Sunny September in Holland September 15-30, 2014

from Julianne

Rembrandt, Van Gogh, windmills, canals

—this is what comes to mind for many when thinking of visiting Netherlands.   Me, too until now.

But--Oreo Cookies?  I have now come to understand that Holland, specifically Wormerveer and Zanse Schans in Zaanstadt, where we are staying, is the center of the universe for the chocolate that is used for Oreo cookies.  No Holland, no Oreos.  What a fate.  I would have come here to worship at the center long ago, had I understood.

In our cozy apartment facing the Zaan River, we look out at a cocoa factory with barges delivering beans which are scooped up into a hopper which must convey them into the factory.  When we go outside, we smell chocolate.  We visited the windmill village of Zanse Schans, a hop down the river, to tour the restored mills which are the few that remain from the 1000 which powered the first industrial society in the 16^th C.  One of them grinds chocolate for the de Zaan Company which makes the Oreo chocolate—I have almost finished my souvenir jar making hot chocolate.  I have finished my Oreos which they sell here but in kind of tiny packages.  The consumption of Oreos must depend on the American consumer market.  I am definitely doing my part, though, during our 2 week stay.

We have bonded with our little neighborhood which is a mix of light industry, boats and houses.  Dutch have really big windows right on the street, often with light lace curtains.  So we and our neighbors become a bit familiar with each other.  We love watching the people who live on the barges delivering cocoa beans.  One family has the most beautiful golden retrievers who get walks every evening and spend the day sunning on the deck.  All the barges have lace curtains in the windows, just like the houses on our side.

We have spent our tourism days in Amsterdam enjoying the city immensely.  We have taken full advantage of the trams as sightseeing tours.  Rembrandt House was even offering etching classes and we made prints.  (I guess it will come as no surprise that Rembrandt was better than I am at the art.)  Van Gogh museum is such a pleasure.  There are so many paintings that we can really see his development of style.  He made such lovely paintings which are uplifting, create feelings of happiness while himself suffered such despair.  A concert by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra presented early 20 C. music which was challenging to absorb—I am glad I had Van Gogh in my minds-eye while the music was in my ears. The sincere little dog at the English Bookstore was as restorative as the coffee and books.

As we hoped, staying outside of town in a quieter location was a good idea.  We have biked around, walked, bussed and taken trains into town.  Although we are in an area which is now an open air museum—Zanse Schans for the windmills—and a large natural area—De Poel Borerderij Wormer, this area was the first heart of industrial Holland in the late 15^th C.  So there is much of interest in a peaceful location.  Our cozy apartment is in The Heritage B&B (www.theheritage.nl; anankejapp@gmail.com).  We recommend them highly for anyone spending a few days in the Amsterdam area.

Our way of moving around

Amsterdam itself was empty marsh until about 1200 but here we find habitation from about 700 BC.  Getting lost has its uses—we took the wrong train home from Amsterdam and ended up having to reverse course at Uitgeest.  (Well, it is funny now but at the time we were a little cranky.)  But a little research leads us to understand that the whole area from Uitgeest to Zaandam was inhabited from 1000 or 700 BC.  When the Romans controlled southern Netherlands and the Rhine Valley, the farmers of this area prospered by trading with them.  To our delight, the nature center offered an archeology tour so we could get a better sense of the local area.  Sunny day, boat trip, local families and the local archeologist—about as good as it gets for the likes of us.

Piet Kleij is the Zaanstad State Archeologist (and aren’t we delighted that there is such a position!) so he knows the local stuff thoroughly.  A Roman coin was found a few days ago in the north part of the area.  Imagine!  I love that.  We also enjoyed reading a history of specifically Amsterdam by Geert Mak.  Our guide, Piet and our author Geert, help make some sense of the fascinating ebb and flow of water and people of this area.

As Piet explains the timeline, this area was populated by migrants from the dunes area on the coast (30 miles away, maybe).  The area was a bit drier at the time and the Frisian people who farmed all over the area extended into this vicinity around 700 BC.  I think I have it right that there was some earlier habitation of similar farmers from around 2000 BC who withdrew when the climate cooled and the higher water table prevented farming.  Stone henge experienced a similar population and cultural decline around the same time. There is evidence that culturally related people came to this area to hunt and fish.  Their descendants then returned to farm in 700.  The style, placement and products of their farms, the way and where they dug drainage canals, consistent place names from the earliest recorded history show that the generally same ethnic group lived here during the entire period from about 700 BC to more or less now.  However, within this continuity, there is adjustment to the climate cycles and the economic vagaries of the wider world. 

The farmers of the area grew grain, raised cattle and sheep, mainly as subsistence farmers.  As the water table changed, they could not grow fruits and vegetables any more so began to make cheese to trade nearby for cash or other food.  The Romans had a fort nearby but were not successful in actually conquering the general area.  Nevertheless, the farmers thrived by selling leather, meat and other farm products for Roman use and for trade to other areas of Europe. A Roman coin was discovered in the northern part of the area just a few days ago. After the Roman Empire collapsed around 400 AD or so, the area lost all its population and there is not even evidence of hunting or fishing.  Well, we know the whole continent lost population—we see that here too.  No signs of many deaths from disease, starvation or warfare—people just left.

Wormer--still a long skinny town

Wormer-close-up. One of the last surviving windmills.

The same kind of farmers moved back in around 700-800 AD.  They used the same place names--Jisp is on one end of our lake and was noted by the Romans by the same name, The physical pattern of their farms was similar.  As they increased in numbers, they drained land and build towns in single lines along the highest ground, the dikes. Wormer, the next town, is one of those long skinny towns. As water was pumped out the land sank and they lost enough land that they had to devise a creative response to survive. They became fishermen.  Well they always fished, now they fished more, farmed less.  “Too much water.  Can’t farm—better fish.  Fishing—hmmm… Let’s build better boats. Let's go far away and find herring and whales.” 

My take-away on this is that we have a people adjusting to rather rapidly changing physical and economic circumstances.  There appears to be enough continuity and security for stable cultural patterns but enough stress to push the folks into inventive ways to carry on.  They invented the world’s first industrial society by taking just the next step and the next step to manage their watery circumstances. They have given many gifts to the world through their inventiveness.

The Zaan River area may be the Saudi Arabia of wind.  It is definitely the first use of power on an industrial scale.  These fishermen had continued to exploit their situation by improving their boats, extending the range of where they could travel and making better sailcloth.  They harnessed the power of the wind.  TA DA!—windmills.  Some local smart guy figured out how to saw lumber with windmills thus making better and cheaper boats.  Similarly, spinning and weaving sail cloth, making ropes.  Then when the fishers were catching whales, they brought them here to extract the oil and other products.  It is the first industrial area on earth and was an incredibly prosperous and sophisticated place.  Our boat passed areas where everything from Roman cloth to a very fine Majolica vase have been found.  Massive dumps of whalebone remain from the whaling era.  Clothing, pottery and other artifacts from every part of the world—including Niewe Amsterdam—has been found within our little catchment area. 

Fishing and whaling tanked—over fishing mainly.  England got better at building boats.  The economy spiraled down.  It took these guys, now including Amsterdam, a while to pull themselves back up but they did, finally.  Our little area, though, was no longer the center.  Water courses changed and industry moved over to the actual river.  More land has been drained, farming thrives but the first industrial area is now a nature center—thus our riverside cocoa factory and a related factory which makes the liquid that chocolate is made from.  Now the former industrial lake is a center for wintering waterfowl and spring breeding shorebirds giving me some great birdwatching with a local birding pal. The white-fronted geese are arriving for the winter. But the smart guys around here who know much about the management of water and taking advantage of climate change have a bright future as the rest of us need their skills.  Maybe the next big thing. 

Birdwatching with apple pie

We are noticing that we don’t much like leaving after we have been somewhere for a while.  Among other things, we have some very odd meals as we are finishing everything we bought.  Tomorrow we are off to northern Spain but we need to have continued reports about the golden retrievers.  And we are wondering about the guys who were working on the neighboring roof in London and whether anything is blooming in Gary’s garden.  The Clement V bakery in Etretat—we just got it figured out that they delivered bread to our campground and we’re gone. Our slow travel might not even be slow enough after all.

Last Day in the Netherlands

On Sunday, 9/28, a shocking realization – tomorrow is our last full day in Holland. Somehow we really settled in, but the end is coming. Tuesday morning we take off for Barcelona.

So on Sunday afternoon, our last hurrah, very satisfactory - an archaeology boat trip into a nature preserve just north of our town of Wormerveer, at the Poelboerderij Wormer (which means, pool bordering Wormer town). We had lots of company, to our surprise. 

Piet Kleig, the district archaeologist 

All kinds of things I never thought about before, such as:

The dunes that protect Holland from the North Sea have been here for thousands of years. They started as barrier islands, like along the US East Coast. The first settlers built on the dunes, which were pretty high, and hunted in the peaty lowlands between the dunes and the hills far to the east.

That land wasn’t underwater, it was peat. Peat comes from years of grass and weeds growing, dying, rotting, growing again. Miles and miles and miles of peat - all above water, but damp.

When they started farming, the early people wanted that good land, and began to drain the water off by digging canals perpendicular to the waterways, like in this wooden map of our local preserve. The new land is called a polder. You can see they came at it from mainly three sides. Pump the water, and your cows won't have wet feet. 

This was when the Romans were about, and a trade developed for beef and leather. The Romans never conquered the area, though - they were forced to stop at the Rhine River. Stories about that, too. But trade? Yes. Just last weekend, in this very polder, a farmer plowing for next year turned up a Roman coin. Piet, the archaeologist, was jazzed in a restrained kind of way.

Problem: draining the peat dries it out, and it shrinks. Then it settles and sinks beneath the water. Simply put, this is why Holland is below sea-level. There are a few other factors, but this one is most striking. The more you dry the peat, the lower it subsides, letting the water in again. So you pump out the new water, and that keeps the land dry, but it keeps going down. Sort of Sisyphean - you solve a problem, but the solution makes it worse, so you do it again - over and over. Our archaeologist shrugged - what can you do?

This is one of many, many small mills that drain water

Later I found a great power point presentation on this: http://earth.esa.int/workshops/fringe07/participants/559/pres_559_carocuenca.pdf

This is the oldest remaining windmill in the area, from the 1720s

The lake we were on is only a few inches deep. Below that the mud begins, at first just a thickening of the water, deeper actually mud, but no solid bottom is apparent. 

Dutch traditional boats have sideboards because the water is so shallow. There are deeper channels though – we passed some sailboats with keels. 

Lots of people on the water, this pleasant warm fall day. The Dutch seem to like water much of the time. Might as well.

from Nancy, 9/29/14

Windmills

Charming views of old-fashioned technology. Life is sweet and days are bright. We went to look at windmills at a sort of reconstructed town on the Zaan River, called Zaanse Schans.

 Windmills, from the Zaan bridge

Julianne at Zaanse Schans, with wind

Makes you think of the old painters, when times were dark and life was muddy.

Rembrandt (left), van Ruisdael (right)

This kind of windmill was developed over time in a triangle of eastern England, Flanders, and northern coastal France. First mention, 12th century, used any place where there wasn't enough free-flowing water for mill-races. In Holland windmills started pumping the water out of the way, and took on many industrial uses like grinding grain and sawing wood.

How does it feel inside a windmill? Is it so cute in full-swing operation? We went to Zaanse Schans, an open-air museum. It was windy, as usual here it appears. Here is a mill for grinding pigment for paints and dyes, called De Kat, originally built in 1782. 

Swoosh of huge, dull blades slashing down, repetitive, not stopping, answering necessity from the air. A loud whisper from the machine – stand clear, stand clear. The serious sense of raw power, a blind force from the wind. 

Get back, get back, I'm coming!

We stand on the walk near the top. Walkway, rails, and joists tremble and creak. We look down through cracks in the planking dizzily. The dark skirting of the mill is old thatch. The wooden vanes are partly covered with canvas to help them go faster.

Inside, a grinding noise, not constant but variable, clattering, groaning, thumping, chopping, crushing. The functionality of the turning shaft can go to more than one action at a time. Subsidiary side shafts supplement the large central mill. Dust in the air.

Reducing chalk to powder.

The wheel, stopped, shows the superstructure. There's a shaft here in the middle that rotates, hurrying the stones around. Things are balanced in pairs - two stones, four vanes, and so forth Above the stones, the shaft rises. It joins the horizontal shaft turned by the wind, located a full floor above where we're standing. Each of these parts can be replaced piece by piece, teeth especially. This is a side connection, transferring power to a secondary grinder, while the main shaft rises up to another toothed gear coming from the vanes turning outside.

 Pigment barrels and vials, though these are empty. They represent the product of the mill. They sell pigments on the side, but I can't be mixing my own paint, so I let that go.

We come down steep stairs very carefully, the hand rails polished by many hands sliding, grasping, sliding. The mill was still, we went outside. 

The mandolin player was still at it, offering his cheery tunes. When we arrived he was playing My Darling Clementine, and Julianne wanted to dance but I was too shy. Later we met him at the bus stop, and he said he's retired, just does this for fun. He's been a member of Friends of Zaanse Windmills since he was 10 years old, 56 years ago. Somehow the rain that threatened blew away overhead, the sun came back out, and we took the bus back home through the most darling streets you can think of, in Zaandijk.

from Nancy

What Nancy Wrote About Rouen

In Rouen on September 5, I had an accident with the rental van. Did you ever try to find parking for a modern van in medieval streets? Me neither.

How do delivery vans manage in Rouen? They park half on the sidewalk, half on the street. How do you get around them? You drift left into the next lane which sadly is full of cars, so you turn back into your own lane. And there you have it, a thud and a shudder, a shout from behind and from your very own mouth, blue language. A very bad day so far!

Our rear-view mirrors kissed, that was all. No damage to his, not a scratch. To mine, a long crack and a smallish hole. A few blocks later, the perfect parking place.

We walked downhill past the tower where Joan of Arc was held by the English after they caught her, a place with very little light. I remembered my former reading about her. She refused to wear skirts as ordered, because the soldiers got rowdy with her if they thought she was really female. But if, to protect herself, she wore pants and threatened them with curses, they thought she was a witch. The girl couldn't win, that was clear, and she was burned soon after, in 1431. The French got her sainted a few years later, Rouen became a pilgrimage site and has been making money off her ever since. See how bad my mood was?

Anyway, a cross marks the spot. The newish Eglise Jeanne d'Arc (closed) is surrounded by a cheery neo-medieval covered market with the smallest merry-go-round I've ever seen (closed) and a Punch-and-Judy (closed).

The old city center mainly survived WWII (the rest of Rouen was flattened). It's full of delightful half-timbered old houses, retail on the ground floor, living above. The corner posts lean wildly after all these years. A pleasure to behold, a spark to the imagination. An improvement to my mood.

We walked down the rue d'horloge with its very fancy 16th century clock that still works. Its one hand is tipped by a gold lamb, and there are fine carvings all around. What? You need a clock with two hands?

The Cathedral. Monet painted the light at different hours of the day, staying in rented rooms above what is now the Tourist Information Center. When I was last in Rouen (2004) its facade was covered with scaffolding, repairing war damage. Now in 2014 the gorgeous stone tracery pleases the eye, though on the side of the church there are holes (from bullets?) remaining. We had ice cream in the plaza and walked through the church, which lost almost all its old stained glass and is bright inside. 

Back to l'Eglise Jeanne d'Arc, which had opened after lunch, along with the carousel. We sat inside admiring the architecture and stained glass. The windows survived the war to be installed in a new church, because they were taken out of their frames and stored someplace. The old church was bombed down to the foundations, making way for this new wonderful building. 

When I wrote the draft of this entry, we were camping in the Valley of the Somme. WWI came through there like a plague, such that every few kilometers (or less) there is another cemetery of war dead. Simple gravestones shoulder to shoulder to shoulder to shoulder.

WWI swept away the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czarist Russia, and the entire power structure of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of perfectly good people died or were damaged. Next, the lower orders (we may call them) rose up to seize the day for better and worse. The Twenties, the Thirties. WWII finished off the old ways of thinking, making our own contemporary lives possible.

I do think that without the clearances of war, the new edifices of thought that we know so well wouldn't have had room to flourish. Think of all the various individual-rights movements. In the arts, think of abstract expressionism, deconstruction (our favorite movement) and today's art chaos. They would have all turned out totally different and we would be different. In a way, we're living upside-down as regards the past.

This is OK with me, as without contemporary thinking, I'd likely be one of those 19th-century literary old maids living in the cracks on other people's charity. I prefer to deal with today - even when it means providing an outrageous rear-view mirror for a rented van.

Normandy and Picardy, France. September 10-12, 2014

Along the English Channel going north and east of Le Havre we reached our destination of Etretat. Unbeknownst to me, it was a vacation destination for most of the famous impressionist painters from Cezanne to Monet and others during the 19^th C. when the movement was starting and gaining ground.

We actually started the day south of Deauville and Honfleur which seems to be something like the birthplace of the movement.  Monet’s home, Giverny, is somewhere nearby.

I had the idea that at the mouth of the Seine, where there is a nature reserve along the coastal estuary, I would find some marshes and be able to see shorebirds and water birds migrating.  So we poked around beautiful towns along the coast finding no marshes and no beach access. At Honfleur, though, we found a nature center.  Yay! I thought.  Well, there is a formal garden with statues and box hedges, a promenade along the south bank of the Seine and a tiny marsh with a few mallards.  The actual reserve is out in the water on the southern side of the shipping channel but I could not find any marsh or shore area where wildlife might touch down or nest.  Turns out that the effort to create the reserve is controversial locally too.  So—lesser black-backed gulls, herring gulls, 10 cormorants and the mallards.  2 wrens in the garden, 4 pied wagtails. Oh well…

Winding back roads trending north and east with Etretat as our destination—it is lovely country.  Though I was ignorant of its glorious past, Nancy was aware and wanted to stand on the beach and paint the famous scene that all the famous and less-famous painters had painted.  What fun and what a great town.  The paintings are of a cliff which forms one arm of the beach.  It is of white rock and has an arch through which a pointy tower of white stone is visible.  All the painters painted it and current painters all want to do so too.  For good reason—what a beautiful scene.  Now, I will see that cliff and arch in every painting and art history book—doesn’t that always happen?

Etretat has been around for a long time—the restaurant where we had lunch is a building made of half-timber framing which is the main old style of building in Normandy as far as I can tell.  Stone ground floor then timber framing filled in with something else.  The something else can be plaster, bricks or stone.  This building has very old carvings on the ends of the timbers and under the eaves.  Although it is called “The Salamandre” I only saw human-type figures.  Carved in the rock on the ground floor—near our table—was the date 1645.  It is hard to imagine wood carvings lasting that long but the place definitely looked old.  Etretat was a fishing town and maybe a pirate town too.  There was not that much explanation about either the building or the history of the town other than about the impressionists. 

Never mind.  I just love this stuff and had a grand time walking around the town and along the beach.  Turns out that the beach and cliffs are actually made of flint.  The beach is pebbly—no sand.  It is about 1 mile from cliff to cliff with no jetty or dock.  They pull the boats up on to the shore with cables and drag them down or wheel them down on a little wagon type of thing.  Not a yachting destination but other areas along the coast have rivers and good pleasure boat harbors.  But flint—I have never seen that much flint at one time.  I thought it was limestone or chalk.  The Neolithic settlers must have been in stone-heaven, with the perfect stone for tools.  There is a bit of evidence for Neolithic use of the area but I could not discover much about it. There is no evidence that the very early Paleolithic or Neanderthal hunters used the area.  As part of Normandy, it was settled by the Vikings that the King of France invited in to protect the area from other Vikings.  No doubt it was farmed and fished during the Gallo-Roman era as well.

All the area we have been wandering around in has been Normandy.  Mont Saint Michel is the western edge and the Seine Maritime just north of Etretat is about the north east.  We have spent most of our time in Normandy—delightfully so.  We had plans to get to Brittany to see the standing stones at Carnac.  Much too ambitious for us—we travel at a much slower pace.  So, we have been wandering Normandy—happily.

Normandy is apple country—cider is the drink, not wine.  This being France, much good wine is available from other parts of the country but locals make cider.  Stopping at local country restaurants, they have a house cider from their own “presse.”  Fun to try.  The main food in the western area is gallettes—crepes made from buckwheat.  As we get further east gallettes and crepes are mixed.  Seafood and fish are featured on menus and good.  Dorrado is a fish I first tried in West Africa where locals could catch it not that far off shore.  They do that here too and it is good here too.  They are small—8-10 inches or so and served whole in both places.  If it is in the Atlantic, near shore, I guess it might be along the east coast of North America but I am not aware of it.

Since we are camping, we are cooking for ourselves often.  One of the delights of most days is our stop at the first patisserie we come to.  They sell bread too so we get our bread, croissants and some kind of delight for lunch—pizza, quiche, whatever they have.  Today was salmon quiche.  It took us a while to figure it out but bread and croissants are delivered to the campgrounds also.  The little van from “George V” came tooting through our campground morning and evening.  Gifford Pinchot National Forest could learn something here.

There is much to say about camping but I will do a riff specifically on that subject in some other post.  We have had superb weather and this is a delightful way to see less populated areas of France.  Today though is the day we are actually wending our way back toward Mulheim, Germany to turn in our van next Monday.  So we are travelling for direction rather than going to a specific destination.  Thank heavens we have enough time to take the scenic roads along the coast.  After a beach morning while the light was just right for painting the cliff we have driven through one beautiful town after another with farm fields and small forests in between.  You know those post-card type pictures with little villages of pitched-roof brick farm houses—it really looks like that here.  Most villages have old churches—either Norman architecture with rounded arches or early gothic with pointed arches.  The churches mainly have quite massive square towers holding up the steeples.  You just would think there would be a few tacky buildings somewhere but there really do not seem to be any.  Some of the bigger towns like Dieppe and Abbeville have recently built houses but they fit the style of the older buildings.  I have no idea if there is some sort of law about such things or if the cultural norms are so strong that this is what people think to do.  There must be some sort of zoning since there is no sprawl—towns and villages do not leak out into the farms much.  There are areas along highways with businesses and grocery stores but the villages have small compact business areas near the center where the bus stops (and where camping cars can park.)

Since we are on our way back to Germany, we did not have a specific destination in mind nor any camp ground identified.  We have ended our day in Picardy saying good-bye to Normandy.  We found ourselves in the very small village of Cramont.  It has a church (brick, gothic) a community center (empty right now) and one business (bar, tabac and newsstand).  There is a school and quite a few houses with child’s play equipment in the yards but not that many people around.  No half-timbered buildings but some massive brick/stone farmhouses which look like the fortress-farms from after the barbarian invasions. The bar/tabac was able to sell us a package of coffee and we had a beer.  We are not in cider country anymore.  Our French is marginal but we managed a few friendly sentences. 

Our evening entertainment has been trying to read the local area newspaper: a garage mechanic from Abbeville is getting ready for a solo voyage across the Atlantic; a local woman is pleased to have been offered the headmistress job at College de Notre Dame. I have found out that the place to find birds is at the mouth of the Somme.  A whole page is devoted to the “spatules” and “heron cinder” who nest there.  Spoonbills and grey herons are more than I found at the mouth of the Seine.  Maybe next spring.

More Pictures from Bayeux

This is a second selection of photos from Bayeux, not of the Tapestry, but of things in the town that struck my attention. The first selection actually follows this one, since I posted it first. Cheers!

It's an old town, not entirely touristed-up. There are also new areas, either because it has grown, or because parts were destroyed in the war. These are pictures of older parts.

This statue outside the plaza leading to the museum with the Tapestry.

Going toward the Tapestry, former princely buildings now state administrative offices. Same function, different government.

This tree was planted after the Revolution, as a marker of hope and renewal. We figured it survived all these years because it's in a protected place, within a horseshoe of former royal buildings, and the cathedral on the fourth side.

Spire of the Cathedral in Bayeux. Below, a carving inside the Cathedral.

There is an art-and-history museum next to the Cathedral. The art is OK. They have a Caillebotte painting, but it's not his best. The Bayeux area was inhabited by the Romans and before them by Celts, and the museum has a good selection of ancient artifacts. They have a lot of crockery, as Bayeux was a big center of porcelain production in the past, and a large display of lace and lace-making that was very interesting. The lace is a lot more intricate in its technique than the Bayeux Tapestry.

 Ceiling in an court room from the ?17th? century. Below, a pate-de-verre vase by Rene Lalique, really the best thing in the technology section. It's a good 14" tall.

In a courtyard, this pump which sadly didn't work (Julianne tried).

 On the outskirts of Bayeux, the museum dedicated to the Normandy Invasion. There's a lot to say about WWII in Bayeux, which is very close to the Normandy beaches, especially Omaha Beach. This wasn't the trip for that, but Julianne went to the museum. I had gone in 2004, with Rob Keyes-Bach. It's very worthwhile, as are the beaches themselves - what those guys were up against!

So, that's it for Bayeux, folks. 
-- by Nancy

Pictures from Bayeux

Mainly by Nancy, and some from Julianne

Our problems with posting anything in France meant that we just couldn't get pictures from Bayeux up on the blog (mainly, our connections were so puny that everything just took forever, or just wouldn't). So here are pictures of the town, and a couple of the Tapestry. 

The museum people don't want you taking pictures, so I just took a couple, but really, for Tapestry pictures, Google on "Bayeux Tapestry" and then click on "Images." You will have more pictures than you can swallow at one sitting.

Blogger is defeating my efforts to upload lots of pictures; consider this a first post, and another will come right along with more pictures.

 We arrived Saturday evening, and walked from our campground on the north edge of town down into the heart of town for supper. The sun was just setting.

 The next morning we walked along the river again in daylight. The last time I was here, in 2004, this walking path didn't exist, I think. Or maybe it was just that Rob Keyes-Back and I had rooms in a hotel on the south side of town, and we never found this beautiful walk? Anyway, you can pick it up from the tourist information center and walk about a mile north on it. 

The carvings outside the Bayeux Cathedral.

These are through glass in low light. Better to Google "Bayeux Tapestry" and check out "Images." But anyway, the important thing to notice, from an artistic standpoint, is how the sense of 3-dimensions was achieved using very few colors and no depth of field. See how the far legs of the horses are a different color from the near legs? There's also a lot to say about the techniques of embroidery, but I'll let that go. Each scene is described in Latin, which helps understand it. There are edgings of decorative scenes (usually unrelated to the story) from local life, fantasy animals, tools, etc. 

This is a story told by the winners, yet the enemy, Harald, is not described as weak or evil. He's presented as a worthy opponent who lost mainly because his troops were tired, and, oh by the way, from the Norman point of view his cause was not just. One British commenter, however, described the Norman Conquest as the biggest catastrophe ever to strike the British. Everything depends on where you're standing.

-- by Nancy