Our Pre-Louvre Excursion

Today was a fabulous sight-seeing day in Paris. We started at Notre Dame, continued at the Ste.-Chapelle (my favorite building in the world except, of course, for Wrigley Field) and concluded, after a late lunch, with the Louvre. The first two stops were sublime. Tourists aplenty to be sure, but the spaces defied the noise and forced one to look UP. We thoroughly enjoyed this morning of colored light, soaring architecture and royal (in every sense of the word) beauty. See below for yourselves...

 

En route

 At about 108 feet tall the nave is as stunning as it is tall.

Me, happy to be in Paris!

The facade of the Ste.-Chapelle, which was built by Louis IX to hold relics of the Passion of Christ and to serve as his own private chapel. It was once attached to his royal apartments on the chapel's upper level and I like to imagine Louis, slipping into the chapel in his satin azure p.j.'s covered with fleur-di-lys in order to glimpse the splendor of this space again and again.  How could one, especially Louis who so closely aligns himself with this building--even depicting himself in the glass inside--turn his back on it? We had a hard time doing so.

One of the great monuments of Gothic architecture, it was an exciting moment as we awaited our entrance... (Note Dave at the end of the line, wearing shorts on a rainy, 55-degree day and loving it).

Drum roll..............

...fifteen, 45-foot tall windows containing over 1100 biblical scenes. WOW! The podium below is where Louis displayed (for a select and special few) his precious relics, dispersed and destroyed during the French Revolution.

The jewel box nature of this structure is much-written about in the history of art and with good reason. In fact, it is the lasting impression I take away from this building on my most recent, that is today's, visit--gold and huge fields of colored light delicately embracing a space where one feels lucky to be.  Exactly as I suspect Louis planned one to feel.

Bonjour Paris!

Both Aachen and Brussels deserve their own posts and they will get them, but for the 3 of you actually reading the blog, we wanted to skip ahead to where we are now and where we will be for the remainder of our trip...PARIS.

We arrived in Paris this afternoon around 5:00 p.m. The City of Lights is just as beautiful as we remembered it being in 2000. The rain clouds parted and blew away as we pulled in to the Gare du Nord, as if heralding our return! We checked-in to the Hotel St.-Jacques in the Latin Quarter (5th Arr.) and headed out for a 90 minute walk through the center of this always stunning city. Below are a few of the spots we stopped along the way.

The "queen" of Paris: Notre Dame cathedral on the center of the Ile-de-la-Cite.

The Louvre, where we will spend a good chunk of tomorrow gazing on masterworks, which include the second best portrait in the world, Raphael's Baldasare Castiglione.

The Eiffel Tower reaching up over the Seine.

At the end of our walk we returned to "our neighborhood" for a bite to eat at Le Pré Verre, a fantastic little cafe and wine bar. What you see below is one of the best meals of the trip and the best meal we've had since leaving Figlmüller's in Vienna. This is bistecca alla Parisian in a light, but flavor-packed broth, along with lightly pickled beets and yellow carrots on the side and smoky mashed potatoes. The bread was so beautiful and delicious it deserved its own photo, below. Now we are preparing to head to bed in a "food coma," but boy, was it worth it!! Oh, and I forgot to mention, homemade chocolate truffle and caramel ice cream for dessert. Ooooh lala!

Views of Cologne

We arrived in Cologne very early on the morning of July 5, so early that we couldn't officially check-in into our hotel for hours, so my first memories of Cologne are of wet pavement, just cleaned, the welcome smell of hot coffee and rows and stacks of freshly baked pastries. We stopped at one of these shops in a square near our hotel and and I had my first German sweet roll--about 5 inches across and delicious! Below is the bakery in question.

(What I loved about this display was the sheer number of pastries and the way they were carefully stacked or neatly aligned in rows. Yes! Those are giant filled doughnuts in the middle.)

***

We used Cologne as a "home base" from which to reach nearby Bonn, where Pixar's new art exhibition opened that evening. (More on that in another post) The hour-long train ride between cities was sometimes a drag, but the beauty of Cologne more than made up for it. Our hotel was again perfectly placed facing (this time the side of) the city's cathedral and so we couldn't avoid it, even if we wanted to. Below are some shots of this HUGE and magnificent structure, which holds two landmark works of medieval art--the Gero Crucifix and the Shrine of the Magi. Unfortunately, due to the low-lighting and massive amounts of gold on both, they were impossible to photograph, but that's what postcards are for!

Me in front of the south transept entrance, which used to be the main entrance to the church before it was finished in the 19th C.

View from our breakfast table on July 6th. You can see from this photo how difficult it is to get the enormous facade of this building into a single shot. It's simply too tall, too wide and in a space that hugs it too closely to get the whole thing from ground level. Below a shot from right in front.

I found this facade endlessly fascinating to look at with its layer upon layer of decoration.

View down the 142 foot tall nave. Whether the sun was behind a cloud or not dramatically impacted these images, as you can see.

 

View of the upper portion of the choir.

View into the transept vaulting with sun blasting through the glass.

***

Cologne has an "old town" that was rebuilt after WWII in an old, that is, medieval style. This area is beautiful, shady and has several pubs and places to eat. On our only night in Cologne, which happened to be our last night in the region, we dined at a riverside pub in this very area. The city hall is also located near here. Below is a photo of Dave in front of it.

As a side note, the temperatures dropped noticeably from Vienna (90) to Cologne (75) and again when we headed to Aachen on July 8. The clouds race overhead and the weather changes are rapid and dramatic--with rain one minute and literally warming sun 10 minutes later. It's really something to behold and it has followed us to Brussels where we spend the night tonight.

Dave in front of Cologne's city hall.

"Old Town" in Cologne. The Rhine is to Dave's back as he took this photo. We had dinner our last night at a pub just our of the photo to the far left.

Crazy happenings in Bonn

Actual, honest-to-god conversation we had over drinks in Bonn before viewing the Pixar show, which was outstanding:

Heather: I'm from Arizona.
Joey (Editor's note: works at Pixar, in Bonn to help launch the show): I'm from Arizona too. Where are you from?
H: Tucson.
J: I'm from Phoenix.
H: My sister lives in Phoenix.
J: It seems so rare to run into Arizonans outside the state.
H: Now here's the important question...

(EN: At this point I know precisely what Heather is planning on asking. Did Joey graduate from U of A, home of the Wildcats, or ASU, home of Sparky the Sun Devil, who Heather derisively writes off as "Sparkles." And it's true, Sparkles does look more like the logo for a kitchen cleaning product than anything you'd be concerned about confronting on the gridiron. To wit:

See what I mean?  "Sparkles: The Quicker Picker Upper"

H (continued): ...where'd you go to school?
J: Corona del Sol (EN: high school).
H: Uh-oh (EN: remarked Heather, a Saguaro HS graduate), but I meant college.
J: Oh, I went to Northwestern.  (EN: At this point, I politely extract myself from an entirely different conversation by whipping my head around in mid-sentence and saying...)
Dave: You're kidding. I went to Northwestern.
J: Really?
D: Yeah, I'm from Chicago.
Warren (EN: also works at Pixar, also in Bonn to help launch the show): Where in Chicago?
D: You're kidding.
W: No, where?
D: Oak Park. It's on the west...
W: I'm from Oak Park.
D: No way.
W: Yes.
D: C'mon.
W: It's true.
D: You're making that up (EN: continuing to accuse someone I've just met of lying)
W: No, I went to OPRF (EN: Oak Park River Forest HS)
D: I went to OPRF.
W: What year did you graduate?
D: '85. You? (EN: Moment of truth...)
W: '87. (EN: Damnit!!)
D: This is unreal. (EN: to no one in particular) Anyone here graduate from Grace Lutheran school?
German guy two tables over stands up and says: Class unt '78.
(EN: Ok, I made that last one up.)

Small world.

And speaking of mascots, Heather and I share one in our undergraduate affiliations: Wildcats.  But the resemblance ends there, as you will, without question, agree.

Sleek, sexy, deadly...Willie

Tries hard, poor paw-eye coordination, best mascot in Arizona...Wilbur

Moron, slack-jawed, inbred...Cletus

For the Glory of God and Man

We started our third day in Vienna with a leisurely tour of the city's cathedral.

Like most European cathedrals, St. Stephan's has a piecemeal past, being started in the Romanesque period on the foundation of an earlier church that was in turn built on the foundations of a Roman temple. The cathedral wasn't finished until the 15th C., but neither time, nor mankind has been kind to this structure (WWII damage) and yet, through sheer human will it does still stand, and magnificently.

Today the structure is not only restored to its former glory, but it is in the process of being cleaned and with the facade already sparkling, it's easy to see how beautiful the whole building will be when finished. Note the unusual colorful roof tiles.

The inside of the building is equally fascinating and we spent the rest of Tuesday morning walking around the cathedral exploring.

The North Tower (above)--never finished due to the diversion of city funds from the cathedral to the defense of the city against the increasing Ottoman threat. (Note the dirt of vehicle exhaust clinging to the building. When the cleaning is done all of that will be gone and it will look like the front.)

Detail of Gothic tracery on North Tower.

Detail of gorgoyles on east end.

Inside of nave looking towards high altar.

It's a forest of brownish grey columns surrounded near their tops with over life-size statues of saints. The roof in here reaches about 100 feet or over, we estimated.

After the cathedral we headed to the legendary Viennese caffe Demel, for a caffeine and sugar injection before tackling the Hapsburg's summer hunting "lodge," Schönbrunn Palace, 15 minutes away on the city's immaculately clean subway.

This palace (calling it what it is!) was meant to rival Versailles in size. I have yet to see Versailles, which is a later stop in our sojourn, but we were both impressed with this "pile of bricks" and its carefully manicured, enormous public gardens. We took a tour of the inside of the palace, seeing only 40 of its original 1440 rooms! We learned from our thoroughly enjoyable tour completed by a self-paced audio guide that Mozart played his first concert here at age 6 and Kennedy and Khrushchev met here in 1961. The palace was redecorated and enlarged in the 18th C. and again in the late 19th C. All was surprisingly tasteful compared to other enormous (Windsor comes to mind) palatial homes of recent or living monarchs I've toured.

The front (needs a bit of a yard, I say!). 

The back (top) and a view from the back of the palace towards the Gloriette, a triumphal monument from the 18th C. commemorating a Hapsburg victory. Note the beautiful formally planted green spaces in the foreground. This pattern is achieved by small boxwood hedges and controlled plantings of flowering annuals. From the palace proper it looks spectacular, as gardens like this are always meant to be seen from the "privileged point of view" of the private rooms of the palace itself, but alas no photos were permitted.

 

Wisteria on a wire frame creating nature's barrel vault and a gorgeous variation in green as sun and shadow played off the leaves.

Detail from one of the enclosed personal gardens close to the palace. As a gardener with formalist tendencies this place was just incredible to behold. The hedges that made outdoor "rooms" were awe-inspiring and I immediately wanted to plant three sides of our backyard with these yews!

Looking forward to fall planting already!

We finished the day in equally dramatic style--we had drinks and a delicious dinner at Do&Co. Their sleek Oynx Bar has a 220+ degree view of the cathedral plaza and we watched a dazzling electrical storm roll into town during the 3 hours we sat in the bar, and restaurant directly above. The two photos below were taken in the bar from Dave's viewpoint (of the cathedral roof) and mine, respectively. What a place!

Our first 48 Hours in Vienna

Dave and I arrived from Florence late Saturday evening. I must say one of the most beautiful sights I've ever had the privilege to see out of a plane window are the Alps and this time the sun was setting on them, turning their ridges and valleys beautiful shades of violet, deep purple, magenta and pink. Snow still clung to a few of the highest points, but you'd never know it from the heat we've had here in Austria's capital.

Day 1: In full tourist mode and after a slow, relaxing morning--The Kuntshistorisches, or what I like to call the temple that art built...this 19th C. structure built expressly for the purpose of housing art holds some of the world's most important paintings, from Raphael's Madonna of the Meadow to Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. See images below for a small slice of the beautiful facade of this huge building.

On our walk home we came across this Mozart monument in the Burggarten (city garden). Dave is standing in front of a treble clef made of pink begonias in honor of the composer. What you can't see in either of these pictures is how incredibly hot it is. So much for average temperatures of 75! It's been in the mid-to high 90s, but with great big blue skies.

Day 2: Bling + a Kiss
Dave decided to sit out a trip to the Imperial Hapsburg Treasury so he contentedly read his Ipad at a local caffe while I spent two hours with some of the most impressive pieces of goldsmithing outside of the United Kingdom. Among the highlights were the 10th C. crown of the Holy Roman Emperor (below), and the oldest version of the Order of the Golden Fleece first awarded in the early Renaissance by the Hapsburgs to "deserving" aristocrats. Also on view were religious items owned by the Hapsburgs, including the Burse of St. Stephen, which reputedly holds bloody soil from his martyrdom (also below).

This crown is loaded with symbolism, quite literally. The 12 stones on the front of this crown represent the 12 Apostles, while the 8 sides symbolize the 8 gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem of which the Holy Roman Empire was believed to be an earthly manifestation.

After lunch we headed to the Belvedere Palace where Klimt's Kiss resides. The palace, the gardens and the view of Vienna from here were also impressive.

Note the cathedral in the upper left, dominating the skyline. Our hotel is right across from this landmark.

We finished the evening in true Austrian style--at Figlmüller's, a family run restaurant that has been serving weinerschnitzel for more than 100 years and coincidentally was 4 blocks from our hotel. Dave already posted an image of our delicious, if daunting dinner so I include here only the outside front of the restaurant with a line of eager diners waiting for a table. Dave and I agreed this was one of the "show-stopping" meals we've had during our time abroad. It was simple, comfort food, in a boisterous, warm (in both senses) environment, and the play of flavors against one another and the quality of the food and (house!) wine were outstanding. A real treat!

Returning to our comfy hotel after a long, slow walk to begin to burn off some of the calories...