Desperately Seeking Sunshine # 2: A Floating Arts Centre

Due to unexpected technical difficulties, I was unable to carry on blogging while I was on the ship. I landed at Fort Lauderdale yesterday and am now back in Canada, so the blogging begins now and will continue until I’m all caught up.

 

Since this was my first-ever cruise on Holland America Line, I think a detailed look around the ship would certainly be in order. As I’d previously mentioned, the M.S. Nieuw Statendam is one of three ships in the Pinnacle Class, the largest ships of the Holland America fleet, shown here at dockside in Nassau.

 

With 12 passenger decks, Nieuw Statendam can carry over 2600 passengers. I know this may sound like a lot of humanity, and it is, but in cruise ship terms this is a mid-size ship. Unusual technical note: this ship uses diesel generators to produce electricity, which is fed to two 19,000 hp electrical motors that drive the propulsion system. One significant result is that there’s less ongoing engine vibration at the stern compared to traditional diesel engine propulsion. The ship entered service in 2018.

 

Enough technical stuff. What did I mean by calling this ship a “floating arts centre?” 

 

Commissioning works of art from contemporary artists is a long-standing tradition at Holland America. Their ships have for decades exhibited the work of multiple artists and designers. With this vessel, the trend goes to extraordinary lengths. No matter how much I walked around the different decks, I never caught the same piece appearing twice in different locations. With that, here’s a gallery of just some of my favourites, from the sculptures in the elevator lobbies…

 

 

 ...to pictures on stair landings…

 

 

…and from tall, narrow pieces placed at the zig-zag bends in the corridors…

 

 

…to the biggest single piece, the extraordinary stainless-steel sculptural creation which takes up most of the atrium and, ironically, prevents it from feeling to me like an atrium at all. 

 

 

A key centre of daily life is the Dining Room (that's actually it's proper name), with huge panoramic windows over the stern. The room's whole look gives a nod to the elegant two-deck design used on so many of the old classic ocean liners before the jet age. Sadly, the staircase in this room didn’t get used for people to make grand entrances as in the olden days, since the upper level was reserved for diners using the same table at the same time with the same table-mates throughout the cruise, while the larger lower level was for those who wished to treat it like a normal restaurant and “come when you wish.” 

 

 

Note: there were very few tables for two on that lower level, and there was an especially long wait for them on Tuesday night, which happened to be Valentine’s Day. Hmm. Shortage of smaller tables was also an issue for many people in the buffet. Overall, the buffet was much more cramped for space.

 

Aside from the artworks, Holland America’s other new signature piece is the Music Walk, the main passage from midships to forward on Deck 2. This cruise line has gone wholesale into promoting music, with four different types of music in three different venues along the Music Walk available to music lovers every day. Lincoln Center Stage promotes classical music, both full-scale and light classics (my favourite venue, as anyone who knows me could guess). 

 

It's no accident that the stage backdrop and the starburst chandeliers both hint at the spectacular architecture of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York. B. B. King’s Blues Club, with its own in-house blues band, uses the same space later in the evening. 

 

Billboard on Board features assorted popular music and quizzes, “ask for your favourites,” and such, all performed by two pianists who also sing. 

 

 

Finally, there’s the Rolling Stone Rock Room, with its own in-house rock band.

 

All of these are free-flowing open spaces, but conflicts are avoided by some nippy scheduling, with performances in each space lasting no more than 45 minutes. Here’s a schedule from one night to give you the idea.

 

There’s also a traditional large theatre spanning decks 2 and 3 at the bow, but with an additional and very sophisticated multi-screen audio-visual setup. Here, most nights featured the Step One Dance Company in assorted performances – something quite different from the usual Broadway shows and show tunes which many lines feature in such a space.

 

The music wasn’t confined to the Music Walk either. Several of the decks were named after famous composers: Beethoven, Gershwin, Mozart, and mine: Schubert. On the Schubert Deck, even the corridor carpets reflected the musical theme!

 

 

Outdoors, the ship includes a feature which has been thrown out, like the baby with the bath water, on many modern ships: a full-length promenade on Deck 3, circling the entire ship except the tip of the sharply raked bow. I had some excellent walking time there.

 

 

Also outdoors: two good-sized pools with adjacent hot tubs, one midships with the now-compulsory large movie screen above it. I didn’t actually go there at all, because I was too taken with the large open pool deck at the stern, the Sea View Pool. With ample sun and fresh air, what nicer place to spend a day on the Caribbean? By the way, that's a Celebrity Cruises ship towering over us. The glass windows above the end of the pool belong to Tamarind, an Asian-fusion gourmet experience which is the absolute showstopper among the ship’s five premium restaurants. Some of my best pictures of the trip were taken from the open-air outer end of this deck, with its magnificent view all around the ship’s stern.

 

 

Even here by the pool, there were a couple of pieces of shipboard art glowering down at us!

Note: the starboard side of the Sea View Pool is the home of the Sea View Bar, and also of the ship’s quite sizable smoking section, adjacent to the bar. If you don’t like the smell of smoke, you would have to stick to the port side or go out farther towards the stern. 

 

Finally, as some of you have read in my previous post, I decided to try an inside cabin for this cruise as a test run, to see if I could stand it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could. Even though the cabin was very compact (that’s putting it tactfully), there was no shortage of storage spaces for my things, and plenty more that I didn’t use. There were North American and European plug sockets and USB ports on the desk, and on both bed tables. The bed was comfortable, the air exchange was every bit as thorough and rapid as the advertising states (a complete exchange every 4 minutes), and I was satisfied. 

 

A real bonus was a large, almost bathtub-sized, shower stall.

 

 

My only question would be to wonder if every cabin has different art works. On such a beautiful ship, so strongly geared towards the arts, somehow that seems far from unlikely!

 

 

 

 

European Musicruise 2019 # 5: Eau de Cologne and Other Bonn-ie Treats

Our ship undocked in Düsseldorf at noon, and by 5:00 pm we were safely tied up dockside in the north end of the city of Köln (better known to English speakers as "Cologne").  But since we were still downstream and therefore down-current from the city centre, it could fairly be said that we were surrounded by "eau de Cologne" -- which means, of course, "water from Cologne."  Sorry, sometimes I just have to crack these silly puns.

A part of the voyage between the two cities was taken up by lunch, and another part by the first on-board concert of the trip, but I did get a few pictures.  So here are a couple of views of the waterfront in Düsseldorf as we departed.

Much of the way were were sailing through placid green countryside, looking very much like a park.

But then there are the more industrial segments of the Rhine -- although the industries are notably cleaner than one expects in Canada's industrial areas.

Anyway, nothing to speak of happened on the evening we arrived.  During the night, the ship was able to move to a better mooring spot right by the centre of the old city, and that was where we began our walking tour the next morning.  River cruises like this one generally feature an included walking tour at every day's stopping place.

General note: although the Old Town district of Cologne looks very quaint, it's actually not very old at all.  Only a handful of buildings, and the iconic Cathedral, survived the blitz bombing that flattened all major German cities into the ground in 1944-45.  Even the Cathedral had taken over a dozen bomb hits, although the main structure survived intact.

 

The massive bridges across the Rhine were destroyed by order of the Nazi regime to protect the heart of the country from the coming invasion. 

So the city that we admired today is very much a post-1945 re-creation of what existed before.  

The first sight, just along the river from the dock, is the massive Hohenzollern Bridge, a key link in Germany's railway system.  It carries no less than six railway lines from the Hauptbahnhof ("Main Railway Station") by the Cathedral across the river to link the western Rheinland region with the rest of the country.

Just south of the bridge is a good spot to get a picture in front of the Cathedral, and our guide was happy to do the honours.

Continuing south along the riverbank, you pass a whole series of hotels facing the river, which would certainly be desirable locations for visitors.  I know that I stayed in one of these hotels on my first visit to Cologne in 1979, but I'd have to go back to my old boxes of slides to find out which one.  My diary might help if it's still a hotel and still under the same name.

This statuary group of (apparently) grumpy old men in a square in the Old Town is a tribute to the Carnival season, which in Cologne begins on November 11 and runs all the way through the winter, reaching its peak in the week before Ash Wednesday.

The sense of fun in Cologne asserts itself in other ways as well.  Looks like a perfectly straightforward modern building between two older ones, yes?

Look more closely:

This naughty little imp is mounted right across another square from the City Hall.

It's enough to give you ideas.

The high point of the tour, both literal and metaphoric, comes when you have climbed the hill and reached the open plaza surrounding the south and west sides of the Cathedral.  Officially this massive church, the tallest in the world with twin spires, is dedicated to St. Peter.  But let's see a bit more.  First, a few views of the exterior.

Notice in this picture the star on top of the central "flèche" spire.

Some parts of the stonework are plainly brighter than others.  It's not from cleaning.  The sandstone used in the building won't stand up well to pressure washing, so deteriorated parts are regularly being replaced.  Below the southeast corner of the church is an outdoor workshop where replacement stones are being patiently carved to be fitted into the massive structure.  Our guide joked that the cathedral is the world's longest-running perennial construction site, and that Cologne is one place where a stonemason has a guaranteed job for as long as he or she wants it.

Heading inside, the first thing you notice is the extraordinarily tall, narrow appearance of the nave.  The ratio of height to width here is 3.6:1, the highest such ratio of any medieval church.  

Large areas of the floor are covered with these elaborate mosaics.  Notice that the borders around the five roundels in the main design are formed out of a single continuous pathway.

There is some lovely older stained glass.

And this extraordinary modern window in the south transept, whose pattern of tiny squares looks for all the world like a random collection of pixels.

Another beautiful treasure is this medieval altarpiece, a style of art of which I am particularly fond.

The highlights of the Cathedral are two medieval pilgrimage shrines.  This one is dedicated to St. Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins.

As I found out last year in the Caribbean, it was the legend of St. Ursula and the 11,000 which led Christopher Columbus to christen a large group of islands of all sizes as the Virgin Islands.  Today I learned, not entirely to my surprise, that the shrewd merchants of medieval Cologne made ample hay by widely selling relics of the 11,000 Virgins all over Europe.  The trade in relics was a major source of the city's wealth in those years.

The biggest shrine of all, an extraordinary creation entirely covered in gold, houses the relics of the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men of the Bible who brought gifts to the infant Jesus.  It stands immediately behind and above the high altar...

...in a location where it is immediately visible down the entire length of the nave to the west door.

And that explains why the flèche above the main crossing carries a star rather than a cross.

Once I had left the Cathedral, I was free to make my own way back to the ship.  But on the way I noticed one more thing, thanks to something our guide told us.  This custom may have originated in Paris, but it has most certainly raised its head in Cologne as well -- and I'm not referring to coffee or sausage-on-a-bun.

And there they are, thousands upon thousands of them, packing the railings along the pedestrian walkways on both sides of the Hohenzollern Bridge.

Our guide told us that his current girlfriend now has two locks on the bridge, and said that one of his friends has a partner who, before age 30, has placed four locks there.  Obviously, "true love forever" means very different things to different people.

And so, by lunchtime, we were again afloat on the stream, watching Cologne recede behind us as we headed out for the short voyage (3 hours) to Bonn.  

This smaller city was the capital of West Germany during the years when the country was divided in two from 1945 to 1989, but for our tour its status as the birthplace of Beethoven is even more significant.  Here, I skipped the guided walking tour (one long, slow walk per day is enough) and opted for a later ride directly to the Beethoven House.

You'd walk past it without a second glance -- just another house in a busy pedestrian shopping street in downtown Bonn -- if you didn't know where to look for it.

Fortunately, we had experts to tell us where to look.

There are actually two houses, and it was in an apartment in the smaller house that Beethoven's family was living when he was born.  The two houses together now form a museum.

After visiting the museum, we went out into the garden, and from there entered a modern addition behind the houses and found ourselves in this perfect little gem of a concert hall, with about 200 hundred seats and beautiful acoustics.

 Ground level is the top aisle around the back of the seats.  But the building goes deeper, since we were informed that underneath the hall is the location of the Beethoven Archives, with many of the master's notebooks, conversation books, manuscripts of music, etc.  Here, our musicians treated us to a concert of Beethoven's music.