The French and Germans follow different denominations of Christianity! At least, that is what it seemed like to me when I stepped inside Nancy's cathedral today. Its first distinguishing feature was that, unlike almost all German churches that I had seen, it did not have pointed arches meeting at its ceiling. By "pointed arches," I mean the decorative stacks (usually, of a separate color from the rest of the ceiling) of brick (or plaster, or some other material), shaped like rounded triangles, that adorn the ceilings of all churches (I presume) of some or another branch of Christianity. Not only did the cathedral at Nancy lack those; it also had very thick supporting pillars, more than two yards wide and almost three yards deep, that were almost completely unadorned until they reached a higher storey of the cathedral's interior - while most German cathedrals have statues, plaques, and other adornments running along their main columns, the cathedral at Nancy had those only up above its columns. A recording of Bach's Inventions, done on a clavichord, was playing when I entered the cathedral. It had no stained glass at all, if my memory holds, and its massive columns created an illusion of vastness that I had only experienced in the much bigger cathedrals of Worms and Speyer. Also unlike most German cathdrals, it was full of paintings - again, if my memory holds - that depicted very scenes from Christ's life. I have seen so many churches today that my memory of this cathedral has both dimmed and, probably, blurred with that of the other religious edifices that I visited.
I have jumped ahead of myself, though, and should tell you how I got to the cathedral in the first place. I started yesterday out, as you know, with a train ride to Gottenheim. On the way there, I saw a wading bird the size of a blue heron, with a white body and black hindquarters, and I saw a great many houses that had roofs plastered with solar panels, even in miniscule villages. Germany is at the forefront of everything!
An entirely-bald*, fit-looking man in a white shirt and white pants greeted me when I left the train. I quickly realized why Dr. Liebermann, my oral surgeon's friend, had told me to meet him on the platform: there were only two platforms in total, one for each direction - he could not possibly have missed me. He drove me to his office, explaining how he first met my oral surgeon and how dental practice differs in Germany and in the United States, and set to work on my gums.
*I have decided that people who have hair grow it out for the express purpose of making fun of bald people. Dr. Liebermann therefore had an easier time gaining my trust than a non-bald dentist would have.
The appointment at Dr. Liebermann's office was a little interesting. First off, the office was empty save for the two of us and Dr. Liebermann's assistant. The second interesting thing was that I was immediately aware of the intensely-professional environment of a dental office. Five minutes earlier, I had been on vacation in Germany, and I was suddenly in a reclining chair with a bib around my neck and a dentist probing my mouth. Dr. Liebermann deftly cut stitches that I could barely even see, removed the brackets from my teeth, and explained post-procedural care to me. He changed into regular clothes, suddenly ceasing to look like a doctor, and took me back to the train station, telling me that he would tell my oral surgeon that he had seen me and that everything was well.
As usual, the train ride to Nancy showed me somethig of note. Since it was my first time taking an intercity train, I was surprised when an enormously-long, sleek-looking train, sliding forward like a dolphin through water, pulled up to the platform in Freiburg. Regional trains, in comparison to the intercity ones, look like they are fifty years out of date; the intercity trains, for their part, must be like a low-rent version of the Japanese bullet trains. Intercity trains coast noiselessly along the tracks, hardly ever stopping (they probably only stop at the start and end points; I did not keep track), and feel almost like airlines in their quiet and organization, as though they were neatly-packaged for passengers' maximum comfort. I did not see anything interesting through the windows, but I did note, as I got onto the train for Nancy in Strasbourg, that French trains are designed worse than German ones from the point of view of sightseeing. A German (regional) train has two columns of two seats each, one on each side of a central aisle, like a city bus. Sitting in any of those seats, even an aisle one, one has a good view of what is going on outside and can, if one cranes one's neck, see essentially anything that one likes (as the windows are big). A French regional train - at least, the one that I got onto - has little cabins of eight seats each, with walls between each cabin and an aisle next to them. Because of this, onl the people sitting at the window seats can see much of anything, and even their view is limited, as the windows afford viewers a small range of vision.
As I said yesterday, my arrival in Nancy was marked mostly by confusion, as I was very tired, for some reason. I went to bed later than I should have and, having failed to open my window for the night, did not even sleep that well, with the result that I woke up just as tired as I had been. I took a very long time to get up, just over an hour, and set out for the day with a mind to see Nancy as quickly as possible and try to get back on schedule.
Before describing Nancy in further detail, I should tell you a few things. One of them is that ten minutes in Nancy would be enough to fill one's head with innumberable new impressions. The city has an incredibly-rich cultural heritage and opulent architecture, like the kind that I saw in Vienna (and, to a much lesser extent, Vienna). It was built with a mind for splendor and elegance, such that even its pharmacies have filigreed roofs with scalloped awnings. Its city center is small enough that I saw all of it, save for a church that I just remembered to check out tomorrow, over the span of about two hours, and yet the city is so densely packed with objects of cultural and architectural value that one's head spins. The most interesting things that I saw today, I should think, were a palatial former residence of sorts and a giant park next to it, which had billy goats, a peacock, and all sorts of woodworking displays set up. The statuary in Nancy is as impressive as its religious architecture, and the city is filled with the kind of plaques that I love, which strengthen a city's ties with its past and show an obvious pride for the people who helped to build it.
I left Nancy for Metz at 12:21, I think, and got there at 12:49, or thereabouts. Since it lacked any sort of city map, unlike any German city that I visited except for Baden-Baden, I started wandering through it at random. At first, I was disappointed, and I wondered why every second city that I visited had to turn out to be a dud, but I came to find it a pleasant city in which to be lost, and, halfway through my stay in Metz, I stumbled upon its cathedral and its tourist information center, where I obtained a free map. Metz turned out, like Nancy, to be a city of refinement and inordinate cultural wealth; it was full of museums, churches, former rich people's residences, and buildings celebrating things like its history in industry and its administrative importance. I liked that its cultural heritage was not one solely tied to famous composers, painters, and writers, as it is only with the help of bankers, scientists, engineers, statesmen, doctors, entrepreneurs, and a wide variety of other people that the work of artists ever comes to exist. The idea that a city's being an administrative center could be celebrated via the same arts through which issues more ethereal and metaphysical are typically channeled was a new one to me, and it intrigued me.
This post turned out shorter than I expected, which is a boon to me; I still have to get a little exercise, shave, shower, and go to bed. I am going to visit Luxembourg tomorrow, which should be relaxing, as it only takes an hour-and-a-half or so to get there by train, and it is a small enough city (the only important city in the country, really) that I will not have to spend more than a few hours there to see all of it; I am again going to get up at around 9:15, as I will have to get up at 7:00 to catch the train to Salzburg on Monday. I should have mentioned to you that I had a decent dinner for 8.50 Euros at a French cafe today. My dinner came, interestingly, with potato chips as a free appetizer (like bread in most resturants and tortilla chips in Mexican restaurants), and I was able to get free water, unlike in the Netherlands or Germany, though it had bits of particulate floating in it. My impression of French cuisine is that it is based on sophistication and a sort of fragile interplay of flavors: while Bavarian food is hearty and dense, a French dish will have one sixteenth of a pinch of cumin in it that is supposed to draw out one of the lesser-known flavors that potatoes carry so that the sole that one is eating (or halibut, or whatever - I had some sort of fish) tastes a little more tart. Or something. This is not a knock against French food at all, as I like it very much, based on today's meal; rather, it is an attemp to describe its characteristic differences from southern German food. I get the idea that the French produce a broader range of dishes than the Germans and that they use a greater variety of vegetables and other ingredients in each given dish. If I had a month to kill in France and a lot of money, I would sample as many different restaurants, cafes, and patisseries as possible in order to try to fully flesh out what French cooking is. I expect that it is divine if one has deep enough pockets (while Bavarian food is always solid but not spectacular and is uniformly relatively-cheap).
Finally, I have a bunch of scattered impressions from the past two days to share with you. Train stations are vastly worse in France than in Germany. They contain more mendicants, for one thing, but, more importantly, they are not nearly as streamlined as their German counterparts (though they also contain fewer shops, which is nice). While there are electric displays everywhere in a German train station that tell one from which platform every single train for the next hour or two will be leaving and where it will be stopping, one only knows twenty or so minutes in advance of a French train's departure (at least, based on the train station at Nancy. I am sure that the one in Paris is more sophisticated and much, much more hectic.) from which station it will be departing. There are no visible clocks in French train stations, while one can find them anywhere in German ones; I did not see any information desk in the Nancy train station; the displays on French platforms are much smaller and less prominent than those on German ones; the railway personnel do not print out schedules for one in French train stations as they do in German ones; and the railway personnel themselves are much more rude and less helpful than their German equivalents. The woman who helped me today wore a look of disdain, as though talking to me were like biting a lemon, and seemed glad when I left the counter, while the people who have helped me in Germany have been invariantly polite and very often cheerful. The only advantage of French railway stations over German ones is that, if a French person sees that the train is going to be fifty feet from where he is standing when it comes to a stop, he starts walking towards it in advance, rather than standing around and picking his nose as Germans do. This alone was not enough to counterbalance all of the downsides to a French train station, but it at least mollified their inferiority.
There is much more broken glass on the sidewalks of French streets than in any city that I saw in Germany, and the walls of buildings seem dirtier. French cities often have gigantic buildings that seem to stretch for an entire city block, while German ones have row after row of different-looking buildings sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with one another. French cities, unlike German ones, have straight roads, as I have mentioned, and they have maps that correspond to the reality that they represent - a big improvement over German maps. French people smoke just as much as Germans, as it turns out, and Strasbourg is the only city in which there are large numbers of free bathrooms. Finally, Frenchmen often have very beautiful dogs, just like Germans. I noticed that Germans - unless I was improperly judging their treatment of dogs, as I have no idea how to treat a dog myself - ignored their dog's thirst for a drink of water on hot days, failed to adequately train their dogs to follow directions, and, as a result, jerked their dogs' collars when their dogs attempted to go anywhere. This is probably an exaggeration and too broad of a statement, but it was a pity to see people - if I was correctly judging their actions - mistreating their dogs for ignorance of the proper way to treat them. I do not know if people in France treat dogs any differently from people in Germany, but I have noticed that there are many large dogs here, which either breaks the stereotype that the French all have lapdogs or goes to show that I have not yet been to Paris. One nice thing about dogowners here is that they do not dress their dogs up in sweaters or treat them like needy babies, which is a nice change of pace from North America.
My final two points are as follows: I discovered, on my way to Nancy (yesterday), that not all Frenchmen have discovered deodorant (or else that they consider armpit smell fragrant), and I heard music everywhere that I went last night. A band was playing some very obnoxious music in the train station, and, in the city's central plaza, another band was playing very loudly and seemingly moving, as though there were a parade going. It turns out that I arrived in Nancy on the Day of Music, which is observed in many French cities. Who would have guessed!
I have broken tradition by showing you two photos of Nancy, rather than one, as I took a very cool shot of the moon last night, of which I am rather proud. Although I felt tired a couple of days ago, my visit to France has proven one of them most stimulating parts of this whole trip. I look forward to seeing more of it in a couple of years!
Oops. I forgot to describe the inside of Metz' churches and its cathedral. While I might be kicking a dead horse at this point, it is important to try to determine the different forms that worship takes in Europe (though doing so without any knowledge of religion and without having seen any religious ceremonies here is probably philistine). Metz' cathedral had an interior that was too complicated to be worth describing here; its most interesting feature was that some of its stained glass panels looked almost Expressionistic. The stained glass panels in one of its more prominent churches, on the other hand, looked like early Renaissance religious paintings, suggesting either that the role of stained glass windows in churches has changed over time, or that accepted styles of representation in them have changed. Finally, I forgot to mention that the ceiling of Nancy's cathedral had all sorts of paintings on it, just like the ceiling of the cathedral in Wurzburg. I do not think that I had seen anything else like that (outside of Wurzburg) on this trip!
I have jumped ahead of myself, though, and should tell you how I got to the cathedral in the first place. I started yesterday out, as you know, with a train ride to Gottenheim. On the way there, I saw a wading bird the size of a blue heron, with a white body and black hindquarters, and I saw a great many houses that had roofs plastered with solar panels, even in miniscule villages. Germany is at the forefront of everything!
An entirely-bald*, fit-looking man in a white shirt and white pants greeted me when I left the train. I quickly realized why Dr. Liebermann, my oral surgeon's friend, had told me to meet him on the platform: there were only two platforms in total, one for each direction - he could not possibly have missed me. He drove me to his office, explaining how he first met my oral surgeon and how dental practice differs in Germany and in the United States, and set to work on my gums.
*I have decided that people who have hair grow it out for the express purpose of making fun of bald people. Dr. Liebermann therefore had an easier time gaining my trust than a non-bald dentist would have.
The appointment at Dr. Liebermann's office was a little interesting. First off, the office was empty save for the two of us and Dr. Liebermann's assistant. The second interesting thing was that I was immediately aware of the intensely-professional environment of a dental office. Five minutes earlier, I had been on vacation in Germany, and I was suddenly in a reclining chair with a bib around my neck and a dentist probing my mouth. Dr. Liebermann deftly cut stitches that I could barely even see, removed the brackets from my teeth, and explained post-procedural care to me. He changed into regular clothes, suddenly ceasing to look like a doctor, and took me back to the train station, telling me that he would tell my oral surgeon that he had seen me and that everything was well.
As usual, the train ride to Nancy showed me somethig of note. Since it was my first time taking an intercity train, I was surprised when an enormously-long, sleek-looking train, sliding forward like a dolphin through water, pulled up to the platform in Freiburg. Regional trains, in comparison to the intercity ones, look like they are fifty years out of date; the intercity trains, for their part, must be like a low-rent version of the Japanese bullet trains. Intercity trains coast noiselessly along the tracks, hardly ever stopping (they probably only stop at the start and end points; I did not keep track), and feel almost like airlines in their quiet and organization, as though they were neatly-packaged for passengers' maximum comfort. I did not see anything interesting through the windows, but I did note, as I got onto the train for Nancy in Strasbourg, that French trains are designed worse than German ones from the point of view of sightseeing. A German (regional) train has two columns of two seats each, one on each side of a central aisle, like a city bus. Sitting in any of those seats, even an aisle one, one has a good view of what is going on outside and can, if one cranes one's neck, see essentially anything that one likes (as the windows are big). A French regional train - at least, the one that I got onto - has little cabins of eight seats each, with walls between each cabin and an aisle next to them. Because of this, onl the people sitting at the window seats can see much of anything, and even their view is limited, as the windows afford viewers a small range of vision.
As I said yesterday, my arrival in Nancy was marked mostly by confusion, as I was very tired, for some reason. I went to bed later than I should have and, having failed to open my window for the night, did not even sleep that well, with the result that I woke up just as tired as I had been. I took a very long time to get up, just over an hour, and set out for the day with a mind to see Nancy as quickly as possible and try to get back on schedule.
Before describing Nancy in further detail, I should tell you a few things. One of them is that ten minutes in Nancy would be enough to fill one's head with innumberable new impressions. The city has an incredibly-rich cultural heritage and opulent architecture, like the kind that I saw in Vienna (and, to a much lesser extent, Vienna). It was built with a mind for splendor and elegance, such that even its pharmacies have filigreed roofs with scalloped awnings. Its city center is small enough that I saw all of it, save for a church that I just remembered to check out tomorrow, over the span of about two hours, and yet the city is so densely packed with objects of cultural and architectural value that one's head spins. The most interesting things that I saw today, I should think, were a palatial former residence of sorts and a giant park next to it, which had billy goats, a peacock, and all sorts of woodworking displays set up. The statuary in Nancy is as impressive as its religious architecture, and the city is filled with the kind of plaques that I love, which strengthen a city's ties with its past and show an obvious pride for the people who helped to build it.
I left Nancy for Metz at 12:21, I think, and got there at 12:49, or thereabouts. Since it lacked any sort of city map, unlike any German city that I visited except for Baden-Baden, I started wandering through it at random. At first, I was disappointed, and I wondered why every second city that I visited had to turn out to be a dud, but I came to find it a pleasant city in which to be lost, and, halfway through my stay in Metz, I stumbled upon its cathedral and its tourist information center, where I obtained a free map. Metz turned out, like Nancy, to be a city of refinement and inordinate cultural wealth; it was full of museums, churches, former rich people's residences, and buildings celebrating things like its history in industry and its administrative importance. I liked that its cultural heritage was not one solely tied to famous composers, painters, and writers, as it is only with the help of bankers, scientists, engineers, statesmen, doctors, entrepreneurs, and a wide variety of other people that the work of artists ever comes to exist. The idea that a city's being an administrative center could be celebrated via the same arts through which issues more ethereal and metaphysical are typically channeled was a new one to me, and it intrigued me.
This post turned out shorter than I expected, which is a boon to me; I still have to get a little exercise, shave, shower, and go to bed. I am going to visit Luxembourg tomorrow, which should be relaxing, as it only takes an hour-and-a-half or so to get there by train, and it is a small enough city (the only important city in the country, really) that I will not have to spend more than a few hours there to see all of it; I am again going to get up at around 9:15, as I will have to get up at 7:00 to catch the train to Salzburg on Monday. I should have mentioned to you that I had a decent dinner for 8.50 Euros at a French cafe today. My dinner came, interestingly, with potato chips as a free appetizer (like bread in most resturants and tortilla chips in Mexican restaurants), and I was able to get free water, unlike in the Netherlands or Germany, though it had bits of particulate floating in it. My impression of French cuisine is that it is based on sophistication and a sort of fragile interplay of flavors: while Bavarian food is hearty and dense, a French dish will have one sixteenth of a pinch of cumin in it that is supposed to draw out one of the lesser-known flavors that potatoes carry so that the sole that one is eating (or halibut, or whatever - I had some sort of fish) tastes a little more tart. Or something. This is not a knock against French food at all, as I like it very much, based on today's meal; rather, it is an attemp to describe its characteristic differences from southern German food. I get the idea that the French produce a broader range of dishes than the Germans and that they use a greater variety of vegetables and other ingredients in each given dish. If I had a month to kill in France and a lot of money, I would sample as many different restaurants, cafes, and patisseries as possible in order to try to fully flesh out what French cooking is. I expect that it is divine if one has deep enough pockets (while Bavarian food is always solid but not spectacular and is uniformly relatively-cheap).
Finally, I have a bunch of scattered impressions from the past two days to share with you. Train stations are vastly worse in France than in Germany. They contain more mendicants, for one thing, but, more importantly, they are not nearly as streamlined as their German counterparts (though they also contain fewer shops, which is nice). While there are electric displays everywhere in a German train station that tell one from which platform every single train for the next hour or two will be leaving and where it will be stopping, one only knows twenty or so minutes in advance of a French train's departure (at least, based on the train station at Nancy. I am sure that the one in Paris is more sophisticated and much, much more hectic.) from which station it will be departing. There are no visible clocks in French train stations, while one can find them anywhere in German ones; I did not see any information desk in the Nancy train station; the displays on French platforms are much smaller and less prominent than those on German ones; the railway personnel do not print out schedules for one in French train stations as they do in German ones; and the railway personnel themselves are much more rude and less helpful than their German equivalents. The woman who helped me today wore a look of disdain, as though talking to me were like biting a lemon, and seemed glad when I left the counter, while the people who have helped me in Germany have been invariantly polite and very often cheerful. The only advantage of French railway stations over German ones is that, if a French person sees that the train is going to be fifty feet from where he is standing when it comes to a stop, he starts walking towards it in advance, rather than standing around and picking his nose as Germans do. This alone was not enough to counterbalance all of the downsides to a French train station, but it at least mollified their inferiority.
There is much more broken glass on the sidewalks of French streets than in any city that I saw in Germany, and the walls of buildings seem dirtier. French cities often have gigantic buildings that seem to stretch for an entire city block, while German ones have row after row of different-looking buildings sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with one another. French cities, unlike German ones, have straight roads, as I have mentioned, and they have maps that correspond to the reality that they represent - a big improvement over German maps. French people smoke just as much as Germans, as it turns out, and Strasbourg is the only city in which there are large numbers of free bathrooms. Finally, Frenchmen often have very beautiful dogs, just like Germans. I noticed that Germans - unless I was improperly judging their treatment of dogs, as I have no idea how to treat a dog myself - ignored their dog's thirst for a drink of water on hot days, failed to adequately train their dogs to follow directions, and, as a result, jerked their dogs' collars when their dogs attempted to go anywhere. This is probably an exaggeration and too broad of a statement, but it was a pity to see people - if I was correctly judging their actions - mistreating their dogs for ignorance of the proper way to treat them. I do not know if people in France treat dogs any differently from people in Germany, but I have noticed that there are many large dogs here, which either breaks the stereotype that the French all have lapdogs or goes to show that I have not yet been to Paris. One nice thing about dogowners here is that they do not dress their dogs up in sweaters or treat them like needy babies, which is a nice change of pace from North America.
My final two points are as follows: I discovered, on my way to Nancy (yesterday), that not all Frenchmen have discovered deodorant (or else that they consider armpit smell fragrant), and I heard music everywhere that I went last night. A band was playing some very obnoxious music in the train station, and, in the city's central plaza, another band was playing very loudly and seemingly moving, as though there were a parade going. It turns out that I arrived in Nancy on the Day of Music, which is observed in many French cities. Who would have guessed!
I have broken tradition by showing you two photos of Nancy, rather than one, as I took a very cool shot of the moon last night, of which I am rather proud. Although I felt tired a couple of days ago, my visit to France has proven one of them most stimulating parts of this whole trip. I look forward to seeing more of it in a couple of years!
Oops. I forgot to describe the inside of Metz' churches and its cathedral. While I might be kicking a dead horse at this point, it is important to try to determine the different forms that worship takes in Europe (though doing so without any knowledge of religion and without having seen any religious ceremonies here is probably philistine). Metz' cathedral had an interior that was too complicated to be worth describing here; its most interesting feature was that some of its stained glass panels looked almost Expressionistic. The stained glass panels in one of its more prominent churches, on the other hand, looked like early Renaissance religious paintings, suggesting either that the role of stained glass windows in churches has changed over time, or that accepted styles of representation in them have changed. Finally, I forgot to mention that the ceiling of Nancy's cathedral had all sorts of paintings on it, just like the ceiling of the cathedral in Wurzburg. I do not think that I had seen anything else like that (outside of Wurzburg) on this trip!
This is a really cool photo of the moon.
This peacock probably thinks that it looks normal.
Metz is a city of great cultural wealth.
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