Chez Katherine

Tuesday 23 January 2007

When we arrived at Saint-Denis last Tuesday we called in first at the Renault garage to see about a navigation disc for Germany - the car had been equipped with navigation for France, but anything else had to be ordered separately. N asked about one for the UK too, while we were there, and it threw them into quite a stir; apparently nobody had ever asked for such a thing before; one or two people had needed them for Spain and Portugal but that was all. And they say the British are insular! Fortunately he was able to go back and collect them from the garage on Thursday, the day before we left.

As usual these days, since no longer having the lock-up garage opposite, we try to drive into the Ursulines, unload the luggage at the foot of our staircase, and then N drives the car back to the municipal car park while I turn on the heating, sort things out, put the kettle on etc. Driving into the Ursulines isn't always easy; if we're lucky the huge doors are open; otherwise they need dragging open while the car is parked in the road, or waiting to get in while several irate pedestrians mutter on the pavement. We never know quite what's going to happen.

Once in and settled, I discovered from the free local paper waiting in the letter box that on the afternoon of December 26 when I came back before going off on Eurostar the next day and was trying hard to get warm, somebody was knifed to death in the next street! Not a mugging, but a settling of scores, the article said.


On Wednesday I went shopping in Paris, looked at sales and bought presents from Lafayette Gourmet to take on my visits. N had by this time caught my cough and cold, and was busy administering himself with remedies and tissues. On Thursday evening I was able to go to the Chorale for the first time in many months; from his gesture I think the chef thought it was rather too long a break, but I was kissed warmly by several members who seemed pleased to see me, including the concierge! Marie-Christine came in late and slipped in beside me; still acting like the bad girl of the class, and making me think of George Sand in her convent. We spent most of the rehearsal working on Fauré's Requiem, which I had sung some years ago and liked, then started on a motet by Palestrina. M-C didn't know when the concert would be, so I was glad (as Parry says) that I should be able to go again in a fortnight, and if there's no fixed date then, perhaps ask her to let me know. As I left a little old lady called Simone said to me "So how long are we going to keep you this time then?"

The next morning we set off on our Winterreise, in rather grey weather, taking the same route out of Paris as last year when we used to go to the dentist at Nogent-sur-Marne, and then on towards Rheims which we had visited together about five years ago. As we got nearer to the Belgian border the landscape became greyer and starker, and we decided we should stop for lunch as soon as saw somewhere possible. This turned out to be an imposing venue called the Hotel de l'Europe at Sedan, very near the border - we tried to remember anything we knew about Sedan and decided there was a link with Napoleon, but couldn't remember what it was. The lunch - in an almost deserted dining room - was excellent; home-made rillettes (soft pork pâté), mousse made with several kinds of fish and served with soft vegetables and cream sauce, and crème brulée. Excellent chilled rosé for me, and unfortunately only water for N.

Crossing the frontiers between the various countries was merely a matter of driving past a blue sign with the name of the country; in some cases there were empty customs buildings and even defunct Bureaux de Change; three cheers for a united Europe! Because N had chosen not to buy the expensive navigation disc for the Benelux countries the map on the car screen just petered out into a black hole, and we followed maps and signs. We saw a lot of storm damage from the previous day; tall trees snapped in two, branches across roads and evidence of trees cut where they had fallen and blocked traffic. There were several flooded rivers too, high on their banks with trees growing out of the water. Our first destination was the City of Luxembourg, of which N had happy memories as a teenager, and where we stopped for a late afternoon walk. I am not usually in the habit of buying English newspapers while abroad, but stopped to get a Daily Telegraph full of photos of accidents and damage in Britain. This also enabled me to hear spoken Luxembourgeois for the first time in the newspaper shop!

It was indeed a beautiful city, and quite unlike anything I had ever seen before, full of elegant stuccoed buildings in pale yellow, pink, cream and white, and a deep gorge full of beautiful trees at the bottom of which was a tiny river. We visited the cathedral, mostly dating from the late 1930's, and I tried to grasp the entire history of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in a few minutes, from a poster on the cathedral wall. Driving out of the other side of the city at about five o'clock, we made slow progress passing through an avenue of large office blocks just as the workers were leaving, and noticed the Clearstream Building. This is a familiar name to anyone who has been watching French TV news recently; a scandal of rigged bank accounts involving several government ministers has taken its name - like Watergate - from the building where the scandal originated, the Clearstream Building in Luxembourg, and this was it! I realised I had seen nothing of the only other Luxembourg connection I knew anything about - Radio Luxembourg - and N said this was further out of the city, and we soon saw tall red and white masts, with a very small building underneath.

We drove on to Echternach, on the far side of Luxembourg, where N had booked our hotel for the night. Having found the town, we could not see the hotel where it was supposed to be near the station, and I was sent out into the pedestrian area to make enquiries. I happened upon the only local inhabitant who did not speak French! but she directed me to a man with some connection to the hotel (we saw him there later) and he explained how to drive round to the front.

It was a pleasant little hotel, almost empty, full of elegant Christmas decorations and narrow and tall with lots of tiring stairs. (N was feeling feeble because of his cold, and I am always nervous of steep spiral staircases when wearing long a coat and carrying heavy bags!) We went for a walk round the town; all shops shut by that time, but were able to note the mixture of different French and German languages, cultures and even religions, from what we could see. We saw the very important monastery which N had visited before, and which made me think of the Ursulines.

Because of our very copious lunch at Sedan we were unable to summon up much appetite for dinner, and explained this to the waiter; French speaking but obviously not his native language. In the end we both ordered fish, sole for me and trout for N, with a whole bottle of wonderful Luxembourgeois Riesling, quite the best wine we tasted during the whole journey.

After a solitary breakfast the next morning, we set off for Germany; if the weather had been better it would have been tempting to investigate the town, but as it was grey and raining it seemed best to leave. This was the first time I had visited Germany for about 25 years, and I was intrigued to see things I remembered; shops, signs, buildings and those little fences on the edges of roofs to stop the snow sliding off too quickly. We stopped mid-morning at a little town called Stromberg and had a walk round looking at houses, shops and the market and calling in for Kaffee und Küchen (coffee & cake, one of my favourite German institutions!) served in the local bread and cake shop. I thought about the boulangerie in La Neuve-Lyre, and wondered how they all were, and how it would be if they had tables for serving cake and coffee there. N queued for some time in the post office for stamps, and after he had written and posted his cards we set off again.

At lunch time we stopped in a little town called Bingen - once the heavy rain had stopped and we had admired a beautiful rainbow - and realized when we saw posters that this was the home of Hildegard of Bingen. At a little supermarket we stocked up on N's favourite German Ritter chocolate (lately unavailable in France) and I found hair colouring a third of the price of that in Carrefour! We had lunch in a spacious comfortable bistro, and set off for Erbach, the little town on the Rhine where Erika's party was to be held, and where we had a room reserved in a hotel five minutes down the street.

It took some time to find, as the car navigation had trouble distinguishing Eltville-Erbach from Erbach (as did we) but after asking and following signs we came upon the hotel in a very English-looking road with large house and trees and a church. (I saw many things in Germany which made me think more of England than France, including houses with gardens and also bicycles.) The hotel, as we read later in the literature provided, had been built after the French Revolution in the style of a French country house by an ancestor of the present owner, why in a suburban street in Germany, it was not clear. We saw no other guests at all - as in the Luxembourg hotel, January was obviously not a busy month - and it was a little like staying in someone's - rather grand - house, especially the next morning when our "host" asked if we had slept well and insisted on carrying our bags to the car.

We had time for a little rest before the party which began at 6.00, in a wine establishment - tasting, restaurant, shop - a few minutes down the road. All the guests were milling about drinking glasses of wine before sitting down to dinner at about 7.00; Erika found us and kindly introduced us to some English-speaking friends, with whom we had several conversations about Cambridge, Italy, Normandy and also Lewis Carroll, the subject of someone's PhD! Most of them were very smooth, elegant upper-class Germans in their fifties and sixties, and I was pleased to note that my pink silky jacket seemed just the right thing to wear - several ladies including Erika, were wearing something similar, often with black, as I was. N had decided to wear his Bavarian jacket, and fortunately sat next to a lady from Bavaria who recognised it.

There was a seating plan with names of guests on differently named tables, rather like a Cambridge college dinner, (Erika had said there would be about a hundred) and once seated we were served some spicy soup and then invited to help ourselves from lavishly laid tables in the next room, to meats, salads, vegetables, pickles, cheeses, fruits and desserts. Unfortunately none of the wine was as good as the Riesling we had drunk in the hotel at Echternach! The main topic of conversation was "So how do you know Erika, then?" and I was pleased to say that each time I explained that for several years running she had stayed with me in my house in Cambridge, the response was always the same: "She was so happy there, I remember her saying how much she enjoyed it."

There were the inevitable speeches, one by Erika's daughter and another by a work colleague, which we found difficult to understand - as they were full of references which went over our heads - and sometimes difficult to hear too, and then "personalised" songs from a trio with guitar and accordion. All of these made everyone - especially Erika - laugh very loudly, so they must have been a success. We decided to leave at about 10.00 as we were tired with all the understanding, plus N's cold and the fact that many of the guests were smoking at table and in some instances into our faces; something we have not been used to lately in France or England. We also wanted to make an early start the next day.

After a wonderful night's sleep - absolutely no sound anywhere in the street or the hotel - breakfast was impressive in a beautifully decorated dining room, where we sat in isolated splendour on a raised dais in front of a window at the far end, and N said it was good to be back on High Table again. (All our German and Luxembourgeois breakfasts were copiously interesting; lots of ham, cheese, eggs, fruit, different kinds of dark bread and preserves, and all the beds, as I remembered from before, were made up with duvets rather than sheets and blankets as in French and English hotels.)

We set off early and drove along the side of the Rhine as far as Koblenz in beautiful sunshine, passing hardly any other traffic, and reflecting that 9.30 on a Sunday morning in January was perhaps a good time for sightseeing in peace and quiet without the crowds. As the river curved round we caught sight of fairy-tale castles in differing states of disrepair perched on the hills and every so often a group of little houses down at ground level. Sometimes we drove past souvenir shops right by the river which made me think of the seaside, until one looked carefully at the Christmas decorations in the windows.
We stopped at Koblenz and got out for a very cold walk; everything was closed in the town, (N said, if you had a café here would you open it today?) but we found one or two souvenir stalls selling postcards by the side of the river. N wanted to see the Deutsche Eck - the German Corner - where the Moselle joins the Rhine in a triangle, and where there is a very large statue of Kaiser Wilhelm II. We had thought we might stop for a drink in Koblenz and then have lunch in Bonn, which was our next destination, but having eventually got back in the car with no drink and very cold, decided to go straight to the hotel in Bonn.

The hotel - previously booked by N over the internet - was called the Hotel Beethoven; there was just one reproduction portrait of him in Reception. The plan had been to visit the house where Beethoven had been born, but N had found out - also by internet - that it was closed to the public between September and April. Fortunately the Hotel Beethoven had a restaurant so we were able to go straight down and have lunch, without having to go out and look for anywhere. I was doing quite well - if slowly - with understanding the menu, when the waitress told me that what I had just understood and chosen was Off, and suggested we had Salmon Florentine, which was very good indeed. It came with compulsory soup and dessert but warmed us up wonderfully.

After a little rest we set off for a walk around Bonn, thinking that at least we could look at the outside of Beethoven's house, but found the street closed by police; we assumed some kind of storm damage. We did find however that the hotel was right next to the Opera House, and that The Marriage of Figaro was playing that night at 6.00 and the Box Office opened at 5.00. We continued our walk round the centre of Bonn, a nice little old town, and called in at an organ concert in the cathedral where all the seats were already taken, and later found that Beethoven's street was by then accessible, so looked in the windows of his house. It all reminded me of walking round Lille with Madeleine last winter; a northern town in the cold weather on a Sunday afternoon with all the shops shut, and more and more people coming out just to walk round and look at each other and sit in coffee houses.

We went back to the Opera House at 5.00, and while N queued for tickets I stood and read a poster which told me amongst other things that this was the first night of The Marriage of Figaro, and sure enough it was completely booked up, which was a pity as apart from anything else I thought we would have been able to nip back to the hotel and change into the clothes we had worn for the party the previous night. (Once when we were in Rome, we ended up going to the opera in our sightseeing clothes, which wasn't right at all.)

Amazingly however, we managed to get two tickets which had been returned, by which time it was too late to go back and change, but at least we were more respectably dressed than in Rome! This was just as well, as the Bonn opera-goers were extremely formally dressed, even more so than at the Bastille in Paris. We both agreed they we just the same sort of people we had met at the party the night before.

The production was very good, apart from some overdone unrehearsed curtain calls which seemed to go on for ever. The singing was excellent, and the costumes and sets an interesting mixture of ancient and modern; I liked Susannah's T-shirt which had Figaro written across the front, and the way the gardener used his rake as a rock guitar. Understanding the more complicated parts was linguistically challenging; darting between the Italian singing and the German surtitles. We had ice creams during the interval, while surveying the audience, quite enough after our large late lunch. It was all over by 9.30; very civilised.

After breakfast at the Hotel Beethoven, overlooking the Rhine and watching people going to work in the early light on bicycles and trams, we set off early on Monday morning for Cologne; not far away. Our main aims here were the Cathedral and the 4711 shop in order to buy Eau de Cologne, and I thought from what N had said that it would be a very brief visit, but we managed to find time to have hot chocolate and cake in another very stylish bistro, as N said, not so much because we needed it but more for the cultural experience.

Cologne cathedral was a very cultural experience; I don't think I have ever seen a cathedral so big and black and forbidding and ornate. As N had remembered, it was right next to the station, which was undergoing a complete rebuilding programme, so it was hard work getting in and out of the underground car park. The 4711 shop also took some finding but was worth it, and we both enjoyed buying gifts to take back to female relations.

Towards the end of the morning we drove on to Aachen (or Aix-La-Chapelle), where N wanted to show me Charlemagne's chapel, the centre of the Holy Roman Empire. Built in the year 800, this was indeed impressive; all the more as the marble for the mosaics had been purloined from Ravenna Cathedral in Italy, which we had visited together on an extremely hot day a few years ago. This must have been an amazing task at that time - what if there weren't enough pieces of the right colours, did somebody have to nip back and get them?? We were lucky to find a guided tour just starting and so were able to see some of Charlemagne's treasure including his throne, but not everything N had seen when he was there before. Our guide mentioned the Basilica of Saint-Denis, but spoke very quickly so we missed the significance of this.

After a quick walk round town - by this time unsure exactly which town we were in or what day it was - we had an unmemorable late lunch in a nearby bistro called Maus am Dom (the cathedral mouse) and set off back to Paris via several motorways, and stopping to reinsert the car navigation disc for France. The car radio was full of the news of the death of Abbé Pierre, the French hero, and of severe weather warnings for the next day. Unusually, we had seen no snow whatsoever during our entire trip; although we saw several pine forests and little steep-roofed houses which looked as though they should have been covered in a sprinkling of snow. We made two stops at service stations for tea and dinner, and driving in the dark via Mons and the Somme, arrived home just after 9.30 pm.