Astray in Europe
or: A Couple of Naïfs Take a Trip
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“This definitely was not the Rhine tour we had hoped for.” |
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IN Paris, we had met a nice young German man on the Metro who had advised us that Frankfurt was a good place to sign up for Rhine boat trips. Other than that, we had no agenda for our stop in Frankfurt other than a leisurely exploration of whatever might present itself. All we knew about the city was something we had heard about it being a financial center of the European Union. (But then we didn't know much about any of the cities we visited.)
On Thursday, July 11, we arose late, had a leisurely breakfast, and checked out of our Munich hotel. The desk clerk, the same dapper, mustachioed young man who had been so helpful on our arrival by making reservations for us in Frankfurt and Calais, said the Frankfurt hotel had called the previous evening to say they were holding a room for us and wanting to know what time we would arrive. But having startled us into thinking we would have to pay for the room, he added that he had sorted it all out. He implied that the mistake had been mine because I had given him the wrong dates. Maybe he was right. Anyway, on our request, he extended our reservation in Frankfurt one more day to make up for the lost day. At least, that's what he said.
By eleven o'clock we were on the Bahnhof platform, sandwiches from one of the food concessions and bottles of water in hand, waiting for our train. When it pulled in a few minutes later, we were pleased to see that it was a slick streamlined job like those between Paris and Caen, only longer and with three first class cars. This was an ICE (InterCity Express) train, and we were going first class because that's the only kind of Eurailpass there is. We found our car, but we had to wait some time before we were allowed to board. It had polarized windows, so we couldn't see inside, but we guessed it was being cleaned. Also, we couldn't see any kind of knob, handle, switch, or other protuberance or indentation on the car's sleek exterior that looked like it might operate an entry portal. So we waited till other passengers started boarding to discover that the secret to admission was to press an inconspicuous and unmarked panel about the size of a man's hand.
We climbed aboard for our shortest, and most luxurious train ride yet. The dark blue plush seats were larger and more comfortable than our favorite easy chairs at home. Most were arranged along one side of the car in groups of four, two on each side of a spacious table. At some tables, such as ours, there were only three seats because stowage lockers of a discrete design took the space that would have been occupied by the fourth. On the other side of a wide aisle, pairs of equally luxurious chairs faced each other across smaller tables. We settled in next to the enormous windows, all bright-eyed and smiling at the prospect of this kind of travel as other passengers straggled in and bustled about finding their seats and stowing their bags.
Three men in business suits came up to our table and seemed to determine that the aisle seat next to me was assigned to one of them. "Well, there you are, all set," one of them said in British English. "Well, here I am," replied his companion with a decided absence of enthusiasm. He was a long, skinny chap, about fifty, narrow hooked nose, crooked teeth, thinning dark hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. After casting a gray, glum eye upon us, he went off with the others.
The subdued bustle of people boarding gradually faded, and soon we noticed that our panoramic view of the station platform was slipping to the rear. As we accelerated through a scrolling vista of the city's backside, catching glimpses of back porches and tiny, well tended gardens, our seemingly surly seatmate returned to take his place. But we had misjudged him. He was holding his attaché case against his side with his elbow and carrying a fist-sized paper bag in each hand. He set the attaché case on the table and put one of the bags into it, then as he sat down, he held the other bag out and invited us to take some pralines. With the ice broken, we chatted a little about the candy, which he had bought at a shop in Munich that, he said, "made the best candies anywhere." Then he said he was going to try the dining car and invited us to join him. We thought he was just being polite, so we declined his kind invitation, and he left.
As we watched the green, thriving countryside roll by, my thoughts were pulled back nearly half a century to the eighteen months I had spent in this part of Germany in the mid 1950's as a buck-ass private, as we used to say, in the rear ranks of an armored artillery battery (I don't remember which one) of the 2nd Armored Division ("Hell on Wheels" we got to wear on our shoulder patches). Most of my sight-seeing then had been from armored personnel carriers and jeeps, a decidedly slower and less comfortable universe than this luxurious bullet of a train. But except for shiny new automobiles on every road and street, the villages of tile-roofed stone cottages, the meticulously cultivated fields, and the long stretches of pine forest in the rolling countryside seemed to have changed very little. It didn't look as much like a well-tended garden as Normandy, but it was much more under control than the Italian countryside.
After a while I got the computer out and began working on the journal, and Minnie opened her book. I had made considerable progress by the time our friend of the pralines came back. "They've got a pretty good restaurant car there," he said as he took his seat. I closed the computer and we chatted some more. He said he had lived in Oklahoma four years and, putting together his appearance, his mien of good-natured self-confidence, his youthful buoyancy, and his time in Oklahoma, I asked him if he were an engineer. He said he was a patent attorney. His children had grown up in Oklahoma, and now he had a house in Tucson. However, his main residence seemed to be Munich, and his wife was German.
He talked mainly about food. He liked the American custom of big steaks cooked through, "not burnt on the outside and raw in the middle as the French do." He also launched into a long dissertation on white asparagus, which he said is a traditional Bavarian dish. It seems this delicacy is available only for a few days in the spring, and two servings cost eight to ten euros (read "dollars") in the grocery store. It looks like a lot coming out of the store, he said, but only about half of what you buy is edible, the rest being tough stems. But it was his favorite dish and in his opinion, well worth the cost.
I started to tell him about my experience with the Weisswurst and the difficulty I had had with its casing. (See Chapter 7.) As soon as I said I had tried Weisswurst he said, "You didn't eat the casing, did you?" When, cowed by his incredulous tone, I admitted that I had, he laughed like a twelve-year-old boy who had just convinced his eight-year-old brother to swallow an earthworm. He then explained that one must never eat the casing of Weisswurst. That is beyond gauche, it's sickening. Then he asked if I had had it for lunch or dinner. When I told him lunch, he nodded. "Well, at least it was around noon," he said. Then he explained that it's another rule that you eat Weisswurst only before noon. So I guess when I thought people were watching me eat the things and smiling sympathetically at my lack of savoir-faire, they actually were gagging and wondering how this hick had ever found his way to a quiet little nook of a restaurant on a sunshiny day in Munich.
But our epicurean seatmate quickly changed the subject back to things American, most of which he seemed to like. I said something about the U.S. lacking a good passenger rail system. He said he had ridden on trains in the New York-Washington corridor that were quite good, though "old fashioned compared to this," gesturing to take in our present 21st century setting. He expressed considerable exasperation that Germany had not developed magnetic levitation technology. (So-called "mag-lev" trains are propelled by electromagnetism which also lifts them slightly off the surface of their single rail, thus eliminating friction and permitting very high speeds.) He said most Europeans who now fly would prefer trains for relatively short hops if they were fast enough. He blamed political cowardice for Germany's failure to develop the technology, which he said has been around since the 1950's.
After a while he said apologetically that he had some work to do, pulled a sheaf of handwritten documents out of his attaché case, and started scribbling away on them with a cheap ball-point pen. When we pulled into Frankfurt at about half past three, he hopped energetically up while we remained seated waiting for the first rush of exiting passengers to pass. He came by with his traveling companions on his way out, and as they filed past, quickly introduced them to us as his "partners." I think at first glance he had taken us for a stodgy British couple, but warmed to us when he heard our American accents. We thought he was a bit of an odd duck, but then....
When the rush of exiting passengers had slowed, we got our bags onto the platform and set out to find a tourist information office and a taxi. At the former, we asked the short, slight young man with thinning straight hair behind the desk about Rhine river cruises. He was very earnest and very helpful. He selected a brochure from a nearby rack and marked the departure times while explaining what we had to do. Unfortunately, it looked like the advice of the kindly young man in the Paris subway had been entirely wrong. We would have to catch an early morning train and ride a couple of hours to a Rhine-side town where the tour would start at nine o'clock, then return to Frankfurt by the last train late in the evening. If we missed the return train, we would be stuck there in the boonies. At the beginning of our trip, we probably would have accepted that risk with aplomb. Or, we would have canned Frankfurt and proceeded on to find lodgings on the Rhine. But, as we later realized, we must have been quite worn down by that time. As much as we had looked forward to that Rhine tour, we didn't think we would be able to manage the schedule.
The experience was beneficial, however. From it, we began to formulate a principle that now is the first dogma of our traveling canon: When traveling, unsought advice from friendly strangers is always wrong.
The north African accent, slight build, and light brown complexion of our taxi driver almost made us think we had space-warped into a hack from St. Louis's Lambert Field. We gulped when he responded to our question about how far our hotel was from the city center with a laconic, "Not near." But then he added, "Two, three miles," which meant we would have to depend on public transportation to get us to and from the action, but at least we wouldn't be in a desolate industrial corridor of the outer belt as had been our plight on our first night in Rome.
The hotel was in a narrow, sporadically tree-lined street of two- and three-story brick buildings that seemed to house light manufacturing operations and warehousing. One side of the street was torn up where a ditch had recently been dug and refilled, probably to install or replace a utility line. This work had progressed as far as the front door of the hotel. The intersection there was partially blocked by striped barriers and temporary fencing, and a tiny excavator that would have been a wonderful, though extravagant, toy for any ten-year-old boy, was busily loading an equally compact dump truck.
Hotel Mercure: Frankfurt
Our driver, who must have been as bemused as we by the construction activity, missed the small gap in the fencing provided for hotel patrons and had to circle the block to get back to it. This took another ten or fifteen minutes of driving because the streets, of course, were not laid out in a grid, and most of them were narrow, one-way, and choked with parked cars. After a brief tour of the decidedly less than scenic neighborhood, we arrived at the hotel with 8.40 euros on the meter. The driver offered to deduct a euro, so we gave him a sawbuck and told him to keep the change.
The clerk, an energetic looking, self-important girl of about twenty, probably fresh out of some hotel management school, looked us up on her computer and told us our room was ready, but it was in "the other building." This was a nearly identical building cattycorner across the intersection with flags of various nations unfurled over the entrance. Our room was oddly triangular, but pleasant enough with large windows and a little balcony onto which there was no reason to go since the only scenic perspective available was the other Mercure building and the Lilliputian street work.
After we had settled in, we set out to take a look at the district near Johann Wolfgang Goethe University which, according to our map, was only a few blocks away. With some 35,000 students, JWGU is one of Germany's largest, and for several reasons one of the country's most unusual, universities. For one thing, on a continent where almost all major universities were founded in the middle ages, JWGU can trace its roots only as far as the nineteenth century. Furthermore, it didn't actually become a university till 1914, and it didn't receive its current official name till 1932. Also, whereas most of those ancient universities originally owed their existence to churches, JWGU was founded and financed by wealthy citizens as a secular institution.
Later, while Googling for information about the university, we also found some interesting differences between higher education in Germany and in the U.S. For example, it seems that in Germany there is no such thing as a student loan, and scholarships are rare. Why? Because there are no tuition fees. Also, there are no entrance examinations. If you graduate from high school, you're qualified to enter the university, and all you have to finance is room, board, and books. (Although entry into some fields, like medicine, is limited to students who have earned the best high school grades.) As a sometime college prof, I also think it's interesting that almost all German profs are tenured and carry a class load of only about eight hours per week. They are expected to devote the rest of their time mainly to research. Performance evaluations consist basically of what we refer to as "publish or perish." In other words, the quality of a professor's published research and, presumably the size of the research grants he or she lands, determines...well, I don't know what, since nearly all faculty are tenured, there's no career path to speak of, and salaries are not negotiable.
Street scene near the university. The tower is the Brockenheimer Warte, one of the city's medieval watch towers.
But that's all stuff from guide books and the Internet. As we walked along the streets in this neighborhood of restaurants, book stores, and small shops, resting on park benches whenever we came upon one that wasn't occupied, we felt that the people on the street were just like the people we see in the "Loop" near Washington University in St Louis: young for the most part; casually, sometimes scruffily, dressed; and portraying every degree of preoccupation from White Rabbit "I'm late, I'm late, oh, my goodness, I'm late" to the idlest of loafing, graduate student idleness. Eventually, we noticed the umbrellas of a sidewalk café at the end of a pedestrian way into an inner courtyard, and on investigation discovered in addition to the café, a book store, a flower shop, and a couple of other shops.
We took seats at one of the café tables and ordered beer from the rather pretty blonde student-age waitress who's English vocabulary seemed to be limited to "hello" and "thank you" and studied the menu for something to snack on. The place was called the Bayken Hahnchen Grill Kaffee Bar, which we guessed meant it was a sort of coffee house with mainly chicken on the menu. (Our dictionary translated Hahn as "cock, rooster.") It had chicken and turkey plates, including something called döner which wasn't in our dictionary, but which we guessed was some kind of sandwich. We saw "pommes frites" and decided to have French fries. The fries turned out to be a dinner plate for each of us heaped high with perfectly done fries. The servings were larger than we had expected, and we thought we couldn't eat it all, but by the time we had finished our half liter beers the fries were gone, too. We even had ketchup with them, although we had to pay for the packets, humongous versions of the little ones McDonald's hands out at home.
We lingered over our beer and fries watching the other customers and people coming through the courtyard. They seemed mostly to be students and workers. A black man at one table was soon joined by another, and later a third, and they engaged in some earnest debate, but we couldn't tell if they were speaking German or some other language. At a couple of other tables lone men ate large servings of chicken. Three kids, two of Caucasian, one of African descent, rode their bikes into the courtyard, circled the benches and flower pots a few times, then buzzed back out to the street. The guide book we bought a few minutes later in the nearby book store said more than a quarter of Frankfurt's inhabitants are immigrants.
The French fries and beer had dulled our appetites so we didn't want to spring for a major dinner. Instead, we bought a couple of sandwiches at a combination bakery and sandwich shop that was about to close and a bottle of wine from a nearby low-end grocery. With that, we were tired enough to head back to the hotel for another in-room picnic and an evening of work on the journal for me, a little reading for Minnie, a few minutes of TV for both of us, and so to bed.
The next morning after breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which was much less extravagant in the variety and quantities of its offerings than the Munich hotel had been, we prepared to set out. We got directions to the nearest S-Bahn (Schnell-Bahn, "fast-train") station from the desk clerk and, with the help of an elderly, somewhat impatient gentleman who explained in fluent German how the ticket dispensing machine worked (there were no ticket windows), got our tickets at 1.60 euro each one-way for the short trip to the city center. On the nearly deserted platform we asked a young man of African descent if this was the right platform for going downtown. He spoke a little English and confirmed that it was. In response to additional questions, he also explained that the Hauptbahnhof would be the best station for us to get off. We understood this, but he seemed to think we didn't. He told us he was going the same way and suggested that we should follow him. He said he was from Ethiopia, but our chat didn't get beyond that because he knew so little English and we knew so little German.
At this time of the morning the train wasn't very crowded, and we found seats where we could keep an eye on our Ethiopian friend, who remained standing near the door. As the train slowed for the second stop, he said a few words to a man sitting opposite us, advised us that we had been relayed to that gentleman, and stepped onto the platform. Our new guide was a husky man with a graying beard and dressed like a workman. He indicated by signs that he didn't speak any English, and also managed to indicate on our map where we should go for the tourist sights and restaurants. When we came to the Hauptbahnhof stop, he remained seated but confirmed in response to our questioning look that that was our station.
Like the Roma Termini, the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof is a huge, mostly underground mall with many shops and food vendors. We walked through it following the signs to what appeared to be the main entrance. After about six very short blocks we heard music and decided to see what was causing that. It turned out to be three young men in T-shirts and jeans who had built themselves a little stronghold behind a wall of amplifiers and other electronic equipment in a broad, open pedestrian mall. The mall appeared to be several blocks long, and basically a very wide street with a park-like pedestrian way in the center skimpily shaded by scattered young trees. The music was very loud and sounded like a pan-pipe on steroids. The melancholy of its digital minor chords permeated the neighborhood.
Street scene downtown Frankfurt
We listened a while, then moved on looking for a cross street so we could re-orient ourselves. As we studied our map, a pudgy man with a very full gray-flecked black beard and wire rimmed glasses came up and asked in a British accent if he could be of help to us. Naturally, we thought he was a panhandler and assumed, in accordance with our still gestating prime directive of traveling, that any advice he gave us would be wrong and that he would want a tip for it. We told him we were looking for the main tourist attractions and possibly a river cruise. He told us to turn right at the next cross street and after about two hundred meters we would be in the Römerberg. This, he said, and later our guidebook confirmed (thus proving by exception the validity of our newborn prime directive), was the heart and center of medieval and renaissance Frankfurt. Further along, we would find a riverboat dock and ticket office. He then wished us well and walked off with no effort to collect an emolument.
Although Römer means "Roman," according to our guide book, the place name has nothing to do with invading cohorts and heroic centurions. It refers to the crowds of Italian merchants who used to lodge in the buildings surrounding the square during medieval trade fairs. In those times, the Frankfurt fair was one of the biggest and most famous in northern Europe. It attracted dealers from all over the continent, and the city continues the tradition today by hosting hundreds of trade fairs annually in a huge area that coincidentally was not far from our hotel. The October book fair is billed as the world's largest. In 2003 it hosted some 6,600 exhibitors from more than 100 countries and 180,000 trade visitors, about a third of whom came from outside of Germany. Maybe this fair is banker Frankfurt's answer to brewmeister Munich's Oktoberfest. But of course, its tens of thousands of book readers are scant compared with Munich's millions of beer drinkers.
Today the Römerberg is a large, slightly sloping irregularly shaped and very picturesque public square. Its dominant features are Old St. Nicholas church, a modest structure with a modest spire, and the Römer itself, the building that gives the square its name. This was the favorite lodging house of the Italian merchants mentioned above. Some time prior to the fifteenth century, after a fire had destroyed the old town hall, the frugal Frankfurt businessmen made it their new town hall, and parts of it are still used by the city for ceremonial functions. For example, it's a favorite site for civil wedding ceremonies. This somewhat bizarre structure drew our attention as we entered the square. The crudely elegant step design of its three-gabled facade screamed "Middle Ages."
The Römer
After the Römer had become Frankfurt's town hall, the German electors established a tradition of meeting there to negotiate imperial elections. The tradition included city-wide celebrations with huge banquets during which the fountain in the square ran wine. It continued four centuries and might have continued to this day if Napoleon hadn't ended it in 1806 by squashing the empire. Since then, Frankfurt seems to have done its best to avoid international politics except as they relate to more gainful pursuits.
American and British bombing in 1943-44 reduced most of the buildings in the Römerberg to rubble. Pictures taken after the war show the distinctive gables of the Römer still standing, but the roof is gone and most of the other walls are down. The spires of Saint Nicholas and the nearby Saint Paul Churches remain standing, but the naves are roofless. A row of magnificent renaissance half-timbered buildings across the square are mere piles of broken stone. All of these structures now have been rebuilt and restored as much as possible to their prewar appearance, at least on the outside.
As we entered the square we saw a broad, sloping paved expanse with, near the center, a fountain topped by a statue of Justice holding a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. (Not blindfolded, however, but gazing sternly, perhaps at the ghosts of long departed Guelphs and Ghibellines in the Römer plotting against each other to name the next emperor.) Tourists were all about, taking pictures, shopping, and dining under the bright red terrace umbrellas of a restaurant on the upper side near the tall half-timbered buildings.
As we approached the Römer, we saw that an art exhibit was open in one section of the building and, seeing a sign at the door that said entry was free, we stepped in to have a look. We estimated the paintings were worth about the cost of admission, but the room where they were displayed was wonderful. Its ceiling was only about fifteen feet at its highest points, but it was built like a cathedral roof in that it consisted of a series of partially ribbed vaults supported by columns. A row of free-standing, ten-foot columns in the center of the room spread at the top to form the vaults which were supported at the walls on each side by engaged columns. The columns were faced with a chocolate-colored ceramic tile and the ribs with lighter hued tile that contrasted with the pale yellow tint of the plaster surfaces of the vaults. The lighting, which consisted only of a single rather small, six-sided fixture hanging from the center of each cell of the ceiling, was less than adequate for a display of paintings, but it was perfect for viewing the room's architecture. The total effect was of gracious antiquity, but with a modern feel to it that was surprising and pleasant given the uncompromising medieval appearance of the building's restored exterior.
Interior of the Römer
Through a set of glass doors in the back wall of the room, we looked into a small tranquil courtyard with a fountain at its center that featured a statue of a nude man holding a club on one shoulder. We guessed it wasn't Casey about to strike out, and we were right. Our guidebook told us it was Hercules and dated from 1901.
Inner courtyard of the Römer
When we left the art show, a wedding party had assembled in front of the building for a celebratory glass of champagne before ascending to one of the upstairs room for the ceremony. This was a decidedly yuppie group, the bride wearing a knee-length plaid garment over matching slacks, and the groom with his head shaven bald was wearing a gray suit with a strange sort of red collar around his neck. A woman was proposing a champagne toast to the young couple, and a little blonde girl sat on a diaper bag at one side sipping something (presumably not champagne) out of a plastic cup.
At the edge of the Römerberg, on our way toward the river, we passed a nondescript glass-fronted building with a ten-foot statue in terracotta of an idealized Charlemagne. A group of school children were happily playing at the emperor's feet as he stared with indifferent, blank eyes across the square, sword in one hand, in the other, a terracotta egg with a cross stuck in the top.
Charlemagne engages in a game of hide-seek
The river-cruise ticket booth was where the kindly Brit had told us it would be. The cost was fifty euros (I think my notes are correct here) for the two of us, and the next boat was scheduled to leave in less than fifteen minutes. Soon a small boat, not much more than a goodly-sized private cabin cruiser, purred by headed down stream, made a U-turn, and slowly nudged up to one of the mooring places. We were a bit surprised at how small this tour boat was, but got in line behind a group of school-kids with backpacks. This was wrong. The ticket taker at the on-board end of the gangplank gently advised us that our boat would be larger and would be along in a few minutes. Solicitously, he pointed out the place where it would dock, and feeling somewhat foolish, albeit relieved that we wouldn't be spending the next couple of hours packed into that small craft with a bunch of school kids, we made our way to the correct embarking point.
A little later the real tour boat, a gleaming white vessel maybe fifty or sixty feet long, inched in to the bank where we were standing near a man with the loop end of a hawser in his hand who helped to tie her up. When all was secure, we went aboard and found a table that was shaded by an overhanging upper roof on the top deck near the stern where we hoped to have a fairly unobstructed view of the shore. Only twenty or so other passengers came to this deck, which could have held close to a hundred, and the two interior decks were completely deserted. After a few minutes, we shoved off and cruised slowly upstream as the city's skyscrapers, dwarfing every church steeple in sight near and far, slowly shrank into the distance.
At first the riverbanks were dedicated to parks with a smattering of people biking and jogging past colorful flower gardens on tree-shaded paths. But soon great gray factory buildings and junky looking industrial storage yards started rearing up. After a while the boat made a side excursion into a wide basin lined with yet more factory buildings and, as she made a stately turn at the end of the basin, we feasted our eyes and ears on the spectacle of a giant crane dropping crushed car bodies into a barge. Back in the main river channel and headed upstream again we passed still more factory buildings interspersed occasionally with spots of greenery. Finally, we arrived at an apparently insurmountable weather-stained and lichen-marked concrete barrier -- a lock or dam -- and after another wide arcuation, cruised back down stream.
Most of the passengers on our deck sat out in the sun, which was quite bright and warm. A steward took our order for beer and water, and soon after delivered them to us at a cost of nine euros. We sipped our beverages and watched the city scroll by on both sides. This definitely was not the Rhine tour we had hoped for. And try as we might, we couldn't stretch our imaginations sufficiently to convert factory buildings and crane booms into medieval castles and towering pine trees. Still, we were off our feet, the beer tasted good, and the sky was blue. We relaxed and took what we could get.
We tried to guess what the attraction was to the other passengers, all of whom seemed to be German, or at least not American, and mostly thirty or forty-somethings. The brochure that came with our tickets recommended the cruises for a "very special lunch break," but few of the passengers looked like office workers. A husky man whom we imagined could have been a private eye (dark of eye, bushy of moustache; hair thick and straight; sunglasses; paunchy, yet fit looking; shirtsleeves; open-collar; chinos; smoking from a pack of cigarettes that he kept next to his elbow on the table) seemed to watch us and the other passengers more than the scenery. Why would a man such as that fritter away an early afternoon in complete idleness? Well, maybe he was writing a novel, or killing time between sales meetings.
A couple only marginally less elderly than we sat at a table further astern gazing into each other's eyes and eating hot dogs served plain with bread on the side, and drank beer from mugs. On the other side of the boat, a young mother, alone, dandled an infant on her lap. The scattering of other passengers were mostly in pairs or couples, some with small kids who became bored and restless long before we docked. We sailed past the landing place a short distance, made a U-turn and docked on schedule after a voyage of not quite two hours. The elderly couple and a couple of other groups stayed on board for the next trip. We had to admit it would be a pleasant way to while away an afternoon, but no matter how long we made it last, those factory buildings and cranes would never transmogrify into Rhine-river castles.
We walked back up the gentle slope toward the Römerberg following the strains of accordion music being played by two ordinary looking, not quite middle-aged men who had set up shop at one corner with a bicycle helmet on the ground in front of them containing some change and a single bill. We stopped to listen a little because they were actually pretty good. Good enough to earn a little more change from us. We discovered that the glass-front building with Charlemagne at its door was the history museum. But by now it was after four o'clock, so we would not have time to tour it before it closed. We stepped inside anyway partly to see if we could get an idea of what we were missing, but mainly hoping there would be an accessible public restroom. It would have been an interesting museum to visit as we could see from the "teaser" displays in the lobby, which included antique maps and a small model of the city as it could have looked in the middle ages. Also, samples of paintings, lithographs, and photographs were on display. This museum's collection of gold and silver plate-ware and jewelry is world renowned, we later learned, but there seemed to be no restrooms available to non-paying visitors. So this dip of a toe into Frankfurt's cultural resources would have to suffice.
It was early for dining by European standards, but a goodly number of people were seated at tables under the red umbrellas on the terrace of the Café Liebfrauendberg. We took a table, and a middle aged, somewhat dumpy waitress soon brought menus and took our order for a regional white wine, which given the name of the place, might have been liebfraumilch, but it didn't have the distinctive smooth, sweet taste of the liebfraumilch we sometimes find at home. There was no English on the menus, but I looked for wienerschnitzel and found it while Minnie ordered a dish after asking the waitress what it was and getting an answer in minimal English that seemed to imply it was some kind of chopped meat. The schnitzel was served with potatoes and was as good as any we would have found at home. So was Minnie's goulash sort of dish with bite-size chunks of meat in a piquant tomato sauce on noodles.
We had hoped to find a neighborhood gasthaus something along the lines of the places "Guv" McGovern, my Blackfoot Indian Army buddy from Montana, and I used to seek out in Mannheim in the 1950s. Our favorite had been a small narrow place with bare wooden tables and a simple bar along one wall where we would usually have our first beers of the evening and, to sober up before catching the trolley back to the base, a plate of schnitzel served with home-fried potatoes and cold, mildly spiced soup-beans. Early in the evening only a couple of the tables would be occupied, usually by young blue-collar workers. Some evenings we would get into a kind of pidgin conversation with some of them, others not. In the late evening, these places would be crowded and noisy, and we would eat our schnitzel at the bar. But Minnie and I never managed to find such a place, not even in the university neighborhood near our hotel.
As we ate, a couple of street musicians, young men in short-sleeved shirts and dark slacks, set up at the edge of the Liebfrauendberg terrace. First, one of them played some jazz that we thought was remarkably polished for a kid with a sax accompanied by recorded music on a boom box while the other stood to one side with his hands in pockets and eyeballed us diners. When the saxophonist had finished his number, he took five while his companion broke out tap dancing to another tune on the boom box. Our view of the dancer was obscured because we were on the opposite side of the terrace, but after they had gone through a short repertoire of saxing and dancing, we thought they were good enough to deserve a few coins when they came collecting with a cigar box.
Terrace of the restaurant Liebfrauendberg with tap dancer at work
When we pulled the drapes the next morning, a light drizzle was streaking the hotel window panes. It looked like it had been raining most of the night. Not to worry, though, this was to be our last day in Frankfurt, and we had scheduled it as an "R&R" (rest and refit) day. Our first order of business after breakfast in the hotel restaurant was to do our wash in a laundry room in the hotel basement. This proved to be a morning-long task. There was no detergent dispensing machine, so we looked around till we found at the back of a high shelf an unmarked plastic cup half full of a white powder that we hoped would do the job. Then it took us a while to decipher the idiosyncratic system for operating the washer and dryer even with the help of instructions posted on the wall in English as well as German. We waited with no little suspense as the washer whirred, hissed, and thumped itself through a seemingly interminable sequence of rinses, washes, spins, and other cycles whose purpose we didn't even want to guess. Then waited another eternity while the dryer baked the fabrics with Teutonic thoroughness before at last we could carry our suitcases full of clean, fresh, hot duds across the street to our room.
The maid service (two young southeast Asian men) was in the room next door, and ours hadn't been touched. We managed to get one of the young men to understand that we were not checking out till the next day and agree to clean our room next. Clearly, news of our changed reservations had not trickled to their level.
To get out of their way, we decided to go downtown to see what touring we could do on a gloomy, rainy day. Across the street from the Hauptbahnhof we saw an Internet café that we had overlooked the day before. On investigation, we found that it was a mom-and-pop operation with a tiny sales room on the ground floor where shrink-wrapped souvenirs and odds and ends of computer gear were displayed in colorful propinquity. The sales clerk, a young Indian woman with a bead under her lower lip, sat on a stool in a nook near the door behind a high-tech cash register. I asked her about rates (three euros per half hour) and for permission to take a look at the computer setup. A spiral metal staircase gave access to a sort of balcony second level where nine computer work stations were set up along two walls of the narrow space. Only one machine was in use, and I asked the scruffy character hunched over its keyboard, "Dass mach schnell?" He ignored that, so I said, "Is it a fast connection?" and he signified an irascible affirmative.
However, we were getting hungry, so we decided to grab a bite before I sat down to try to check our email. The clerk gave us directions to a street where she said we would find restaurants, but we must have misunderstood because after two or three blocks in the drizzle we found that we were entering a neighborhood of rough looking bars, junky resale shops, and stores with names like "USA Sex." Concluding that this was not a good place for a couple of befuddled American retirees, even at high noon, we tried to will ourselves invisible and sidled back to the friendlier environs of the Hauptbahnhof.
We found a hot-dog stand whose name I later noted as die Wurst und Weck. They sold all kinds of sandwiches including some that resembled giant American hot dogs. We ordered one of these each from the high-school looking girl in the booth after first asking if they were served on buns. They were indeed served on buns with mustard, relish, mushrooms, lettuce, cucumber slices, and who knows what else. And they were very tasty washed down with bottled water. In checking our dictionary later, we found that "die Wurst und Weck" seems to translate roughly as the "Hot-dog and Bun."
Frankfurt hot-dog
Having eaten, we turned on our walkie-talkies, and I went back to the cyber café while Minnie set off for some shopping. The computer connection was as fast as our Charter connection at home. Even so, by the time I got logged on, deleted more than a hundred decaying chunks of spam, and read and briefly replied to a few notes from friends and family, my half hour was almost up. I logged off, paid down stairs with compliments to the management on the speed of their connection, and returned through the drizzle to the train station. Minnie was sipping a Coke just inside the door. She had bought a scarf to keep her hair dry.
The weather wasn't suitable for more touring, so we took the S-Bahn back to the hotel where we stopped at the bar to buy a chilled bottle of liebfraumilch, and crossed the street to our room where we were disappointed to discover that our plastic keys wouldn't work. So I had to return to the desk to get that straightened out before we could relax. Apparently, the hotel's computer system still had not digested the correction to our original erroneous reservation. For the rest of the afternoon we sipped wine while I worked on the journal and Minnie read or sewed.
The next day was Sunday, July 14, and the day on which we first began to feel like we were starting home. We were taking the train to Calais where we would catch the hovercraft to Dover, England. After two nights and a day in Calais, we would once again be able to speak with strangers on a level slightly above "Wo sind die toiletten?" ("Where are the restrooms?"), and we would be in the last country of our trip. We had decided to travel by day to Calais instead of taking the night train because the day trains dashed to the Channel in only ten hours whereas the night trains for no discernable reason dawdled along for a full twenty. (See Chapter 8.)
Our train pulled out on schedule and smoothly and swiftly swished us to the banks of the Rhine and our first look at that fabled and picturesque river. It lived up to its name, especially in a long stretch of its course where it ran between high bluffs on both sides. Houses in the towns and villages would be stacked from the water's edge up the steep hillsides looking from our perspective like jumbled piles of children's blocks sometimes separated by seemingly vertical streets. Occasionally a seemingly isolated castle or a church could be seen clinging to the face of a cliff. At other times, we caught glimpses of the countryside beyond, verdant fields and frequent vineyards. Boats, mostly motorized barges, quite a few tugs pushing strings of barges, and now and then a tour boat, were constantly in sight plying up and down Europe's and one of the world's busiest and most beautiful inland waterways.
The train schedule we found in a brochure indicated the towns we would pass through before our first change at Cologne. I kept track of our progress and was comforted as we hit the first two or three towns right on schedule. But then the flavor of what should have been a ten-hour period of mild boredom thrice punctuated by irksome train changes, soured. Our first clue that something was amiss was a marked change in the gait of the bucolic panorama galloping by outside. It slowed, sometimes to a creep, then returned to full speed for a few minutes, then slowed again, and at last came to a full stop. We waited; we started again; we reached full speed; but then slowed again to another stop in an undeniably rural setting where anything as pragmatic as a train station would have been an unesthetic intrusion. This happened two or three times, and I quickly concluded that we would never reach Cologne in time to make our connection.
As I began to sense a cold, iron marble of panic in the neighborhood of my transverse colon, we watched for the conductor and finally caught him on one of his many trips up and down the aisle of the car. He spoke very good English and was very helpful and patient. He said basically that we should take our itinerary and tickets to the "service point" in the Cologne station, and they would get us straightened out. He was everything an alarmed elderly foreigner could ask for in cheerfulness, confidence, and reassurance. But sadly, his cloud of optimism, like Mr. Btzlfk's rain cloud in the Li'l Abner comic strip, hovered over him alone. As soon as he continued his jolly way down the aisle, the marble of anxiety in my gut expanded: Would we be able to find the "service point?" Would there be another train that would get us to Calais on time? If not, would we be able to find a decent hotel room for the night? How much was all this going to cost? Would we have time to get something to eat? (We were supposed to arrive in Cologne at eleven o'clock, and it was already well past that, so my lump of anxiety was sprouting small tentacles of hunger.)
We pulled into the Cologne station at a little past 11:30. The next train on our itinerary, to Liège, had already departed at 11:14. Fortunately, as we started down the platform hoping we would recognize the "service point" for what it was when we saw it, we came upon the cheerful conductor who gladly pointed it out to us, a little cupola in the middle of the platform that we surely would have missed without additional assistance. We showed our tickets and itinerary to the young woman inside, and she filled out a form by hand and gave it to us. "Give this to the man on Platform 9," she said matter-of-factly and assured us that that would get us on the next train to Brussels where we would easily make the connection to Calais.
She assured us, but again, I was dubious. Our schedule was completely ajumble. Forsaking the Liège that we thought was somewhere in northern France and that had been on our itinerary since our arrival in Frankfurt, we were now striking helter-skelter for Brussels, which we knew was in Belgium...somewhere. (We were wrong about Liège. It's a Belgian city, too.) Thus, we became painfully aware of how ignorant we were of European geography, an insight that contributed nicely to my golf-ball-size lump of insecurity (although Minnie kept a cooler head). We knew Calais was on the English Channel, but beyond that we had only the vaguest notion of how far apart these cities were, and in my intensifying state of panic, that seemed important somehow.
On Platform 9 we found a blonde woman and a dark skinny guy in railroad uniforms (red hat, white shirt, dark necktie, dark trousers) in another little office cupola. We showed them our form, and the blonde told us to wait. We stepped back and I thought of the scene in The Great Escape where Richard Attenborough and James Donald, fresh out of the tunnel under the Stalag Luft III fence, wait in line to have their counterfeit papers inspected. We watched others who had missed their connections approach the cupola and after a few words with the blonde, either step back patiently like us, or argue a bit, then step back impatiently.
After a while, the blonde came out of the cupola with several printed tickets and handed them out. Several people, including us, had questions, which she answered -- at least ours -- satisfactorily. She said we would arrive in Brussels at 2:22 in plenty of time to catch the 3:17 TGV to Lille, where we could catch a train to Calais. We would have to go to a ticket window in Brussels to have our reservations confirmed, but she assured us that fifty-five minutes was plenty of time for that. She added that the train then at the platform was the one we wanted and asked us to please board the last car because that was where they were putting people without reservations. We climbed aboard and found seats, although the car was somewhat crowded and we had to push through a handful of people clustered in the entry vestibule. This was a second class car, so the seats were smaller and three abreast on each side of the aisle instead of two, but still it was quite nice, and the train, as usual, ran fast and quiet. After we were on our way, I made my way forward to the lounge car to get sandwiches and a couple of beers as by this time it was well past noon.
At the Brussels Midi terminal we made our way to the customer service area where some twenty stations were set in a curved counter in a long, narrow room with a curved glass wall behind the counter that provided a view of the interior of the spacious terminal. Like the other big-city European terminals we had seen, it consisted mainly of boutiques decorated in bright lights and flashy colors. Only eight of the ticket stations were manned as a crowd of people milled around in the space between them and the entrance to the room. We proceeded with our normal drill of finding an out-of-the-way corner where Minnie could watch our bags, then figuring out the routine by which I could insert myself into the system: in this case by getting a numbered chit from a machine. We had about 20 numbers to wait and about forty-five minutes. For a pathetically time-ridden dolt who gets nervous if he's less than ten minutes early for dental appointments and is uncomfortable about being late for restaurant reservations, this was like packing an infinite quantity onto a pinhead of time. If Minnie hadn't provided a wholesome damping effect on my overheated psyche by growing proportionately cooler -- one might say icier -- and less tolerant of my insecurity, I might have gone off like a bottle-rocket. To distract me, she pointed out a tourist information booth in the middle of the mall-like station and suggested that I go see if I could find out anything there. I did so, and showing the young man in the booth the documents we had accumulated, I explained our situation. He said the TGV leaving at 3:17 would get us to Lille in plenty of time to catch the last train for Calais, but he also confirmed that we would have to make reservations in the ticket office I had just left.
So I reported back to Minnie and she helped me watch the electronic sign announcing the most recent number being served creep toward our number in a painful race against the galloping minute hand of my wrist watch. When at last I got to a ticket window, I explained our situation again and showed the agent our documents. With slow-motion gestures, irritating casualness, and patently false good humor, he sorted the papers we needed from those we didn't and asked if I wanted to keep the latter for souvenirs, which I did. He moved his fingers glacially across his keyboard and waited patiently as our tickets seeped out of his drowsy printer. He explained that we would arrive at Lille-Europe station in time for us to catch any one of several trains departing throughout the afternoon and evening from another station called Lille-Flanders. He said the stations were only about 300 meters apart, and a foot bridge connected the two. I paid the six euro reservation fee (not covered by our Eurailpasses); he handed me the tickets and told me how to get to the platform; and Minnie and I hurried off.
"TGV" stands for train à grand vitesse (very fast train). Once they're out of the city and in open country, these trains run at about 180 miles per hour, and in test runs have been clocked at over 190. France first put them into commercial service in 1981 between Paris and Lyon, and since then has created a fleet of over 300 "train sets" running on a network of special tracks throughout the country. Each "train set" consists of a power unit at each end and four to eighteen "trailers," i.e., passenger cars, more or less permanently hooked together. They're electric trains drawing power from overhead power lines just as ordinary electric trains do, but traction is provided by motors in each set of wheels. In other words, the "engine" doesn't pull the cars; the cars propel themselves. Naturally, the trains are loaded with safety features including three different braking systems, each with built-in redundancies and automatic switches to cut electrical power if needed. And of course conventional signaling equipment is useless for trains traveling at 180 mph. So all the signaling is computer controlled and conducted to the train through the rails.
Although the Inter-City Express (ICE) trains we had taken from Munich to Frankfurt and then to Cologne, and the Thalys we caught from Cologne to Brussels are based on the same design and technology as the TGV, and except for color and logos, their train sets are virtually indistinguishable from TGV train sets, the TGV is the high-speed European train. So for the moment, at least, it appeared that all our (my) angst resulting from the glitch in the Deutchbahn's vaunted efficiency wasn't for naught: we would get to ride Europe's original "bullet" train.
But still, we had to hurry to the platform and arrived only a couple of minutes before departure time. Our seats were near the end of a nearly empty car with passengers scattered here and there through its length. The train pulled out on schedule and made the sixty mile run in less than forty minutes for an average speed of a little under 100 miles per hour, dead stop to dead stop. The sensation was little different from the ICE or the Thalys. Nearby objects flashed by while further off the green, yellow, and amber patchwork of the countryside wheeled steadily and silently front to rear. Occasionally, clusters of tile-roofed, stone buildings, often marked by a church steeple in their midst, would float by in the middle distance. Roads and streams would appear suddenly along side the track, run with us a few seconds, and just as suddenly dart off.
After only a few minutes at this speed and long before reaching the outskirts of Lille, we started a gentle deceleration and soon coasted to an almost imperceptible stop in the Lille-Europe station. It was late in the day, but we could relax because we were confident that even we could find our way 300 meters to the Lille-Flanders station without getting involved in another tiresome hassle and catch one of the Calais trains. We even took a few minutes to have a look at the exterior of the TGV in the semidarkness of the underground platform and try to get a photo. Its front end was less streamlined than we expected, but still, its sleek surfaces, sloping snout with dim headlights close to the tracks, and completely blacked-out engineer's compartment bespoke speed and power: like a giant greyhound resting its belly after a short sprint and eager to go again.
Then we rode the escalator to the main part of the station. It was high and wide, concrete and glass, flaunting its bare trusses and naked plumbing in the immodest style of late twentieth century airports and warehouses. We got confirmation from a passerby that the bridge we could see through one of the huge windows was the one we wanted to cross to the other station, and set out under a bright but not very warm sun. The bridge was actually a viaduct over an open park-like expanse surrounded by glass-and-steel office buildings, with the Lille-Europe station on one side, and on the other, behind an open square the Lille-Flanders station. The latter was in an older style of concrete and brick with many heavy rounded arches on two levels and a clock tower on top, fitting for the slower, noisier, more Spartan train that would carry us on our final leg to the edge of the English Channel. We found the platform and saw that one was in. Two conductors were standing at the head of the platform chatting casually. Because no passengers were on the platform, and it was already a minute or two past the posted departure time, I asked the conductors if we could still get aboard. They assured us we could after we had validated our tickets. We did so, passed through the turnstile, and walked past a couple of cars that looked too crowded before somebody, probably one of the conductors, blew a whistle. So we skittered aboard at the next entrance, and as we made our way along the aisle, the train started moving.
This was a "milk train," but our car, though plain, looked fairly new. The seats were arranged to face each other and were upholstered in leather or a very good imitation, well padded and reasonably comfortable. Most of the other passengers were young people. The only empty seats we could find near each other were on opposite sides of the aisle near the end of a car next to the entry vestibule where the restroom was located. I put the big suitcase and the computer into the overhead rack and we sat with the smaller bags at our feet. I was in the aisle seat of a set of two facing away from the door. A young man was in the window seat next to me, and three young women were in the three facing seats. Minnie also had an aisle seat, but facing the door. Next to her was a young man in the middle seat and his girl friend in the window seat. We knew they were a couple because by the time we reached their station a few stops short of Calais, they were seriously engaged in tongue-to-tongue excitation.
The train rolled through a flat Picardy countryside that was distinguishable from the countryside between Brussels and Lille only by the occasional crossing of a canal and more exquisite horizonality. One of the first stops of this very definitely local train was Armentieres, home of the mademoiselle of WW I who could "parlez-vous." It looked like a thoroughly unimposing little town, but it turned out to be the chief point of touristic interest in the two hours it took to go seventy-five miles. As we jogged along, pumping up to a reasonable speed, then immediately slowing and finally stopping at every village, hamlet, way-station, and crossroad, I finally asked the college-aged girl opposite me if the next station would be Calais. She said it would not, and digging into her purse for a little schedule, she showed me that we would arrive there at a little after 5:30. She ventured some English, and her accent was quite good, so I complimented her on it and asked her if she had learned it in school. She beamed with pleasure at the compliment and said she had, but at that point the conversation was interrupted by a loud crash in the vestibule at my back.
I couldn't see what was going on, but Minnie and all the other passengers who could burst into laughter. It seems someone had been unable to open the door to the restroom and had asked the conductor for help. The conductor first tried his key, which didn't work, then apparently assuming that the lock was jammed or that someone inside was up to some kind of funny business, stepped back and leveled a good hard kick at it. It yielded to reveal a very surprised middle-aged man sitting on the commode. He and the conductor exchanged some very earnest and no doubt very colloquial pleasantries, but the conversation was too rapid for me to understand, so I was unable to extend my French vocabulary.
When we finally reached Calais, we first grabbed a sandwich and a beer at the station restaurant, then dragged our bags up a slight grade to a taxi stand and waited in the hot sun for a cab to show up. When at last one did, and I told the driver we wanted to go to the Ibis Hotel, he refused to take us saying the hotel was just up the street "deux cent metres" (two hundred meters). Less offended at his refusal of our patronage than grateful for his saving us the cost of the short ride, we walked along the Boulevard Jacquard. There had been a Bastille Day street fair, and the street was still blocked to auto traffic as merchants disassembled the last of the booths. I asked a woman passerby where the Ibis hotel was, and she said, "Just avant le Prix Unique" ("Just before the Prix Unique," a kind of discount store), so we continued another block, giving wide birth to the most notable sight in Calais thus far, a portable toilet that clearly had been used the whole weekend without service and was leaking out onto the sidewalk.
The hotel's entrance on the Boulevard Jacquard, which is Calais' main thoroughfare, was locked, but a sign taped to the inside of the glass door directed us around the corner into a very narrow one-way street where there was another entrance.
This establishment was a tad more than a star or two below the Mercures that we had been patronizing to this point. The desk was at the opposite side of a small lobby furnished with a Naugahyde chair and matching sofa and a small TV. The desk extended along the side of a corridor-like area toward the back of the building, mutating at some indistinguishable point along the way from hotel front-desk to small-town bar. A man in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and blue jeans was sitting on a stool at the bar end, sipping a beer and chatting with the desk clerk. Beyond that, the corridor opened into a breakfast room furnished with small, plain tables. It was all quite picturesque in the way the French have of making cheap and tawdry charming.
The elevator was no smaller than those in the Mercures we had patronized till now, and there was no fancy electronic card key, but we jiggled the old fashioned one in the keyhole till the lock relented and we were able to open the door. The smell of the room was not altogether pleasant, but the window could be opened. In the distance, rising above the tile roofs of nearby buildings we could see a lighthouse in the harbor and the famous belfry of the old town hall. A seagull was roosting on a chimney just a few yards off. We were quite charmed, not even put off by the courtyard full of small (thankfully empty) trash cans below us, where apparently they had been collected for some enigmatic Gaulic reason.
We unpacked and rested a little, then went for a walk to see if any of the fair booths were still open. The sun was still fairly high, though it was after six o'clock, and the evening was warm and balmy. The booths were all gone now; the street littered with scraps of paper and plastic bottles. Four teenage boys walked toward us up the middle of the street setting off firecrackers. This was the only reminder we had had all day that it was July 14, Bastille Day, the French Fourth of July.
We walked past the old town hall with its abundant formal flowerbeds among which stands Auguste Rodin's statue, The Six Burghers, which commemorates a famous episode in the Hundred Years War: In 1346 Edward III of England had been unable to breach the city's walls after a siege of nearly a year, a year during which the French soldiery and hapless women and children inside slowly starved. Finally, the city fathers offered to surrender if the English would promise to forgo the traditional orgy of pillage, rape, and murder. Although Edward was irritated by the pig-headed stubbornness of the French, he agreed, but only on condition that the city would soothe his pique by sending him six of its leading citizens to be executed. Of course the city fathers objected, but they and everyone else in town were starving, so finally the mayor and five aldermen volunteered to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of their fellow citizens. They were brought to Edward's court, dirty, emaciated, dressed in the best rags they could find, and with ropes around their necks.
It was a sight to soften the heart of the most obdurate Christian. Edward's queen, Philippa, was moved to tears and begged so eloquently for the lives of the brave burghers that Edward finally yielded and gave them to her to do with as she wished. She had them cleansed, gave them a good meal, and returned them to their city and their families. It was an incident unparalleled in the bloody annals of European warfare before or since, and rightly memorialized by the Rodin sculpture, which portrays the six ragged, starved men, their faces variously grim and horrified, bickering with each other as they stumble toward what they believe will be a slow certain death by torture. The next time we're in Calais, we're definitely going to get a photo of this statue.
The picturesque 250-foot belfry of the town hall is a different story. The guidebooks say it's in the "Flemish Renaissance" style, which we guessed means that it has a 16th century flare to it. It looks relatively fragile, and we wondered, given the near total destruction of Calais during both world wars, by what miracle it had survived, especially as the Nazis had used the building as their headquarters, and it must have been an ideal landmark for English bombers and cross-channel artillery. We later found out that no miracles were involved. In the first place, the tower is not ancient, even by American standards. Ground was broken for it in 1911 and construction finished fourteen years later. And it was built of reinforced concrete. The "Renaissance" brick is a veneer. In a word, it was built like the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago that were being built at about the same time. And apparently, it came through both wars nearly as unscathed as they.
We left the town hall gardens through a gate that startled the somnolence of the neighborhood with the shrill squeaking of its hinges. It was early evening and still broad daylight, but Sunday and a holiday. The sounds of occasional traffic on nearby streets were muffled by many hedges and trees. The only other pedestrians -- or potential pedestrians I guess I should say -- were four disreputable looking men on a bench at the side of the walkway who were engaged in quiet conversation and ignored us completely. We crossed a foot-bridge over a wide canal that we thought might have been a remainder of the powerful fortifications that repulsed King Edward lo those many centuries ago and took a flight of concrete steps down to the level of the canal to investigate further and see if that setting offered any photo ops.
Calais town hall with canal in foreground
With the still, dark water of the canal on one side and a twenty-foot embankment covered with shrubbery, trees, and high weeds on the other, our feeling of isolation increased as we walked. At first, we were relieved, for in Europe we hadn't encountered many locales that offered such complete seclusion. But after a couple of hundred yards, I started thinking about us being the only people within sight or hearing, and the idea occurred that this was a good place for a mugging. Minnie thought I was being silly, but at the next bridge there was another set of steps to street level, and I was glad to climb back up. I was relieved to see that we were back in the Boulevard Jacquard. Most of the stores and restaurants were closed, and even the bars seemed to be hosting only a scattering of customers. We stopped at one place for a glass of wine just because it was too early to return to that extremely modest hotel room. But finally we did, and after a little TV, turned in.
The coffee in the hotel breakfast room came from a machine like a soft drink or juice machine that dispensed instant coffee from one spout and, theoretically, milk from another. The milk side wasn't working so we used some from the nearby pitcher of cereal milk. After a while, the manager, or whatever he was, came in and tried to fix the milk dispenser, but it still didn't work properly. The buffet choices were dry cereal, bread and croissants, cold ham, yogurt, fruits, and juice. A far cry from the pretentiously over-laden board offered at the Mercures of our previous stops.
After eating we headed for the ocean under overcast and slightly chilly skies, taking note of a miniature (four-story high) Eiffel Tower half a block from the Tour du Guet (Watch Tower), the oldest building in the city, and contrasting nicely with it. The Watch Tower is an authentic remnant of Calais's storied past. It was built in the 13th century as a lookout post to warn the city of the approach of English war fleets and other pirates. And it was on its doorstep that the six burghers gave themselves over to the English king in 1346. That it survived the destruction of the two world wars must be attributed, in this case not to the strength of reinforced concrete, but to the craftsmanship of medieval stone cutters who patiently carved, lifted, and placed each massive block without mortar to form the single nearly indestructible whole.
The ersatz Eiffel Tower on the other hand, half as high as its ancient neighbor and painted white to ensure that the passing tourist could note that here the Café de Paris offered a piece of the capital right in the middle of beautiful downtown Calais, was about as authentic looking as any commercial advertisement could be.
Tour du Guet with fake Eiffel Tower
From about this point, the city's ambience changed from typical provincial commercial center busy with Monday morning traffic to typical ocean front resort town groggily facing another work week. We passed what looked like a small fleet of private fishing boats forlornly keeled over on the stone floor of a large basin that was completely drained. Then we walked between beach front hotels and arrived at a low seawall with only the sandy beach and the gray waters of La Manche (the Sleeve), as the French call the strait we know as the English Channel, before us. Next to the beach, and between the hotels and one of the channels leading to the busy port, was a camp ground filled with randomly scattered tents and quite a few camping trailers that looked like they were permanently emplaced.
Boats aground
This was the site of Fort Risban, one of three forts that used to defend the port of Calais. It's not clear when the fort was first built. Some say Caligula built it during his expedition into the lower Rhine country in AD 39. Others trace it only as far back as Charlemagne (d. 814 ). But apparently the only certainty as to its age is its undeniable presence in 1346 when Edward III arrived on the scene. It has been damaged and rebuilt at various times since then as ownership of the port and nearby territory changed hands over the centuries from English to French to Spanish and back to French. In modern times it was neglected and allowed to crumble till the two world wars basically finished it off. However, interest has revived in the past few years, and some archeological work is now being conducted there. From our point of view, nothing remained but a sea-side camp ground, although if we had pursued it further, we might have found some fragments of walls.
The beach itself was an expanse of fine sand that looked to be at least 300 yards deep and extended in one direction as far as we could see. In the other direction it ended at the nearby port facilities, which were busy with ferry traffic. At least one, and usually several of these large vessels designed to haul dozens of cars and trucks and hundreds of passengers, was always in sight. To appreciate the volume of cross-channel traffic handled at Calais, one must keep in mind also that the tunnel port is only a couple of kilometers outside the city. With all this commercial and cultural interchange one wonders how the French and English can continue to stand apart from one another as though they have almost nothing in common.
Calais beach with ferry boat in the channel
The breeze freshened considerably out here away from the city buildings, but the low clouds continued continent. We took off our shoes and walked barefoot in the sand to the water's edge. No one was swimming or sunbathing, and the beach was practically deserted. A couple of people in the distance were digging clams, and another couple nearer by were wading in the low surf. Behind the seawall, of course were the hotels and restaurants, and on the sand just below the wall were hundreds of changing cabins just like the ones we had seen in Masterpiece Theater movies. It was the middle of July, but a very cool Monday morning, so we figured that was why the changing cabins were all pulled up next to the seawall as though in storage. We wondered how they were handled when the waves were high enough to reach the sea wall. We picked up some sand to go with our Omaha Beach sand, took some pictures, watched a kid in a sort of go-cart being pulled by a kite, and another group of people pulling a sailboat to the water's edge.
Kite-carting on Calais beach
The most active people on the beach were three groups of school children playing supervised games in small fenced in areas of the sand. They appeared to be in their school clothes, and their back packs were piled nearby. Several young adults accompanied each group, with one or sometimes two young women directing the children's activities while the men clustered at one side and talked wine or strikes, or whatever French teachers talk about in their spare time. The kids were having fun. The group nearest us looked to be sixth or seventh graders. Most of them eagerly participated in the singing and jumping about and waving of arms, but some of the bigger boys, trying to look macho hung back and barely went through the motions.
Beach games
Back at the seawall, our appetites sharpened by the fresh air, we checked the menus of several restaurants fronting on the beach. None of them were busy, and in only one was a terrace table occupied. We settled on one called Aujourd'hui le Dauphin and took a table that was on the terrace but screened from the wind by glass panels. Our waiter fit our stereotype for a seaside restaurant in northern France: early forties, dark hair, open collar revealing a tuft of chest hair, no apron, cocky mien. I ordered a tomato and tuna salad for my appetizer, and Minnie had a ham and cheese crêpe. For our main dishes I had cod in a mustard sauce with boiled potatoes, and Minnie had mussels cooked in white wine. We washed it down with the house white wine. For dessert Minnie had ice cream, and I a crêpe suzette. Everything was very good.
When we paid the tab, our waiter commented that we drank a lot of water. I told him we had to for our health. He said water isn't healthful. Jokingly, I said, "Seulement pour le bain," which I hoped meant, "Only good for bathing," because I had heard or read somewhere that that was a common French expression. He replied that it was only good for that, gesturing toward the ships in the channel.
After eating we strolled back up the Boulevard Jacquard noting as we passed that the basin that had been drained was now partially filled, and the boats were afloat. A husky elderly man in denim work clothes had rowed out to one of them in a little row boat and was tinkering with it while another man sat on a bench occasionally giving directions or perhaps commenting in a loud voice.
We walked to the Parc Saint-Pierre, which the Boulevard Jacquard skirts on the east and went in to take a look at the War Museum. Near the entrance to the park was a fountain, called the Fountain of the Three Graces, that is supposed to be a replica of a fountain at Versailles. It featured carvings of children playing under a large dish into which water poured from openings in an upper pedestal on which stood the three frolicking Graces. The fountain stood at the center of a sizable pool of water, and the area was shady and pleasant, so we found an unoccupied bench to rest a little and watch the kids playing at the edge of the pool. An Indian woman in her sari was on another bench nearby looking after three kids aged about four to nine, and on the other side of the fountain a couple of elderly women appeared to be baby-sitting a two-year-old and an eight-year-old. The kids were throwing pebbles into the water and trying to reach into the pool to retrieve some inestimably valuable bit of trash from its bottom. The surface of the water was a bit of a stretch for the smallest kids who appeared to be at some risk of falling in, but their "nannies," or grandparents, or whatever the were, chatted along with no apparent concern. At the edge of the fountain's dish we could see the bottom of a floating plastic bottle, but generally the park was clean of trash and looked fairly well tended. Better than the Rome park, not as good as the parks we had seen in Munich.
We spent a considerable time in the museum, which was quite interesting. It is housed in a former Nazi communications bunker that was converted to a museum in 1962. It consists of an underground corridor three-hundred feet long with rooms about as big as a medium-sized living room on both sides. Walls, floors, and low ceilings are all white-washed concrete. Most of the walls, including those of the corridor are hung with newspaper clippings and Nazi propaganda art where they're not covered by display cases containing weapons, parts of downed aircraft, military uniforms and other equipment, German, French, and English. There are also several models of battle scenes and one of a prisoner of war camp. It would be possible to spend days examining nothing but the newspaper and magazine articles, but we soon wearied of the depressing and closed-in environment as well as of the unyielding concrete floors. After a couple of hours we weren't halfway through with our merely cursory tour, but as there was no place inside the museum to sit or otherwise take a break, we had to get out. We returned to the overcast skies of the park and walked back to the hotel. We still had some wine and bread in our room and an apple we had bought at a street-side market, so we made supper of that, watched a little TV and went to bed.
The next morning the coffee-cream dispenser in the breakfast room was working, but the coffee still tasted awful. We checked out and paid in cash to get rid of Euros and asked the clerk to call a taxi to take us to the Hoverport. The driver was a woman, the first female driver we had had in Europe. She maneuvered businesslike and expertly through the tangle of streets around the port area, offering nothing in the way of conversation, and replying monosyllabically to my feeble overtures.
The Hoverport was clean and modern, and looked like a concourse at a small airport. We bought tickets and checked our bags, then looked around at the small concession stand, where the food was mostly of the prepackaged, cheap, and fattening variety. We picked up a copy of a free English-language newspaper and found seats on one side of the passageway near a door with a sign indicating that foot-passengers would depart through it. Through another set of glass doors at the end of the passageway, we could see the deserted hovercraft landing pad and cars lining up on it preparatory to driving aboard. We were curious about the cars parked right where we thought the hovercraft would stop.
As sailing time approached, the cars set off in single file across a short bridge and disappeared into another part of the port area. Then a bus came around to the side door, and we foot passengers climbed aboard. We followed the route the cars had taken across the former landing pad, over the bridge, and to the dock where a huge catamaran called Seacat was docked. This was when we discovered that these vessels, faster, quieter, and presumably more efficient than hovercraft, have replaced them as high-speed channel ferries. We boarded through a ramp similar to the loading ramps at airports.
The passenger cabin was quite large. Over the hulls on each side were more than a hundred well upholstered seats arranged in groups of six, three on either side of spacious tables. On the elevated deck between the hulls another couple of hundred people could have found seats similarly arranged at long tables. Nearly all of the seats were unoccupied. There was a duty-free shop in front under the bridge, and a bar at the back.
Doors opened to the outside deck at the back and there was a short stairway to an upper level in the front with windows to the outside and into the bridge. It was a bright, sunny day and the channel was calm. We left Calais at about 9:00 am, and the trip took less than an hour, so because England is in a different time zone, we arrived in Dover a little before 9:00. To dock, the craft was turned 180 degrees and backed into the docking space. The cars exited over a ramp at the stern, and one end of another covered catwalk like at an airport was lowered to the deck for foot passengers.
We came out in a nearly empty, purely functional concrete and steel concourse that looked like an empty warehouse left over from the 1920s. After collecting our bags from an airport style carrousel, we stopped at a nearby information stand to ask the young woman there to recommend a three- or four-star hotel. She said she wasn't sure about the rating, but she recommended the Churchill Hotel. She said it was on the beach front a five-minute walk away and said we could see it from the "brow" of the hill (meaning the slight rise in the street) just outside the port. We would recognize it by the yellow umbrellas over the tables on its terrace.
We followed her directions, and from the "brow," which was the middle of a short bridge over a canal or basin, we saw the beach with the hotels in the distance at the foot of a bluff on which was perched a medieval castle. From seaward, this bluff forms part of the famed white cliffs. We walked on the wide paved walkway along the beach, noting that in contrast with the fine sand of the Calais beach, Dover beach consists of rather large pebbles smoothed by eons of weathering.
Dover beach
The Churchill was one of several establishments in a long curved row of four-story white buildings, really all one building, and distinguished from its neighboring apartment and office buildings only by a modest painted sign.
Churchill Hotel and neighboring buildings
The lobby was high Victorian with lots of polished wood, glass, and brass. We booked a room with a view of the beach, and as our main target while in Dover was to visit the nearby site of the battle of Hastings, we asked the clerk the best was to get there. She said Hastings was quite a distance, more than an hour by train, which didn't seem like much to us. She didn't know how to get from Hastings to Battle. She thought we might have to rent a car.
The second floor hallway of the Churchill was narrow, the ceilings high, the doorways trimmed with broad planks of white-painted decorative wood. Our room was even more Victorian than the lobby, with painted wood trim, antique bathroom fixtures, and lumpy twin beds that turned out to be quite comfortable. It overlooked the beach and had a small balcony with a table and chairs. We could imagine that Matthew Arnold had slept here, maybe sat one moonlit summer's night on this very balcony and listened to:
"...the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow..."
But, for us there were no waves. The Channel was calm, but the beach is now sheltered by a long mole or jetty designed to put a stop to any poetic "beginning" and "ceasing" nonsense.
View from Churchill Hotel