Colmar

This is the 3rd of 4 posts tonight, finally, after several days without wi-fi. The most recent is at the top of the page; scroll down to take them in order.



Colmar, Alsace, France - July 21, 2010



The terrace of our restaurant all but fills a widening in an alleyway. We face a wall of mango-painted plaster broken by half-timbers stained and laquered to a rich chocolate brown. At the corner of the wall, a careful arrangements of stones are exposed. A sax player blows standards, accompanied by an accordian. I feel like I’m in Disneyland.

For those of you who’ve never been, Disneyland is divided up into districts meant to represent particular environments. You can visit Polynesia, for instance, or the French Quarter of New Orleans. Supposedly. Disney could transplant Colmar cobblestone by cobblestone, timber-framed house by timber-framed house, and it would still feel like . . . Disneyland.

Not that it’s not beautiful. It is. It is perfect. It is astoundingly well-preserved. (The bombers seemed to have had instructions to avoid it.) If it weren’t for the hoards of tourists, one could feel transported to the 16th century with barely a street seeming out of place. One imagines oneself among the tanners or the fishers, the shouts of merchants and the stink of their wares. This terrace has been occupied, possibly, for hundreds of years.

The good part about a town like this is that it’s very photogenic, and there’s not much to do. We take an afternoon nap; I get to catch up with my blogging.

There’s a fantastic little museum here, the Unterlinden (funny, the main drag in eastern Berlin is Unter den Linden), whose prize exhibit is the Issenheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece of early 16th Century art painted by Grunewald (people may know his depiction of monsters tempting St. Anthony, a piece that looks Goya-esque and thoroughly modern) and with a centerpiece sculpted by Nicolas de Haguenau. The Altarpiece was designed to open up to show several different scenes at different times of the litergical year, but the museum has separated the panels so that we can view them all, and then created models which we can move, to see how the original worked. In the basement of the museum is the modern art gallery, which is currently exhibiting the work of Joe Downing, an American who lived in Paris, and we got excited with ideas to work with, with our students. We spent a couple of hours in the museum, which occupies a one-time convent, cloister and all.

It is so good to be in France, where we can at least partly understand what people are saying, where we can make requests and even a little conversation without having to think too hard. (Think too hard?? In Germany, thinking did us no good whatsoever; we needed Katharina or Ezra or our phrase book to say the slightest thing!) Colmar is an oddity in France, with its heavy Germanic influence, and it may be Disneyesque, but we are happy to be here.




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