26/7 - Luxembourg
More powerful than Singapore pledge. Not only can you not discriminate based on Race, and Religion but also Nationality, Colour, Sex, Class, Political Opinion. Note that Language is not there. This is because anyone who doesn't speak French deserves to be discriminated against.
Hollow tooth - remains of the old fortress. Even if you didn't know it used to be the whole city, you can see that the old fortress must've been really huge.
Alzette river
Bock casemates
Alzette & bank
2 of the 3 towers. The last was quite far from the first two, so I don't know why it was grouped with them.
Spanish turret (a) - >1
The Luxembourgian flag looks a lot like the Dutch flag. Only the lowest stripe in the flag differs, and then it is only in the shade of blue it is.
At the casemates, using a cubicle cost €0,50 but using the urinals and sinks were free. This is why I always say women should learn to pee standing up, and no, not using the plastic/cardboard funnel thing. Yes, I know it's possible. No, I do not have practical experience; I'm still looking for test subjects.
View of Alzette valley through casemates loophole
The Luxembourgians speak Luxembourgish (sp?), a West German language, but this is rarely written. So the official written/administrative language is, surprise surprise, French, and not German. Why ah.
Most signs and information panels in Luxembourg were bilingual - French and German. Argh.
Long chamber: main galley with cannon, chambers and embrasures
Hollow tooth from casemates
47m deep castle well
The Bock casemates were totally bare except for 2 cannon and an iron door or two. They'd have been so much nicer furnished.
More ways for Museums to make money: charge wheelchair users for a compulsory escort and/or require them to ride in specially padded wheelchairs which won't damage anything if they crash (incidentally, some places have free admission for people in wheelchairs and 1 companion of theirs, so it might be profitable to rent wheelchairs).
I then went to a museum. Admission was free for Students, and the special exhibition cost €5, but everything was in French. Argh. And photography was banned, bah.
The museum was fun. It had a pre-history collection (something you rarely see), stone tools, a fur tent with antlers on top (I particularly liked this), neolithic pottery fragments set in a modern reconstruction and a reconstructed house from 5300 BC.
The construction of the place was also most novel. It was literally set into stone; surrounding the parts of the museum below ground level were stone walls, and in some parts of the museum the stone entered the museum (for example, a pillar of stone in the middle of one level). The effect was conveying the impression that the museum was hewn from the living rock.
A very funny artifact: a postcard of the erection of a statue of Napoleon III in 1865, with the traits of Vercingetorix, at Alise-Sainte-Reime.
There was an interesting picture of a coin struck to commemmorate Caesar's victory in Gaul: it showed a horn with the spoils of war (arms, armour), a bound, Gaulish man in a submissive pose amd a woman in a pose of despair below.
The museum had this lovely huge mosaic with Homer and the Muses from a villa at Vichten. Comparing it with a graphic on the wall of it before restoration, it seemd half had been reconstructed.
There was also an amazing model of the fortress of Luxembourg in 1867, just before it got destroyed.
Besides the living stone being incorporated into the museum's design, a 1580 staircase from 'Ancien hotel gaillut de Genouillae' was also present. It was purely cosmetic though, since visitors weren't allowed to walk on it.
The decorative and popular arts section was closed, bah.
Giacomo del Pisamo. 15th century. In vierge et L'enfant entoures d'Anges et de Saints. One of the most horrible I've ever seen. St Peter's keys were fused and so looked like a mace. Jesus' body had the proportions of a grown man, but he was portrayed as an infant, giving a freaky effect. And the 2 angels holding him, with their sinister looks, looked more like demons dragging him to hell.
There was a depressingly large collection of kids' puzzle games by 'Imi Knoebel'. For example 'Portraits' from 1992 had a collection of portraits which were all the same, just in different colours.
The special exhibtion was on a Duke of Luxembourg who became Holy Roman Emperor (Sigismond, 1387-1437), and it truly had a wonderful collection of things. Looking at the number of sources they drew on for the exhibition was an eyeopener as it was remarkably large, but then they were particularly proud of this fella: New York, London, Budapest, Vatican, Cologne, Constanz, Munich, Vienna, Zagreb, Sarejevo (they survived the bombing, it seems) Assorted Hungarian-sounding towns, Florence, Leeds, Nuremberg and Berlin, though the bulk of the items were from Budapest. When museums hold special exhibitions, usually a lot and sometimes even the bulk of the items come from their permanent collections, but a only small minority of the items here had that provenance, so you can tell how much effort they went to.
The exhibiton was huge. Usually temporary exhibitions are not that big, but this took up about 1 1/3 floors of the museum, maybe 30% the size of the permanent collection.
There were 3 large, decorated drinking horns from ~1400. I didn't know they still used drinking horns then. Or maybe they were just status symbols.
There was a 'Lamp with Queen Sophie von Bayern' (Lampe de la Reine Sophie / Lampe der Konigin Sophie von Bayern, ~1400, Deutschordenland. Bratislava, Metske Muzeum, F 355) which was very strange. It looked like 2 elephant tusks set into the bone of the nose, and on top of the base where they tusks met, a pavilion with the figure of the Queen rested. One chain hung from each tusk. 2 on top of the pavilion joined at the top on a ring, for carrying the lamp. I'd never seen anything like it before.
There were 5 saddles which seemed to be made of ivory ('Selle d'Appant recouverte de plaques en os'/'Beinsattel' - bloody French), all similar in design. 2 were from Budapest, 1 from Leeds, 1 from Florence and 1 from New York. Presumably they were gathered to show how similar they were, or maybe they were 5 of a kind. More evidence of the dilligence of the organisers.
There was one Hungarian sword loaned from the Lord Mayor of York. There wasn't anything indicating just why the Mayor of York had a Hungarian sword, though.
When I entered the museum, no one said anything. When I wandered about, no one said anything. But when I'd almost finished exploring the museum and had the last 1/3 level of the special exhibiton left, the woman there asked me to put my bag at the reception. Gah. Going back to the reception, I saw that it said that no big backpacks could be brought in, but the accompanying graphic clearly showed a backpackers backpack, rather than the medium sized school knapsack on my shoulders.
The special exhibition had lots of well-preserved 15th century documents with the seals still on them, hanging from a string attached to the parchment. I didn't know so many of these even existed in the world, let alone could be mustered for one exhibition.
There were some coins in display cases, and there were funky mechanised magnifying glasses one could pilot over individual coins with the aid of a joystick.