Tour Log 7: Kortrijk
Friday 25 April 2008
Our long and busy Anzac Day is drawing to a close and we are getting ready for the final performance in Kortrijk (and the final performance for the tour) this evening, and I am taking the opportunity to bring you up to date in one of the anterooms of the Church of Our Lady while the kids are literally doing some fine tuning in the main body of the church.
I left the narrative earlier as we were leaving Hamburg, on our way to Münster. That was an easy drive down the Autobahn and I did, as promised, inform my captive audience of a whole lot of history they probably thought was in the category of ‘too much information’. However, you never know when the ability to converse intelligently about the contribution made by Albrecht von Wallenstein to the imperial cause in the Thirty Years’ War might come in handy during a job interview.
We arrived at the Johanniter Akademie in good time and got ourselves unpacked and into our rooms. I was pleasantly surprised by the Johanniter. It is very new and exceptionally spacious compared to the Youth Hostel in Lübeck, which I think was built to house the seven dwarfs while they were in town to negotiate their story rights with the Brothers Grimm.
Münster was a great town. It was massively bombed in World War II (92% destroyed, we were told by a very precise German guide) and has been rebuilt pretty much the way it was. So there are lots of cobblestone streets, little churches, outdoor cafés and restaurants. The weather was cool but pleasant, and we had another guided walking tour around the town. Münster is a renowned university town with 60,000 students (more than one in four of the population), and it is very flat – hence, everyone rides a bicycle. In fact, our guide told us, the practice is to have two bikes: a nice one for going to church and other more smart events, and an old one for going to uni and the pub. This means that the old ones tend to get recycled (so to speak) around the town, as drunken tertiary students come out of the pub and take the wrong bike, leaving theirs for someone else.
We had thought that we were doing our Münster concert in the Dom (the main cathedral), but that turned out not to be the case. Rather, we had a choir rehearsal with the Dom choir (kids aged from nine to 13) in the afternoon of our second day, and the performance was in another very large church near the Dom, called the Church of Our Lady, and known universally for centuries in Münster as the ‘Überwasserkirche’; the ‘church over the water’, because you have to cross a little creek to get to it from the main square. Before dinner, we had a pizza in a restaurant in the town hall.
The concert went pretty well, and then it was back to the Johanniter for a well-earned rest.
The next day, it was off to Belgium. We took off down the Autobahn and then did a right turn across the top of Essen and the Ruhr. At about his point, my Tom-Tom, which I had usefully stuck to the window alongside my seat to keep track of progress, seemed to lose its bearings and was telling me we were crossing a large expanse of open green field, while all around there were roads and buildings. I was puzzled about it for a minute and then it dawned on me, we had actually crossed over into the Netherlands and were now cruising south through the Dutch province of Limburg, as Csaba, our driver, had elected to go right round the Ruhr to avoid the traffic. Accordingly, we had simply driven off the German map I had installed in the Tom-Tom – try driving off the map in Australia! Anyway, as I told the kids, they were getting a fourth country thrown in, so it was all good. As we went south, I gave them a potted history of Belgium and the EU, helped along by the fact that we drove through Maastricht, which gave me a good intro for a brief outline of the Maastricht Treaty establishing the EU and the common European currency.
Shortly after we crossed into Belgium, we reached Liège, the centre of Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium. By this time, it was quite warm and sunny, so we were able to take a break to walk around the centre of town in little groups, and some of us retired to a street side café for our first Belgian coffee. Others, naturally enough in Belgium, headed for the nearest shop selling fine Belgian chocolates. I won’t name names, but one such insatiable chocoholic looked remarkably similar to the Director of Music.
