L'Hiver et la froidure

On this 18 November the weather in Ottawa has taken a decidedly wintery look, the sidewalks are icy  and the snow is a light hard icy cover. Our Nicky is not happy, he hates the cold so does Nora but she is tougher and won't complain as much as him.

The air is crisp and there is a smell of wood burning in someone's fireplace. No wonder I am thinking of Christmas.  My friend Dr. Spo in Arizona says it is around 14C right now and he is thinking of making hot coco, I am also thinking at -7C of hot coco. The winter night sky is dark blue and we have been having strong cold winds or rafale de vent.

All this to say that it feels like the Christmas Season already. Which brings to mind our annual little trip to the Christmas Market in Munich or Bologna, two different countries but each have a fun market with lots of cold weather and good food.
This little video is of the Christmas Market in Munich, we were there at the time when this video was done. Love Munich at this time of year, so beautiful and so much fun.



I also downloaded my Advent Calendar and started to play with the different functions, like making snowflakes, I like this one and they are easy to make.  I can then insert them into the Advent calendar scene and they flutter down.

I also decorated the Xmas tree which goes into the scene of the calendar and it changes everyday as we get closer to Christmas. The Advent Calendar has lots of items to choose from and you can decorate the tree in many various fashions. This is what I did today.

Some music by Emile Waldteufel, Les patineurs Valse. Because soon if this cold weather keeps us we will be skating on the Rideau Canal.

OktoberFest

This annual Festival has only been popular around Canada since the late 1970's, I do not really remember such a German themed Festival in October before that date, unless it was a local festival in some communities of Ontario around Kitchener Waterloo and Stratford where there are substantial amounts of Canado-German families who have lived in the farmland area for generations. After all Kitchener only got that name at the time of the First World War, prior to that date it was Berlin, Ontario.

In Ottawa it is a weekend festival around 18-19 October with some Bavarian style bands, beer and sausages, but nothing like what you would see in German speaking countries where the festival runs for 6 weeks.

The Festival itself started at the time of King Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786-1868) not to be confused with the other Ludwig II who was deposed and drowned. So King Ludwig I married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen on October 12, 1810 to mark the happy day a great festival was organized in a Meadow named for her Theresienwiese. The festival has been held ever since every year and now attracts upwards of 6 million participants annually.

King Ludwig I of Bavaria

It is interesting to note that Germany has 1200 beer labels and very strict laws on what constitutes beer making, you cannot produce beer with ingredients like wheat or sugar per example and production is strictly regulated. Every region of the Old Holy Roman Empire produced beer and had it's own recipe, freshness being one of the key ingredients.

Of course with it goes Sausages and every German Town appears to have its own sausage recipe. From Berlin with its Curry Wurst to the Frankfurter Wurst, Munich's Weiss Wurst, to my favourite the Nuremberg Brat Wurst with the special spices that Nuremberg was able to obtain because of its link to Venice and the Oriental Trade routes.

The Curry Wurst of Berlin is a new addition to German Sausage Family, in 1946 the City had been devastated by war and on the verge of famine. A British soldier had bought a sausage from a street vendor and simply added curry powder to make the sausage more tasty. People noticed what he had done and in no time at all a new sausage was born.

The Frankfurter Wurst is a thin pure pork sausage in Mutton Casing originated at the great Coronation Banquet given for the Coronation of Charlemagne, a whole Ox was stuffed with sausage and roasted and served to the guests, it was a success. Today the Frankfurter is known as the lowly hotdog.

The Nuremberg Sausage dates of the early Renaissance period around 1350, it is usually 5 to 9 cm long and weighs about 20 gr. More than 3 million sausages are produced daily and exported around the world. Goethe loved them and while he lived in Weimar would have packages sent to him from a supplier. It is served with horseradish and potato salad.


But there is also other sausage recipes and favourites like the Thuringer, Sonnenberger, Coburger, Frankishe, Kumbacher, Hofer, Westfalishe, Nordhessische, Pfalzer, Rote Wurst, Sulzfelder and St-Galler, what a choice.

Beer and Sausages define German character and culture, it was Tacitus who noted that German Tribes drank prodigious amounts of beer each day. It was Bismarck who said that there are two things people do not want to know, one is how Laws are made and the other Sausages.


   

de retour

We are back from our pilgrimage to Salzburg Pfingstfestspiele via Munich and then on by train to Dresden and by boat on the Elbe River to Meissen. Beautiful weather all along and maybe a bit hot at 30 C, but I am not complaining after the dreadful and very long winter (4 mo. and 7 days) in Ottawa.

We arrived in Frankfurt and took the train from the train station in the basement of the airport to Munich, you have to give it to the Germans as masters of organization in terms of public transport something we do not seem to understand in Canada.

When in Munich we stay at the Eden Hotel Wolff on Arnulf Strasse 4, immediately across the street from the Haupt Bahnhof, very central and in walking distance of all the sights.

In Munich at the Kunsthalle I went to see the Otto Dix and Max Beckmann painting exhibit World as Myth covering the period of the Weimar Republic 1919-1930. They are both the most important German artists of the first half of the XXth century.  As of 1933 they will be blacklisted by the Nazis as Degenerate non-German artists. This exhibit in Munich has 180 works on display, paintings, drawings and prints from many important museums and private collections. See the website http://www.kunsthalle-muc.de

This year being the Centennial of the beginning of the First World War also known as the Great War 1914-1918, many exhibits around the world are devoted to painters like Otto Dix. At the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa currently on display is an exhibit entitled ''Transformations'' which features his work and that of A.Y.Jackson who was one of the painters of the Canadian War Memorial Fund of Lord Beaverbrook.  Saturday 28 June will be the 100th anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, the trigger that will provoke an unfortunate series of events leading to the start of the Great War on August 1, 1914.

On this trip I was also reading the book Danubia by Simon Winder, it is the history of the Habsburg Dynasty and their Empire and also that of Holy Roman Empire over a period of 800 years, they ruled both and more, since the Spanish Branch of the Family also ruled the vast Empire in the New World. It was interesting to read this historical book as we travelled from one city to another.

Our destination of course was Salzburg for the music festival which this year was devoted to the works of Gioachino Rossini. Because of the rising cost of attending the Festival we decided to go a different hotel this year and we decided to stay at the Wolf-Dietrich Hotel on Wolf Dietrich Strasse. The hotel is named after the Prince Archbishop who is buried in an elegant mausoleum in the St-Sebastian Cemetery with its church behind the hotel, the entire Mozart Family, with the exception of W.A., and their musician friends the Weber and Haydn are also buried there. It is an excellent hotel and with very good services. See website http://www.salzburg-hotel.at 

Again within walking distance of the Festival Halls and Mozarteum, Salzburg is such a small city that it is very easy to walk everywhere.  We have been going to the Pentecost Festival for some years now and this year we finally took of tour of the different Festival Halls, the Haus Für Mozart, the Grosses Festspiele Haus and the Felsenreitschule. We got a lot of details on how the halls were built inside the mountain rock and on the budget of the Festival etc.... It is basically the former stables and riding school of the Prince Archbishop which as of 1928 were converted into halls for theatre and then music. I will write one entry devoted to the story of the Festival Halls.

We also this year visited the Lake district around Salzburg, there are 72 lakes and we went by boat to St-Wolfgang who is a Bishop of the early Renaissance shown with an axe in hand, looks more like a mass murderer than a Saint really. The village on the lake is quite lovely and features the White Horse Inn which I am told was the sight of a famous musical.

After the Festival we took the train to Dresden the Capital of Saxony, to see the latest reconstructions and renovations including the famous FrauenKirche which is now re-built in its original form.  We also took a vintage 1860 steamboat on the Elbe River and sailed to Meissen for the day to visit the celebrated Porcelain factory and the Albrechtsburg Castle where the process to make porcelain was discovered in the 18th century.  A recipe the Chinese had kept secret for centuries, this enabled the Saxons to develop a lucrative industry. See website http://www.albrechtsburg-meissen.de/en/homepage/

So in the coming days I will write and post photos of our adventures on this European trip.

Munich, Bavaria

In Italian Munich is known as Monaco di Bavaria not to be confused with the other Monaco the Principality. Munich is where we will spend our first night after arriving from Canada.

A city that is fascinating and has so much to offer, we have been to Munich in summer and winter. The Christmas Market is simply great and full of food and very good street food Bavarian style.

From Munich you are almost at the border with Austria and we will take the train to Salzburg.

On this trip I decided I will not blog and will simply make notes of things I wish to blog later. Am not bringing my computer, too heavy and too cumbersome, one less thing to worry about.

Dark brooding castles in the Allgau.

Today by pure coincidence, I discovered that it is Richard Wagner's 200th Birthday and here we are in this town which so reflected his inspiration for his operas in the castles.

The Wittelsbach Royal Family ruled in Bavaria for several centuries until 1918 when the German Republic was proclaimed. They are part of the Swabia Royal families. The Hapsbourg of Austria are their cousins and also started out in Swabia as their other cousins the Hohenzollern who ruled Prussia and then as German Kaisers until 1918. They too have some fantastic castles in this part of Bavaria.

This morning we got up and after breakfast took the bus to the Castles, on a good sunny day I would have walked it, the surrounding scenery is perfect for walking. But since it was raining pretty hard we took the bus for only 5 minutes. There are many mountain stream fed lakes in this area, the water has that strange glacier colour combined with the green of the forest is quite beautiful.

At the Visitor centre all is well organised and despite the crowds, we got our tickets in hand in a few minutes. You have a choice of visiting one or both castles at a pre-set time with a guide, all visits are guided and very regimented. We first went to Hohenschwangau, the old summer residence of the Wittelsbach family, they have owned this castle for 6 centuries. It was previously the seat of the Knights of Schwangau (the Swan) who controlled this border area between Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland. It is a dark and brooding place, full of heavy dark wood furniture and wall paintings telling stories of Tannhauser, Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde. Richard Wagner was a friend of the family and they supported him financially for many years. It is difficult to imagine anyone living in such emotionally charged castle with its dark rooms and gothic architecture.

It is at Hohenschwangau that Ludwig and his brother Otto grew up. Their father King Maximillian II of Bavaria was married to Princess Mary of Prussia. At the age of 19 Ludwig becomes king and he goes on a mad spending spree building several palaces and having plans for several more, all more and more elaborate in size and architecture, costing basically the entire national treasury of Bavaria. Ludwig appears to have been a strange man, he was deeply religious and his Catholicism was a mixture of Arthurian Legends, Knights in shining armour, Holy Crusades and Christ Lord of the World. It appears that Ludwig thought he was Lohengrin mix in with St-George, his family patron Saint.

Hohenschwangau will remain his mother's Queen Mary home until her death in 1889. His uncle Prince Luitpold will live there until his death in 1913. Because the staff of Hohenschwangau work for the Wittelsbach family, they are very circumspect on what happened to Ludwig and his brother Otto. The only answer you get is that this family tragedy is all a mystery.

Ludwig II behaviour alarmed his uncles and the family, Prince Luitpold in particular will try to advise him to no avail.  After visiting this depressing castle we went up the hill, way up, above the lake to Neuschwanstein, what you see today took 17 years to build and is incomplete. You can visit 3 floors where the rooms are complete with furniture and interior decoration.

Neuschwanstein is even darker than Hohenschwangau, the Gothic decor is oppressive, heavy and full of mythical dragons and gargoyles starring at you in the semi-darkness. Heavy drapes of gold and silver thread, enormous chandeliers of gilded bronze with semi-precious stones and coloured glass. Rooms look like Byzantine cathedrals, again the legends of the Knights and Christianity painted on the walls everywhere you look. Everything is massive, the bedroom of Ludwig II took 4 years to decorate. The canopied bed alone is in Oak with 9 Gothic spire sculpted as its roof. The wash basin is also uncased in
Oak and the water spout is a solid silver Swan. The water for the castle comes from a stream 150 meters above the castle. What is interesting in the castle is the servants quarters, beautiful furniture and very pleasantly appointed rooms with views of the mountains.

 Neuschwanstein Castle

The throne room and the Singer's Hall are both spectacular by the wealth of the decor and the multitude of symbols recalling King Arthur. To say that Neuschwanstein is the result of an obsessive mind, is an understatement. Even photos of Ludwig in his thirties show a man with a wild look in his eyes, there is something not quite right with him.

He will be arrested and deposed in June 1886 in his bedroom at Neuschwanstein. His Uncle Prince Luitpold realizing the precarious state of Governmental affairs and the drain on the treasury the palace building program has created, will arrange for a quiet Palace coup. However another more powerful hand is at play, the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck has a strong dislike for both brothers, they are not playing along in his plans for a strong German Empire ruled by the Kaiser in Berlin. It is believed that Bismarck supported the removal of Ludwig II and the internment of his brother Otto, they were seen as too critical of the Kaiser, thus undermining the Empire.

Ludwig is told that he is insane, no one will ever examine him and no doctor will ever have a chance to observe if he is or not insane. The only medical document that does exist was signed by a medical doctor at gun point. This doctor will later declare that he did not know anything about Ludwig state of mind. Ludwig will then be escorted to a palace just outside Munich under very heavy guard. He is more or less a prisoner of his uncle. Only three days later he is found drowned in a lake nearby with another doctor who was a friend. Immediately all construction projects are stopped and Neuschwanstein is opened as a museum. It will never be completed.

Otto the younger brother of Ludwig is proclaimed King of Bavaria, however he too will be declared insane,  the doctors will write that he suffers from melancholy and is depressive. Today we would say that he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress syndrome, he had an active military career and after the Franco-Prussian War 1871, he is showing signs of distress. He will spend the next 26 years in a palace sanatorium under heavy guard, often sedated for his own good. Prince Luitpold is declared Regent and will govern Bavaria for many decades until his own death in 1912. Otto will live on until 1916 but unable to assume the throne. His cousin Ludwig III will take charge until 1918 when all kingdoms and principality in Germany are dissolved.

After all this melancholy we went for lunch. A beautiful place but such sadness.

Munich, München,

Did you know that you can surf 4 foot waves in Munich, how can this be, the city is landlocked at the foot of the Alps. Well I discovered today by going to the English gardens in the Park of the Residenz the man made EISBACH stream crosses the park, it is a tributary of the Isar River, underwater boulders have been placed strategically to create big waves which allows for surfing and in other places waterfalls. The Eisbach stream crosses the large English gardens of the Residenz of 1030 acres, one of the largest public park in the world.

The Residenz on Odeon Platz was from 1500 to 1918 the Royal Palace of the Dukes and Kings of Bavaria. The large buildings have an Italian air about them, reminiscent of Florence and the Medici Palace. Along the side of the Palace are French Gardens which have recently been restored to give them back the look of 1776 and then just beyond is the English garden which is larger than Central Park.

The English garden was created in 1789 by a British Officer, Sir Benjamin Thompson Lord Rumford who fought with the Loyalist troops of the British Crown against the American rebels. Thompson is an interesting man, born in Woburn, Massachusetts then a Colony of the UK, he married in Rumford (now Concord) Mass. He was a physicist and inventor. He wrote on thermodynamics and help change thinking in that field, he introduced the cultivation of the potato in Bavaria and created soup kitchens for the poor. As Bavarian Minister of War, he reorganized the Bavarian army, he also did several studies on the force of gunpowder which influenced its use in Europe.

Eisbach stream, English garden, Residenz, Munich

The gardens are open to the public since 1920, its vast green spaces are used for nude sunbathing and water surfing and even farming in some area with flocks of sheep and goats. Strange to think that in the middle of the city such an area would exist. We saw about a dozen surfers in their wet suit ride the waves, the current of the stream is quite strong and is also very shallow in some area.

We also walked along the pedestrian mall in what was many centuries ago the original central area of Munich, with its cathedral (Dom) and Marien Platz where City Hall is located with its clock tower which chimes the hour while life size mechanical figurine dance. We visited St-Michael's church where the Royal Wittelsbach family have their crypt, the famous Louis II of Bavaria is buried there and so is the step-son of Napoleon Bonaparte, Prince Eugene Napoleon Beauharnais who married the daughter of the King of Bavaria and died in 1821 at the age of 40. Their sealed lead coffins are in the basement of the church. Like so many buildings in the centre of the city who were badly damaged during the Second World War, much had to be rebuilt according to records on hand, quite lovely to see.

St-Michael's Church, Munich

It is asparagus season and many stalls sell them, white or green, they look wonderful. Louis XIV is said to have loved asparagus so much that he asked his gardeners at Versailles to grow them all year round. Apparently special trenches were dug in the gardens and filled with horse manure to allow the asparagus to grow even in Winter. The manure came easy since there were about 250 horses in the stables of the Palace. Bavaria also means beer and they have some beautiful beers, dark creamy golden colour with a nice head.

White asparagus 2 kilos (4.4 lbs) for only 4.90 euros a bargain!!!

We did a bit of shopping bought shoes and validated our train tickets for tomorrow. This up-coming weekend is a major holiday in Germany and Austria, Pentecost, so lots of people will be traveling Friday, we will travel Thursday mid-day to avoid the crowds, the DB railway representative told us that the 5:20pm train to Salzburg with connection onward to Budapest was completely full.
The weather is sunny and quite warm around 24C. We hope for good weather for the  rest of our stay.

Traveling, Voyage, Viaggio

Today on this day 7 Mai 1664, the Sun King Louis XIV inaugurated the Palace of Versailles.

After yesterday's good news, the trip to Europe is back on schedule, though somewhat truncated, we will not be going to Dresden or Meissen or Bayreuth, this we can do later this year. Instead we will fly to Frankfurt and then with DB we will travel to Munich for a few days and on to the Whitsun Festival in Salzburg. On the return leg we stop at Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau Castle.

What is great about Frankfurt airport is that the train station is in the basement of the airport. So you get off the plane go get your luggage and proceed through Customs and Immigration and down the stairs you go to your train. How easy can that be? The first time we did this, I thought to myself why can't we have such integrated services in Canada. This is something you find in many German cities, trains, subway, airports are all integrated in one hub, clever really.

We have been planning this trip for one year and it is a return trip for us to Munich and Salzburg.
Favourite restaurants, sites, cultural venues etc....

The website of the Whitsun Festival gives a good idea of what is on offer with Cecila Bartoli as Director this year. Click on the trailer on the website to get a glimpse of what it is like. We have been going for a few years and enjoy it immensely.  http://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/whitsun

Hotel Bristol, Salzburg

Because Salzburg is a small city and all the music venues  are all in walking distance, restaurants are around the venues and it is not unlikely that you are sitting next to an artist you have just seen on stage. What I also like is the offering of Asparagus ''Spargel'' in May, many restaurants have them either white or green with ham or sausages. On arrival in Salzburg, we will go to Café Bazar for lunch, since 1927 it has been a wonderful place for something to eat in a decor of wood panelling and large windows which has not changed. The food is excellent and the Café is on the river Salzbach.

Café Bazar, Salzburg


Munich is a beautiful city, Capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria, prior to 1918, home of the Von Wittelsbach family.  We went to Munich on different occasions, either for the Christmas Market which is wonderful or at other times of the year. On our return we will visit the two castles famous for their architecture in a style reminiscent of Wagner's Operas.