Cochem – Don't hold your breath

Small things about Cochem

Villages in Europe which have buildings from four or five centuries ago are not uncommon. Cochem, a charming village on the Mosel, is one of them. The village has grown in modern times, with a lot of structures added in the 20th century, and more being added currently. But a street or two are essentially unchanged from the early modern age. I noticed the plaque whose photo you see above in a half-timbered building which is anywhere between four and five hundred years old. It has been preserved well, but the wood is clearly old. All I could recognize is the double-headed eagle symbol of the Habsburg dynasty. I wish I knew enough about heraldry to read what the other shields mean, and what the connection with the Habsburgs is. In any case, it was easy to recognize this as the pre-modern equivalent of a nameplate.

When I think of art on the street, it is usually public art: paid for by or donated to a municipal body. Another category is street art, often painted against the wishes of local bodies or owners, but also, more often now, solicited without being paid for. But when you get to an older place like Cochem, you find a third category: external building decorations commissioned by owners. They can be votive niches, corbels or street signs. I saw beautiful examples in Cochem, as you can see in the gallery above.

In the arch of the door of the town hall (village hall?) I saw embedded Cochem’s heraldic device. It was in the middle of a date, presumably of when the hall was built, almost four centuries ago. The other important structure here was the church. It is older, but like all churches, has pieces from many eras. The latest was the door handle that you see above, in the shape of a fish. On this rainy day it was impossible to go up to castle above the village, so I spent my time chasing these little decorations and ducking into cafes to avoid rain.

What’s the subject today?

Maybe a simple macro of May’s flowers growing by the roadside in the charming Baltic town of Lübeck. Or maybe a little more about it. I have no idea why my eyes light on one thing rather than another, why I find one thing more attractive than something else. But if I want to show you what I find interesting, then I will try to make it singular, give it the focus of my, and your, attention. The simplest way to do that in a photo is to focus the lens on it and blur everything else. If it is small enough, then macro mode works best, and that’s what you see in the photo above. Of course, with today’s phone cameras and their resident AI/ML slaves, you can choose your focus after taking the photo.

Maybe you want to play games instead. Focus on something which is not really what you want to show. Here is an example. Show this, and most people will first look inside the frame. Ah ha, leisure time in the sun. And then they’ll look at the frame and ask, where is Travemünde? It’s a nice beach by the Baltic sea, but that’s not the story. The story is the empty frame. Why is it there, with nothing really to frame in it? (You can see that I had to stand off on one side to frame the loungers.) Something has been removed. You could follow up in a long blog post which solves the mystery. So here the composition of the photo is totally deceptive, like a classic mystery story by Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr.

And here is another sleight of the hand with focus. The fountain in the lovely village of Cochem, on the banks of the Mosel, is topped by a sculpture of St. Martin cutting his cloak in half to share with a poor man shivering in the cold. It was awfully cold and rainy when I took this photo, but that is not the story either. It was hard to get this photo to work. The square is too small to blur out the background, not that I wanted to. So I played with saturation and exposure, partly desaturating the background, and lightening the sculpture. There’s only so much you can do with a badly lit scene unless you use AI/ML tools. But the photo is misdirection again. I wanted to show the charming half-timbered renaissance houses which give the square its character. Taking their photo would have been pretty flat, so I tried out this method. I hope this postcard is more full of movement. I wish it had been full of sunshine too, but that’s May.

Overcome by choice

Rain and a thunderstorm drove us into a bakery in the charming village of Cochem. Coffee or tea are a given in a bakery, but then comes the hard part: the choice of pastries. A flaky croissant? Maybe not totally out of place so close to France. Or one full of quark and strawberries?

The Family chose something which looked less extravagant, and I chose something which looked very indulgent. The rain lasted for a while, giving us enough time to taste each other’s choices and discuss what we would choose if we had to choose again. It is because of such indulgence that we always put on a couple of kilos on every trip, and spend a month or so getting rid of it when we get home.

What a lovely spring!

Normally it would take less than an hour to go from Koblenz to Cochem (-on-the Mosel) by train. On this wet and cold spring day the train did not run, and it took almost twice that time for the trip: first by bus to an intermediate station, and then by train. As we walked down Bernstrasse we could see lots of old half-timbered houses. “They would look wonderful in sunlight,” The Family said. Indeed, the contrast between black stained wood and white plaster walls would have been lovely in bright daylight. I could also imagine the sun shining on the slate tiles of the Mansard roofs. But this was not the day for it.

We’d walked past the old quarrystone gate, clearly from the middle ages, with a house tacked on to it which could have been from the mid-16th century like most of this part of the town. And then, right opposite the church was a 19th century house built to resemble the houses of the 16th century. The town was confusing. So we walked down a side lane to the Moselpromenade with its shining old houses repurposed into restaurants. After a nice lunch accompanied with a good Riesling, we walked back into the threatening weather.

It started to rain in fits and starts. We made it past the town hall into a side street where we found remarkable stone benches in front of an old brew house. But then a thunderstorm drove us into a nice cafe. We stayed there for more than half an hour and then decided that it would be impossible to climb up to the castle behind the village. It began to clear up only when we got back to Koblenz.

As we changed from the train to the bus on the way back we stood with another couple in a little shelter. As the spray drenched us, I turned to the man and tried out my German. “Lovely spring weather, isn’t it?” I think I got it correct. He nodded and replied “Welcome to Germany.”