't feed your cold). I also didn't understand "No news is good news," taking it to mean that all news was bad. Well, these weren't the kinds of things I heard in my family - they were the kinds of things I read in books, so there was no-one to pick up on my mistakes or clarify. I still quite like "All news is bad" as a saying, though.