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with Paul Dacre
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The magic museum, Maison de la Magie at Blois, doubles up as the town’s cuckcoo clock.
On the hour dragons (sorry, salamanders) emerge from its windows and do a little dance. The half hour is marked by a soloist.
A bit like an upmarket Las Vegas hotel.
This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).
Clos Luce at Amboise is no ordinary French chateau. It’s the house in which Leonardo Da Vinci spent the last three years of his life and when you’ve finished touring the chateau, you discover the grounds are nothing less than a theme park for grown ups.
Katharine and I were so over stimulated we found ourselves in the childrens’ play area bouncing around on the see-saw.
The garden’s packed with full scale working models of Leonardo Da Vinci’s inventions, like this recently fired machine gun. Other military highlights include the spinning tank and I’ll soon be uploading video of yours truly operating the paddle boat to YouTube.
Update 2 September:
Here’s me operating Leonardo Da Vinci’s Paddle Boat at Chateau Clos Luce, Amboise.
The French don’t seem to do ice cream. Or frozen deserts in general.
French ice cream is a particularly artificial construction, notable for its weird colouring and unfortunate after taste.
The problem appears to be the dominance of Carte D’Or, which not only monopolises the cornet market, but frozen deserts in everyday restaurants. Desert menus are like those you find in Indian restaurants back in the UK. Photos of sundae type things and sorbets, the most famous of which is the scooped out half orange filled with sorbet and laid down at the bottom of the freezer for several years.
Just nine or ten gardeners (depending on who you talk to) tend the magnificent gardens at Villandry, France. And given the formality and variety of gardens that’s a hefty workload.
So maybe someone had been lax with regard to the flowers in the Chateau…
A burly attendant bursts into the room and barks at a very proper English lady — let’s call her Mrs Terribly Terribly — who’s not only touching the flowers, but manipulating them. Does she desist? Does she hell!
‘It’s okay!’ she insists. ‘I’m a flower arranger. I spotted a gap.’
This is Chateau d’Usse near Chinon, the castle that inspired Charles Perrault to pen Sleeping Beauty, way back in the seventeenth century. And to celebrate there’s an appropriate wax work within. Locals reckon Walt Disney not only took inspiration from Perrault’s work, but this castle’s turrets too. Others have more convincing claims.
Disney built his empire adapting out of copyright works like this, so Perrault’s descendants got nothing. And quite right too, otherwise they’d still be eating out on work of a long dead man they’d never known.
But now the Disney corporation is fighting to keep control of Mickey Mouse, whose entry to the public domain is fairly imminent. Someone’s already put him in a porn film.
Chartres is a town noted for its cathedral, which is huge. This is as it should be: the myths of religion require grand humbling displays like this to keep doubters on side.
Registered on the UNESCO World Heritage list, its mismatched towers are 112 and 103 metres high. And it stretches right back. And its got loads of stained glass (2,600 square metres). And there are a very great many carvings. And there’s plenty more. They don’t build churches like this any more.
But when you’ve seen one grand gothic cathedral, you’ve seen them all. Some are just bigger than others.
More interesting is to track down all the wonderful contemporary art that’s dotted around the place. Katharine poses once again with a pair of wellies.
Well hidden by its own (free to view) gardens, Giverny’s Museum of American Art is far more substantial than it first appears.
Many Impressionist (and, I guess, would-be Impressionist artists) wanted to get close to Monet and so a colony emerged. Many were American and the permanent collection, which includes a couple of outstanding etchings by Edward Hopper, illustrates the movement’s subsequent influence on modern art.
The temporary exhibition (until 31 October) is Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860-80. It’s a kind of ‘while the West was won’.
Breathtaking images of, for the most part, what are now Yellowstone and Yosmite national parks for documentary purposes, alongside Native Americans pictured in much the same way, set in the context of the ongoing genocide of that people.
This bee on a sunflower just pipped a self aware image of tourists on the Japanese bridge photographing a gardener cleaning the lilly pond.
The house and gardens of the Impressionist leader have benefitted from a great restoration job. Just let your eyes drift out of focus and you’re standing in a Monet.
This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).
The train does seem a fair bit faster on the French side of the Channel Tunnel. It’s certainly a bumpy ride, on the other side. Kent must be a lot flatter.
Otherwise the experience is something of a let down as there is no fanfare, the train is ever so ordinary (with a totally rubbish buffet car) and Waterloo a terrible dump.
I don’t know why, but I somehow expected the Chunnel to feel special.
This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).
It’s 8.21 on a Monday morning and all is quiet at Manchester Piccadilly. It’s Bank Holiday!
The station got its make-over and dashing airport style looks in time for the Commonwealth Games five years ago. With that they moved the entrance round the back, which I guess is now the front, and threw all the cabbies off course.
None of Chorlton’s cab drivers has yet worked out how to get to the dropping off point without performing an illegal manoeuvre. It’s as if defying the new-ish arrangement is a point of high principal. To get it right, would reveal that you’d read the road signs and followed directions, something no cabbie could ever own up to.
And it’s just a fifteen minute journey (today), but no two cab drivers ever take the same route in. They all love a quirky little short cut.
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