The Boat

I am ending this blog where it should have began, with a post about the boat.

We were staying in the middle deck in room 229, in the back of the boat by the library.  

The beautiful sundeck.  Despite our late trip and cooler weather, we were able to spend some time up here.

One of the new experiences I had on the boat was going through a river lock.  This is a picture from our bedroom window of the boat sinking into darkness as the water levels were lowered, allowing our boat to pass down into the next section of the river.

A nuclear power plant that we passed.

Some of the industry the region is famous for.  Most of this we passed in the night.

Sunset spew.

Some Basics about the Rhein/Rhine

Our boat went from Basel in the South (the highest navigable river on the Rhine) to Amsterdam in the north, whereby we left the Rhein and traveled by canal to the largest port in Europe, Rotterdam and then the second largest port in Europe, Antwerp. Along the way we stopped at the following places, about which a post will be created in the future:


Basel
The Black Forest
Heidelberg (on the Neckar River)
Rhine Castles
Wine Tasting
Cologne
Arhnem
Amsterdam
Rotterdam (via canal)
Brugges (via bus)
Antwerp (via canal)


While currently under construction (in a big way), each of the above documented stops on the trip/blog posts can be accessed in reverse order as I write them by scrolling down or by clicking on the blog's archive to your right.


A map of the Rhine in Europe:





Two more detailed maps of the Rhine River:








The following are facts about the Rhein/Rhine:


-The spelling of the river Rhein/Rhine uses the same letters in English and German
-Readers are split on which spelling they consider more grammatically correct*
-Both spellings of Rhein (German) and Rhine (English) can be found in my dictionary
-The river flows north from its beginnings in the Swiss Alps and finishes in the Netherlands where it splits into five rivers or canals
-It has an average discharge of more than 2000 m3/s


*According to some data I made up




The best anecdote from the Wikipedia article is:


"Length:
Until 1932 the generally accepted length of the Rhine was 1,230 kilometres (764 miles), but in 1932 the German encyclopedia Knaurs Lexikon stated its length as 1,300 kilometres (810 miles), presumably through a typographical transposition error. This number was then copied the next year in the authoritative Brockhaus Enzyklopädie; apparently no one spotted the mistake, and the new number became generally accepted, finding its way into text books and official publications. Only in 2010 a researcher noticed the discrepancy. These findings have been confirmed by the Dutch Rijkswaterstaat, who determined the length to be 1,233 kilometres (766 miles)."


another fun one:


"In November 1986, fire broke out in a chemical factory near Basel, Switzerland. Chemicals soon made their way into the river and caused pollution problems. About 30 tons of chemicals were discharged into the river. Locals were told to stay indoors, as foul smells were present in the area. The pollutants included pesticides, mercury, and other highly poisonous agricultural chemicals."


and for those eager to have a slightly deeper cursory knowledge of the Rhein River there is the entire wikipedia article, which you could search for yourself, but I am going to show off my ability to do this and give you the entire link in this post:


Rhine Wikipedia Article


An even more entertaining site can be found here:


Rhine River Website

Strasbourg: Reconstructed Memories

The pictures from the trip reconstruct the memories of the journey for me (and you), more than anything else.  Not only do buildings, faces, and places, but entire towns and cities get lost in between folds of memory and absence of photographic evidence.  To avoid losing the small city into such an abyss of forgetfulness, I’m dedicating this post to Strasbourg.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera when we visited Strasbourg, but I was so taken by the city that this is probably for the best since otherwise I would have worn out the battery too early, and even now I can vividly recall its narrow avenues and gently flowing waterways.

To find out more about the history of Strasbourg I would encourage you to go to the wikipedia article.  The city has passed between France and Germany several times and has a festive and unique regional character that is not quite German or French.  Additionally there are many beautiful photos of the medieval city in the article.

The morning, as often was the case, was spent on an unmemorable walking tour of Strasbourg, which Mom and I ditched early to get some coffee and explore on our own.  Featuring more pink sandstone, a beautiful old town, a new government district containing several important EU buildings, and a large university, I had a great day exploring Strasbourg.  After getting coffee, Mom and I headed for a stroll along the canal that encircles the old town.  We then explored some of the historic university on our way to the botanical garden, which, of course, happened to be closed that day.  I’m not sure how gardens come to be closed, but I think it may have been for construction purposes.  Afterwards we headed back to the city center to have lunch and then retraced the steps of the tour we had missed, getting slightly lost, and finally finding what is called petite France.  It was a beautiful part of the city where two canals converge around an island populated by ancient-looking willows and dreamy medieval buildings, with their colorful shutters and flower boxed windows, filling the space with bucolic charm in the center of a modern city.  It was a pleasant moment we spent gazing upon petite France.

We were free to catch different busses departing from the city to our boat docked on the German side of the river, so I stayed into the afternoon, exploring a large park, part of the suburbs, and finishing my excursion with a walk along a canal for a ways.  Worn out from walking, I made it to the bus just as the first drops of rain were falling and remained on board for the duration of the day.


You can retrace my steps by looking at the tabs on the map below:


View Strasbourg in a larger map

Antwerp

Our final port of call was Antwerp, Europe's second largest port.


View Antwerp in a larger map

It was drizzling the entire time we were there, but I still set out for a few excursions to wander about the old town and gaze upon what our guide called one of the most beautiful train stations in the world.  I skipped the tour and explored on my own, and, despite the weather enjoyed the city.

We were docked in an overlooked and decaying part of town, with construction fences around abandoned projects, rotting buildings, and piles of rubble mixed in with dystopian high rises and corner bars.  All said, it was still an alright neighborhood and contained relics of Antwerp's port past/present/future in the last picture I was able to take with my then dead camera battery.  It is a series of identical warehouses from the early 20th century

Antwerp

Bruges

After arriving safely through the storm to Antwerp we had a few options as where to be bussed.  I opted for a morning in Bruges and the afternoon back in Antwerp, while Mom opted for the morning in Bruges and the afternoon in Ghent; if you want to how Ghent was you'll have to contact her directly.  I was motivated by my wariness of the storm as well as my weariness of busses and medieval cities (towns).

Bruges was beautiful (see pictures below), but incredibly small.  Having been important in medieval times, the town remained little affected by much in the following centuries except for tourism.  Beginning (according to our guide) with British tourists seeking nearby Waterloo and staying a while to experience Bruge' rustic charm, tourism seems to be about all the city has to live for.  If you compare the satellite map below with a map from 1775 (far past its heyday), you'll see that the city has altered very little.  To give you even more perspective, walking from one side of the old town to the other took about 30 minutes at the most and if you look at the wikipedia article I can confidently say that I saw all of the beautiful panoramas during my brief stay of 4-5 hours.




Map of Bruges from 1775

Bruges is criss-crossed by canals,

Studded with churches,

Comprised of narrow cobblestone streets,

Bordered by windmills,

Broken by towers,

And centered around a square, and this suggestive tower.

Once again, in the morning light:

Bruges

Rotterdam and Gouda

There was an optional tour to go to some quaint dutch city or something, but I decided to get up early and find free, fast internet before the Viking Sun set out for Antwerp.  A large storm was brewing (that would kill at least two people in floods that plagued Belgium and the Netherlands a few days later) but had not hit yet so I ventured off into Europe's largest port: Rotterdam


View Larger Map

Having been extensively damaged during World War II by German bombings, Rotterdam lacks the rustic charm of Amsterdam and has many of the characteristics of post-war reconstruction and modern architecture that many Americans find abhorrent: broad avenues, large buildings, suburbanization (that's only ok if everyone has a lawn), cars, mass transit, metal, cement, and glass, which have replaced stones, castles, narrow alleys, market squares, and ornate façades.  At this point I am beginning to realize how often the subject of WWII comes up, but, while there have been many historical events and changes, the war physically shaped the face of much of Europe--or its absence in the buildings of cities such as Amsterdam--in a way that few other events have and therefore insinuates itself into the present for even the ephemeral passage of the Viking Sun and the shallow observations of passengers like myself.

In the early morning sun I roused my slowly dying camera to take a few panoramic shots of the city

As a port city built around water, two of Rotterdam's most characteristic monuments are its bridges like the swan one pictured below.

Though I would have preferred to explore on bike, I enjoyed the city and its long blocks and wide avenues.  I quickly found the public library (and its free internet) only to be disappointed that my early arrival at 8:00 did me little good as the library did not open until 10:00 and I could not access the wireless network without dealing with their straight-forward though complicated bureaucracy inside the building.  After walking around and having coffee I returned to the library/space station (at least that's how it looked) and pushed a button on a machine which printed a receipt giving me a temporary guest log in to their network.  Fortunately their artificial gravity was working.

I walked back to the boat just as the rain was starting.  The storm was so severe that we had to alter our course and went straight to Antwerp.

Rotterdam

~  ~~~  ~

Before Rotterdam, we went to a farm that makes fresh gouda cheese and then spent the afternoon in the town of that same name.

Here is one of the farm buildings where we saw a video and presentation on the cheese-making process. The roof is thatched, a common feature of Dutch (and other European) houses.  It's a bit strange for me to see such an antiquated and artisan type of roofing, but I would love to live in an old house with a (new) thatched roof.  Apparently it's also a bit of a luxury item and status symbol because the roof has to be replaced so often and brings with it much larger insurance costs as well as having to pay for the skilled labor of the craftsmen who can build such roofs.

After the lively cheese tasting and presentation we continued on the city of Gouda.  During our journey our tour guide, at least I think it was this tour guide, told us the story of the how one time when she was taking a group of Viking guests to the dairy farm/cheese cultivators and one woman was so caught up with taking a picture that she fell into a body of water and when her husband tried to help her he also fell in.  The rest of the tourist looked on and took pictures.  Maybe this sheds some light on the character of our companions.

The town (small city?) of Gouda has a beautiful gothic city hall which is so ornate and beautiful that many people in our group were calling it a church.  A picture can be found in the wikipedia article below.  We spent a few hours, at most, and then made our way back to the boat or met in in Rotterdam, I forget.

Gouda

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is one of the places we stopped on throughout the course of our voyage that I hope to revisit in due time.  Of course we only spent about 20 hours in the city, which was too long for many of the more conservative and loudly complaining passengers who prefer to gawk at reconstructions of unreal pasts and find that Amsterdam contains too much litter and immigrants to be truly enjoyable for much more than a few hours.


View Amsterdam in a larger map


Given the commonly held maxim that a boat tour really gives you a different perspective of a city, we were herded onto small boats equipped with glass ceilings instead of the usual bus, though after the boat tour we were then put on buses.


I learned that they change the canal water once or twice a week and that seeing a city from a boat is a perspective one cannot quite get from anything else, but it is still not a very good perspective for seeing anything but the undersides of bridges and the houseboats.  I do enjoy being in a boat, however, as well as our guide's dryness.


This is what a lot of the northern part of the city looks like (progress).

Houseboats are a common feature of the city which has floating houses lining its famous canals in many different and creative shapes and sizes.  

I forget why, but a lot of the old houses are crooked.

More progress.   The city is currently building up/developing the northern side of Amsterdam.

Typical grey skies and beautiful brick buildings, trees and houseboats lining the canals.

This really caught my attention and I wanted to share it with a few of my friends: note the palm tree in the background of the smoking girl's picture is not her hair but just poorly aligned and the man with the leather pants and long hair is holding ice skates.  

After the morning of zipping around the city, Mom and I decided to explore at least one of Amsterdam's many famous museums instead of buying diamonds.  We agreed upon a visit to the Hermitage museum, part of the enormous collection of art held by the Hermitage in St. Petersburg which displays some of its collection in this branch in Amsterdam.  The exhibit was on Alexander the great and much of what was shown was different renderings of him throughout history on carpets, coins, jewelry, writing, etc.  My favorite pieces were the cameos and intaglios, which must have been popular in Imperial Russia because they had quite a collection.

I spent the evening having dinner and catching up with my friend Katriena, who studied abroad in Berlin when I did.  It was a lot of fun seeing her again.


Though brief, Amsterdam was one of the better stops that the Viking Sun made.

Amsterdam

Arnhem

Slipping over the border in the last hours of the night, the Viking Sun reached the Netherlands where the river splits into five different bodies.  The details are of little importance, but we awoke to find ourselves in the small, but sort of important Dutch city of Arnhem.

View Arnhem in a larger map




City gate, church renovation, and Louis Vuitton-esque brick façade

Post World War II reconstruction and church

Bits of the old town that survived or were rebuilt

Our official morning activity was to visit a memorial site to the Canadian and allied troops who died in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the bridge to facilitate movement into Nazi territory.  More info into the battle is available at the wikipedia article, there is not much more I can say because I did not go, despite a feisty octogenarian we had befriended saying "shame on you" to me.  The city of Arnhem, and many other parts of the Netherlands such as Rotterdam, suffered enormous losses and destruction during the war and becoming the sights of massive post war modernist reconstruction projects which are less appealing and accessible to Viking Sun passengers.


Arnhem

Cologne

As our boat left behind the picturesque castles, small towns, vineyards, and red sandstone of the southern Rhine, we came upon the largest city on our journey north, Cologne, and river landscape that became more urban and was often hidden by nightfall.  Like a secret worth keeping, our boat cruised past what I would like to imagine as an industrial wasteland, fit for the filming a post-apacalyptical odyssey but not for the Viking Sun's illustrious guests' eyes.

As one of the oldest cities in Germany, Cologne, finds itself in a bit of a bind because of its near total destruction in World War II as well as its current economic importance which have erased its past nearly completely.  Of course there are remnants of its past such as the cathedral, rebuilt facades, and chocolate museums, but the city contains very little "historical", or even anachronistic charm, except for the cathedral.  Cologne is the largest city in the Rhein-Ruhr metropolitan area, one of the largest concentrations of human population in Europe, and therefore highly cosmopolitan, which is great because I was able to find Starbucks and Louis Vuitton, traveling essentials I generally was forced to make due without in much smaller places.

To explore the city a bit, here is the map:

View Cologne, Germany in a larger map

I did not go on the guided tour which walked from the boat to the cathedral and back, ignoring 99% of the rest of the city, I was looking for a Laundromat and internet.

I found some people walking across a skybridge.  I'm not sure what a group so large was doing crossing a skybridge on a sunday, perhaps a sad chore of sorts.

Inspired by the skybridge walkers (skywalkers) I took a flight into the sky and through time to see the Viking Sun on its way out of Cologne under a bright sun and blue skies.

In the afternoon, having resigned myself to my weary fate of wearing unwashed clothes for a while longer, Mom and I went to the chocolate museum for obvious reasons.

The private museum was a poorly constructed PR machine, built by chocolate corporations such as Lindt and Ritter, and was capable of loosely presenting a brief history of chocolate production and consumption, masking the current living conditions of chocolate cultivators, having a small room dedicated to the plant's biology, and containing an installment which simulates a chocolate factory but is really just cooling and wrapping melted chocolate to give to greedy paws (like mine).

The museum went so far as to be offensive at times, such as this instance:

*Mohrenkopf can be translated as Saracen's Head or Moor's Head and Negerkuss is a chocolate covered marshmallow candy that can be translated as Negro Kiss

In a few words the text has attempted to justify colonialism while supplicating readers, with chocolate dreams, to put inequality, enslavement and exploitation in a distant past, erasing the present misery chocolate production and distribution causes.

Not wishing to end this post on an aura of this sort, I invite you peruse the Cologne Wikipedia articles:

Cologne
Cologne Cathedral

Wine Tasting

At some point around Heidelberg we went wine tasting and visited a small town, not sure which, but as another of our favorite passengers, a self-described Dan Brown-esque author, commented later that day at lunch, "I don't want to sound like a philistine, but these small medieval towns are all the same: a church, a square around the church, and then a quaint old quarter with small streets.  And it's raining, plus I felt so inspired I just had to go to my room and write all morning"  Sounding quite philistine, the pudgy author missed out on a lovely two hours, some wine that was better than the stuff the Viking Sun's staff kept filling our glasses with, and very little rain.

Castles!

Our departure from Heidelberg marks the beginning of a new phase of the trip, we were now traveling in the part of the Rhine river that has Germany as the country on each side of the banks, whereas before the river made up the border between France and Germany.

It is in this stretch of the river that some of the most beautiful and celebrate scenery can be found.  Because of this we did the river cruising during the day and had some beer and roast suckling pig while we were trapped aboard the vessel.

The Rhine River is also the largest wine producing region of Germany, as the river valley creates a milder climate that the grapes need.  Much of this part of the trip had steeply terraced vineyards along the banks of the river.

Heidelberg

Passing over Stasbourg, a wonderful small city that I forgot to bring my camera to, we turned up the Neckar river and visited the sleepy, old university town of Heidelberg.

Most of the pictures here are of the castle which is on the hill overlooking the town, it is marked on the map as Königstuhl, I believe.

Part of the castle was destroyed by Napoleon or something, but the city liked it that way and/or had not money at the time to repair it, because by that period cannons and population sizes had caused castles to be obsolete as defenses for a city.  Today, according to our guide, it costs the city more to maintain it as a ruin than to restore it.  

Here's an example though of how the ruins look:

On the far side of the palace which had been restored, their was a view of the city.

Afterwards we had "freetime" which is a funny word for it since we were all adults and could do whatever we wanted, keeping in mind that the boat would not wait for us.  Mom and I ditched the tour early since it was raining and coffee sounded better.  The weather cleared a little and we found this plaza where I barely captured two tourists taking a jumping picture, an Education Abroad Program (EAP) photo winning favorite genre of picture.

At this point you should be able to find the wikipedia article if you are interested, but to continue to facilitate it, I will include it as a link at the bottom of each article without any explanation:

Heidelberg