7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 6. Les Clochards

There is no denying it, the Eiffel Tower is impressive and, yes, beautiful in a way that sidesteps the cliches. It is astonishing to think that it was almost torn down in 1909 when the original 20 year permit expired and only avoided that fate because having antennas so high up was deemed useful. We took the requisite several dozen photos from various angles, necks constantly craned upwards, but what sticks in my memory is what I saw when I looked down. On the narrow cement boulevard in the street that runs between the tower and the Seine lay a man. He was black and shoe-less and lying face down, wearing a shirt that hung loosely from one shoulder and pants that were so torn that most of his left buttock was exposed. Streams of people passed around him on both sides like a river around a rock. It was hard to tell whether he was breathing. This was our first clochard.

Les clochards are the Parisian versions of bums or winos or what I suppose we now rather colourlessly call homeless persons. They have a long tradition here and few tourists fail to notice them. The clochard classique is a scruffy bearded fellow wearing too many layers sitting with his fellows on the banks of the Seine, gripping a bottle of red wine by the neck. These still exist, but the range is much wider today. The unconscious fellow under the Eiffel Tower represents the one extreme where it's hard not to imagine a heart-rending back-story involving a West African family pooling its savings to pay a smuggler to take their brightest boy across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, only to have the dream end in destitution, starvation and collapse. Or maybe he was just tired and needed a nap. At the other extreme, near where we were staying, we saw a pair of clochards pitch two spiffy mountaineering tents on a patch of grass under the Pont d'Austerlitz. Every morning they would pack up their tents and clean up their campsite and then every evening they would set everything up again. They didn't bother anybody and nobody bothered them.

My favorites though were the nattily, if eccentrically, dressed old men, greasy grey hair carefully combed, colourful scarf knotted just so, favorite bench reserved from where they would smile at the pretty girls (yes, no shortage thereof in Paris) and perhaps thumb a fat tattered novel, sipping something from a paper bag. Or perhaps these weren't clochards at all. Perhaps they were just happy to get out of the house.

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 5. The Ballad Of The Missing Brick

And so it came to pass that we found ourselves with several hours to spare in Munich before boarding a night train to Paris. Munich is fun, Munich is cool, but Munich late on a Thursday evening offers few diversions for a family with two children. So we took them to a beer hall.
Some Munich beer halls are exactly what you picture: long wooden tables of people swaying and singing while comely waitresses in dirndls (google that) carry giant mugs of beer and a polka band does its thing. That's not where we went. I remembered a smaller polka-free spot from my last visit, the Andechser am Dom, and I remembered that with luck we could get a table in the crypt. A beer hall with a crypt. Sure enough, the waiter led us through the packed hall, down a curving stair and into the basement where there were a handful of high tables set in dark niches. Much quieter, much cooler. "Medieval".
And so it also came to pass that Alexander brought his new Lego to that dark niche. We ordered great lashings of sausages and beer, or at least I did, and settled in for an evening of watching the toings and froings and generally soaking in the beer hall crypt vibe. This entertained Alexander for all of twenty seconds after which he began campaigning to open his Lego package. I told him, no, that's a bad idea because inevitably you will lose a piece and it will disappear on the dark floor below. The crypt was very old and very dark with lots of cracks and corners and spaces, in short a black hole for Lego.
But I really really really want to.
No, it's a bad idea. Look at the cool pictures on the wall.
Da-ad. Please please please, I won't lose any. I promise.
By then the beer had buffed my edges down to a smooth agreeable gloss.
Ok. But it's your problem if you lose a brick.
So Lego playing began on the small high table with the yawning black hole below. More beer was consumed and the evening slid along in an agreeable fashion until... plink.
Uh oh.
What happened?
I lost a brick.
See! Well, you won't find it. It's lost forever down there. I hope you learn something from this. Yada yada yada.
To our chagrin Alexander hopped off his stool and began crawling around on the floor, under other people's tables, in front of waitresses carrying armloads of beer, poking in dark corners that hadn't been poked in since 1571. Everyone was very accommodating though, charmed by the cute little boy looking for his Lego. The waiter even crouched down and used his lighter to illuminate the area.
No luck. A piece of fossilized chewing gum and an earring, but no Lego.
See! You didn't find it did you? It's lost forever down there. I hope you learn something from this. Yada yada yada.
When it finally came time to leave and we stood up to put our jackets on Alexander suddenly dropped to the ground. Before I could say anything he was up again, grinning triumphantly, holding up - you guessed it - the missing brick.
See dad, you were wrong!
So, the moral of the story is...

   

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 4. Bavarian Green

When you think of Bavaria you might think of the Alps, or of gigantic mugs of beer, or of ornate castles, or of, I don't know, lederhosen? You should think of green. I have been many green places from Prince Edward Island to England to Belize to New Zealand (to be fair, the latter just for a day), but now when I think of the colour green I only think of the view outside the window of our farm-stay in the foothills of southern Bavaria.
After some confusion involving the fact that the tiny village of Niedersonthofen sported two farm-stays run by families named Schoell we settled in and began to stare at the green. Or at least I did. Lorraine spent time with the farm's beautiful Arab horses and the kids loved feeding the goats and watching the gentle brown cows being milked, but I would sit on the balcony and stare at the meadow or, even better, wander out into it and stand there. A Bavarian meadow is not just grass, but an array of plants, all diligently cropped to a uniform height by the cows. It is claimed that many of these plants impart subtle flavours and even health benefits to the milk. I cannot vouch for that, although the fresh milk certainly was tasty, but I can vouch for the colour: yes, green. Not just regular Canadian suburban lawn green, but an intense pure green. Acid trip green. Mad science radioactive green. Alien planet green. Photoshop green. I don't know why this is. Perhaps the cows produce not only special milk, but special manure too. Regardless the effect is mesmerizing and I could not get enough of it. This was a wandering through and standing on and staring at meadow though, not a laying on meadow like in Provence. "Special manure".

  

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 3. Manarola Inside Out

Manarola can be a little hard to get to. Apple Maps infamously sent drivers deep into the Australian Outback where they had to be rescued, but Google Maps need not be too smug as it sent us down a serpentine Ligurian road towards a dead-end that had been created over a year ago by a mudslide. So we backtracked, returned to the main road and took a circuitous detour to approach Manarola from the other direction.
Manarola.
If you've ever received a calendar from a real estate agent you've seen it. It's one of the five fishing villages that make up the Cinque Terre on the northwest coast of Italy. It's a multicoloured Lego brick town jammed against a cliffside. Paul Klee could have painted it. The harbour is so small that the fishing boats are hauled up on rollers and parked in front of the houses on the only road, and that road is only open to local traffic and then only for a few hours in the early morning. Visitors park above the village and walk down, their rolling suitcases making that characteristic rattle on the cobbles. Only one road even though 800 people live here. This is because all the other streets are in effect really just open-air hallways. Narrow, winding open-air hallways, interrupted and connected by staircases, in some cases very steep and long staircases. There are no bicycles and very few fat people. These "hallways" are often only as wide as you can reach. The house we rented was one small room wide and five floors high. The front door was on the first floor and the back door on the fourth floor.
The effect was bewildering and delightful. When the church bells rang and children raced ahead and disappeared around corners I felt like I had stepped into a classic Chef Boy-ar-Dee commercial and I laughed. When Alexander raced ahead and disappeared around a corner - really disappeared - I felt like I had stepped into the opening scene of a made for TV drama and I shouted. We eventually found him, of course.
If we had stayed a few more days we would have cased every odd little side passage and stairway and inevitably the strange topography would have become familiar and even ordinary. But the maze spreads outwards, up and down the steep wine terraces to the next village and then the next and the next, so I don't think I would have become bored.

7 Snapshots of Europe, Spring 2014: 2. Bathed in Klimt

Les Baux de Provence is a tiny fortified medieval town that sits high on a rocky outcropping and has the distinction - perhaps even notoriety - of being named one of France's "most beautiful towns". This appellation brings with it the promise of tour buses, many many tour buses. Being tiny as well as most beautiful then becomes a significant problem. Fortunately we were there in early April, at a time when the tour buses were in the single digits, rather than the double or even triple of July, but it did lead one to wonder, where would all the people go? The answer it turns out was into the mines. The bauxite mines. A couple hundred meters back, along the side of the rocky outcropping, was the world's first bauxite mine (bauxite, Les Baux, get it?) and this has been transformed into an otherworldly art experience. I was skeptical. "Tourist bait," I thought. "Cheesy and overpriced," I thought. "Bo-ring," I thought.
I thought wrong.
Maybe the experience in July packed shoulder to shoulder with jostling seniors from Hamburg would be different, but that day it was mostly empty and it was extraordinary. We stepped into a vast empty underground chamber, the floor, walls and ceiling of raw stone. The ceiling was three or four stories up and the chamber divided into sub-spaces by massive square pillars and partial walls. And all around us, on the floor too, were moving projections of paintings. Moving and morphing and blending into each other. The show that day was Gustav Klimt. We were bathed in him. Bathed in his astonishing colour. Music took this already overwhelming experience and made it emotional. "Overwhelming" has a pejorative flavour, but I mean it in its most positive sense. My jaw literally dropped. I mean it: my chin hung loose with my mouth open. I almost cried it was so beautiful, so moving, so unexpected. This went on for twenty minutes as we wandered the vast space, but I could have spent the whole day there.
This was apparently originally the idea of the artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. His films are run continuously in a second mine space. We saw old Greek women wailing about a dead boy in jerky black and white. We lasted about two minutes. This was the anti-Klimt. Perhaps the antidote was necessary to ease the transition back into the world.