Okay, so this may be a bit gross

If you don't like stories about skin rashes or insects then I suggest you don't read any further, you have been warned.

So it turns out old College Franco-Britannique has given me scabies (those are the skin mites that generally nurses, homeless people, remote communities and now CFB residents suffer from). Thank you College Franco-Britannique! I can handle the lack of hot water and heating in the middle of winter, the patchy internet service, the almost weekly fire alarms, but getting skin mites (I don't like calling them scabies) is really on a whole other level. Thank god I have 2 beds in my room, it means I can quarantine one whilst I sleep on the scabies free one, before swapping over once they wash my sheets. It certainly makes me look forward to getting out of this place. At first I wasn't sure it was scabies, I had taken the treatment but there seemed to have been no improvement. I am only posting this as today, 2 weeks after the pills, that there is actually a noticeable improvement in my rash. Scabies are horrible, in fact they get heaps worse after you take the pills, I'm talking waking up in the middle of the night to have a scratch worse. But anyway the rash finally seems to be subsiding, but is in no way even close to being totally gone, I just hope I haven't jinxed it and that it comes back with a vengeance tomorrow. Never get scabies, you have been warned!!

Perhaps this was too much information for people, I bet you are all dying to visit me now. Come to Paris for the wonderful sights, leave for the insidious skin mites. Hey, at least there are no photos with this post :)

Louvre Part III

I finally got back to the Louvre to see some of the stuff I hadn't seen in my last two visits, in particular the large Italian, Spanish and French paintings (including the Mona Lisa). The statue to the left (not a painting I know) has to be my favourite piece at the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. I've probably already put a photo up before, but I really do love it, and how it is situated too on the landing of some stairs so you are walking up to this headless woman who looks like she is about to take-off.

One thing I noticed on this trip to the Louvre is the advent of the digital video camera. I mean digital cameras are so passe now, everyone has one hanging off their wrist, myself included, but there are certainly starting to be more of the video cameras. Honestly I couldn't think of a worse experience than being forced to sit through someone's holiday video which included footage of their aimless wanderings through an art gallery, complete with tops of heads, out of focus art and people walking across your shot. Maybe it is some new form of CIA torture that they are trialling, seeing as how that waterboarding thing is now out, and they need to get enough footage for a proper test.

I hadn't been a big fan of this 16th-18th century art, I don't know why, I just thought it was a bit boring, but going back this time I think I was able to appreciate it a bit more. I don't know maybe I was in the right mood, or I'm getting older, or this style of art is like olives or horseradish sauce and so it takes a while to acquire a taste for it. What really blew me away though were just the colours of the paintings. These things were 400-500 years old and yet the blues and reds were still so vibrant, obviously the artists were incredibly talented as well which certainly adds to the pleasure of the colours.

I liked this painting of the Virgin Mary appearing before some saint because it looks like once she died, or rather Assumpted, she got her own little band of child labourers who were then forced to carry her wherever she wanted to go. I guess this is a consequence of Mary entering heaven with her body and soul intact, so I suppose there is then some heavenly decree that she doesn't get a set of wings, at least they are consistent.

Saint-Denis

Wow, I've done a lot of posting this month, this post will make it my most posted month yet, a new record for me! Today I headed north to a suburb of Paris called Saint-Denis. It is home to the famous Saint-Denis church, but really the only reason I knew about it was because I read a pretty crappy book called Pillars of Earth. It was set back in the middle ages and followed one family across 2 generations, the father was a builder and the son followed in his footsteps. Eventually the son somehow finds himself in France (I won't go into details) and then ends up building a fantastic new cathedral just north of Paris (Saint-Denis) which was full of architectural revelations. I wouldn't recommend buying or even reading this book, it really wasn't that good, but the bit describing this modern wonder of a cathedral got me inspired to come visit. A side note to this, I actually saw English and French copies of this book in the gift shop at Mont-Saint-Michel. I don't know what it was doing there as I don't remember Mont-Saint-Michel being mentioned at all in the book, if it was mentioned it must have been very brief, and yet I didn't see the book on sale anywhere at Saint-Denis.

So this church was first built in the 470's and over the years the ties between it and the French monarchy have grown. It was most powerful in the 12th century when it was improved to it's present state. I was a little surprised that the architectural revelations mentioned in the book were actually true, this church had the first rose window of it's time. Just in case you don't know the rose window is situated below left, though I doubt this is actually that first rose window. I think the biggest improvement of this church over it's predecessors is that apparently in building this one they finally mastered the art of diagonal ribbing for the ceilings, this is shown below the rose window, where the ceilings of the chapels behind the altar have this diagonal shape. What this meant is that smaller pillars could be used and so the walls could be hollowed out and more stained glass windows put in. I think the church really did benefit from these new techniques as when I think of Notre Dame in Paris I always remember how dark it is inside, I guess they didn't use the techniques mastered here.

What is really famous about Saint-Denis, I mean apart from the fascinating architecture, is the fact that nearly all the French monarchs were buried here. I'm talking back to Clovis I in 511 and almost every king since then. This church was also where the queens were crowned, the kings being crowned in Reims.

Unfortunately the bodies are no longer in their tombs, after the French revolution there was a fairly large hatred towards all thing royal and so the people broke into this church, smashed a few tombs and dumped all the remains in a mass grave. They remained there until 1817 when the grave was opened and all the remains moved behind a marble wall in the crypt with all the names of the monarchs inscribed on it.

It was a bit freaky to walk through this place, it was like an indoor graveyard with all the tombs around the place. There were a couple that were particularly impressive, looked like someone was trying to compensate for something. The tomb below is of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, the tomb is decorated with statues of the Apostles whilst underneath the King and Queen are shown dead, whilst above the canopy they are shown praying, meant to represent their resurrection. Apparently on the base are inscribed the great deed's of Louis' life, though it was only after reading Wikipedia that I had any idea what they might be. The deeds are pretty boring, reforming the legal system, reducing taxes, blah blah. The most interesting "deeds" of his life, though probably not inscribed on his tomb, was the divorce to his first wife, Joan of France.

He wanted to annul his first marriage so he could marry Anne and get his hands on Brittany. Usually back then annulment was granted because the husband and wife were too closely related, though apparently that was no impediment to them getting married in the first place. But old Louis wanted to try something different and wanted an annulment on the grounds that Joan was "malformed", and so he couldn't consummate the marriage. He went into great detail as to her deformity, which Joan of course argued against this and produced witness to testify how many times a night the king had found her "desirable", I'm about to run out of euphemisms soon. Luckily the story ends there with the pope at the time being forced to be on Louis' side and annulling the marriage. Sounds like a medieval Paul McCartney and Heather Mills saga, though I wonder if Joan got $50 million?

The other cool thing there was the below statue of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, they are meant to be praying, but I'm not sure what Marie-Antoinette is doing. These guys obviously weren't initially buried at Saint-Denis but in a different churchyard and covered with quicklime. In 1815 though a search was made for their remains, a few bones were found and some scraps of a lady's garment and these were proclaimed to be Louis and Marie-Antoinette and interred here.

Some of the bodies were really tiny, like the ones below, the women especially were child-size, though back then they probably were kids when they married. It is hard to get the sense of scale with nothing to compare it to, but take my word for it, they were pretty small. You can see in this photo that the queen has a couple of dogs at her feet and a lot of the men had lions. I don't know the significance of this whether they guarded the soul or guided it or if the sculptor just had some extra marble and liked dogs or lions.

Heidelberg

As well as visiting Munich I also spent almost 2 days in Heidelberg on my way south. It was really quite a nice city, particularly the pedestrianised centre bit, but then you would hope it was nice as it is meant to be the prettiest city in Germany, having been spared the bombing of the Second world war.

It is most famous for it's ruined castle, which sits about 80m above the city and which was very popular during the German romantic period. The castle was first built in the early 15th century and was later added to in the 16th and 17th centuries, before it was destroyed during the 30 years and the 9 years wars.

The people at work were quick to point out that it was the French that destroyed the castle thus laying claim to the cause of Heidelberg's fame. I have no idea if this is true, German history is such a mess that I found it impossible to tell who was fighting who and for what reason. Anyway someone destroyed the castle for some cause and it remained that way until the 1760's when the new Elector (someone who votes on who is going to be the king, I think) started rebuilding it. This rebuilding was again halted when lightning struck the castle damaging it further and the Elector took this as a sign from God that no renovation work was to be finished. And it has been a ruin ever since, with a brief period as a quarry when the townspeople were stealing bricks for their own homes.

As well as the castle Heidelberg is also famous for it's university, which is one of Europe's oldest having been founded in 1386. But I think a bigger claim to fame should be this freaky monkey statue. I don't know what it is for or why it is there, but it comes complete with life size mice statues next to it.

I really liked the city planning in both Munich and Heidelberg, with their pedestrianised city centres, but also the city centres didn't seem to be the business district but rather the shopping/restaurants/pubs district. I think it gives the cities a nice feel then as you don't have suits rushing around to what they think are their very important meetings, but rather it is just people wandering around, meeting friends and checking out the sights. The pedestrianisation also means that the old buildings and churches are in what was their original surroundings and so you don't suffer the bizarre sight of having a 15th century church surrounded by hordes of very 21st century traffic.

Heidelberg's famous university, German towns really have a different look to Paris, what with all the very red roofs. Unfortunately it was a miserable 2 days with rain and periods of sleet so all the photos are a bit misty.















Here is the ruined castle from up-close.

Munich

I spent quite a few days in Munich over Easter, it is pretty popular with Aussies after all, particularly in October. It was an odd town, this was were I found the most old people and got yelled at the most, and yet it seems to be one of the more popular tourist destinations in Germany. I was constantly amazed by how well people spoke English throughout Germany, I was having lunch in a restaurant in Munich when this 90 year old woman came and sat down at my table (I found that a little strange, but I think that is just how it is done in Munich) and she could still speak a surprising amount of English, much more than most French people, and she learnt it in school which must have been a looooong time ago.

Munich sure is a big drinking city, that 90 year old woman who had lunch with me ordered herself a beer, and there were other really old women with the full on 0.5L mugs of beer in front of them. I was amazed, they could drink more than I could! Throughout Europe there is no law against drinking alcohol in the streets, which always startles me when I first see it. Having grown up in Darwin, the city of hard drinkers in a hard drinking nation, alcohol is most definitely banned from public places (too many fights), so whenever I see people drinking on the trains or in parks I always expect fights to break out. I've got used to it now, and I can certainly see the attraction, but perhaps in Munich they should ban it from public, or at least from the train stations. You already have quite strange people hanging around public transport and when you introduce alcohol things can get a little messy, there were people passing out in the stations at 10:30am and the others who could handle their alcohol a little better were staggering around hassling people.

Once I had dodged the drunks and made it into the train station I set off on my first tour of the weekend, out to Neuschwanstein castle. It is a 2 hour train ride from Munich, near the town of Fussen (which is the town in the photo to the left) and 3km from the Austrian border, set in the German Alps. As you can imagine the setting was suitably amazing, and since it was only just spring there was snow all over the place. Even though there was snow all around this was the warmest I was all weekend, the sun was shining, there was no wind and just generally it was a fantastic day.

Neuschwanstein castle was built by "mad" king Ludwig II in 1869and is the inspiration for the disney castles in Snow White and Cinderalla. Now whilst King Ludwig II of Bavaria was known as the "mad" king, I'm not really sure if he was, there is certainly intrigue surrounding this diagnosis and his death. King Ludwig was taken from Neuschwanstein to a different castle after a psychiatrist had decided he may be insane after speaking to his family (he had never actually met King Ludwig himsefl). He was taken to this castle so the psychiatrist could determine for himself whether he was sane or not, but very soon after he arrived the King and his psychiatrist were both found drowned in the lake after heading off for a walk. No-one knows how they died, both the King and the psychiatrist were strong swimmers and neither had been dressed for swimming when they headed out, so who knows what really happened.

Whilst King Ludwig may not have been clinically insane, he was certainly a bit strange. He built the entire Neuschwanstein as a homage to Richard Wagner and so throughout the whole castle there is only one very passing mention to King Ludwig, whilst every room is decorated with scenes from different Wagner operas. This King really did have a thing for Wagner, apparently he also had a cave renovated as an opera theatre, but with only two seats, one for him and one for Wagner, funnily enough Wagner never saw a performance in the cave. He also only visited Neuschwanstein for a total of one night, I'm guessing Ludwig creeped him out, sounds a bit like Johnny Howard and the Australian cricket team. Unfortunately we couldn't take any photos inside the castle, copyright reasons, but I sure got heaps of the outside. Can you see the people in the photo to the left?

I haven't decided if the tour was a good idea or not, I think if I went again, or if I was advising anyone else, I would say just go by yourself. All the tour guide really did was make sure we got on the right train and bus (it was all via public transport) so there was certainly nothing I couldn't have managed by myself. Because I was on this tour it also meant that there was a bit of time waiting around and then a big rush at the end when it would have been good to have spaced the time out a bit more.

What I did really enjoy about the tour was chatting to the tour guide on the train ride home, he was an American, and I've never really had a chance to chat to an American about politics and history and everything, mainly because I haven't met many Americans and those I have I didn't really want to speak to, college students on "Spring Break" are the ones I generally come across. I did feel a little bad at the end though as perhaps I was making him talk about things he didn't really want to, since I was the "customer" and maybe he felt like he had to answer all my questions. Still I found it enlightening.
Me in the snow, I think spring was the best time to see this castle, the crowds weren't too massive and it just felt like a winter wonderland, awesome!















This photo is of Maximillius' castle (Ludwig's father) this castle is literally 20 minutes walk from Neuschwanstein, but this was apparently not good enough for Ludwig, he wanted his Wagner castle.














The next day it was a tour out to Dachau concentration camp, which is in a suburb of Munich, with the same tour company. This one was an awesome tour, the guide took us throughout the entire camp, describing what happened here, the conditions for the prisoners and the history of the camp. It must be really hard to be the tour guide though, going out to the camp a couple of times a week, no guide does it every day, and being surrounded by all this death and degradation.

In the photo to the left are shown all the camps in Germany, the death camps are not in this photo they are more to the right, in Poland. Every grey square is another camp, so there were an awful lot during the second world war. Dachau was the first concentration camp and was the prototype for all other camps that followed. This one was actually a concentration camp, and not a death camp like Auschwitz and the others. Even though it wasn't a death camp it did still have a gas chamber (never used) and at least 32000 recorded deaths occured there in its 12 years of operation and there were probably at least another 20000 unrecorded deaths. There were also the Nazi medical experiments occuring on the prisoners as well as torture and hard labour. Overcrowding was a serious problem, it was built to house 5000 people and yet when the Americans arrived they found 32000 people living there.

It was really quite amazing to visit there and see what people are capable of and it is good that the Germans do remember what happened during the war as there are quite a lot of other government brutalities around the world which have just been forgotten.


Dachau concentration camp, it was a really bleak day with snow every now and again, fairly appropriate for visiting a concentration camp I feel. The sculpture is called Bodies on the Wire and depicts prisoners who have thrown themselves onto the electrified barbed wire rather than spend another day in the camp.












After that rather sobering day I had one last morning in Munich before flying back to Paris. I tried to do as much sightseeing as I could in the town centre, but it was difficult when I could only last about 40 minutes outside before I really had to find a warm coffee shop and wrap my hands around a cup of tea until the feeling returned. I did manage to see a lot of churches, Munich is apparently one of the most religious cities in Germany, very catholic, which meant that as it was Easter I couldn't actually see inside any of the massive churches. The bells were certainly going off though. I really liked the centre of Munich, it had the same feel as Heidelberg, all pedestrianised with alley ways and churches tucked in corners. I got to see the Munich Residence, which is where the Bavarian kings lived in Munich, as well as their crown jewels. Looks like the English monarchs are a hell of a lot richer than the Bavarian kings were. And to finish off I got to see the world's largest glockenspiel going off at midday (in the photo to the left), so all in all a nice way to spend the Easter, though sadly lacking in chocolate.

My First French Demonstration

Today I got to experience my first demonstration, it wasn't a full on strike, just a gathering of people expressing their displeasure at the government's proposals. It was a researchers demonstration outside the front of the CNRS headquarters in Paris. The CNRS is the organisation in charge of research and allocating funding, kind of like the ARC in Australia. Because it was just researchers it was a pretty tame demonstration, nothing like the agriculture students who demonstrated yesterday and so bought a whole stack of cows into Paris. I think we need to bring a few lasers and some liquid nitrogen along next time to liven things up. It was a little disappointing that there weren't more people there, particularly more PhD students, as the proposed changes will affect them the most.

At the moment science in France is awesome, it is well funded (extremely well-funded), well organised and run by scientists, which is the complete opposite from the Australian academic system. The proposed changes would make the French system more like the one in Australia, where people have to apply for grants every couple of years, and nobody has permanent positions. I just look at what they have in France and you want to shake the PhD students to make them see how good they have it and how they should protect it, because once the system is gone there is no returning.

One of the main reasons I'm leaving academia at the end of this year is the poor system in Australia, you are paid like a public servant, but you have absolutely no job security. Can you imagine public servants having to reapply for their jobs every 3 years, in fact it is worse than just reapply, it is like every 3 years the government downsizes and you have to try and convince them as to why they should keep employing you over the other public servants. In the French system though if you want to become an academic you will, eventually, be given a permanent position, it is fairly rare to miss out. What is changing a little now is the length of time spent doing post-docs before you get that permanency. About 40 years ago you could get a permanent position straight away, no post-doctoring required, but now you do have to spend at least 2-3 years doing a post-doc before you can even attempt to go for permanency. I think the only change they should make to the academic system is perhaps get people to do maybe 2 postdocs (ie 4-6 years) before applying for permanency. I think post-docs are a great idea for academics, they force you to move, you do different things in different labs and they just generally make you a much better scientist. At the moment the only problem with the French system is that it is perhaps a little too easy for the academics, but really I would much prefer too easy than impossible.

German Impressions

I've just got back from my Easter weekend in Germany and I thought I would write a little about my impressions of the Germans and Germany.

I had a conference/workshop in Darmstadt for a few days and then I headed off first to Heidelberg and then to Munich. The conference was really awesome, small, only about 20-30 people, who were all doing the same thing in this highly specialised field. So that meant that everyone was interested in all the talks, which certainly makes a change from the usual conferences. Because it was so small it was also really easy to chat to people over coffee and ask them different questions about their work, this is one thing that I think I will miss when I change jobs. I really enjoyed chatting to, generally, intelligent, interesting people about work they were really motivated by. I hope my next job has this aspect of academia, because I really did enjoy it.

My first impression of Germany is that it was cold, this is a photo of me outside the conference building during one of the morning coffee breaks, and yes that is snow, and yes it is meant to now be officially spring. Everytime I have been to Germany (a whole 2 times this year) it has been about 5 degrees colder than Paris, now that could just be that Europe goes through a cold snap everytime I go over there, but it means that I now always imagine Germany as freezing cold.

My most overwhelming impression of the Germans I met in my travels was that they really like shouting, particularly at tourists. That was the thing I really disliked the most during the weekend, never knowing when some serving person would start shouting at me for something. If only I knew what I was doing wrong I could try and not do it again, but it seemed to be fairly random when the next outburst would occur. One of the strangest incidents was when I was walking around a museum and I start to go into a room I'd already been into and the attendant comes up, tells me I've already been there and that I should continue on the other way. I then make the mistake of taking a few steps the wrong way (I wanted to see for myself that I had really been in that room), the attendant then shouts at me that I have to go the other way until I hurry the way he was pointing. There was to be no short-cutting at that museum, you were going to see every last room, and you were damn well going to enjoy them!

When I was in Munich I was also a little startled by the sheer numbers of old people, and I'm talking over 80 old, not merely over 50. There were hardly any people under 40 and the ones that were seemed to be tourists. I was sitting in a restaurant eating lunch and I notice that easily 90% of the patrons were well over 80, I didn't realise Germany had such an old population, and since there were hardly any kids I don't know who is supporting these thousands of oldies. The last off-putting thing was the proportion of freaky old men in Munich, it is true I did spend a bit of time around the main train station, a real magnet for freaky people, but there was definitely a higher proportion there than elsewhere. It was as if when the men hit 50 they all take out a subscription to Dirty Old Men Monthly for the fashion advice, that was actually a bit scary at times especially on the trains and when combined with their shouting.

Germany was nice though, it was good to experience another, completely different, culture for the weekend, though I'm sorry to say Germany that I think I prefer France. I will be posting some of my adventures later, I did see some lovely scenery and castles, I just think it takes longer than 4 days to get used to the German ways and perhaps start to appreciate what I currently see as their freaky ways.