The Hotel Regent Contades seemed like an appropriate staging area for the most anticipated event of our trip, a visit to the ancestral home of my paternal ancestors to which we had been ceremoniously invited by Karl and Hannah Britz, as reported in the background introduction to this chronology.

Our hosts had sent instructions for travel by tram to Kehl, the small city opposite Strassbourg on the German side of the Rhine.

On the bridge, I recalled my grandmother’s tale of her husband Rudolph’s swim across the river to Strassbourg with my father on his back, much to her dismay. (more…)

Facing the next day meant a shift of role back to tourist from that of honored guest and time traveler. Nevertheless Jan and I both had earlier associations with this City that added dimension to the brief visit we’d planned.  My father’s birth in 1907 was registered there–perhaps because Kehl had no hospital at the time. After the Franco Prussian war in 1870, it was annexed to Germany, along with the rest of Alsace-Lorraine, before being returned to France at the end of the World War I, then reconquered by the Germans in 1939, then again becoming French in 1945.

Jan remembered hitchhiking with a friend from Stuttgart to visit the Cathedral and medieval art masterpieces in the surrounding area during her 1965 year abroad.  I recalled roaming its docks until I found work on a boat that would take me down the Rhine to Brussels without being able to pay passage near the end of my three months’ summer adventure in 1962. (more…)

August 2 turned out to be a welcome transition day after the intensity of the two previous ones.  We had planned to spend it in nearby Metz with a person whom we’d last seen 37 years ago, the best friend of our son in grade 4 while we lived in Claremont CA.  After reading a recent autobiography by his mom, we’d connected by email and learned that he’d moved to France and lived on an off-grid organic farm with his wife and two children.  We were eager to see each other, but shortly before the planned visit an unfortunate circumstance required its cancellation.

After a slow morning we arrived  by train in Metz stayed in the least expensive hotel near the railroad station we could find, and next day continued on  getting a taste of local transport by switching trains in Luxemborg and Brussels.

We arrived late in the afternoon at our destination, another vast nineteenth century monument to the railroad, Amsterdam Central Station.

Crossing the bridge over the wide canal crowded with boat traffic that fronted it, we found the hotel that Jan had selected online, a small-scale tribute to the rail transportation system that continued to thrill me. (more…)

Amsterdam is known as a city of museums, containing 75 of varying scope and size.  We were interested enough to purchase IAmsterdam cards in advance providing free entry and reservations, remembering the summer’s tourist invasion.  Our conservative preference for Rembrandt and other early modern Dutch and Flemish masters led us to the Rijksmuseum during the first morning.  It wasn’t surprising to see the rainbow flag displayed over the entrance as it was everywhere else celebrating the upcoming climax of this year’s Pride Week (or month).

The building itself, another late nineteenth century combination of Gothic and Renaissance Revival style, opened onto a grand plaza and park, unlike the other compressed spaces of the city, where only the waterways offered open vistas.

On the way to the Rembrandt galleries, I relished the raunchy canvases celebrating peasant delights in drinking and sex (more…)

After breakfast we set out for another major museum, the Hermitage.  Located on the bank of the Amstel River, one of the city’s natural major arteries, the morning fog obscured the building’s name and nature, which only partially revealed itself in the course our visit.

Through a basement stairway we entered the old industrial brick compound into a sleek new interior occupied by independent galleries surrounding  courtyards and gardens and found the Rembrandt and Contemporaries exhibition visiting from New York. (more…)

Next morning was rainy, and we decided to return to the Hermitage complex to explore some of the galleries we’d noticed the day before, none requiring reservations or as crowded the Rijksmuseum.  The City Museum provided a graphic history of the town which helped make sense of the  technological achievement of reclamation of swamp and seawater that started in the thirteenth century.  It provided a system of defensive moats, a transportation grid allowing easy movement of goods and people and access to river and ocean trade routes that led to the 17th century Dutch Golden Age. It also made the city, like Venice, an attraction for tourists.

Rather than glorifying the Dutch cultural heritage, most of the exhibits emphasized the brutality and injustice suffered by the victims of empire and their efforts to survive, witness and protest. (more…)

On a walk around the neighborhood, before our scheduled train departure for Paris, we happened upon a building fronting a large square where booths, stages and grandstands left from previous days’ Pride celebrations were being dismantled.  It  was the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, originally built as a City Hall in 1655, later converted to a Royal Palace by the conqueror Napoleon’s brother Louis Napoleon in 1806 and eventually appropriated by the Dutch Royal Family who retain control of it today.

We arrived at the grandiose Paris Gare du Nord in the early afternoon (more…)

We began the day with the practical task of doing laundry, which, not surprisingly, turned into a memorable adventure.  Morning sunshine reflected from the recently cleaned old buildings turned routine urban activities into paintings.

Ancient architectural monuments  adorned the way to  the laundromat up the block.

Apartment buildings appeared as architectural marvels. (more…)

We traveled to the eastern edge of the Marais to attend “Eternal Mucha,” a show about the life and work of the early 20th designer whose posters are familiar icons of Art Nouveau.  A cycling 40-minute slideshow was presented on a huge screen with surround-sound music intended to overwhelm the  audience reclining on couch seats in a theatre housed in the modern opera house at the Place Bastille. But after the previous night’s experience in the Sainte Chappelle its effort to create a contemporary spiritual aesthetic experience fell flat.

After a tiring walk across the huge Place de Bastille, the site of the start of the Revolution in 1789, we recharged at a cafe with shots of espresso (more…)

Our intention this morning was to stray from the cliche tourism of the Bateau Mouche and ride a City bus at the quai to the end of the line and back as we’d done in London.  We walked a new way toward the river and came upon a tiny corner sculpture park centered on a travertine marble box behind which a large red circle was painted on the blank wall of a building.

A sign indicated that the box was used as a base for temporary art installations, this one entitled “Pandora’s Box.” A young woman walked up to the pedestal and pressed  a button causing the plastic assemblage to revolve and look like a discharge of steam. (more…)