Amsterdam is a big bike city. And by big bike city, I mean you see people texting while cycling, helmetless, with their groceries under their arm. Their attitude is, to use Dad’s word, insouciant. They cycle along with utter faith that everything that is not on two wheels will get out of their way. Or, …
Leiden is a lively university town with its share of canals, old houses and cute boutiques, but I’m not sure anything (except perhaps excessive amounts of caffeine) accounts for why I’ve fallen so completely and unreservedly in love with it. American history not being my forte, I can’t say I’ve ever been that interested in …
This is Kootje, one of a matched pair of orphans who grace the gate of the former Holy Ghost Orphanage in Leiden. If anyone can explain to me why he and Kaatje each have one red and one white sleeve, I’d love to know. The tourist plaque outside the gateway has a picture from a …
The question in this case is not so much what I just ate as why I thought it was a good idea to eat it for dinner. This is what happens to me in the absence of parental supervision. I wish I had a picture of it. “It” is a chocolate-covered waffle with white and …
Heidelberg Castle perches high on a rise above the Rhine. It has a long and tangled history involving the Electors Palatinate, the Reformation, and many Fredricks, Ludwigs, Heinriches, Gustavs, Karls, Leopolds, Williams, and Johanns. Here’s a reconstruction of the castle around 1500: The castle was partially demolished in a French siege in the late 1600s. …
My favorite thing about the Dutch Masters is that so many of their paintings tell stories with layers and layers of meaning. This is a painting at the Hermitage (part of a Russian collection on loan to Amsterdam). Of course, I failed to write down the artist’s name or the title of the piece, but …
When you see a fantastical creature you don’t recognize from the usual European pantheon, odds are it’s a safari animal whose description the artist read in Roman sources, or heard about from a patron who had read the Roman sources, or possibly picked up from crusaders telling tall tales at the Green Dragon Inn after …
Because I dredged up a few more Basel photos. This is a street leading up to one of the smaller churches. Most of those buildings are maybe sixteenth century at the earliest (the house from 1272 was somewhere in this area). This is just a cool bay window at the top of one of the …
Marksburg Castle (coming soon) has a room full of historical armor. I’d never seen a reconstruction of Merovingian (500-700 A.D.) or Carolingian (700-900 A.D.) clothing. Here’s the Merovingian: And here’s his shoes: And here’s something that would probably make the enemy fall out of his saddle and die laughing:
I only know of the Lorelei from a collection of fantasy short stories I read way back in elementary school, but for those of you unfamiliar with the story: The Lorelei was a beautiful woman who sat on a cliff above the Rhine to comb her golden hair and sing. Her voice was so beautiful and …
While floating down the scenic Rhine Valley this morning, they served us coffee with Bailey’s on the sun deck. Can I please just change my return address to the Viking Vidar?
This is Katz Castle. It has a longer name, but no one can remember it, including our tour guide. Just downstream there’s a Maus Castle, so called because it’s smaller than Katz.
You’re welcome. Mistletoe is everywhere here. If you think about it, mistletoe is an odd choice of symbol for love, since the actual plant is a parasite with hallucinogenic properties and a tendency to kill its host. And it’s dratted hard to get rid of once it takes root. Or maybe that makes it particularly …
This tombstone from Basel is a whopping 1,200 years old…according to our guide, whose information seems shaky to me. Look at the third through fifth characters in the inscription. Arabic numerals didn’t make it to Europe till the 13th century. I think his estimate may have been off by a few (hundred) years. Not that I’m complaining, …
Apologies for the radio silence on Colmar and Strasburg. There will be a temporary gap in your feature presentation owing to the fact that your author is (sing it with me) technologically inept. I spent two days taking photos exclusively on my phone before I realized that the bandwidth on the boat isn’t strong enough to …
It occurs to me that perhaps I should toss out a little context for all these Rhine photos. My spring break is three weeks long and Dad and I are spending it on the Viking Vidar. This means many French and German towns, much French and German food, and very limited opportunities to botch a …
This statue to the right of the cathedral door was originally St. Michael sharing his cloak with a beggar. Sometime in the 15th century, the town fathers decided that it was unseemly to have the image of a beggar so close to a holy place, so they removed him and replaced him with a stump.
To the people of medieval Basel, the basilisk—unholy result of a toad incubating a cockerel’s egg—was a very real creature. Its glance could turn men to stone. It was invulnerable to weapons, and only its own gaze, reflected back at it in a mirror, could slay it. According to our tour guide, in the 13th …
The waiter translated the important part of the receipt for Dad: