Visiting Augsburg, Germany - home of the Fugger Bankers in Augsburg, Germany with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Home of the Fugger Bankers in Augsburg (Germany) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once tourists discover the Bavarian city of Augsburg outside Munich they often come back to visit again as my husband Laurent and I have done on several occasions.  Augsburg’s architecture is Renaissance with an imposing town hall (Rathaus) and Perlachturm bell tower.

Augsburg was the financial center of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century when the Fugger family in the person of Jakob Fugger the Rich (1459 – 1529) was banker to Carlos V (1500 – 1558) of the Hapsburg Empire.  The Fuggers first became wealthy in the woolens industry and then set up banks to finance their businesses.

These banks gradually extended their businesses to lending operations outside the family. The Fuggers were much like the Florentine de Medici family, who started in woolens and ended up as the bankers of Europe as well.

The Fuggers also set up the Fuggerei, which is a low income housing complex for Catholics.  In return for living quarters, the Catholics in the home pray for the Fuggerei’s founders to this day as part of their lodging agreement according to the Guide Michelin.

The speed of life in Augsburg is fast.  Even on weekends during summer, pedestrians rush to outdoor cafes in throngs on the streets.  Germans like to congregate outside, talk, and laugh it seems.  After cold, wet, and dark winters, this love of the sun is understandable.

Children appear to be happy in Augsburg.  The town boasts a puppetry museum and puppet theatre.  One day when we visited, a concert was taking place in the town hall.  At the end, we saw one of the young musicians rush out with a cello attached to her back.  She ran smiling to her parents full of creative adrenalin no doubt.  That is the image I will forever hold of Augsburg in my mind.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's Christmas Market with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's Christmas Market with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Nuremberg’s Christkindlesmarkt first appears in historical records in 1628 when an oval box decorated with flowers mentions it. The box contained skeins of silk to be sold at the market. 

 

The box is now housed at the German National Museum in Nuremberg according to the website www.christkindlesmarkt.de , which details the world’s most famous Christmas market.

Today the Christmas market features 180 wood stalls that sell traditional wood crafts, food, and drinks. In the children’s area, there are small train rides and a merry-go-round.  

 

The Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt hosts two million visitors every year where the good-natured crowd treads cobble stone streets and is just as much part of the scene as the wood carved decorations on the booths and Christmas trim.

While walking around the main square where the market is held, my husband Laurent and I discovered the Korn and Berg Bookstore.  Korn and Berg was founded in 1531 and is Germany’s oldest bookstore.  The scent of new paper greeted us when we entered the ship.  I purchased a blank book with a flower-patterned cover that shimmers in the light for my alchemical musings brought on by our visit to this German town full of medieval buildings.

On our next trip to Nuremberg, we plan to visit the German National Museum which houses paintings by Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528), Hans Holbein (1497 – 1543), and Lucas Cranach (1472 – 1553) among other art objects.  

Art was often my entryway to understanding French culture when I was younger.   I hope to use art again to understand German culture in addition to studying the German language.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Lyon, France with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Lyon (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Lyon, France’s geographical position has made it a commercial hub between Italy and northern Europe for centuries.

Charles VII (1403 – 1461) used this geographical position to his advantage by instituting the first of several international fairs that made Lyon a sales capital in 1419.  Later in 1450, Charles VII gave Lyon the monopoly on the sale and manufacture of silk in France.

Men in Lyon still wear beautiful silk ties in diamond patterns with red, blue, and yellow backgrounds.  You can find these ties in luxury stores and exclusive hotel shops.  The silk industry also gave Lyon its famous guignol marionette.

An unemployed silk worker named Laurent Mourguet created the guignol character around 1808.  Guignol is a citizen of Lyon, who works very hard, but never seems to have good luck.  There is a museum devoted to guignol and marionettes from around the world at the Château Gadagne in Lyon.

Lyon is world famous for this museum as well as its food, which I happily sampled at the Brasserie Georges.  The Brasserie Georges makes fun of itself for being an Alsatian brasserie and choucroute landmark, but it has been an institution in Lyon since 1836 when it was founded by Jean-Georges Hoffherr.  (Traditional dining establishments in Lyon are called bouchons.)

Brasserie Georges is located by the Perrarche SNCF train station.  Its location allows businessmen to arrive on morning trains, carry out business over a leisurely lunch, and return home without having to stay in a hotel.  

One of the first things I noticed about Lyon was that diners concentrate on their food and do not spend as much time inspecting other diners’ clothing and jewelry as they do in other cities.  Lyon is considered to be the capital of French food and maybe this attitude towards eating is responsible for it.

The first lunch I ate at Brasserie Georges reminded me of what someone from Paris would eat as they headed south in France: roast saddle of lamb with a endives au gratin.  The endives au gratin were not bitter at all and tasted sweet a crust of browned cheese. The gratin stayed deliciously warm in its own heat dish.  For dessert, I ate crème brulée which had a sugary, warm crust on it – perfection.

The next day was a Saturday and the clientèle changed from the weekday businessmen’s lunches.  More multigenerational families were there.   My husband Laurent and I had to wait a short while for a table and watched as waiters carried baked Alaska desserts around the dining room hall with sparklers on top of them for birthdays to the tunes of a hole-punched, card-fed music box.

I ordered a traditional Lyon-style menu this time starting with a terrine made of chicken livers.  Following this course was a course of sausages meant for cooking that Lyon specializes in.  They had been flavored with pistachios, but can also be found with pepper corns and truffles in their more elaborate forms.  Mashed potatoes accompanied the sausage.

We drank a Beaujolais from Brouilly with our meal. We laughed at the old Lyon joke:

-What are the three rivers that run through Lyon?

- The Rhône, the Saône, and the …

- And, the Beaujolais!!!

To finish the meal I had a “cervelle de Canut” cheese, which literally means a silk worker’s brains cheese. This is a specialty of Lyon made from soft, white cheese with chopped herbs (chives in the Brasserie Georges version), shallots, salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar.

This meal marked the end to our visit to Lyon.  After three trips to this beautiful city, I still feel as if I have just scratched the surface of what Lyon has to offer.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Tintin - Herge Museum in Brabant, Belgium with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Tintin - Herge Museum in Brabant, Belgium with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

During a visit to the Les Secrets de Moulinsart exhibit at the Château de Cheverny in France, I picked up a brochure for the Hergé Museum in Louvain-le-Neuve outside Brussels, Belgium.

Ever since I studied French-language literature for children and francophone children’s culture to become a French teacher in the 1990s, I have wanted to understand Hergé, the creator of the Tintin comic books better.  The Hergé Museum was one of the first stops we made on a weekend vacation during the summer of 2012.

The museum is rich in panels of cartoon page drafts that allow you to understand the multiple sketches that went into the creation of a single page when Hergé was a cartoonist.  As you work your way through the French-language exhibits, you learn about the newspapers that Hergé worked for; Le Vingtième Siècle and Le Soir.  Both newspapers were Catholic and sought to have a leisure section for young people that Hergé filled with Tintin or other comic strips.  Most of Hergé’s comic books started as comic strips in these newspapers.

Hergé was not a wealthy illustrator at the beginning of his career.  The second gallery following the tour is decorated with his work for the advertising industry.  Both his advertising and comic strip work make use of techniques such as speed lines to indicate motion, the interplay of angles to focus the eye, and color to incite emotion among other techniques to focus viewer attention on use of products or product placements in attractive surroundings.

My favorite gallery was devoted to the influence of cinema on Hergé’s work.  Books for each decade of his work were set out on tables in this gallery.  It was interesting to see how Hergé could speed up a sequence by showing one long frame on line, then two frames on the next line, and finally three frames on the last line.  The same sequence of frames in reverse could slow up a sequence as well.

I am more interested in technique than content with most comic books.  However, Hergé’s publicity claim that Tintin comic books were for people aged “seven to seventy-seven” keeps me coming back to the medium.

A book in the gift shop convinced me to buy it for its focus on narrative in comic books.  The book is entitled J’apprends à raconter une histoire: l’atelier de la bande dessinée avec Hergé (2001, editions Moulinsart).  The books shows children how to ask themselves questions to start a story, how to track story notes and sketches, how to convey different moods with bubbles, and how to tell a story with figures in action among many tips.

Children often learn how to draw comic strip characters, buildings, and vehicles, but sometimes need help with creating stories.  I was happy with this purchase that appealed to my love for knowing how things work.

It took half an hour to get back to Brussels where we ate dinner:  a carbonnade flamande (beef stew) with fries for me and entrecôte (steak) with fries for Laurent.  Of course, the fries were dunked in mayonnaise like the Belgians eat them.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Discussing Napoleon's Battle Plan for Waterloo (Belgium) over Lunch with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Discussing Napoleon's Battle Plan for Waterloo (Belgium) over Lunch with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



As my husband Laurent and I drove towards Belgium for a weekend trip in Brussels, I thought of how many times Belgium has been a battlefield or subject to foreign powers.  Our touring guide did not gloss over any of Belgium’s painful history.

Instead the Belgique, Duché de Luxembourg Michelin guide lists Belgium’s 500 years under foreign domination before it notes tourist sites.  The monarchies or states that controlled Belgium during this 500-year period include: the Dukes of Burgundy (1384 – 1482), the Hapsbourgs (1482 – 1701), the Austrian Netherlands (1701 – 1795), France (1795 – 1814), and the Kingdom of the Netherlands (1814 – 1831).  In the twentieth century, Germany also occupied Belgium from 1940 – 1944.

On this trip, Laurent and I visited Waterloo, which is about fifteen minutes outside Brussels.  I had read about Waterloo in 100 Decisive Battles: From Ancient Times to the Present Day by Paul K. Davis several years prior to our visit.  Davis writes that Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769 – 1821) strategy was one of “a separation of enemy forces” or “divide and conquer” in the jargon of office politics.

I remembered Napoleon’s strategy from Waterloo, but not the specifics of this battle, which took place on June 18, 1815.  Laurent drew a map of the battlefield on my paper place mat at the Wellington Café of the battlefield site.

The A-shaped battlefield had Napoleon in the center facing the Anglo-Dutch forces under Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington (1769 – 1852).  Prussian forces under Field Marshal Prince Gebhard von Blücher (1742 – 1819) arrived on the right flank of Napoleon’s forces in the late afternoon (after 4 pm), allowing the Anglo-Dutch forces and Prussian forces to defeat Napoleon at once.

The Anglo-Dutch forces under Wellington held off Napoleon’s forces until the Prussian forces could arrive.  This resistance completely undid Napoleon’s plans to defeat each force separately; instead he had to fight both forces at once from the middle of a triangular battlefield.

Rainy weather contributed to Napoleon’s defeat by making intelligence difficult and creating muddy battleground conditions for his cavalry as well.

The battleground was hot and dry when we visited.  Laurent walked the entire battlefield on foot as his souvenir of the site.  I hoped that Belgium would never have to be a battlefield again.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Romeo and Juliet's Town of Verona, Italy with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Romeo and Juliet's Town of Verona, Italy with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

My husband Laurent and I loved Verona, which Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) used as the setting for his play Romeo and Juliet. 

Verona reaps a fortune on this fictional love story, but we still went to San Franceso al Corso Church to see Juliet’s tomb.  When we left the museum, we helped several groups of British ladies find their way to Juliet’s tomb, too.

The play Romeo and Juliet may have been fictional but the domestic turmoil within Italian cities that Shakespeare described was very real.  The Italie du Nord Michelin touring guide we had gave background on this conflict as one between the Montecchi (Montagu) family and the Capuleti (Capulet) family.  The Montecchi were Guelphs, who supported the pope.  The Capuleti were Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany.

The conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines divided cities within themselves and also against other cities that threw their entire support behind either the Guelph or Ghibelline faction.  According to infoplease.com, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict affected central and northern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 

The time of the most heightened conflict took place when Guelph-supported Pope Alexander III (1105 – 1181) and the Hohenstaufen Emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa (1123 – 1190), who was supported by the Ghibellines, fought one another with alliances and battles.

Medieval history left my thoughts as the arena dating from the first century C.E. came into view.  The arena has 44 rows of seats and can hold 25,000 spectators.  Operas such as Carmen still take place there in the summer.  Men dressed as centurions complete with swords and women dressed as Cleopatra posed outside the arena with tourists for photographs.

The arena is located on the Piazza Bra.  We ate an outdoor café despite the heat that could fry an egg on the pavement.  We ordered pizza with three liters of water.  From the café we had an excellent view of the arena, park, and a huge TV screen set up for the Spain-Italy Eurocup match.  (Spain won later that night 4 – 0.  It was a very quiet evening in Italy Laurent noted.)

As we walked back to the car after lunch, I thought all had ended well for our Verona outing.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

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Visiting the Italian University Town of Padua with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Italian University Town of Padua with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


When my husband Laurent and I visited northern Italy, the city that topped my list of places to visit was Padua for its university. 

The University of Padua was founded in 1222 and is the second oldest in Italy.  (The University of Bologna was founded in 1088.)  According to our Italie du Nord Michelin touring guide, Galileo (1564-1642) taught at Padua and Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), Giovanni Pico della Mandorla (1463 – 1494) and Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595) were students there.

The astronomer Galileo had to stand trial before the Inquisition in Rome in 1633 for teaching that the earth rotated around the sun.  According to Stephen Hawking’s On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy which records Galileo’s renunciation of his teachings and book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, Galileo is reported to have said “Eppur si muove” in a mutter as he stood up from kneeling.  (“Eppur si muove” is loosely translated as “yet it moves.”)

Law and math were the main subjects of study for Copernicus at Padua a generation before Galileo supported Copernican theory that is laid out in De Revolunionbus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus.

One of the University of Padua’s most distinguished students was Giovanni Pico della Mandorla.  Pico della Mandorla wrote Oration on the Dignity of Man, which is one of the reference texts for Renaissance Humanism.  Torquato Tasso, a poet and leading figure of the Renaissance, studied law and philosophy at the University of Padua as well.

As we walked through Padua’s streets, I wanted to imbibe some of the insight that Padua seems to foster, but Padua’s red buildings retain scorching heat well.  The medieval town has narrow streets, no arcades, and very few piazzas.  I was dripping wet when we visited.  Padua’s scholars must have taken summer semester off I thought.

The walk in the heat to the Church of the Eremitani (Church of the Hermits) was worth the effort, though, despite our not having reservations to the Scrovegni Chapels with its mural paintings by Giotto (1267-1337).

I wanted to see Andrea Mantegna’s (1431 – 1506) paintings in the Church of the Eremitani.  These paintings were his first major work and date from 1488 according to the National Gallery of London’s website.  

When we arrived his work was being restored, so we could not see most of it.  However, what was visible of his Martydom of Saint James, the Assumption, and the Martyrdom of Saint Christopher show how he achieved the sensation of grandeur in viewers through several technical devices, especially perspective.

When you look at Mantegna’s paintings of figures, you feel like you are looking upward.  He achieves this effect by tapering and angling his figures.  He seems to have lighter colors at the top of his paintings as well and darker colors below to enhance the upward flow of his paintings.  He also uses architecture in his paintings to create upward momentum by positioning his arches at angles.   These technical devices all give his work a dramatic impact.

The heat had worn me out and ruled out further touring.  Getting out of Padua was tricky.  Medieval Italian cities like Padua have a circular pattern, which seems to throw off GPS systems.  We circled around a bit until we could decode the “veer right, then turn left” instructions. (Tangential instructions?)

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Laurent Paget Photography

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