EAK does Europe

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Speyer

Our next stop was Speyer, another German city along the Rhine. We didn't get there until the afternoon, at which point it was excursion time.

My mom decided to take the day off, so I abandoned the "gentle walkers" group and joined one of the regular groups instead. Our tour guide was a Portuguese instructor at a nearby university, and he primarily explained the history of Catholicism to us as we schlepped around the city.

I forgot to mention that, of course, there has been a heat wave in the Rhine valley during our trip. I'm starting to think I have some sort of weather powers, bringing unpleasant heat with me wherever I travel. It's been in the mid to high 80s most days, which isn't as bad as Jilli's and my 100-degree Italian adventure, but still not ideal.

Anyway, our tour guide primarily gave us a religious history lesson about Catholic indulgences and the emergence of Protestantism, which I guess was technically relevant because Speyer was the birthplace of Protestantism, but like... it was also the (supposed) birthplace of pretzels, and I would have liked to hear more about that, especially since all the little guys on the walk/don't walk signals are carrying pretzels.

The main attraction in Speyer was — say it with me — the Cathedral.

At one point the emperor didn't like the pope and tried to make Speyer the new Catholic pilgrimage site by building a huge cathedral and filling it with relics, including C3PO's head and someone's femur-based crafts project.

Unlike the elaborate gothic cathedrals in the other cities, this one is Romanesque, meaning it is much simpler and less adorned.

But it did have this neat candle altar thing shaped like a tree with weird animals and bugs on it.

Also, while we were wandering around inside the cathedral, our tour guide apparently got shat on by a bird, and he didn't turn his microphone off, so we were all treated to him muttering a volley of "scheisse!" to himself while we admired the austere beauty of the architecture.

The tour ended after that, and we were set loose upon the town to do whatever we wanted. It was really hot so I wandered around a bit but ultimately headed back to the ship in dire need of a shower and dinner.

Many days without a good night's sleep were catching up to me, so unfortunately I had to skip trivia night (unfortunate for the people whose team I would have wound up on — I'm great at trivia) and went to bed early.

[eakdoeseurope]

From Koblenz to Rüdesheim

As we sailed on from Koblenz to Rüdesheim, we passed through the lower Rhine valley, which might have the highest density of castles in the world.

We also passed many terraced vineyards, which despite their terracing were still at angles that seemed very impractical.

We docked in Rüdesheim while dinner was underway, and a flock of at least a hundred geese floated tranquilly past as we dined.

There weren't any excursions for Rüdesheim because we were just docked there for the evening, but after dinner, I decided to go for a walk around town. The waterfront had a very nice promenade lined with highly pruned trees, many of which had mourning doves nested atop their gnarled leaf-fists.

The rest of the town was... not particularly interesting, although that could have been because it was 9pm and everything was closed. There was, unsurprisingly, a church.

At this point I realized I did not know for sure what time I needed to be back at the ship for departure. I was pretty sure it was 9:45, but I couldn't get the app to load to double-check, and I also made the mistake of not "tapping out" with my card when I left the ship (you tap out when you leave and tap in when you return so they can keep track of who is and isn't on the ship), so I started to panic that the departure time was actually earlier than 9:45 and I would be left behind in a nighttime Rüdesheim with all the mourning doves and the church and not much else. I speed-walked back to the ship and found my very unconcerned mom, who informed me that departure time was actually 11:45.

On to Speyer!

[eakdoeseurope]

The many stained glass styles of the Liebfrauenkirche in Koblenz

a.k.a. I guess this is what happens when a lot of your church gets bombed by the allies in WWII.

[eakdoeseurope]

Koblenz

Our next stop after Köln was Koblenz, another (much smaller) German city. If I'm being honest, I do not remember much about this city. Our tour guide talked a lot about military history, and military history bounces off my brain like a space shuttle approaching the Earth's atmosphere at too shallow an angle. Who is the man on the horse in that enormous statue? I have no idea. But I do remember that the horse's ass is facing France.

The main attraction, like most of the towns on our route, is a cathedral. This one had beautiful painted details on the vaulted ceilings. It also had a very wide assortment of styles of stained glass, which I'll share in a separate post.

The other thing I learned about Koblenz is that their mascot is a little spitting boy. Again, I don't remember the details of why, but they have a fountain of him and all of their manhole covers have him on them.

I was hoping to take the cable car up to the giant hill-top fortress with my free time after the trip, but unfortunately we didn't have much time left over after our tour, so instead I wandered around a little bit and took in the scenery. They had a really nice fabric shop that it's probably for the best I didn't have time to browse.

From there we headed back to the ship so we could set sail for Rüdesheim!

[eakdoeseurope]

Some favorites from the Museum Ludwig in Köln

"Portable War Memorial" by Edward Kienholz

Some Picasso sculptures:

A Marie Watt installation:

Karl Schmidt:

Bernard Schulze:

Didn't write down the name of this artist and can't find it on Google:

And I thought it was extremely funny that, in his depiction of artistic geniuses, Max Ernst painted himself noticeably hotter than everyone else.

[eakdoeseurope]

Some favorites from the Museum of Applied Arts in Köln

An Eames leg splint:

These stackable dinnerware sets:

This awesome lighting fixture (which sadly costs like a thousand dollars but maybe I'll try to make my own interpretation of it):

A chair that looks like (or is made out of?) a shopping cart:

A deer pendant made out of a freshwater pearl:

Ancient Roman glass made into a necklace:

This stunning maple seed hairpin:

A cool brooch:

An old paint stirring stick whose cross-sections were made into brooches:

And this very whimsical glasses necklace:

[eakdoeseurope]

Köln

Our next stop on the river cruise was Köln, aka Cologne. (Köln is the birthplace of Eau du Cologne, but almost every perfume gives me a headache so I did not explore that element of the city.)

We docked on the opposite bank of the river, giving us this lovely view of the famous cathedral and the pedestrian/train bridge that leads into town.

We've been in the "leisure" tour group, which consists of the people with mobility issues. Instead of us walking over the bridge, we were bused directly to the city center, where we saw the cathedral and went inside.

After that, I escorted my mom back to the bus, and stayed behind in the city. It was a holiday in Germany — Pentecost — which meant that all the stores were closed, and the usually bustling high street was empty.

But it also meant that the museums, which are usually closed on Mondays, were open, which was good news for me! First, though, I had to have lunch. I wanted something small and casual, and I saw that there was a currywurst takeaway near the Old Market square. I'd had currywurst in Berlin and it was pretty gross, but I decided to give it another try, and I'm glad I did because Köln currywurst is actually good. Whereas the one I had in Berlin was a literal hot dog covered in a ketchup-based curry sauce, this was a grilled bratwurst cut up and covered in actual, non-ketchup based curry sauce. I sat on the plaza and had it along with a zero sugar Fritz Kola, a local soda that tastes so much like Coke Zero that I think they might just be decanting 2L Coke Zeros into their own bottle.

This is the Rathaus, which apparently means "city hall."

Anyway, my first museum was the MAKK, or Museum of Applied Arts. If you know me, you know I love crafts and design, so this was perfect for me.

It was a small but well-curated museum, with sections following the chronological evolution of Western design. They also had a special exhibit about the history of jewelry, which was fun. And, as a bonus, because it's not one of the most popular museums in the city, it was pretty empty, which always makes for a more pleasant experience. As usual, I'll share some favorites from the museum in another post.

After the MAKK, I headed to the Museum Ludwig, Köln's modern art museum.

They had a Yayoi Kusama special exhibit going on but I think it was sold out. But out on the rooftop terrace they had some of her sculptures with a much better backdrop anyway.

This museum was also really confusingly laid out, but I enjoyed their collections, which included a surprising number of Picassos, many of which were sculptures. Pictures in another post; you know the deal.

After that I meandered through the massive flea market set up on the promenade along the riverfront. When I say massive, I mean massive; it must have been at least a mile of tents. Lots of random antiques, jewelry, and the occasional food vendor.

Unlike Berlin, people in Köln largely either don't speak English or don't care about accommodating English speakers. I say this without any resentment; it makes my experience slightly more difficult but that's fine and entirely my fault! I was nonetheless able to buy something for my dad from one of the antiques vendors. (No spoilers!)

Then it was time to return to the ship, so I walked across the footbridge, which is covered in thousands upon thousands of love locks.

It also has this fun sculpture hanging off it, which a seagull decided to keep company.

Got back to the ship in time for dinner, and then rested while my mom went to a classical music performance in the lounge.

[eakdoeseurope]

A brief interlude about food

One thing I was unprepared for was the sheer amount of food that is available on the ship. Lunch AND dinner are three-course meals, though there's also a buffet available in a different area of the ship. I do appreciate that they provide smaller, fine-dining-style portion sizes, so it isn't QUITE as overwhelming as it could have been. I also appreciate that it's been very easy to eat vegetables, which isn't usually the case when traveling.

I haven't been very consistent about taking photos of the food, but here's what I've photographed so far.

Bonus tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce:

[eakdoeseurope]

Kinderdijk

First things first: no motion sickness whatsoever! The ship doesn't even feel like it's moving. It's actually MORE disorienting to look out the windows than it is to just read a book.

Our first stop on the cruise was Kinderdijk, a place that is known for one thing: windmills. I never put much thought into why there were so many windmills in the Netherlands; I think I assumed that they were for milling grain, but why would the Netherlands need more grain than anyone else. Anyway, turns out they're for pumping water to the other side of the dikes, because for whatever reason people decided to create a coastal country below sea level.

Kinderdijk is a UNESCO site because of its many old windmills, all of which are still inhabited and operational, even though they have developed much more advanced ways of moving water from one side of the dike to the other.

It was a pretty windless day, so we didn't get to actually see the windmills turn, though we did see one of the millers opening up the sailcloth on the lattices in the hopes of catching a breeze.

One of the windmills is set up as a museum, and you can go inside and climb ladders to the various levels to see how millers and their families used to live in them. The beds were extremely small and set in cupboards for some reason.

We also went into the old pumping station that first replaced the windmills, which contained some extremely large steam-powered water pumps.

There's a statue floating in one of the canals that represents the (probably apocryphal) story of how Kinderdijk (child dike) got its name: a baby was found floating down the canal in a basket, with a cat jumping from side to side to keep the basket steady. I'm not sure where the cat enters into the name, but the statue is cute.

Another fun fact I learned about windmills is that the miller rotates the top depending on the direction the wind is blowing. There is an elaborate crank system that allows a single person to rotate the enormous top section of the mill.

We left Kinderdijk at noon for the very long trip to Köln. I took a nap and then spent the rest of the day and evening sitting on the sundeck, reading. We passed under some cool bridges.

We also passed beach cows, which was an odd thing to see. I'd be sitting there on the sun deck, and I'd suddenly hear a bunch of mooing, and there they were, enjoying the beach.

[eakdoeseurope]

The thing about being on a cruise is that you'll be having a perfectly pleasant conversation with someone at dinner, and then an hour in they say the word "illegals" and the smile drops off your face so quickly you might have sprained a muscle.

[eakdoeseurope]

Amsterdam, day 4

Today was mostly about getting to the ship, but before we checked out of the hotel this morning, I went for one last walk in Amsterdam.

I strolled down a street with some of the most robust rose bushes I've ever seen, and stopped by the National Holocaust Name Monument. As a semiotician, I'm always fascinated by how Holocaust memorials are designed. This one consisted of four different jagged structures with reflective geometric tops. From above, the shapes spell out "In Memoriam" in Hebrew.

Each of the hundred thousand bricks that made up the walls had the name of a a Holocaust victim on it. It was, as intended, an overwhelming thing to witness. It was powerful to see Anne Frank on there, just another brick alongside 102,000 others, reminding us that although she might be the most well known, the millions of others who were killed had lives just as rich and worth saving.

I walked back to the hotel through a park that ran alongside a canal. I saw this heron that seemed to think it was a pigeon.

As I continued my meander along the canal-side path, I saw a couple looking at something in the water. It was a pigeon, floating along like a duck. A strange sight! They continued on their way, and I continued on my way, but then I thought "that pigeon didn't look so great. I should Google whether pigeons can get out of the water." It turns out they get waterlogged very quickly, at which point they struggle to exhaustion and then drown. I went back to find the floating pigeon, which looked like it might already be dead, but then it slightly moved its head. So I scrambled down the embankment to the edge of the canal, where I miraculously found a large, loose tree branch, which I used to drag the pigeon out of the water.

I managed to get it onto the sloped pavement at the edge of the canal, but I couldn't do any complex moving of a sopping wet, floppy pigeon with my tree branch. I also did not want to touch it with my bare hands. Luckily, during our Italy trip, Jilli taught me the utility of always having a plastic bag with you. So out of my purse came the trusty Trader Joe's bag that has traveled thousands of miles with me. I stuck my hands in it and used it as a protective layer to pick up the pigeon and carry it back up the embankment.

I had no idea what to do with it at that point, because I need to get back to my hotel, so I placed it on the grass in a patch of sun so it could hopefully dry out and warm up.

Since I've started my European travels, I've developed a fondness for pigeons. I like that they are everywhere I've been, adapting to so many different places. I think we tend to overlook how pretty they are because we're so used to seeing them everywhere, and that reminds me of my own academic project of making the familiar strange. From now on I'll associate them with my travels even more strongly. I hope you are doing well, Amsterdam pigeon. And if not, I hope you at least got to die a little warmer than you would have otherwise.

Anyway, my mom and I have boarded our river cruise ship, and unpacked our belongings in our comically small room. The porter took my suitcase through our ship and into the ship that was docked alongside it (river cruise ships often dock abreast, with one serving as a bridge for the other), but I noticed him doing it because I have a very distinctive suitcase, so I stopped him afterwards and was like "that very colorful suitcase you just brought onto the other ship does not belong there."

Soon I'll find out whether I get motion sickness on a river cruise. Stay tuned!

[eakdoeseurope]

The two genders.

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A few favorites from the Van Gogh Museum.

First, some paintings that were actually done by Van Gogh:

I also liked this tiny painting by Seurat:

This is by Leo Gestel, whom I'd never heard of (one of my lifelong ambitions is to be able to paint the sky the way impressionists did, combining normal colors in ways that seem to glow):

And finally, I found it amusing that when Van Gogh asked two of his friends, Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, to send him portraits of one another, they decided to troll him by sending self-portraits instead, but with portraits of the other in the background.

[eakdoeseurope]

Amsterdam, day 3

For our one full day together in Amsterdam, we checked off our two "must-see" things, both of which made me cry.

The first was the Van Gogh Museum.

Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists, which is extremely unoriginal of me but, I mean, *gestures to his oeuvre*. Although most of his most famous works are elsewhere (growing up in NYC, I could easily see "Starry Night" in person), it was nice to see so much of his work in one place, and to see it alongside some of the artists who influenced him. And, of course, heartbreaking to see it in the context of his struggles with mental health. I was doing okay until I got to "Almond Blossoms" at the end, which was already one of my favorites, and learned that he painted it months before his death for his newborn nephew, Theo's son Vincent, and that he put particular effort into it. And, indeed, seeing the painting in person, you could see that it was much more detailed than his other work, and now I'm crying again writing about it.

(I didn't take a ton of photos in the museum because I wanted to mostly absorb the paintings in person, but I'll share a few favorites in another post.)

After the Van Gogh Museum we headed to lunch at Frank's Smoke House, where they make a wide variety of smoked meats.

They also make sandwiches with said smoked meats. I ordered a Dutch specialty, the smoked eel. My mom, who is a less adventurous eater, went with the lox.

After resting up in the hotel room for a while, we headed to De 9 Straatjes (the 9 streets), a shopping area spread across three different islands, where we walked around for a bit. My exciting purchase of the day was at a silk shop, where I got seven sample pieces of Dupioni silk for €5.

Then it was time for our second big thing, the Anne Frank House. There's nothing to say about it that hasn't been said before, but it was extremely sad and made me think about the unimaginable suffering that happened at the hands of the German government and the unimaginable suffering that is happening now to immigrants in the US and Palestinians in Gaza.

Anyway, here's a cool doorway and a big ship we saw.

After that we went to dinner at the Pancake Bakery, where I got a ham and cheese crepe the size of a truck tire and my mom got poffertjes (tiny little pancakes) with cherries and vanilla ice cream.

Every table had a big, open vat of communal syrup with a wooden spoon stuck in it. Surely it wasn't decorative, but it's hard to imagine anyone actually using it (especially since there was a perfectly normal bottle of the same syrup next to it). As my mom said, "once something flies into that, it isn't flying out."

Stuffed full of pancake, we returned to the hotel. After many irritating issues with Uber, I've found that the only way to reliably get paired with a driver in Amsterdam is to choose "priority." It seems to be a seller's market here for Uber drivers — high demand, low supply — and you know what? Good for them. You get that bag, Dutch Uber drivers. You're braver than I.

Tomorrow our river cruise begins!

[eakdoeseurope]

I've never seen artificial bellybuttons used to display jewelry before. They look like little mouths, which reminds me of that Levi's low-rise jeans commercial circa 2000 where grotesque CGI-ed bellybuttons sang "I'm Coming Out."

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Amsterdam, day 2, part 2

After the Wereldmuseum, I returned to the hotel to retrieve my slightly-more-rested mom. Our first destination was the KattenKabinet, a museum devoted to my mom's favorite thing: cats. Basically a guy who really loved cats bought a big house and filled it with cat art. I can relate, other than the "bought a big house" part.

It was a small museum (one floor of the house) but every square foot was jam-packed with as much cat content as possible.

There was even an original Picasso print (top left), which had an X drawn through it to indicate that Picasso did not actually like the print enough to continue making it, which is presumably how it wound up in some random dude's cat museum.

There was also a resident cat: this absolute unit of an orange Maine Coon who bore a striking resemblance to Ron Perlman.

From there we went to the nearby flower market, which consisted of a bunch of stalls selling identical touristy products and a lot of different flower bulbs.

One of the stalls was actually on a boat floating in the canal, and the "ceiling" was all bouquets of dried flowers hanging from a lattice.

From there we crossed the street to visit the "Mouse Mansion," a store dedicated to an extremely large and elaborate dollhouse inhabited by toy mice.

Apparently there's an entire mythology with specific mouse characters, and you can buy supplies to make your own versions of these characters or kits to make houses for them to live in. You can also buy many different children's books about them. I don't know, I just like tiny versions of big things.

I especially liked their mouse-based miniature of Vermeer's Milkmaid.

After that I bought a fresh stroopwafel and ate it while we waited for our Uber back to the hotel.

The sidewalk outside the stroopwafel bakery was mobbed by pigeons, who knew where a good meal could be found.

The Uber driver kept getting further and further away, saying that a road was closed(?), so eventually I cancelled the ride and made my poor mom walk more to take public transportation.

We had a light dinner at the dumpling restaurant 50 feet away from our hotel, and now it is time for me to sleep.

[eakdoeseurope]

Amsterdam, day 2, part 1

I started the morning off at Schiphol airport, meeting my mom. I was waiting for quite a while. Although I breezed through passport control yesterday when I arrived, apparently today was a much busier travel day, because she had to wait in line for nearly an hour. Combine that with just having experienced her first ever 10-hour flight, and let's just say she was ready to go to the hotel room and take a nap.

While she did that, I went to the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, a museum of human cultures that I actually found incredibly well done. Most of the time, non-Western art and artifacts are exhibited in "natural history" museums alongside dinosaur fossils and gemstones, perpetuating the idea that non-Westerners are a "natural" relic of the past.

The Wereldmuseum is an anthropology museum that demonstrates what (contemporary) cultural anthropology really is. Their exhibits are oriented around the legacy of colonialism and the racist opposition between "science" and indigenous knowledge and practice. They combine contemporary artifacts with ancient ones, but not in a way that flattens history. The exhibits frankly discuss colonial oppression and the resistance to that oppression. I was seriously impressed.

They had a room about the racist origins of anthropology, where they had phrenology tools on display. They also had a section on stereotypical representations, and I thought it was funny that they included two Japanese prints that made fun of Dutch people.

A lot of the museum was self-reflexive about the ethical problems with exhibiting cultural artifacts obtained through colonialism. They used to have a Mixtec mosaic skull, but they recently repatriated it to Mexico, and replaced it with an empty display case and an installation about the repatriation process, including the letters that were sent to the Dutch government requesting the return of the skull.

One of their special exhibitions was by Larissa Sansour, a Palestinian artist. I especially liked her project "Archaeology in Absentia," which was linked to her film "In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain." She buried pieces of pottery decorated with traditional Palestinian motifs around Israel and the West Bank, and repurposed munitions casings to carry the coordinates of the locations where the pottery is buried.

The other special exhibit was "Made in China," which explored the history of Chinese innovations and their impact on global trade (and vice versa). This exhibit was also very cool. This ivory carving consisting of 17(!) nested, independently moving spheres was particularly impressive.

I also enjoyed this display of brushes made from different animals' hair, especially since I got to touch them all. I've always wondered what a squirrel feels like, and now I can report that they are very soft. "Chicken hair" is also very soft.

On the first floor they had a series of small rooms that each addressed a "hot topic." I was very moved by this exhibit of bags containing everything that particular refugees took with them when they fled their home countries.

I also really liked the room about climate change, which was focused on the slow disappearance of the Marshall Islands. Small windows cut into the walls allowed you to look at photos and videos of the Marshall Islands, but you could only view pieces at a time.

In case you couldn't tell, I was really impressed with the Wereldmuseum. It's what a cultural anthropology museum should be. It started out like any other colonial project, but the changes they've made are huge. I hope more museums follow suit.