Settling in at the church waiting for the concert.
It’s a 400-year-old church on one of the little islands in the river Seine. I had a bit of time to stroll around and snap photos before we all sat down.
I can’t help thinking of fault lines back in California when I see this dude.
A few weeks later I would show these pictures to Ann and Andrew. Of the first one, I said “I can’t help thinking of the Bay Area when I see San Andreas…”
Andrew replied, “Hah, well that’s hardly his fault. Oh wait! it is.”
When I showed them second picture, of the plaque donated by the city of St Louis, Andrew said “Wow, thanks guys. Classy American gift…”
I said, “Oh come on, there’s not a lot going on in St Louis, and a plaque is a nice gift.”
Ann said, “Tell that to my dentist…”
Aaaanyway. The conductor walked to the podium and there was a brief introduction, then a couple of short pieces I wasn’t familiar with but enjoyed. Then the full choir shuffled out and the requiem began.
Nice shed you’ve got here! Must keep the rain out a treat!
It was wonderful. An absolutely “bucket list” experience, and one that I didn’t even know I could have before yesterday. This music, in this intimate old church, in the heart of Paris… Oh là là!
I noticed that among all the people in the audience, I moved around the most. I couldn’t help tilting my head and tapping my fingers on my leg. I didn’t want to bother other people, but … come on y’all, it’s great music. I suppose if I spent more time in churches I would feel more hushed and reverential, and less like I was at a show that could be visibly appreciated.
Some well-dressed people in the audience stuck their phones up and tried to record large chunks of the performance. Like, not 30 seconds or so, but entire five-minute movements. It was a little strange because I thought only Americans were that gauche.
The performance relaxed me, beyond the relaxation I already felt from the weekend. When I emerged from the church I was like, “aaaaahhhhh,” and walked slowly around the little island with my AirPods quieting the city sounds. And then, ice cream was right there, so why not!
This is about an hour of waiting in line for a few scoops of ice cream. I’m sure it’s tasty but, I’m going to go with a different vendor, thanks…
One scoop passionfruit and one scoop dark chocolate.
I also knew it was a holiday from work tomorrow. Usually I would spend part of Sunday reviewing notes and email, to be ready the next morning. The thought that I didn’t have anything to do at all except stare at the canal and eat ice cream, with the Requiem echoing in my head, felt unfamiliar in a way that was almost sad.
It really is true that people live their lives stretched out, across the events of the previous days and the looming demands of the next ones. The feeling that I didn’t have to leave the present moment at all – not just for the next hour, but for the rest of the day – was spooky. I wasn’t even planning to change locations soon, like I usually would on a bike tour.
Why walk around in the crowded streets when you can cram your butt onto a barge, standing cheek-to-cheek?
As magical as it was, I didn’t want to linger on the island for the whole evening. I unlocked my bike and rode back near the apartment, and sought out yet another bakery I hadn’t tried. There I found a slice of quiche and a little chocolate eclair.
That’s 17 bakeries open after 7:00pm, within a 5 minute walk of the apartment.
That’s 17 bakeries open after 7:00pm, within a 5 minute walk of the apartment.
I was being careful with the amounts of things I ate, because I noticed some weight loss on the Rhineland bike tour and I wanted to keep the momentum. It felt easy to hold back, when I knew I was completely surrounded by amazing food, so close at hand that I could walk in any direction for less than one minute and find something great.
An ex of mine (who shall remain nameless because she was rather unkind) once said, “Being in Paris consists of a lot of ‘seeing of beauty.'” Since this was my first non-work day in the city, it was time to go do some of that!
I stripped all my luggage off the bike, leaving one bag with the camera in it. Everything else could stay locked behind this insane apartment door:
I got a recommendation from friend Cara to try the hot chocolate at Angelina. It looked amazing but there was an equally amazing line, and the wait for a table was 70 minutes. So I hopped across the street to Tuileries Garden, and did some “seeing of beauty” instead.
This park is rather long. Note the tourist dragging his suitcase. Common thing: Pack up to leave your hotel room, then roll around for the day until you get on a train in the evening.
This park is rather long. Note the tourist dragging his suitcase. Common thing: Pack up to leave your hotel room, then roll around for the day until you get on a train in the evening.
I wandered the gardens with my “courtyard” playlist adding to the atmosphere — mostly stuff by Harold Budd and Stephan Micus, with the Coil album “The Agelic Conversation” mixed in.
I passed two large fountains ringed with chairs, and every chair was occupied, with crowds milling around them. There were at least three cafes partially under shade, and each had a line about 20 people deep. It was more like being in the middle of a farmers market than being in a park. Perhaps it’s some kind of post-COVID travel boom, but it really feels excessive, like, how do the actual residents of Paris even put up with this?
I also saw people – I couldn’t tell if they were locals or tourists – sitting with their feet deliberately across a second chair just to get a little more comfortable, even though literally hundreds of people, including elderly, were all around them and any one of them would have probably sat down given the chance. I was thinking, “Is this Parisians saying ‘screw you’ to the tourists, or is this tourists saying ‘screw you’ to each other? Maybe both…”
When I reached the other side, it was time to launch myself into the streets again to find that big pokey-uppey thing everyone’s heard about:
Cool! Now if someone dares me to prove that I’ve seen the pokey-uppey thing, I can show them this picture, which looks totally fake and exactly like all the other ones. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Meandering back to the north, I encountered a protest in progress.
This is a march about … Hmm. About apparent side-effects from the COVID-19 vaccine? What?
Several people were carrying anti-COVID-vaccine signs, but they were mixed with others I couldn’t parse. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what the protest was about. But it was very French.
After that, I found some more buildings to stand in front of:
Whoever’s buried here must be, like, important and stuff!
Whenever I step out, I bring an angel along to keep my drapes from falling off.
Some time after that I saw this poster on a wall, and was intrigued. With a little help from my phone I realized it was a concert happening the very next day, and I could still buy a ticket for it.
Back in 1992 I was gifted a CD with Mozart’s Requiem, and I played the heck out of it. It fed into my lifelong obsession with music. It’s one of the most popular pieces of “classical” music in the world, and for good reason.
I paused my random bicycling to eat another decadent snack, and try to buy a ticket with my phone. The interface was just a little bit broken. Perhaps that’s why there were still tickets!
I was starting to run out of daylight, but there was one more garden I could visit on my way to the apartment: Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in Paris, commissioned by Henri IV in 1612.
When you’re pressed for time because there are so many things to see, and one of those places is a gorgeous park that’s been sitting around being gorgeous for 400 years, and one of the best ways to enjoy a park is to stretch out and read a book for the whole afternoon, but it’s already evening, what can you do?
All I could do was stroll around and take a few photos, and imagine that I’d been lounging on the grass all day.
I was too excited by the city to stay indoors yesterday, but today it was time to catch up on sleep. I woke up half a dozen times, and kept thinking “nope!” and dropping back onto the pillow.
The final tally according to my watch was eleven hours.
Around noon, I threw all my clothes into the tiny washing machine under the counter, puzzled over the French interface, then got it started. As it churned I did some writing and work at the table. It was Friday, and that meant I could put in a workday today, then have the whole weekend free to go exploring.
Three hours later I realized I needed food, and though I knew it would be possible to find some kind of food no matter what time it was, I wanted to catch a bakery before they all closed. I picked one at random, and cycled out.
There are many, many, many bakeries to choose from.
There are many, many, many bakeries to choose from.
So many delicious things! I pointed at stuff until I had at least two meals, then pedaled back to the apartment. The first thing I devoured was a cookie:
Two kinds of quiche from two bakeries, plus other goodies.
Two kinds of quiche from two bakeries, plus other goodies.
The quiche was next. I ate it while spending half an hour trying to figure out how to activate the drying mode on the weird clothes washer installed in the kitchen.
More work, more snacking, a brief walk around outside… Then it was sleep again.
For a while we drifted away from the river, into some low hills. The landscape reminded me of the nicest parts of river delta area, east of San Francisco back home. Vivid greens, dark fertile soil, and air that was just a touch humid without being overwhelming. Evidence of small-scale and industrial farming, and residential gardens, scrolled by on both sides of the path.
Local version of the moisture renention I see over crops back home.
“Any one of these cute townships could feel like home,” I thought, “just from the look of them, laid out across the slope of a hill ahead.”
Of course at the same time, another part of me was busily examining this feeling, and considering the ways that pop culture – like Disney films – and the stories told by my extended family combined to generate this feeling, even though I had never been here before and couldn’t even speak the local language.
The architecture was a combination of immediately familiar, based on my time visiting Berkeley as a kid and staying in my great grandmother’s Victorian house, with mythical, as I recognized the half-timbered style from illustrations in fairytale books and computer games, with the anonymously modern and undistinguished style I’ve seen everywhere from Los Angeles to London.
Nick was still ranging ahead of me, and we kept in touch over text, occasionally sending photos back and forth of whatever caught our eye. This was castle territory: The Rhine is absolutely crawling with castles, keeps, fortresses, et cetera.
Somewhere in the last couple of centuries the practice of cannibalizing stone from an old castle to build a new one ground to a halt as internal combustion made it far easier to refine and transport new building materials like concrete and steel – while simultaneously making these structures useless as defense – and nowadays they’re maintained for their aesthetics more than anything else. Which is fantastic, frankly. I would cycle down this river even without castles to look at, but they really kick it up a notch.
Many a feast has been chomped behind those windows!
Eventually I closed the gap with Nick, who was catching a truly amazing vibe down by the shore of the river at a small cafe, sipping a microscopic espresso. It looked so perfect that I was reluctant to disturb him: I got the feeling he was making a specific memory that would bounce around in his mind for years.
We also discussed the riding schedule. Our stretch goal was a campsite called “Campingpark Sonneneck”, about ten miles outside of Koblenz. We were making good time, and if we could get all the way it would give us more time to look around Koblenz before we turned west up the Moselle.
We rode near each other, then with me directly behind Nick to draft him, for the remaining miles. We talked about starting up an audiobook together, but were enjoying our music too much.
“Only narrowness can birth wideness. All else goes to the sea.” -F.G. Paff
I’m not sure what it means or whether I agree with it, but there you go.
Right down by the river we saw a lot of small plots of land with gardens and shack-like houses on them. We couldn’t decide on the purpose of these. Some appeared to be exclusively for gardening. Some were barely habitable, and didn’t appear to be insulated or electrified. Some looked lived-in. Were these properties used for vacationing? Was this considered some kind of low-income or government-assisted housing? We couldn’t figure it out.
If people wanted to build structures of this size, and in this location, in modern times, they would use different materials and a different design, and the result would probably need a whole lot less maintenance. But, am I glad these grand old buildings were retrofitted? Yes I am!
We pushed the pedals and chugged along, but it was fully dark when we arrived at the campsite. The attendant said the place was full, but if we wanted, we could set up in the space next to the cute little mini golf course. It wasn’t much room, and there might be some noise, but we counted ourselves lucky.
We rolled our bikes over to the site and I sent Nick out immediately to run to the pizza joint in the middle of the campground and ask if they could still make us food. Turns out they could, so we ordered two personal pizzas and glasses of orange juice. We chowed down with gusto. I wasn’t sure if we were being rude by picking up the slices directly rather than cutting them with a knife and fork, but I was too hungry to care.
Nick and I hauled the bikes downstairs and packed them, and this time we managed not to accidentally switch our smaller bags. I also did a quick inspection and found that my rack was missing a screw. This is why we bring spares…
Time to explore, with an appropriately themed t-shirt.
Time to explore, with an appropriately themed t-shirt.
Our first destination was one from yesterday: We cycled back to the Römerberg, the big square with all the amazing buildings. Our mission was to get a picture standing in the same spot that Nick’s grandfather, Ben, stood a quarter century ago.
Standing in the spot where dad did, about a quarter century ago.
With that photo done, we barged into a random restaurant for brunch. We pointed at stuff behind the counter and they loaded the items onto a dish, then charged us all at once. Service via the point-and-grunt method! My mother would be proud.
The coffee was terrible, but we devoured the food, chatting about New York versus German cities, about bikes versus cars, about different modes of dress.
“Germany skews much more older than America,” Nick observed. “Or perhaps those are the only people we see out in the middle of a Friday?”
We strolled around a bit, getting our last looks at the magnificent square.
Little houses in a little house shop, in a house that looks like the little houses!
Back on the bikes, we set out for another photo op, reproducing a shot from 1997 at the David and Goliath sculpture. This went a bit better. Here’s the original:
The David And Goliath fountain. Sitting where Dad sat about a quarter centurty ago.
There were some other photos we could try to reproduce but they were just on random street corners, so we declared victory and began to move west and south, picking streets almost randomly. Frankfurt was a busy place, and we encountered all kinds of goings-on, for example a trade union protest.
We crossed the Opelbrücke bridge using a bike lane, putting us on the south side of the river. The weather was great. The wind was against us but was very mild.
For several hours we stayed on the Eurovelo route. Nick expressed interest in the mapping program I was using, so we installed it on his phone. It allowed us to use (and cache) the OpenCycle map, upon which all the Eurovelo routes are marked. Now we would both know what was ahead.
The Eurovelo route was charming. It was clearly pieced together from other things: Connected bike paths, old walking trails, decommissioned rail lines, suburban streets … even chunks of parking lot.
Interesting! The USSR hammer and sickle. Symbols of communism turned into symbols of racism, thanks to Russia.
There was a snag: The campground did not accept any sort of charge card. It was cash only. I would need to find a cash machine in the morning. In the meantime, I agreed to leave my passport with the clerk overnight as a kind of collateral.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the city of Mainz was the birthplace of Johannes Gutenberg about 600 years ago. There was an amazing museum featuring early examples of mass-printed type, but it was already closed for the day.
I found an ATM, and then hung out for a while at a hip-looking and expensive cafe. I was surprised to see how many German people smoke, including young people. That would explain the cigarette machine I saw at the campsite. I haven’t seen one of those in 30 years (since they were banned.)
Back across the river I paused to grab a photo of the city, because the light was calling to me.
I crawled into my tent and tried to inflate the mattress, but the pump was nearly dead and would barely move air. I sent Nick a snippy text about it. Then I scooped together a bunch of gadgets and crawled back out, and found a power outlet in the bathroom building. Since I had time to kill I trimmed my beard, then sat reading. An hour later everything was decently charged. Now I could have a nice mattress!
There was a pub next to the campground and a bunch of revelers were laughing and shouting in German until late in the night. I put in my Airpods and was able to mostly ignore it.
Very often I question the sheer amount of stuff I haul around in bike bags while touring. But on days like this it feels okay.
