Zurich

I'll just go ahead and start out with the very best part of my time in Zurich--the Marc Chagall stained glass. Seeing these windows (pictured left, but there were two more of them, too--one is orange and the other another blue one) goes right up in the category with the Pantheon in Rome and Fallingwater. And so I blatantly disregarded the no photography rule for you, my dear reader (okay, okay, also for myself).






Chagall did a masterful job of innovating within the tradition. These windows are very different from any other stained glass windows that I've seen in a church. They have one theme that weaves through each window--a Christ window, a Jacob window, and a Zion window, among others (the window on left is the Zion window--this part is the streets of Jerusalem).







The windows are modern, while still containing discernible subjects. The window to the left shows Jacob's ladder, with angels ascending.









Here, Jacob is wrestling with the angel.











Here is an angel trumpeting.











Here is Mary and the baby Jesus












and Christ on the cross.










In another church in Zurich there were stained glass windows made from agates by Sigmar Polke. They were no Chagall windows, but I also really liked them, especially when there were brightly colored stones.




























Finding a Catholic Church in Zurich was difficult, to say the least (especially given Stearn's and my lack of German). We walked all over town looking for one, trying to translate the descriptions of the church in order to tell which kind it was. Finally, I suggested we try places that might hold Catholics, like an Italian restaurant near our hostel. One confused waiter, who really wanted to help, exclaimed, "Catholic Churches! We have tons of those!" (He started pointing all of Zurich's churches out on the map.) ... "But you have to understand--we're all Protestants here!"

I think he was confused about what exactly a Catholic Church is...

Food Blogging

I ran into a cactus fruit at the grocery store yesterday and so decided to try it. It tasted to me like a mix between a tomato and a watermelon, except with very hard, hard seeds (that you eat). Aside from the seeds, I liked it very much and ate it on a salad with lots of cheese. I'm not really sure how you're supposed to eat it (googling didn't result in anything helpful except that you can squeeze it and drink the juice, which, now that I mention it, I do remember drinking very delicious cactus juice in Krakow).

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Goodness gracious, I wish I brought my camera! I stopped in the bookstore today to make sure that the books I ordered for my class are there, and it was a far more wonderful feeling than I anticipated to see all the lovely books that I chose on that shelf!

Konstanz

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After Ulm, Stearns and I headed to Konstanz (actually, I forget--perhaps we went to Konstanz first). Konstanz is in Germany, but it's just on the boarder of Switzerland. We spent most of the day being unsure about whether we were in Germany or Switzerland.





I love this statue of Jesus, pausing on the way to the cross, that was in the cathedral in Konstanz.











I also loved (but for another reason) this picture of Jesus ascending into heaven, which was one of the panels on the door to the cathedral. He looks like a cartoon with just His feet sticking out of the clouds!

Whimsical Ulm.2

Here is the sign outside of a bookstore. This is actually the bookstore in which I thought I'd found an amazing steal of an antique architecture book (inside the front cover said 7-, which I assumed meant 7 euros; nope. It was 150. Talk about bitter disappointment.)


Here is a sign that was hanging outside of a shop in the Fisherman's Quarter.



These were three adorable ladies (all wearing hats!) who Stearns and I unashamedly photographed several times. They were chatting up a storm. I think that they could tell that we were taking pictures of them.




This was the roof of a tower. It reminds me of candy (specifically that candy that tastes like candy hearts but is thin and round and I can't remember the name).

Ulm.1

After several days in Munich, Stearns and I headed by train to Ulm, a little town in Germany.

Ulm has the tallest church in the world, Ulm Minster, and it's Gothic. It was extraordinary.



This picture gives you a vague idea of how high the ceilings were.

After deciding not to climb a church in Munich, I thought we'd better climb this one. Which was a decision Stearns and I regretted repeatedly in the half an hour it took us to climb to the top--as we neared the top we were climbing through passages so narrow that to pass a person you each pushed yourself against the wall and hoped for the best.



























You could see into the room full of bells. I would have liked to see it when they were ringing. I took these pictures for Hopkins (who, with Stearns, would like to be a bell ringer).




















The art in the church was wonderful. Here is a picture full of women, including Mary stepping on a dragon (women, too, get to slay some dragons).









Here was a surprisingly graphic picture of Jesus' circumcision. That's a scene from Jesus' life that there just aren't that many paintings of...











In addition to the church, Ulm has a lovely section of town called the Fisherman's Quarter. The buildings are old and a little bit falling over.





There are rows and rows of canals in between the houses. It was perfect.






















This is the steeple of a church that you see just as you walk into town. The steeple is on the church crooked! (The things they do with churches in Europe...)









Here are a couple of pictures that we saw (I forgot to post them in Munich, where we saw them). This one is called, "I lock my door upon myself." The title refers to a line from Christina Rossetti's "Who Shall Deliver Me?" Here are a couple of lines:

All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

Here is the picture I was most thrilled to stumble across--it's Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Margarethe Stoneborough-Wittgenstein, the sister of the philosopher (it was her wedding portrait).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

What a good book! I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo after a recommendation first from my high school English teacher and then from Sayers, who actually lent me the book. It is the first time since I Capture the Castle that I stayed up all night (okay, it was just half the night this time) reading--well, reading for fun.

I like mystery novels a lot (although my experience of them is quite limited--Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, P.D. James). This one was a combination mystery novel/reflection on the abuse of women (and, as a result, as Sayers put it, has some weird sex-stuff; the translation of the original Swedish title is, "Men who Hate Women"). Occasionally the novel got a bit pedantic--Larsson was best when he was describing the psychology of abuse in the character Lisbeth Salander, and less good when the authorial voice stepped back from the story and gave its own commentary. The novel's ability to make you understand the psychology of abuse is remarkable; additionally, this novel is a crime novel where following the law is not by any means the highest virtue (which is, I think, an interesting twist on detective novels). The highest virtue is treating women (and people) well. Sometimes this lines up with the law; other times it doesn't.

I have read so so few contemporary writers that I found the amount of technology in this one surprising--it sometimes read like an advertisement for macs.

The novel is fairly allusive--I couldn't pick up on most of it as I haven't read that many crime novels, but he mentions Dorothy Sayers, among many others (I'm sure it's a coincidence, but I found it strange that the name of one of the main characters in this novel, "Harriet Vanger" is quite similar to the "Harriet Vane" in Sayers' Gaudy Night). He is also self-conscious about following in the detective novel tradition of setting a crime in a closed situation on an island.

Schloss-Nymphenburg (Munich.5)

Schloss-Nymphenburg is a royal summer home just a bit outside of Munich. The combination of "nymph" with "burg" always seemed funny to me--nymph is so romantic and burg is so German.



The royal residence is covered with a swan motif.


Here's one that combines the swan motif with the woman motif. Below are two of the "halls of beauties," which were commissioned by various rulers--they basically got an artist to paint pictures of all of the women who these rulers thought were pretty. Goodness gracious, you can imagine how up in arms this made me. If I were one of these men's wife...


The room below, the green room, was obviously my favorite--the combination of green and gold was lovely and a little worn is just the way I like.


The grounds of the palace were enormous--you could stroll all day.

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I drove over this bridge on Sunday ("structurally deficient," "functionally obsolete," and "is nearing the end of its useful life").

Food Blogging

Tonight I had Salinger, my friend who lives and teaches in Kuwait, over for dinner. I made lemon risotto and a salad (and brownies for dessert, which I accidentally didn't bake all the way through, although Wystan and Salinger didn't complain). I've been increasingly addicted to lemon--stick a real lemon in basically anything and I like it more (especially lemon ice cream!). Last time that I made the lemon risotto, however, I just threw everything in it--things like mushrooms and peppers. They didn't really go too well (this is always my shortcoming--I always want to invite more people along for the ride). This time, over Wystan's hesitation, I tried adding sausage to the lemon risotto (I did my homework and googled it to make sure other people had had this same idea). Sausage and lemon aren't really an expected combination, as far as I know. But I really liked it (risotto by itself seems just too little to have for dinner).

Also: I must say, making dinner with a dishwasher is infinitely better than back at the May of Teck Club...

From an Email from my Mother

"Daddy noticed at dinner tonight that everything on the table was either caught, shot or grown by us. It was beautiful, too: the venison and the bass were perfectly grilled, the sliced tomatoes and green beans added color, along with the chard and the squash casserole. I thought you would like to know this..."

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I want to move to New England.

The Red and the Black

I did not love this book (The Red and the Black by Stendhal)--when I was reading it, it just seemed like a tragedy of everyone wanting what he couldn't have. It didn't seem like there was love in it anywhere (not that there has to be love in a book to make it good, but there was so much romance in this one that you would've thought he could have slipped some love in somewhere).

The politics were interesting (although they were tied up in early 19th century French politics, which sometimes confused me). I suppose Machiavelli would have approved of the main character, Julien Sorrel (until the end, that is). Julien was the master of making fortune bend to his will.

The women in the novel are pretty passive--Julien's first lover, who is married with children loves him but battles continued feelings of guilt (after he has to leave, as their affair is discovered, she is pushed around by her priest). Julien's second lover is a bored rich girl who begins by playing with him. He discovers this and finds out enough about her to make her fall in love with him and stay in love. At the end, she falls into some over-the-top romanticism, which she's really been boredly longing for her whole life.