May 19, 2008

I’m way behind on the blogging – since Paris we’ve done a number of day trips while my Mom was here, a great visit especially for Maeve who got lots of Granma time. Trips include Volklinger Huette, an industrial site near Saarbruecken, which is way cooler than that brief description sounds, Trier, an American WW2 cemetery in France, and Chris Kribs who was visiting his extended family on a farm in France just across the border. So hopefully more about those soon. We just got back from Leipzig, where Mike was attending ICSE, so I’m going to write about that while it’s still fresh.

I was in Leipzig 15 years ago, not too long after the Wende, and it was my favorite former East German city. It was half-broken, with empty lots, boarded up buildings etc like all former East Germany, but it was also very dynamic, people everywhere, lots of construction, and I took an excellent tour with the tourist information people that took us behind many of the building facades to look at old arcades and hofs (patios) previously used for commerce. Leipzig has been a trade-focused city for a long time. So I was interested to see how it’s changed.

It’s quite different. New, modern high-rises are everywhere, huge amounts of construction going on. Some buildings like the university building, which was built post-war on the remains of a school/church and that the people hated, had been torn down and is being rebuilt. Other street and building construction was just renovation. And other construction was just new. In Berlin, there was tons of construction right around the path of the wall, as that was all the empty space, and the city of Berlin has overreached itself financially with all the construction. I don’t know about Leipzig finances, but it felt like it was booming, with construction and repairs throughout the old city. There are also plenty of empty lots around, not right in the main drag of the center city, but only a few blocks off, which have probably been empty since the city got bombed out in WWII. There’s a lively street scene, lots of cafes, etc. Of course, the weather was also beautiful, upper 60’s to 70’s so everyone was out. All around an enjoyable city to bum around in.

The ride to Leipzig was 6 hours on the train, quite a ride for a 2 year old, but overall train is not a bad way to go. There is plenty of freedom of movement and tons of interesting people to see, a dining car to explore, and almost always other babies to look at. When we got to Leipzig on Monday, it was a holiday here called Pfingsten (Pentacost) so things were relatively quiet, except for the thousands of Goths. We caught the tail end of Europe’s largest Goth convention. My favorite Goth accessory was a black parasol made of lacy material that had black boa fringe to keep the sun off. Very Goth chic.

Our first evening we were pretty much all beat and did an easy supper – Auerbachs Keller. It’s in the middle of the main drag and was a 15 minute walk from our hotel, which was right outside the ring road. And it had vegetarian options. Mike was suspicious because it’s totally on the tourist map as it was featured in Goethe’s Foust and Goethe is a big deal. But the food was good. I was on the lookout for Leipziger Allerlei, one of the culinary specialties of Leipzig which is pretty much a Spring veggie stew and is only available during the Asparagus season (asparagus is a big deal here in Spring which suits me just fine). Auerbachs Keller had their version, but it had crab meat so we didn’t get it. But I was going to try again and again to find a veggie version of this one German veggie specialty. Anyway, Auerbachs Keller is in the basement of the Maedler Passage, which is an indoor mall very near the Old Rathaus (townhall). These passages are a typical Leipzig construction that were used starting hundreds of years ago (Leipzig got the royal okay to be a trade city in the 1400’s) as showrooms for goods. The Maedler used to have lots of little stalls for silk merchants, but is now an upscale mall. The glass ceiling is neat. Over the next couple days, Maeve and I walked through several other passages, all of which are now malls.

On Tuesday we went to Dresden, as that was the one full day we had when Mike wasn’t at the conference. Our first stop was VW’s Glaserne Manufaktur, where they make their high-end car the Phaeton. It’s a VW limo, made almost completely by hand (there are only a couple of robots) in a factory line that you can tour. The line wasn’t running when we were there – it’s only 1 shift a day, so we were able to see most of the factory. They assemble 30 cars a day there, and they are all made to order. If you order one, you get a private tour and can be present for the baptism (when the car gets its VIN) and the wedding (when the engine is put in). The electronic wiring weighs 90 kilos. The tour was interesting but all in German so Mike didn’t get everything out of it. We needed advance reservations for English. At the end, there was a demo Phaeton so we got to try out all the fancy features, including seat massages and a trunk that opened with the press of a button. The car is too heavy for a spare tire, so the spare is full sized. Pretty fancy.

Afterwards, we wandered around town. We basically walked the tour in our Lonely Planet, past the old and new markets, Rathaus, Frauenkirche, river bank, and Zwinger palace. Much of downtown is post WWII construction, as the downtown was leveled with firebombing. When I was last there, the Frauenkirche, the main protestant church that was built as a foil for the Catholic Hofkirche (the rulers were Catholic even though Saxony was overwhelmingly protestant), was deliberately left a ruin as a war memorial. It’s since been rebuilt and has a beautiful interior. They put most of the stones back in their original positions, an amazing accomplishment. We wanted to climb to the top, but children under 6 aren’t allowed. We could have gone up the Rathaus tower or a tower at the Palace, but ran out of time.

One of my favorite spots was the raised promenade by the river. It is just behind the Frauenkirche and Residenz, right at the city center, and on top of what’s left of Dresden’s original bastion. The river there is full of tour/cruise boats.

By 11:30 we were dragging hard and Maeve was fussy, so we went to lunch at the main veggie restaurant in Dresden called BrennNessel, which was a 10 minute walk outside the city center past the back side of the palace garden. It was in a quarter that was outside the original city gates and had been used for pasturage, and later for institutional buildings such as hospitals and orphanages. The food was excellent. We got a stinging nettle soup, which was a little weird, and a gnocchi with pears and blueberries (yummy) and potatoes with lentils and tofu (yummy). After lunch we all felt better and went back to wander a bit more through town. We just walked through the courtyard of the Zwinger, which was a pleasure palace for the rulers of Saxony and now houses several museums. Some of the museums would have been nice, but since we only had one day we’d decided to just get the overview and look around without doing any museums. Maeve liked the palace entrance as it went over a moat that had big koi, which she correctly labeled over and over as “peces.” The entrance was called the crown tower, as it was topped by a gilded crown. Next stop was a huge ceramic mural of all the Saxon kings on horseback. It was originally pained, but had been redone in Meissen ceramic tiles, and covered the back of a building for a whole city block. It was neat.

By that time, I was getting a little worried about making our train back and we started back to the train station. Then we realized that we had plenty of time to walk to the train station in Neustadt, on the other side of the river. We could pick our train up there as well, and then we’d see a new part of the city. So we turned around and walked over the Augustusbruke and down the main drag of Neustadt. It was pretty much all post-war buildings and a major shopping area, but there was a nice gilded statue of Augustus the Strong once you got over the river. There were also several fountains with water that Maeve liked playing in since her shoes are waterproof and the day was warm. We made our train with plenty of time – we could have wandered a bit more but I didn’t want to miss it.

Maeve as usual didn’t sleep on the train and it was going to be late by the time we got to Leipzig, so we decided to be crazy and instead of going back to the hotel for a nap, touring around in Leipzig. It was Mike’s only day-time hours chance as his conference started the next day. So we got to Leipzig and walked to the hotel where Mike could register for his conference because we wanted the tourist information. We could have also gone to the Tourist Info, but this way we killed two birds with one stone. Then we walked over to the Stassi museum in the Runde Ecke ( building with round corners) on the ring around the city center. This building was the Stassi headquarters for Leipzig, and the Stassi was the East German secret police, a government-sponsored terror organization. The building was occupied as part of the Wende and a group of concerned citizens took control of the Stassi records so that they wouldn’t be made public. This group later formed a non-profit which runs the museum and deals with people who want to look at their records. The museum had a model of an office and a prison cell, but most rooms dealt with different Stassi branches, like the one that censored the mail, provided surveillance, took scent samples of dissidents so dogs could later be used to find them, shredded dissident materials, provided border control etc. Some of the displays were really interesting but impossible to make sense of without reading the labels. For example, in one room there was a big machine with big 1-foot grey rocks with dust in a corner. It turns out that this machine was a shredder that was used to shred dissident materials and then mixed it with water to make a paste. The “rocks” in the corner were paste balls of materials that were destroyed during the Wende. The museum was put up soon after the Wende and needs some serious design help – there is too much info, all in German. The titles of each of the displays are done in magic marker – seriously low-budget but also hard to make sense of all the disconnected info. I was also trying to get Maeve to take a nap in the sling, and she wasn’t cooperating, so I wasn’t able to read as much and explain.

From the Runde Ecke we walked into town, thinking we’d just head south to dinner. About 1 minute from the museum, Maeve fell asleep in the sling, so we changed plans and decided to see the Thomaskirche, where Bach was rector for 25 years. The interior of the Thomaskirche is also beautiful, mostly start white with red-stained wood-looking rafters that soar from gothic-style arches. There is one wall of stained glass windows, which include a WWI memorial with guys in trenches, and window for Bach and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The most interesting anecdote we learned about the church was about the Bach organ, which was in the middle of the apse on the balcony. They actually changed that organ out a few years ago for a smaller organ that is more like the organs from Bach’s time. Outside the church is a statue of Bach with one of his pockets turned out. He had over 10 kids and was apparently always broke. In front of the church is a fountain with sprays of water that alternate and little metal bridges that cross over the water. Maeve was asleep this day, but this fountain later became her favorite. She’d look at the water under the bridge and step gingerly from the cement to the metal and then run across.

Maeve slept through the Thomaskirche, but we decided not to push our luck and headed to dinner at the one vegetarian restaurant in Leipzig, called Zest, which is a bit south of the city center. We took the tram, which goes straight there, although we got off a stop too early. The service was slow and food was okay but not as good as lunch, and we were all happy to get home and go to bed after a serious day of tourism.

Wednesday Mike had to conference, but decided to skip the first section so we had a little time together in the city. We first went to the GDR museum, which is on the main pedestrian street cattycorner across from the town hall. It’s very slick, modern, and well done, following the history of East Germany from post WWII aftermath, through the tensions with West German and reunification, with a fair amount of information about daily life. We only had 45 minutes and didn’t get to see nearly everything, but the museum is free so we went back for another 45 minutes the next day. Actually, Maeve and I went back for another 45 minutes later that day, and Maeve pulled on a hand cart that refugees had used to move their belongings after the war and pulled it off its display. After that I was kind of embarrassed to stay at the museum any longer and I didn’t want to let Maeve run around, so we left. But we went again the next day with Mike and the display was fixed but we left a decent donation.

We popped by the other main Leipzig church, the Nicholaikirche, before Mike had to head to the convention center. It was also beautiful inside, done in peach and light green and all of the columns looked like trees. Maeve and I passed by this church a couple of days later on our way to meet Mike for supper and there was organ music coming out, so we popped in and listed to the practice for a couple of minutes. We’d have listened longer, but the practice session ended. I forget how powerful big organ music can be.

Maeve and I spent the rest of the morning wandering around downtown, revisiting the museum, checking out the passages etc. We also looked at a lot of menus to see which restaurants had more than 1 veggie entrée for later. We finally ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant off behind the new art museum just north of the Market square. Good, cheap, and had tofu. Then it was home for a nap, more afternoon wandering, and meeting Mike for supper.

The next day we spent a little time in the GDR museum again and then Mike needed to head to the conference. Maeve and I walked around the south part of downtown to what’s left of the old city bastion, which is now a multi-level café and venue and over to the new townhall. We got back to the hotel early enough to take a swim before lunch. There was a little lap pool in the hotel and I’d brought suits to go swimming with Maeve. Last summer she never got into swimming and I wanted to spend some time in the pool with her. She didn’t want to go in and protested hard. She doesn’t like it when the floor is cold and says “coco” for cold, which she said repeatedly and emphatically about the pool. I took her in holding her next to me and started walking in the pool and she got into it. We “walked” back and forth in the pool for a while with me holding onto her and her with the deathgrip around Mommy’s neck for a while, and then she loosened up. We talked about the fish and ducks that swim, and Maeve likes fish so we tried to be like fish. First I let go of her with one arm, and then with two so I could use my arms. Then she was willing to let go and use her arms, although the legs still had Mommy-chest-grip-of-death. Later we practiced kicking our feet and she didn’t want to get out of the water. Altogether a successful swimming experience and we really need to do more of it this summer.

Lunch was a Chinese food truck outside the hotel (cheap, convenient and tofu), then nap, then wandering around a bit before meeting Mike for dinner. After dinner, Mike had an optional reception and music evening in the Gewandhaus, the symphony hall. Mike had given up his ticket for a grad student as he wasn’t going to the concert, but we went by the Gewandhaus to crash the reception, which was still going on. They wouldn’t let us in without a ticket, even though we weren’t staying for the concert. So as we were walking back to the hotel we passed a couple people Mike knew who were also going to try to crash the reception, also as it turns out unsuccessfully. No one told the conference attendees they needed the tickets for the reception. Oh well.

Our last day Maeve and I went to the Zoo. First we bought a stroller at the baby superstore next to the hotel. We haven’t had a stroller in Germany, usually use the bike, the sling, our shoulders, or Maeve walks. But she’s getting heavier, and we need another sleeping option which for many kids seems to be the stroller. So we got a small umbrella stroller and Maeve and I headed to the zoo. There were flamingos as we entered the zoo and they were squawking so Maeve spent the next 10 minutes squawking and getting me to describe the flamingos. We wandered a bit past a prairie dog family with a baby that they carried around by the scruff of the neck. Maeve likes babies and kept saying “baby.” We also saw bears, lions, zebras, and gazelles. Then we wandered past a buffalo, think Maeve saying “buffalo” over and over, and to the simian area. There is a huge island with a warm indoor dome that has gorillas, orangutans, and other monkeys, and we watched these guys for a long while. We had lunch there on the only vegetarian option (except for French fries) which were kartoffelpuffer (fried potato pancakes) with applesauce. Maeve also had yogurt and fruit we’d brought with us. We’d past a lot of water but no fish and Maeve by that point was tired and asking for “peces.” So we headed back to the entrance where the aquarium was and checked out the fish. Often the aquariums make me a little ill as too many fish are in too small a space, but this one, like the rest of the zoo, was small but not overcrowded. We spent a long time looking at the fish and even longer sitting by the koi tank while Maeve watched other kids touch the koi, asked Mommy to touch the koi, and resolutely refused to touch them herself. The whole zoo was great – not too big even though we saw less than half, the animals had some freedom of movement and for the most part weren’t pacing badly, and Maeve really enjoyed it. We just missed the tram on the way out and there wasn’t another for 30 minutes, so we just walked back to the hotel. Maeve was down for nap late, but had done well in the stroller.

That evening we wandered a bit more around town and did some shopping (cheese for the train and other provisions) and met Mike and some friends for dinner next to der Coffe Baum. The Coffe Baum is the oldest coffee shop in Leipzig, and the regular restaurant next door just happened to have multiple vegetarian entrees. Dinner was good and I finally got to meet Bill Griswald, who had so kindly sent us the Philadelphia Chickens CD, full of truly evil children’s music as many of the songs stick in your head. Needless to say, I never found Leipzier Allerlei that was actually vegetarian. I found it with crab or shrimp, or made with beef stock, or in some other way not-vegetarian form. So I missed eating the one “vegetarian” German specialty.

Home was another 5.5 hour train ride, but we shared the children’s compartment (kinderabteilung) with a 4 year old and she and Maeve had a good time. Most of the German high-speed trains have a children’s compartment, that you can reserve or just use if no one reserved it. It sometimes has a climb-on horse/motorcycle or other toys, but generally provides more space and privacy. In the second train from Frankfurt to Saarbruecken we shared with a nursing mother who could leave her kid sleeping the bassinet/stroller and stretch her legs.

Paris March 21-28, 2008

Easter Week we were in Paris as Maeve had day-care vacation. It’s been several weeks since we were there, so this blog is a bit impressionistic. In our usual travel mode, we rented a 1 BR apartment near the Reamur Sebastopol metro stop in the 3^rd district, 10 minutes walking from the Pompidou and 20 from the Louvre. A great location. A somewhat seedy apartment – especially the smoke that seeped through the floor from the restaurant below was unpleasant. And getting locked in our first evening was less than perfect. We’d gotten in the apartment and Mike locked the door from the inside, as is only safe. An hour later, Maeve was down for the evening and I was ready to head out to the grocery store for milk and staples. And we couldn’t get the door open. The key just was spinning in the lock. I called the rental agency, which was closed for the holiday weekend so just a message. I emailed them, no reply. Half an hour later, we were considering skinnying down to the ground floor (we were one floor up) on a sheet, calling the police etc. Mike was looking out the window and saw a neighbor coming in the building, and asked him to let us out. Our (barred) bathroom window opened into the stairwell, we’d briefly considered going out the window but in no way could fit. So as the neighbor came up, we handed him out the keys out the bathroom window and he let us out. Big, big relief and a scary way to start the Paris vacation. Luckily, that was the low point of the week.

Paris is only 1 hour 50 minutes from Saarbruecken on the TGV, so the trip was easy. Near the boarder, the train isn’t so fast, but once we were in France we were often going over 300 kilometers an hour. We had a bit of trouble getting our 10-ride metro passes when we got there. The Paris metro invariably has very long lines at the customer service counters and often shorter lines at the metro vending machines. We had trouble understanding the machines, finally figuring out how to change the display to English and using our Germany ATM cards. The 10-metro ride passes are great – the machine just spits out 10 metro tickets and you use them up and buy 10 more. There are also several day passes, but we walked a fair amount and aren’t on the go the whole time because of Maeve’s nap schedules, so figured getting the 10-pack was cheaper. Our Germany ATM cards were valid pretty much all over Paris, but often took a very long time to be validated.

Easter was early, so the weather was not quite yet the proverbial Paris in the spring. It was chilly (40’s) and overcast and rainy most days. Not really anything was blooming yet, and the trees weren’t green, just a faint tinge of getting ready to open. But nonetheless a great city. Our first day, March 22, we went to the tourist information station and then took the bus to see the Eiffel Tower. The lines to go up were enormous and there was no way we were waiting for an hour or more in a line with Maeve in the drizzle and cold. Lines in general were very long all week, but after all, it was Easter week. So we took lots of pictures and ate a snack in the park between the tower and the Champs de Mars, and headed back into the Metro to warm up a cranky and cold little girl. From there we headed out for lunch at a very nice vegetarian restaurant on the left bank near Notre Dame, called Le Grenadier de Notre Dame, in the 5^th district. It’s a rare treat to find a veggie restaurant that is fine-dining oriented and the food was very very good. I got peasant food that was a baked-bean like dish and Maeve very much enjoyed the beans. After lunch, the sun briefly came out and Mike got a couple of good pictures of the outside of Notre Dame. We walked home in 25 minutes, down rue Beaubourg past the Centre Pompidou.

For dinner we walked down to a section of town we’d read about that had good falafel joints, on Rue des Rosiers in the 4^th district. When we got there, we realized Rue Rosiers was the Jewish area of town and everything was closed for the Sabbath. Outside of the falafel and other stores on Rue des Rosiers, it was a totally happening area of town, with tons of people sitting outside at cafes under the heat lamps trying to fight off the chill. So we wandered around until we found another veggie-oriented café nearby and had dinner before heading home to get Maeve down for a very late evening.

On Sunday March 23^rd we spent the day in the Louvre, walked there from our apartment through the park at Chatelet les Halles and past a small farmers market. Later in the day we stopped there for some bread and saw several groups of older men playing boule in the park.

The Louvre is amazing and worth more than one day. We spent the AM there, did lunch and another 45 minutes, left to take a nap, and then back for 90 minutes in the evening. We were beat at the end of the day and didn’t nearly see all the collection – not even all we wanted to see, including a history of the building in the basement that was really appealing but we didn’t have time for. Next time. We first did the highlights – Venus de Milo, Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa. Venus de Milo we both liked, she’s a great statue. Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa were less impressive. Winged Victory is up on her boat on a pedestal in a huge stairway – a very impressive setting, but I felt that after the very human scale of Venus de Milo, she was just too monumental. The Mona Lisa was a riot – it’s not a very big picture, and it is cordoned off at a 10 foot distance, so you can’t get close enough to even begin to see detail. And it’s very dark, so without being close enough to get out of the glare, you can’t make out anything. And it’s surrounded by hoards of people, so even getting to the rope through the people all holding up their cameras and taking pictures over the crowd is difficult. I basically don’t have too much to say about the actual picture. But we did enjoy some of Leonardo’s other pictures – I particularly liked St. Anne and some of his portraits.

The Louvre itself is a beautiful building. Maeve at this point knows to admire the ceilings. Many of them are stuccoed and painted with mythological or royal scenes. Just to remind you that the Louvre used to be a royal residence before it was a museum. The numerous courtyards are also monumental – huge arches and wide expanses of building. The Louvre is shaped more or less like a flat-topped A – 2 side wings, and a top and a middle connecting wing. The IM Pei pyramid in the open courtyard at the “bottom” of the A doesn’t seem out of place in the midst of the fountains. And the Louvre clearly needed the extra entrance/bathroom/restaurant/facility space that opened up with the pyramid. Maeve especially liked the ducks swimming in the fountains around the pyramid. We didn’t actually enter through the pyramid in the morning, we got there at opening time and there was a huge line. We walked around the side and entered through the underground mall that also feeds into the main entrance. We bought tickets from a ticket machine and got through security quickly. Definitely the way to go. In the afternoon we went back to the main entrance and entered there – there was a line but it went quickly through security and once underground, entering any of the three wings was easy.

We wandered through the European painting section of the Louvre after hitting the highlights. In the afternoon we saw the Michelangelo gallery and I think my favorite statues of the day. He had two statues which were of escaping slaves, and the slave’s beautiful bodies were struggling to escape their bonds as well as escape from the block of marble. There was so much tension and movement emerging from the stone.

On the way back home, we stopped at a street near the apartment (Rue au Marie) that had lots of Chinese restaurants. We went in the busiest one and got yummy food although they didn’t have scallion pancakes even though they were on the menu. Maeve loved the tofu in the soup and drank all her soymilk.

On Monday, we took a walking tour of Ile de la Cite with Paris Walks. The tour was great and we would recommend this company – although 2 hours was enough for Maeve to be outside in the cold. We learned about Ste Chapelle and the Conciergerie, which used to be the royal palace, then the jail around the time of the revolution, and is still the courthouse. There are still 5 medieval towers fronting the Seine in the palace construction. We weren’t able to go in St. Chapelle, but decided to come back another day to do the interior and inside Notre Dame. We learned that many of the statues on the front portal of Notre Dame were defaced during the revolution. The statues were of Biblical kings, but by the time of the Revolution, everyone thought they were French kings, so they were vandalized. Sometime in the 20^th century, they found the head of the kings when they were doing some rebuilding in a townhouse that had belonged to a staunch royalist during the time of the revolution. These heads are now in a museum and replicas are on the façade. Anyway, the first theory about the heads was that the owner of the townhouse was a royalist so he somehow got the heads and buried them as it would not have been politically expedient to have them in his possession. A later theory suggested that this guy just happened to be expanding his stables and needed rubble to fill in the foundation and the heads just happened to be in the cheap rubble he bought. Go figure – but regardless a great story.

I particularly liked the spire of Notre Dame, which sits atop the crossing, not on the bell towers. It seems kind of out of place to have the spire and flat bell towers, but I liked it. The spire apparently had been hit several times by lightening and is now grounded. I also liked the clock that was on the back side of the wing pointing towards the left bank. Just a nice everyday (large) clock over the buttresses. The buttresses on the side of the church seemed heavy but those around the back really flew.

One other neat thing we learned on the tour was about a restaurant that was on a side street near Notre Dame. The restaurant was cheerily painted red and had bars over the windows. The bars were not for security, but rather at some point in the past, the Paris government passed a law saying that taverns had to have bars on the windows so that when the police went in to cool off a fight or other problems, the patrons couldn’t jump out the window to get away from the authorities.

After the nap, we headed out to a restaurant near Montmartre that had fondue, as we wanted to visit a cheese restaurant in Paris. On the way there, we walked by the Moulin Rouge, which basically just has a bit neon windmill on the outside. The whole red-light district was a bit seedy, although plenty of families were still wandering around outside and we weren’t at all out of place with Maeve. And there were plenty of tour busses parked nearby with their passengers ensconced in one of the review for dinner and a show. We walked uphill a bit to the restaurant and found out their cook was still out so dinner would start 30 minute late. What to do on a rainy night while waiting for dinner? Walk uphill to Sacre Cour! The walk uphill wasn’t actually very far, and Sacre Cour is worth seeing. It’s a relatively new church, it was finished in the early 20^th century, and the onion domes are distinctive. We walked up and the porch was full of people milling around and trying to stay dry. Inside, a service was going on and the church was full of people attending mass and a solid pack of people walking around to see the chapels. The dome over the main alter was a mosaic of an enormous Jesus, and both Mike and I rather liked it.

We walked back downhill and had cheese fondue. The dinner consisted of melted cheese and bread cubes. It was good, but not something I’d need to do again. Maeve was not terribly excited and was more than ready to go home. She even managed to break a glass – something she’d never done before.

On Tuesday we went to the Musee D’Orsay. We figured changing up between museum and walking around was good. Neither is perfect for Maeve – outdoors was too cold and museums were only as good as the benches they had to be climbing on – but she’s a trooper. The Musee D’Orsay was great. We again got there first thing in the AM, spent the morning there, ate lunch, spent another 45 minutes, went for nap, and went back in the late afternoon for another hour. We didn’t get to see everything, but did pretty well, and really liked the museum. What’s not to like about impressionism? I think my favorite was an “unfinished” painting of turkeys. I just really liked it. Another painting I really liked was one of some workmen refinishing a floor by Caillebotte. He was a new artist for me, but this painting was great.

But it was also nice to see a lot of paintings I’d seen in books. The colors of some of the clothing, like the Renoir of two people dancing – you can see all the white with rose and grey in her dress and he’s almost completely obscured. The colors of the clothing or the landscapes and they way light played over water or foliage are really amazing. I also liked the Seurat of the circus – I think the pointalist paintings gain from being seen in person, I’d never really understood the technique before. Anyway, the circus painting still had a wonderful sense of line and movement, even though most individual brush strokes were tiny. Maeve liked the horses. Dejuner sur L’Herbe is still a ridiculous composition, even in person. Why are the women naked and the men dressed? It makes no sense. I kind of liked the Gauguins, the Samoan women he paints just seem so approachable. I also really liked the Toulouse-Lautrec drawings. My favorite sculpture was Degas’ small dancer girl – she looks so weary yet patient. I really got overwhelmed with art I enjoyed looking at – this museum is a must-see.

On a logistical note, if you have a kid in tow, you can go in the group entrance, which has a much shorter line that the general entrance. This is very convenient. On another logistical note, I recommend that you not lose your claim check, as I did. If you do, your husband has to go into the cloak room and search for your bag. Then you say what the contents are before you pull them out so the attendant believes the bag is yours. Then you fill out a missing claim check log. Don’t do this, any of this.

On the 26^th we headed back to Ile de la Cite to see inside Saint Chapelle and Notre Dame. St. Chapelle had a long line because the metal detector was broken, but it was so worth it. You go in and are in the lower chapel, which has a gift shop and a starry ceiling. Nice but no biggy. Then you go up the curving stairs and come out in the main chapel that is a riot of color from the stained glass, even on an overcast day. The walls tower above you with skinny columns of stone supporting and separating the stained glass windows from one another. The scenes in the windows are really too small to make sense of the Bible stories they’re telling, but the overall impression is just amazing. I think this chapel is my favorite piece of Gothic architecture ever.

After St. Chapelle, Notre Dame was just another big cathedral. There was a service going on while we were there, so the English-language tour we’d been hoping to catch was happening later. Just the main altar was lit up, and then there were several hundred people attending the service, with many more walking around the outside of the apse and looking around. The people were dwarfed by the architecture and the priest was miniscule and isolated, like a little mouse, during the service.

Next to Notre Dame are a couple of major tourist streets with tourist cafes, street food, and junk for sale. Before entering the cathedral, I wanted to get something hot to drink, so we looked at the street food. The first vendor was selling crepes for maybe 5 Euros each, a lot of money. So we went 3 or 4 vendors down and got them for 3 Euros, still no bargain but a lot cheaper, and got some hot chocolate. This is important, because that’s where Maeve learned to say “cocoa,” her word for chocolate. It’s now become an important part of her life.

That evening we headed out to another cheese restaurant, or so I thought. We did a lot of looking for cheese restaurants. On the way there, we stopped by the Arc de Triomphe. We had planned to go up to the top of the arch, but there was a military ceremony going on and the arch was closed for 90 minutes. There were tons of police and a few protesters, and lots of old veterans marching to the arch. All the traffic in L’Etoile, the huge traffic circle going around the arch, was stopped. Once the procession got to the arch, traffic started again and 8 lanes or more were buzzing around. Bizarre. After L’Etoile we hopped back on the metro to head to the cheese “restaurant” which was part of a local chain in the 17^th district. It turned out to be a cheese shop, but not a restaurant. I had info about another one of the chain, so we hopped back on the metro after a detour through a very smoky restaurant for a diaper change. Smoking isn’t allowed indoors so all the smokers are on the street-side tables, which is fine except when it’s raining and the restaurants put out awnings to keep people dry, which also funnels the smoke into the restaurant. Yuck. So we hopped on the metro to head out for the other cheese restaurant on Rue Mouffetard in the 5^th district. This restaurant also turned out to be a shop, so we just bought some cheese and some bread at a nearby bakery and headed home for dinner. The area was pretty lively with lots of little shops and good street life. Apparently, this chain of cheese shops, called Androuet, does in at least one of its shops have cheese dinners, but somehow when I was researching, I didn’t realize not all the outlets had food. Oh well, we saw two new neighborhoods while searching and ended up with a very good soft goat cheese and one harder cow cheese. Apparently restaurants that serve cheese do exist in Paris, but we never found one.

Our last day in Paris we went to the Picasso museum in the AM. The collection is fabulous, but the signs are all just in French which was difficult for me and impossible for Mike. In the afternoon, we went to the Centre Pompidou to look around, and somebody leaving gave us their tickets. There were some street performers outside the building and Maeve enjoyed running around the huge open space. With the tickets, we went in with Maeve and checked out the children’s exhibit on the first floor (after first taking a lot of stairs, elevators, and escalators around the first 3 floors) where she could play with blocks and then see what she made on TV. She mostly enjoyed moving blocks around. For dinner we went to a very small restaurant near the Centre Pompidou on Rue Rambuteau, Le Potagier du Marais. The food again was excellent, my favorite was the soup/puree, but the mains were also good. Maeve particularly enjoyed looking at the sous chef through the bar and the server gave her a small bit of smoothe left over when she made one for another customer. Altogether a good dinner and it was nice to have two really nice vegetarian meals in one week.

The next morning we headed out bright and early on the metro, Mike going to Charles de Gaul and the US, and Maeve and I taking the train home to Saarbruecken.

March 5-11

Berlin

Photo: Brandenburger Tor

We were in Berlin for a week to do some site-seeing around an MPI retreat Mike had there. We had a great time. Maeve and Cat were coming off a cold, so we did a fair amount of resting. We also got there the first day of an U-Bahn strike, which meant that the metro and the buses weren’t running. Luckily, Berlin also has a system of light rail, which was running, and our apartment was a 20 minute walk from Bahnhof Zoo, the central rail station in former West Berlin, so we did more walking than we had anticipated, but were able to get around okay.

We were staying in an apartment off the former government area in former West Berlin. Now, all this has moved back to former East Berlin, which was the original government district. Our first day in Berlin, we took the bus from the airport, planning on getting off to take the U-Bahn to our apartment, which was a 2 minute walk from an U-bahn stop. We mistakenly got off at the S-Bahn stop (Schnell Bahn or light rail), which turned out to be lucky. After taking the S-Bahn one stop, we asked around and found out about the strike and a helpful Berliner helped us make a plan about how to get to the apartment. At the same time, we were talking on the cell with the lady who rented us the apartment – she was supposed to meet us there but got stuck in traffic as the metro wasn’t going. After 90 minutes or so, we got to the U-Bahn stop near the apartment, but couldn’t find the apartment because the street numbers were going up instead of down, and we needed to find number 3. We called the landlady several times, who helpfully told us to keep walking until the numbers went down. We eventually found the apartment. It just so happens that some streets in Berlin are numbered with evens on one side and odds on the other. Other streets, like the one we stayed on, are numbered going up on one side, and when the street ends, the numbers switch sides and keep going up. We were looking across the street and saw the numbers increasing, while they were decreasing on our side. Very confusing. Luckily it had stopped snowing by the time we started walking around towards the apartment and ended up being a chilly but pretty day.

We spent our first morning getting into the apartment, and then went to eat lunch at a veggie restaurant called Einhorn, across from KaDeWe, Berlin’s biggest department store. The food was fine, and it was close to the apartment. After the afternoon nap, we went to wander around Kurfurstendamm, the main shopping street of West Berlin. A slow tourism day.

March 6 we went to Unter den Linden, the main drag of Berlin, which used to be in East Berlin. From Freidrichstrasse train station, we walked down through the business district. Unter den Linden is a boulevard with businesses, embassies etc, but not really a street to hang out on. We walked past the Gedarmenmarkt, which has 2 very similar looking churches, one for the French Huguenots and one for the German Lutherans. In the middle of the square is the Schauspielhaus, a former theater. The square is supposed to be on of the most beautiful in Berlin, but it seemed somewhat bleak to me, as by that time we were all getting cold and Maeve a bit more unhappy. Nobody was around as we stood next to the Schiller monument in front of the theater and read about the churches, perhaps a cool, rainyish morning in March is not the best time to see life there.

We then headed out for the Musueum insel, an island in the Spree river that was the original location for Berlin, and that now has several excellent museums, the cathedral, and used to have the Berlin palace. On the way there, we went through August-Bebel Platz, which is across Unter den Linden from the main building of Humboldt University and inbetween the Opera and formal Royal library, which is now the law faculty of Humbolt. This used to be called Operaplatz, and was the site of Nazi book burnings. Now there’s a plack about the book burnings in the middle of the plaza and a plexi-glass covered hole in the ground that has empty library shelves below it. Creepy. From there we hurried to the Pergamon as Maeve was cold and fussy, and got there right as it opened at 10AM.

The Pergamon is an amazing museum, and good to visit with kids. The museum is full of large-scale reconstructions of buildings and monuments. You walk into the museum and see a reconstruction of the Pergamon altar, a Greek altar built about 200 BC in Turkey. The façade of the altar is reconstructed with as much of the frieze as they could find. The frieze is hundreds of meters long and depicts the battle of the giants and gods in high-relief, with the typical Greek beautiful bodies engaged in dynamic movement.

We spent most of our time in the Near-Eastern wing of the museum. It was full of monumental gates. The Ishtar gate was first (after a Roman market gate in the process of being reconstructed). It’s made of blue tiles, and was part of the processional way in Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar. It’s huge, and the part of the processional way that has been reconstructed is something like 3 times as narrow and only a fraction of the original length. There were also a number of other gates from the Sumerian times – my favorite was one off to the side that was made from small ceramic tiles that looked like corks – centuries older than the Babylonian tiles and much simpler, but impressive nonetheless. We quickly did the Islamic art floor as Maeve had to be changed and gotten home for a nap, but the Mschatta façade – a stone-carved façade for a palace in Jordan, was the main highlight. There were lots of smaller prayer niches as well, but having Maeve run around the main architectural reconstructions was the best way to see the museum.

On March 7 we started the day at the Brandenburger Tor, which used to close Berlin in (Berlin then ending at the end of Unter den Linden and the area where Tiergarden – Berlin’s Central Park area- and former West Berlin being out of the city limits) and later was a symbol of the split city as it was off-limits for years, located in the no- man’s-land in between the two walls separating East from West. We then walked to the Reichtag (now called Bundestag), the parliament building that was burned in 1933 and served as Hitler’s excuse for dissolving the legally elected government. Its dome was redone in the 1990’s as the Germans prepared to move their parliament from Bonn to Berlin, and is now a huge tourist attraction. We’d read that the lines to go up get quite long, but if you have a baby in tow you can skip ahead. Sure enough, when we asked a security guard for directions, he said we should go in the handicapped entrance, and we went straight up. The dome is all glass and has a history of the German parliament with a lot of pictures on display at the base, as well as the requisite restaurant. To go up to the top, you walk a spiral ramp, and a different ramp spirals down. On non-rainy and cloudy days, you can apparently get a great view of Berlin, but our view was better near the bottom of the dome where the slope of the glass was greater and not so many raindrops distorted the view.

From the Reichtag, we walked a few blocks to the new Holocaust Memorial. Aboveground, it’s a whole block full of concrete slabs of varying heights forming a maze. Belowground is a museum and visitor’s center, luckily again very kid-friendly. The room I spent the most time in had excerpts from the last narratives of about 15 holocaust victims, mostly letters home, on the floor. There were also a number of benches in the room that Maeve enjoyed climbing on which gave me the opportunity to read. The most telling part of the room, however, were the numbers of victims in different countries which were like a decorative band around the top of the wall. Germany had maybe 300,000 Jewish dead, of course, this was after massive amounts of people had fled or been expelled. But Poland and Russia – Poland was several million and Russia was almost 10 million murdered. It’s unfathomable.

Leaving, there was information about other Holocaust memorials around Europe, and plenty of disclaimers saying that although this museum focuses on Jewish victims, memorials for others are planned.

From there, we walked to Potsdamer Platz, which was a major hub before WWII and got mostly bombed out. It was never rebuilt because the wall went through the middle of the square. When I was last in Berlin in 1993 or 1994, Potsdamer Platz was an urban wasteland – just huge tracks of empty lots in the middle of the city. Not anymore. It’s now a major shopping and entertainment hub, with two malls and plenty of high rises. Not being that interested in malls, we ate lunch in a food court and got Maeve home for a nap.

That evening, we took the S-Bahn to Oranienburger strasse, which is just north of the area with Unter den Linden and used to be the Jewish quarter. It’s now very funky. We walked past the New Synagogue, which was saved from being burned by the Nazis by a policeman, only to be totally bombed out by the Allies. It was recently rebuilt, but as a cultural center not a site of worship. We had dinner at Diafana, a little organic/vegetarian café and bakery around the corner from the Synagogue, and got to listen to a lecture on bread baking. On the way back to the station, we walked through a Hof. Hofs are like patios behind buildings, but in this section of town there are Hofs connected to Hofs, so you can walk through the interior of the block. This Hof had a very touristy candy-making shop, where we saw them pull out hot raspberry-flavored glass-looking play-dough, run this through a mold machine, pop out any candies with bubbles while the candies were under a fan to cool off, and break the candies into pieces, separating out the extra hard candy connecting the molds. Then they ran the candies through a big drum to break off any remaining extra pieces and coat them with a little bit of sugar. Neat. The rest of the Hof was cafes and boutiques around nice gardens, but was mostly shut down for the evening.

On March 8, we went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum. This is a museum, originally set up right on the boarder between East and West Berlin, that was a foundation for human rights and helping people escape East Berlin. It’s very kitsch and needs badly to be modernized, but has tons of information about how people resisted oppression and escaped from East Berlin, including modified cars, a little submarine, a hot-air balloon, modified suitcases, and even a contraption used to turn power lines into zip lines to get over the boarder. Each detail was interesting, but the museum needs to invest in providing more general information about the context of each exhibit or room. We at this point were picking out museums we wanted to see that we thought might be kid-friendly, and again, Maeve had a good time running up and down stairs, climbing in old cars, and generally wandering around the exhibits.

On the way back to the S-Bahn at Potsdammer Platz, we stopped by the Topographie des Terrors, an outdoor exhibit on the grounds of where the SS-building used to be, about the Nazi war and terror machine. They’re thinking about reworking the exhibit, and most of the site was under construction, but they had one very full wall of information in what used to be the basement of the SS-building. We had a hard time making sense of it all, and could have used more overview. At that point, I was pretty much museumed out anyway and tired, so we got some fast food pizzas on the way home for lunch and took naps. The plan was to get Maeve down early and up from her nap to go out that evening.

We did get Maeve up at a reasonable time and went to the Kathe Kolowitz museum, which was walkable from our apartment. She’s a 19-20^th century artist/sculptor who lived most of her life in Berlin. Her art feels heavy, and her themes emphasize the oppression of the masses, mothers and children, and is very anti-war. It’s a small museum with only 4 floors in an old mansion, and again was very kid-friendly, in part because it only takes a little over an hour to see everything. It’s still well-worth going to see if you like her work.

Our last free day was Sunday, as Mike had to check in at the retreat Sunday evening. We packed up the apartment and then went again to Potsdammer Platz to walk to the Jewish museum, which is a very new museum and we were hopeful would be kid-friendly. It was. We entered through an older building where they have the coat check, restaurant etc and then you go underground to walk to the new building and up to the third floor where the exhibit starts. The museum is very well done, starting from Jewish life in the Roman times and continuing to the present. It has information about architecture, daily life, travel journals from businesspeople, biographical information about famous people like Mendelsson etc. It also has plenty of interactive exhibits as well as audio texts, but those were in German only. Maeve found plenty to play with in each room, so we were able to move along and have one of us keep an eye on her while the other browsed the museum. Like at the Pergamon, we ate in the museum café so we could go back in the museum for a little while after lunch. We left the museum a bit before 1 and decided to get a taxi to take us back to the apartment and then straight on to the retreat site which was out near the Free University, outside the city center in Western Berlin. It would have been easy to get there on the metro, but… Anyway, we were out on the street outside the museum and a fair number of taxis were coming by, some to drop people off, some with passengers. I was trying to call a taxi, but the line was busy. Sunday with no metro is not a good time to try to get a taxi on the fly. After about 10 minutes, Mike finally flagged a taxi that was free and didn’t mind taking a kid without a kid seat.

An aside about car seats for kids: some drivers didn’t have a booster seat and wouldn’t take Maeve without it, others had a booster seat, really for kids much larger than Maeve who should be in a car seat, and wouldn’t let Maeve sit in our laps because they said the booster seat was safer, and others just let us hold her in our laps. Our CambioCar (the car-sharing service we use in Saarbruecken) claims to have a child seat in every car and actually does have a booster seat, but we take our own car seat along when we use it as Maeve is still too small for the booster. Most taxis do seem to have these booster seats as well.

So we hopped in the taxi, went by the apartment to pick up our bag, and headed to Harnak House where we’d be staying for the retreat to put Maeve down. When we go there, we realized it’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the Free University. After Maeve’s nap, we walked about 15-20 minutes to Dahlen, the nearest village, to get Maeve and me dinner. Mike had dinner later with the retreat. In Dahlen, there is a working farm which if Maeve were a bit older would have been lots of fun to visit.

The next two days, Mike was mostly working and I also listened to a few talks during Maeve’s afternoon naps. But the mornings Maeve and I got to explore. We called a cab to take us to the nearest S-Bahn station and then took the train into town. The first morning we went to KaDeWe, as I wanted to see if they had a baby monitor and to find some pesto. On the way there, we stopped by the interior of the Kaiser Wilhem peace monument, which is the bombed out remains of a church right on Kurfurstendamm near Bahnhof Zoo. We’d seen it from the outside before, but hadn’t gone in. Only the vestibule remains (there’s a modern church beside it) but the vestibule has a lovely mosaic ceiling. I had Maeve in the sling and we walked around with me staring upwards and Maeve bending over backwards to be able to better see the ceiling.

About the pesto, Maeve is allergic to nuts – not the deathly allergy some kids have but every time she eats nuts, including peanuts and coconut, she gets a skin rash. And all the pesto I can find in Saarbruecken has cashews in it. When I make pesto, I use pine nuts which is no problem for Maeve, but I don’t have a food processor here and we want non-nutty pesto. So Maeve and I went to the gourmet food section in KaDeWe, which is a very very upscale department store. They did not have non-cashew pesto, but they did have ground up basil and garlic paste, so I got a couple of jars and can add grated parmesan at home. The baby monitors were 59 Euros at the cheapest, so I passed on buying that. We got lunch at our buddy Einhorn restaurant and got some take out to take back for dinner.

March 11 was our last day in Berlin. Maeve and I headed out to explore in Kreutzberg, a section of Berlin just south of Mitte, the section with Unter den Linden. The neighborhood was more edgy, and we spent some of the morning walking up to the top of Kreutzberg, a small hill in a park that had excellent views of downtown. We then had lunch at Seerose, a vegetarian café, and got some take out for dinner, which was going to be in the airport on our way home. We stopped by a Turkish stand in a market on our way home and got some flatbread and a zucchini fritter, also for dinner. The fritter was a big hit with Maeve in the airport.

We got home to Saarbruecken at about 9 that evening – a very late night for Maeve who usually goes to sleep about 7. She was hyper on the plane, but not fussy and traveled very well.

Maeve’s words

March 8, 2008

English

1. Mommy
2. Daddy
3. juice
4. moo: moon
5. hot
6. hat
7. up
8. down
9. up a high: star
10. pea
11. baba: banana
12. bea: bear
13. mo: more
14. cheese
15. ball
16. uh’oh
17. key: used to say but not now
18. boot
19. dis: this
20. pee
21. book
22. mole
23. eye

Spanish

1. a’m: aqua
2. ‘am: hambre
3. ba: uva
4. ma: mas
5. papa: pata
6. luz: used to say, but not now
7. pa: pajaro
8. pan
9. te
10. gat: gato
11. milla: semilla

English/Spanish

1. no

German

1. tschuss
2. nein
3. ei: egg

Other meaningful communication:

1. trill: yuck, when sees trash
2. moo: cow noise
3. ba’a’a: sheep noise
4. mmmm: yummy
5. lip smack: kiss
6. ululation: ear, as in wants an ear to pull on for comfort
7. waves
8. points 3 ways, ie, self, mommy, bed, meaning Mommy puts Maeve in bed
9. ah: yes

February 21, 2008. Maeve in the bath in Saarbruecken.

February 2, 2008
Mike and Maeve with a balloon hat.
Cologne, Germany

We were in Cologne for Carnival weekend, and a friendly clown made Maeve a balloon hat while we were watching the Funkenbiwak. You can see the green Funken (soldiers) on the stage in the background of the picture. This event was at 10:30 in the morning on Saturday, and the red and green Funken paraded onto the stage, made political speeches about how the Neumarkt, where this event was held, should continue to be available to the people, sang songs about Cologne and Kolsh, the local variety of beer, showed off their Marie (a young female soldier) to the crowd, danced, and wiggled their tushes as they rode their "horses." It was hilarious, watching with hundreds of other people, almost all in costume, and most buying copious rounds of kolsch from the stands set up in the square. People sang along with the songs and swayed. Many people even had little knitted bags hanging around their necks, perfectly sized for holding a glass of kolsch.

We found a couple of good vegetarian restaurants our first day in Cologne, but most of the time the restaurants were closed for lunch and had Karnival parties at night which had DJs, lots of smoking and little food. Also, all the museums and churches were closed, so we got to see the Dom, Rathaus, and Gross St. Martin, one of the Romanesque churches, from the outside, but weren't able to do any serious cultural tourism. But there was plenty to do with the Karnival activities and walking around the city watching everybody dressed up and having a good time. On Saturday when we were walking around the pedestrianized area, businesses all along the parade route were closing shop for the evening and construction crews were everywhere. In some cases, they were putting up reviewing stands for the parades. In many cases, they were boarding up the storefront windows with plywood. We saw plenty of not quite sober people at the parade, and lots of candy and flowers were being thrown, but no property violence or even very rowdy behavior. I'm not quite sure why the stores boarded up.

On Sunday, we watched the children's and neighborhood parade, which was tons of people marching in costume and bands. Little kids were everywhere scooping up the candy and flowers. Everyone was in costume. Monday was the Rose Monday parade, which included a lot of Funken groups as well as other floats, bands, and marchers. Award winners from the children's parade also marched. Again, there was tons of candy and roses being thrown out. On Sunday, the groups were generally carrying their supplies with extras in baby carriages or pushable wagons. Monday was serious - floats were pulled by horses or tractors decorated with horses, and there were van and truckfulls of extra gummy bears, chocolates and flowers. Mike later found out that there were several tons of candy given away over the weekend. It was amazing. Maeve started out the parade sitting in my lap, but pretty soon realized the other kids were scrambling for candy and started making small forays into the street to pick up the goodies. Compared to the huge Thanksgiving day parade floats in the major parades in the states, the floats were generally small and most of the parade was made up of costumed marchers and bands. However, they are walking down small city streets, and some of the bigger floats on Monday really did take up most of the street, so policemen had to come through making sure everyone was off the street.


Monday we were invited to stand with a pig, two unicorns, and several other characters. This was very nice as it meant that Maeve didn't get crowded and we had a dry spot to store our backpacks. The unicorns were particulary well costumed and got lots of candy and kisses from marchers. You can see that everyone had empty bags around their necks, just waiting to fill them up with candy. This group had at least a couple of kegs with them, which seemed to be typical of many of the groups. We stored our backpacks under the keg table which kept them nice and dry through the rain. There were also plenty of places to buy beer and sausages and other street food set up around the parade route. We hung out on the parade route near the start - it was out of the center city and a little less crowded, plus the parade started earlier which worked well with Maeve's nap schedule. We watched the parade for an hour and a half or so, then headed back to the hotel for lunch and a nap.

After the parade, the city was a pit. On Sunday, we wandered around the pedestrianized area after Maeve's afternoon nap. Everyone was in costume, bars were full, and street vendors were everywhere. Around the city hall square, we saw clean up crews coming through. They consisted of several workers with big push brooms pushing trash into piles, several street cleaning trucks and one big vacuum truck. This truck had a tube maybe 1.5 feet in diameter that was connected to a huge vacuum and couldsuck up piles of trash, including whole wine bottles.

On Monday, Maeve got up early enough that we made it back out to the end of the parade route and watched a bit more near the Dom and main train station. The streets were packed. The apartments along the parade route were also packed, and people on the upper stories were raking in a lot. The larger floats had people throwing candy on level with the second floor anyway, and some were throwing to third floors and above. At the start, the street was narrower and the second floor people also had the advantage of often being over a sign or some type of overhang for the store on the first floor, and were ingeniously laying out blankets, baskets etc connected with strings so they could haul up the loot that was thrown to them but didn't quite make it.

Aswan-Cairo-Frankfurt
December 29-31
Written in Saarbruecken

Just a bit about the end of our Egypt trip.

Philae Temple outside Aswan is in an amazing location, after the Hatshepsut temple, the most beautiful location for a temple we saw. It’s on an island between the two Aswan dams, and was moved there because the island it was originally on was getting flooded. There was a lot of time, energy, and money put into saving some of the these temples from the High Dam. We had to take a boat to get out to the temple, and then got to walk around. It had the usual offering scenes, birth house, and additions by later rulers. I’m now about blogged out, and by Philae we were about templed out. We saw a lot of temples, and pretty much could make sense of the architecture and main pictorial themes. To get any deeper and continue to learn would require some real study and more time than we had.

We also went by the High Dam, which we were excited to see, but really you just stop in the middle of the dam and look both directions. There is no tour of the machinery. There is also a very stark memorial to Soviet-Egyptian friendship by the dam, as the Soviets helped pay for a lot of it. On the way back into Aswan, we stopped by an old quarry where a half-excavated obelisk was left when the quarriers realized it had a crack. It was an interesting wander.

We also got booted from our hotel rooms in Aswan at noon although we didn’t have to leave until mid-afternoon. We got back early from our trip and got Maeve down before noon. Then everybody went to check out, while I camped out in the hall outside our room until Maeve woke up. She slept maybe an hour and a half, not too bad.

The trip back to Cairo on the plane was fine, bur our travel agent had booked us in a hotel near the Pyramids instead of a hotel by the airport, and the traffic, as usual was horrible. We were so tired and exhausted by the time we got in. We first negotiated a later pick up time the next morning to get to the airport and ordered to go boxes so we could eat on the run. We got Maeve down, ordered room service, ate, and went to bed. Yay!

The next morning, Mike took a quick picture of the pyramids on our way out of the hotel. We had no problem making our flight from Cairo to Heathrow. We got a quick bite in Heathrow, and we headed for our flight to Frankfurt, leaving Mike’s parents to make their way to Dallas. In Frankfurt, there were no problems getting through the airport and we had time to hit a bakery and the grocery store and still waited a few minutes for our train although I’d originally been worried we wouldn’t have time to make our connection. Two hours later in Saarbruecken, and a taxi ride to the Max Planck guesthouse on the Uni campus, and special for new year’s eve – sleep!

December 28, 2007
Aswan

We’ve been in Aswan 3 days, and are staying at a hotel a kilometer or two out of town, but luckily, there is a shuttle bus. Aswan is nice, about the size of Luxor, so very walkable on foot. The souk here is very large, and has less touristy parts, meaning that people who live here also buy some things in the market here.

Our trip here from Luxor wasn’t the greatest. We flew out at 9 PM, and it was just way too late for Maeve, who imploded on the flight. We finally got her to stop crying, but Mike and I were both wiped out. We couldn’t stay late in our rooms in the hotel in Luxor because Sarcosy, the French prime minister, was staying in the hotel starting the day we checked out. So we spent the afternoon by the pool, and managed to get Maeve to sleep a bit over an hour, but this wasn’t enough to last until 10 PM. This is the second time Maeve has imploded on a flight, not so bad given the amount of traveling we’re doing and how difficult it is for her, but it’s basically a bad experience for all to have an uncontrollably crying baby.

Our first day in Aswan we all slept in, and then went into town to do some shopping and arrange excursions. We went by Karnak travel, which we’d scoped out in Luxor to by our Abu Simbel excursions. This is a temple 250K south of Aswan, near the Sudan border. It’s an all day car ride trip down, flights are also available but booked out this week. So, we went into Karnak travel and the office was so smoky Mike couldn’t stay inside and took Maeve out. Then we tried to pay with a credit card and their machine wasn’t working. So we went next door to American Express and bought the same tours for $5 less per person, with a credit card and in a non-smoky office. We’re taking turns traveling down to Abu Simbel – the other couple will stay with Maeve and hang out in Aswan. No more imploding babies, please. Maeve had a great time moving brochures from Mike to Carolyn while we completed the travel arrangements.

We walked a bit in the souk and saw a number of bakeries where they were pulling out steaming pita bread and putting them on wooden racks to cool off. There were long lines at the bakeries – Carolyn and I were in line at one while Mike and Paul went to a nearby fruit stand to buy bananas. Some Egyptian came by and facilitated our purchase and we got some yummy pitas, paying only 1 Egyptian pound more than the price for the expediting. The pita were yummy – we’re also buying yogurt, fruit, juice etc to self-cater. The cheese we buy is a variety of La Vache que Rie, little processed cheese wedges that are ubiquitously sold here. Maeve really likes these and scarfs four wedges at a meal – she’d eat more but we cut her off.

After the afternoon nap, we headed uphill out of town from the hotel to get dinner at the Nubian House. It was a farther walk than we thought, about 15 minutes, but doable. It’s comfortable weather here, but I can see how it must be really hot in the summer, as we’re located right on the tropic of Cancer. The restaurant had a wonderful view over the Nile – the Nile here seems much narrower – mostly because there are lots of islands and hills close in on both sides, so there is very little arable land. We weren’t able to actually eat there, as they weren’t going to be able to feed us for at least an hour – their kitchen was booked with tour groups, I suppose. There were little boys outside the restaurant running around with “baby crocodiles” that you could touch for baksheesh. So we walked back to the hotel and ate on the terrace there, which turned out to be great. We got Maeve a strawberry milkshake, which here does not include ice cream. We discovered that she liked this in Luxor, when Paul ordered one and then Maeve drank it all. This has become part of her dinner – a habit we will probably change when we’re not traveling, but for now it means very heavy overnight diapers and a well-hydrated baby.

Yesterday Mike and I went to Abu Simbel and the grandparents hung out with Maeve. We went in convoy at 11 AM - there’s also a convoy at 4 AM which I expect is very popular in the summer, but we opted for the later one that gets back at 7PM. We went in a “limo” which was a Toyota corolla. The 30 K or so outside Aswan is habited- you go over the old dam, past the airport etc. And the 30 K or so outside Abu Simbel is also habited – mostly human impact is irrigation projects, though you also pass the airport there. But everything else in the middle is just desert. It really makes you realize the power of the Nile – this land is all desert except for this very thin strip, but the fertility of that small strip powered civilization.

Abu Simbel is one of the many many temples built by Ramses II, Ramses the Great. It was built on the border with Nubia, by the viceroy in charge of administering this area for the pharaoh. It’s cut straight into the cliff face of the Nile. This temple was one of many that would be inundated by the High Dam, and a Unesco lead effort cut it out of the mountain and moved it up 100M. The temples are now under artificial mountains, but despite this, they are pretty impressive. The main temple is for Ramses, and the second one is for his wife, Nefertari. Not Nefertiti, who was the beautiful wife of Akhenaton, but Nefertari, the favorite wife of Ramses II. Her tomb is the best in the Valley of the Queens and visitable for the small sum of $4000.00. Needless to say, we didn’t visit it.

In the sanctuary of the main temple, there are statues to four gods, the god of night, the god of the noon-day sun (Amon-Re), Ramses, and the god of the morning sun. Two days a year the sun would shine on 3 of these status – not the god of the night. When they moved the temple, they kept the same orientation, but the sun now shines in one day later.

Mike and I figure we’re getting templed out – we thought Abu Simbel was neat but weren’t overwhelmed by it. One of the most interesting things was making sense of all the offerings. Most of the side rooms in the main temple showed Ramses making offerings to different Gods, including himself. We’re starting to be able to identify some of the gods as well as some of the different offerings, like lotus, bread, other food, essential oils, and incense being burned in censors. That’s interesting. We’re trying to learn the cartouches for the different kings, and took some pictures of Ramses’ cartouche on the outside of the temple – photography wasn’t allowed inside. But these didn’t match the cartouches in the inside so this remains a bit of a mystery. When we get home I’ll have to look at all the pictures of cartouches I took and see if I can sort it out.

Nefertari’s temple was interesting because she featured in many of the decorations. In the valley of the Queens, we visited two tombs of princes. Their tomb decorations included depictions of the youths with a sidelock, denoting their childhood. But in these pictures, they invariable followed behind their fathers. The guide said that because they were children, they didn’t know about the afterlife and their fathers, the pharaoh, acted as their guide through the underworld. But the effect for me, at least, was that their tombs seemed more about their fathers than about them. In most of the iconography we’ve seen, the pharaoh is physically much bigger than his wives, and children are even smaller. Even in the mastabas we saw at Saqqara, the person being buried (a man) was shown very large and the members of his household much smaller. So Nefertari’s temple was quite an exception, in that she’s depicted the same size as her husband and making her own offerings to the gods. In a couple of scenes, she’s watching Ramses defeat their enemies, but in others either she or Ramses are making offerings, and there is a scene of her coronation. Also the columns are square and have Hath or heads, the god the temple is dedicated to, which is a human head with cow ears. I like those columns.

In our drive back, it was mostly dark and our driver mostly didn’t have his headlights on. Here, like in Tanzania, they use their directional signals to tell you when it’s okay to pass and when not. They also use their headlights, as in turning them off and on, to make sure a car going in the other direction sees them at night. In the city, there are generally street lamps, and many cars run with either parking lights or no lights at all.

Lake Nasser, the huge lake formed behind the high dam, in addition to covering lots of temples, swallowed up all the fertile land on the banks of the Nile for hundreds of kilometers, completely displacing the Nubians from their ancestral land. There are cliffs on either side of the lake, at least the parts we could see, so it’s not a simple thing to farm using the lake waters, as they’d have to be pumped pretty high to be useful. The Egyptian government is sponsoring some large-scale irrigation plans at Tosca, not too far from Abu Simbel, but all the Nubians basically got relocated 40 years ago, giving up their land. It’s not clear to me how they’re making a living now.

This morning Mike and I took Maeve to the Nubian museum, which she also visited yesterday with her grandparents. It was built about 10 years ago, also in response to the destruction of the Nubian lands by Lake Nasser, as a way to preserve some of the cultural artifacts that were submerged. The museum is well labeled in English, with the usually misspellings and grammar errors that seem to be the status quo. There was tons of information, but both Mike and I felt it was a bit hard to keep track of the Nubian history – we needed more of an overview of the different periods and how independent Nubian states interacted with and were incorporated into the Egyptian dynasties. There were also many dioramas about Nubian life as well as models of old buildings, forts etc. Maeve liked these, as well as the ramps throughout the museum.

Today we had to replenish our larder and this afternoon went out to buy more fruit, yogurt and cheese. We had a lot of trouble finding yogurt, and learned the Arabic word for it – zabaadi. Several stores only had plain yogurt, which is fine for Maeve but Mike’s parents don’t like it. We found some strawberry yogurt at the third store and bought it. Shopping today was much more pleasant, at this point, we more or less know the prices for things, so are able to know how to bargain for a fair price and are paying something closer to the Egyptian prices, with a tourist premium thrown in I’m sure. We then tried to buy stamps, it costs 150 piasters, or 1.5 Egyptian pounds to send post cards. I went to the bookshop in our hotel, which sells stamps, but they were selling each stamp for 4 pounds. A bit of a markup. We decided to find the post office, which we did, but it was closed because today is Friday.

We had dinner at a restaurant on the corniche. We walked through the restaurant, past an internet café, down one level on the corniche and across a little walkway to get to a floating dining room on the water. It was a great view across to Elephantine Island, and we got there right at sunset, in time to see fellucas and ferry boats bringing their loads of tourists in. It was a perfect setting, except for the intermittent aroma of diesel fuel. The waiters (all male) were as usual enamored of Maeve and all wanted to play with her. Maeve liked the water, which was covered with a sheen of oil, but you could still see pretty large algae plants in it.

Tomorrow our plan is to do a half-day tour of Philae Island, a temple to Isis that got moved after the High Dam was built, and see the high dam. Sunday we’re leaving for Cairo in the afternoon, and again can’t stay in our rooms past noon as the hotel is fully booked. We’re trying to think about how to make sure Maeve gets a nap.