Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all who still check this blog despite my terrible neglect of it recently! I have been busy with various projects but shall make it a resolution to post more often in the New Year.


Adoration of the Magi on a Romanesque capital at Autun Cathedral, Burgundy, France


Nativity scene in bronze on Bernward's Door in Hildesheim Cathedral, Germany. The door was commissioned by Abbot Bernward in 1015.


Nativity and Journey of the Magi on a bronze door of similar date from Pisa Cathedral, Italy


Adoration of the Magi and Shepherds in a medieval stained glass window at Canterbury Cathedral, England


Romanesque nativity scene on the facade of Notre-Dame-la-Grande, Poitiers, France


The golden Shrine of the Magi in Cologne Cathedral, Germany, said to contain the relics of the Three Kings themselves

Moissac Cloister

The magnificent cloister of Moissac Abbey in southwest France is the oldest and largest cloister with narrative capitals in existence. Completed in 1100 AD, it contains 76 capitals plus marble pillar reliefs of apostles. Forty-six of the capitals depict narrative scenes from the Bible or the lives of the saints. Unfortunately nearly all human faces have been smashed by iconclasts, but the rest is remarkably well-preserved for being 908 years old.



This evening I've completed a fully-captioned photo gallery of the Moissac cloister, which is my largest yet! It contains a whopping 383 photos, some of which are shown in the mosaic above. Explore the gallery here.

Also new is the accompanying Illustrated Guide to the Cloister of Moissac, with descriptions of all 76 capitals and photos that link to the gallery.

If you haven't visited Moissac in person, I hope these new features might be the next best thing! It is a real must-see for medieval art lovers.

For fun, here's a link to my brief original post on Moissac when we visited in July.

Tournus Abbey Church

New on Sacred Destinations: the magnificent Abbey Church of St. Philibert in Tournus, France. One of many fine Romanesque churches in Burgundy, this was built mostly in the 11th century and has all kinds of interesting things to see. Click photos for captions, learn more in the detailed new article or just go straight to the big photo gallery.

Magnificent Medieval Art

Medieval art is one of my favorite things about Europe's churches and cathedrals. I've been working with photos of medieval art quite a bit lately, so you can now explore the following places in detail on Sacred Destinations:


One of the beautiful early-1200s stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral in France. Shown above is the month of February, symbolized by a man warming up by the fire, in the Zodiac Window. So far I've managed to caption, crop and publish 210 photos of the windows, with many more left to do. I've also recently added a special section with a plan of the main windows and detailed guides to nine windows, including the famous Blue Virgin Window and the interesting Thomas Becket Window.


Sixth-century ceiling mosaic of the Baptism of Christ in the Arian Baptistery in Ravenna, Italy. Can you guess who that guy is on the left?? The answer can be found in the photo gallery.


Detail of a 6th-century Byzantine mosaic at Sant'Apollinare in Classe, also in Ravenna. Learn more in the article or go straight to the fully-captioned photo gallery.


A dark-complexioned Christ in the apse mosaic of Santi Cosma e Damiano, a 6th-century church in the Imperial Forum in Rome. The photos are from our 2006 trip before we had very good lenses, but I've used some newly-acquired Photoshop skills to improve them as best I can.

New City Pages, Plus Hildesheim and St. Cecilia

I've started to upgrade the layout of the city pages on Sacred Destinations. This will be a long-term project that I won't do all at once, but so far Ephesus and Rome are available for your perusal:

www.sacred-destinations.com/italy/rome
www.sacred-destinations.com/turkey/ephesus

Hope you like it! Let me know if you don't. Comments are always welcome.

And there are a couple new articles and photo galleries available:


The wonderfully Romanesque, 11th-century, double-ended, Church of St. Michael in Hildesheim.


Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, which has a really interesting statue of the saint's incorrupt body and a nice 9th-century apse mosaic.

As you can see, we didn't have very good weather when we visited either of these! That's what we get for traveling in the winter.

What's New

Updated Monday, September 22

So here's what I've been working on lately while neglecting the blog, beginning with the newest first:


San Vitale (Ravenna, Italy) - updated article, new photo gallery & new floor plan


Germigny-des-Pres (France) - new article with photo gallery


Aulnay-de-Saintonge Church (France) - new article and new photo gallery


Regensburg Cathedral (Germany) - new article and new photo gallery


Albi Cathedral (France) - new photo gallery and updated article


Notre Dame de Paris (France) - new photo gallery and updated article


Conques Abbey (France) - new photo gallery and updated article


Assisi (Italy) - six new photo galleries plus updates to articles


San Clemente (Rome, Italy) - updated article and new photo gallery


Paestum (Greek temples; Italy) - new photo gallery and updated articles

A new specialty bookstore section

New gallery page with all our photos - 14,589 so far!

Addition of Baltimore by popular demand (mainly for the Basilica of the Assumption)

More soon...

Just a quick note to promise that, despite appearances, I won't be abandoning this blog entirely now that we're home! Since our arrival back in Oregon on August 6 we've been quite busy settling in, seeing family and friends, finding an apartment, setting up house, unpacking all the stuff we put in storage or sent from Europe, marveling at the hugeness of everything, and the like.

And finally, in the last week I've been able to get back to work on Sacred Destinations full time, which is something I've really been looking forward to. I'm so excited to get the best of our gazillion photos from Europe captioned and published (which will take months!), as well as lots of new articles and new features.

So now that our whirlwind European adventure is over and we're not doing as much sightseeing, most of my publishing work will be over at the main website - but I do have some more blog posts planned, including some illustrated "best of" lists from our trip! I'll also post occasionally with brief news about new stuff on my website and sacred sites in general.

In the longer term, we will definitely be doing more traveling worth blogging about. Currently highest on the agenda are the western states, Japan and Scandinavia. Watch this space!

Leavin' on a jet plane

Well, we've had a great few days in Amsterdam and are so excited to head home to the States in the morning!! We're really glad we chose to fly out of Amsterdam Schiphol - it's an excellent airport. It has always worked smoothly on our previous visits and there are lots of great shops and restaurants to wander around. We've already checked in electronically and scoped out our departure point, so here's hoping everything goes as well as we expect it to tomorrow!


One of the best things about the airport is this panoramic terrace with a view of all the airplanes! It is so fun.


David enjoying the view


The plane that takes us home might be one of these


Or one of these. Our flight is jointly operated by KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) and NWA (Northwest) so it could be either one. We do know it's an Airbus A330, which is on the small side for a transatlantic flight but we like that.


Our hotel, the CitizenM, is very fun.


As advertised, it really is only 1-2 minutes walk to the airport, which is awesome. Under a covered walkway, too!

Our room is as small as expected, but it is so well designed that it's not claustrophobic. It comes with lots of fun gadgets, including a nice flat-screen TV with about 60 channels and free movies! We also have a Philips "Moodpad", a hand-held touch-screen gadget that controls the TV, music, blinds, lighting (available in many colors), and temperature. David loves it.


The bed takes up one end of the room and is absolutely huge - a big, comfy square of 2 meters by 2 meters, complete with fluffy white duvet and lots of pillows.


View from the bed of the rest of the room. There's a pod for the toilet (right) and one for the shower (left) - highly unusual, but it works!


The room and entire hotel are filled with clever little messages, all in English. The one at the top of this post is in the elevator.


Sometimes the design is just a little too creative, such as these signs on the bathroom doors in the lobby. It took some squinting to determine which one is the ladies!

Aside from entertaining ourselves in our hotel and at the airport, we've also found time to do some last-minute packing and take the train into Amsterdam for an afternoon.


The city was a whole lot more crowded now than when we visited in November! This is the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) on the wonderfully named Dam Square.


Canal


Street in the Red Light District, with Bulldog "coffee shop" up ahead. We walked through here on our way to revisit the Oude Kerk, which is in the heart of the district (and no longer functions as a church). We didn't linger long, as it's all rather seedy and we did enough gaping at the women in the windows on our last visit.


Oude Kerk (Old Church)



The main reason I wanted to visit it again is to take some photos of the weird and wonderful misericords, which I somehow missed the first time around.

So that concludes my last blog post from Europe! But I hope we'll still do enough interesting things back home worth writing about every once in awhile, and of course Sacred Destinations will be updated a great deal over the next few months with more of our photos and experiences!

Delft, Leiden & Amsterdam

Tomorrow morning we leave Delft for Amsterdam, our last stop in Europe! It is pretty exciting to be getting so close to the home journey.


Oostpoort (East Gate, c.1400 AD) in Delft

The second half of our week in Delft has been as pleasant as the first, consisting mostly of relaxing days around town plus a nice day trip to Leiden and The Hague. We've had a few more pancakes, a few more canal walks, and lots more easy conversations in English. We will definitely miss peaceful little Delft, but we are looking forward to Amsterdam and even more to coming home.

Leiden

It was fun to revisit Leiden, as we had spent a day there in November 2006 and liked it. We still liked it this time around, but not as much as Delft. It's mainly because Leiden is a bigger city and therefore more crowded, a little dirtier, and less peaceful. But it also has lovely canals and bridges and interesting shops, plus several churches and museums.


Fast train at Leiden Central Station. Our train was efficient and on time, but old and stifling hot.


Outside of Leiden Central


Windmill


One of many canal scenes


Hooglandse Kerk, a Calvinist church like most in the Netherlands


A side street


National Museum of Antiquities, which I was so disappointed was closing for the evening on our last visit. This time it was open, and it was great! Mostly Egyptian, with some good Roman and other stuff as well.


Ancient Egyptian offering table


Egyptian coffin

We had dinner at the Oudt Leyden restaurant on the way back to the train station. It specializes in "the largest and best tasting pancakes in Leiden", which are served on huge Delft Blue ceramic plates. The sign outside mentioned that Sir Winston Churchill and the Dalai Lama have eaten there.


The pancakes definitely lived up to the hype. They were large, and they were delicious. David had an "apple strudel pancake" with apples, raisins, cinnamon and almond paste.


I got the banana and powdered sugar pancake, and it was to die for. On the small plate is a Dutch side dish with a great name we hadn't heard of before: kwekkeboom bitterballen. They were kind of gravy-ish inside. Interesting and not bad, but the pancakes took priority and we only ate a couple.

The big Delftware plates were available for sale for €45, so it's a good thing we didn't break them! I thought I might like to buy a more authentic big plate back in Delft, but they are hand-painted and cost around €500. Whoa.

We had a bit of an adventure on the way home, as our train stopped at The Hague and we all had to get off, due to a problem down the line. Thankfully, The Hague is only about 10 miles from Delft and we were able to take a tram the rest of the way. We weren't the only ones who did, so it was a very crowded, hot tram. But it was otherwise nice, and it gave us a chance to see a little bit of The Hague, which is a big, shiny, busy city.



Off to Amsterdam!

The final three nights of our Big European Adventure will be spent at the CitizenM, a brand-new hotel at the Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Estimated walking time to the airport terminal from the hotel: 1 minute! It's a budget hotel but a very interesting designer one, with pods and mood lighting and all kinds of modern gadgets.



Groovy though it may be, the hotel room is very small, so we probably won't be spending too much time there. Fortunately the airport also has a train station, so it will be very easy to go into Amsterdam to keep busy until we get on the plane Wednesday morning! Woo!!