Bruges

Aachen was really high on my list of places to visit for this trip, because I’ve seen the Cathedral there in several documentaries (my favourite being The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 2: In the Light of the Above, which discusses the impact of rediscovering Greek and Latin scientific and philosophical writings on Western European thought). Also, we used this video to help us plan the trip. So here we go! Shorter post this time because we were only here less than 24 hours.

Day 7, cont.

We got on the IC (inter-city) train to Brussels where we changed to the high-speed ICE (inter-city express) train. It was a very high speed train because however fast I guessed it was going from looking out the window, it was probably going about 50% faster than that. (A high-speed train later in the trip was going about 240k/h, which it said on the screen that announced the upcoming stops, so it was really booking it. North America could never.) There was a really cute black baby on the high speed train, but he was a wiggly little boy and when the mom walked away for a few seconds to attend to some luggage I had to keep him from squirming out of his seat and running after her! Eventually she got him to sleep.

It was very flat still until we were within like, I don’t know, 45 minutes of Aachen. Also Liège’s train station is new and modern and stylish. I like it. Couldn’t get pictures from inside of it though.

The Aachen train station didn’t give as good an impression on first glance as elsewhere on the trip, but we found a map and walked down a slope to the city centre. (Also avoided a panhandler which made me realize… Bruges carefully keeps anything like that, if it exists there, out of their tourist centre. Which makes things very stress-free for the tourists… I hadn’t thought about it at all while I was there. I hope my hometown can solve their homeless problem in the near future.) We went to the tourist info centre and they did not have paper pamphlets or maps, they had an app with .pdf downloads. It was kind of slow, and I don’t think it’s just my phone being cheap. I know pamphlets create a lot of paper waste but I like holding things.

Our hotel was one of the nicest ones on the trip (definitely one of the pricier ones); Tharash managed to do the entire check-in process in German and both he and I were very impressed by that accomplishment. : ) Our hotel room was a bit odd. We did have two separate beds finally, but the bathroom was… open plan? The toilet was in its own little closet, which is fine, but the shower was separated from the sleeping area only by a pane of frosted glass, and there was a little wall to put the sink and mirror against but no door, soooo getting in and out of the shower meant having to fuss about not looking. Still, I slept really well there. We had some of the complimentary tea (I guess my berry infusion wasn’t technically tea but it was good) and I forgot to mention Tharash had brought soft Hasseltse speculaas cookies to have with tea and I dunked it in the berry tea and it was great. The hotel also had complimentary chilled drinks in their minifridge (not like the Bruges minifridge), one of which was a fizzy rhubarb drink which I took with me when we left. So we chilled out, looked up dinner options, drank tea.

Anyway, Tharash wanted a snack, so we went out and bought some muffins that were very sugary from a local bakery. There were bakeries all over this town, it was amazing. We walked through the town hall square, and around it to see the back of the Cathedral. There’s a little wooden house tucked into the side of the town hall, and apparently there has always been a house on that spot from the early medieval period, barring when the whole city burned down (the city burning down is also why it’s a lot more Baroque-and-later than some other old cities).

So we walked to the front of the Cathedral, and the foyer feels a bit more modern, though they have some ancient (10th century at latest) statues of a bear and a pinecone. The bear’s paw is shiny and golden, I think people must rub it for good luck (gotta say the bear looks kind of like a dog). It was €0.50 for a pamphlet guide, and then we pushed open the inner door and I almost cried. It’s so gosh-darn gorgeous in there. I learned from the pamphlet that most of the bling is actually from the 19th century, but I don’t care, it’s incredible. It’s overwhelming at first sight, but even though the mosaics and the coloured marble and the tiling are very visually busy, it actually all works together. (Also there’s a donation box at the front requesting €1 if you want to take pictures. I decided to let Tharash take the pictures with his good camera, so all of these are his.)

I learned a lot about it both from the pamphlet and from the museum the next morning, how originally the Cathedral was just the Octagon, and part of the Emperor’s palace complex (the rest of the palace being where the town hall now stands). Then they added the long part, which now holds Charlemagne’s sarcophagus and the supposed holy relics he brought back, and which was off-limits to us unless we were on a guided tour. We arrived at the wrong time for the guided tour, and it didn’t bother me at the time because I had so much to look at anyway, but now I kind of wish I’d been able to go. It would also have gone up to see the Throne (and the organ). I guess I’ll have to come back. Anyway, then they started adding chapels around the sides, which kind of reminds me of the concept of the church I saw at the castle in Krakow, but while that church was all higgeldy-piggeldy with different styles, Aachen’s feels more unified on the exterior at least, even though they really aren’t inside. And then in the 19th century, some people said “Charlemagne had this built in a Byzantine style, let’s honour that by putting Byzantine-style mosaics everywhere” so they did and it’s breathtaking. (Wikipedia says they were trying to restore the original mosaics on the central ceiling, though I don’t know how they knew what those were.) (I have no doubt it was stunning in medieval times as well, let’s not underestimate our ancestors.)

We visited the gift shop and then went to the treasury museum, where we saw even more ridiculous works of craftsmanship, creating miniature dioramas in wood or gold depicting various religious stories. My notes say “much bling, many reliquaries”. Also a golden bust of Charlemagne, which… is a reliquary holding a piece of his skull. Charming! I learned at the other museum in the morning that it was present at all further coronations of the Holy Roman Emperor that were held in Aachen, as a way of pretending Charlemagne would bless the new Emperor.

After that I was rather blinged out – tired of bling, after the other religious treasuries we had also visited. So we went to a place called Frittenwerk, which advertised themselves as selling poutine and “Canadian street food”! I did not get poutine (it makes me feel ill, tbh) but I did get Tijuana fries, which was guacamole, vegan sour cream, and tomatoes, on garlic fries, and I had a grapefruit-raspberry schorle (bubbly) juice. Tharash had chili cheese fries and a beer. The restaurant is in an odd glass cube building. An odd choice. They’re a chain, we saw them in a few other cities as well.

We went back to the hotel to watch the above-mentioned episode of The Day the Universe Changed because I wanted to, discussed how our collective perspectives have changed since the 80’s when it was made and how much nuance was lost to fit such a big chunk of history into a 50-minute episode, and went to bed.

Day 8

We had discussed whether or not to get this hotel’s breakfast or not; it was €24 per person, which felt a bit steep. Apparently before the trip we’d decided to treat ourselves here, but when it was actually upon us, we decided to go get buns and pastries from the local bakery instead and eat them with tea in our room. Which was adequately filling and tasty, it was private and quiet, and it only cost like €5 for both of us. I feel that’s a win. (we also went to the pharmacy to get anti-itch medication for those dang mosquito bites for me, and also blister bandaids as my weak-sauce feet were having trouble with all the walking we were doing. The practice I’d done beforehand wasn’t holding up. Tharash wasn’t sure how to say these things in German even with Google to help, but the pharmacist spoke English so it was okay.)

We checked out of the hotel (I nabbed that rhubarb soda since I hadn’t had the chance to drink it yet) and took our bags to the Centre Charlemagne museum, where they had lockers big enough to store all of our luggage while we checked out the museum. The guide was good but I didn’t figure out that it had text (as well as audio) until later so I didn’t use it much in the museum. But we learned about how Aachen is a place of hot springs (did you know that? I didn’t know that), and the Romans used it as a spa town. They had a great model showing which parts of the Cathedral and Town Hall are original medieval work and which parts were added later, and how the buildings around them used to be different as well. There was also a rather long interactive video (for kids) about the process of crowning a new Holy Roman Emperor. The closer to modern times the museum got the less interested I was.

We went to the Elisengarten park to have lunch, and though it showered heavily a couple times, Tharash had an umbrella, I had a hat, the showers were brief and things dried quickly. There was an archaeological site under a pavilion enclosed in glass, which was fantastic except we were a little tired of museum at this point so we didn’t get so much out of it. So we sat on a bench and made sandwiches. There were some cute kids running around, it seems to be a popular place for families.

Then we were off to the train station again! And our train was late.

Cochem