9 Countries in a Day.....
Well not quite but during our travels today we went from Luxe to France to Luxe to Germany to France to Germany to Luxe to France to Luxe and all before afternoon tea time. It wasn't even confusing as most of the time we were just following the main roads to a restored French chateau for a day out. The borders weren't even marked so I had to rely on Julien's word for which country we were in, although the road signs did change occasionally to the local language.
Julien is a big fan of castles and this one had an exhibition comparing Samurai's armour and their way of life with that of medieval european knights. I found it a little ironic to be viewing the Samurai clothing, armour, weaponry and descriptions of "Bushido" a day or two after the 70th anniversary of VJ day. Particularly in light of how the philosophy and attitudes of Bushido had been displayed towards prisoners of war and the Chinese and Korean populations, (amongst others). This display, coupled with Prime Minister Abe's non-apology for the Japanese behaviour during those times, (as reported in the Guardian), left me feeling a bit uncharitable towards them. It also reminded my inner self, (again), of how difficult it is to move away from childhood and adolescent attitudes and prejudices that are instilled about our one time "enemies". I've also worked with people who had personal experience of Japanese treatment during this period and there was little forgiveness there.
Suffice to say then, that I didn't pay a lot of attention to the samurai masks and swords, as I was too much concerned by the fact that the swords were often used for WW2 atrocities.
Enough of that, the chateau itself had been restored beautifully with the help of big grants from the EU and other governments. The original chateau was started in about 1050 AD and was in its heyday in the 14th and 15th centuries, after which it fell gradually into disrepair.
This is what it looks like now, with a view of the courtyard and "Ladies' Tower", (no explanation was offered of why this was so called). The really great thing about the restorations was that the archaeologists had to work out how the timber frames and roofing etc. had been constructed and had no idea of how medieval tradesmen actually built things so they had to work backwards from fragments of wood, stone, slate etc. and then had to re-learn the medieval building skills so as to rebuild it authentically.
There were lots of little models and demonstrations of exactly how this had been done and the workmanship and skills that they had developed were remarkable, not least as the methods were so time and labour consuming.
During the journey to the chateau we passed through some fairly dangerous territory but we never had to send for the cavalry. The village was actually spelled Apache on some of the signs.
On the return journey we stopped at a small town on the Moselle to buy a couple of bottles of wine for dinner. The Moselle isn't a huge river at this point but has some pretty large boats cruising up and down. We saw one very big freighter and a couple of fairly substantial pleasure cruisers, one of which was complete with ballroom chandeliers and brass band playing as it left the wharf, hopefully the brass band would keep playing if it should ever sink.
The Moselle floods occasionally and the town where we bought our wine suffers accordingly. As we walked through the main street we came across a water height rule that was about 2.5 metres high by the side of the street . The marks above this rule are the last two really big floods in 1947 and 1988. The '47 flood must have been quite something.
There wouldn't have been much schooling going on in 1948!
After our day trip out we met with Julien's family, (Mum, Grandma and Brother Max) and had before dinner drinkies and snacks at Chez Jules before travelling out to a country restaurant for dinner. The restaurant was interestingly sited in the charmingly named suburb of Focken-Hiel!
I shall always remember this place, (for all the right scatological reasons of course).
We had a lovely dinner, in a traditional French restaurant, enjoyed by all. As usual the poly-lingual Luxembourgers put us to shame as they switched effortlessly from French to German to English and Luxembourgish. The waiter and waitress in the restaurant had about as much English as we had French though so there were at least two people that we didn't feel inferior to, (linguistically that is). Julien's Mum did tell Iris during the course of the evening that Jo's French was impeccable and accentless, so score 1 for the Kiwis!
After dinner, it was back to the campsite and a departure the following morning for Belgium, picking Jo up on the way to take her back to Brussels. We set out on time but struck major problems with Satnav Maud. After I missed a turn, she decided to exact revenge by taking us through Luxembourg City, as a short cut. Unfortunately, there were road works at a critical turn and she then insisted on taking us on a never ending series of loops and U-turns. It ended up taking us nearly 90 minutes for a 15 minute journey, that culminated in arriving at Julien's place from the North instead of the South. I have since discovered that the Nazis conquered Luxembourg quicker than it took us to cross the city.
So it was on to Brussels but not before a stop to fill the tank with the cheapest diesel in Europe, (thanks to Luxe's low taxes and banking fiddles).
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