July 5, 2022
It only took one day in Metz to ....
convince us to come back!
We are actually checking airBnB entries for apartments here. It would be a wonderful place to study French for a month, maybe next year? We spent the day wandering around the city, and marvelling at the ancient structures everywhere, but a 20,000 student university helps create an energetic feel.
Starting with our hotel, La Citadel, which was built as an armoury in the 1600's, and is refurbished beautifully.
Behind our hotel, as I mentioned yesterday, is this Knights of Templar church built over 400 years before. It was one of many built as safe waypoints for the Knights as they traversed Europe to fight in the Crusades. As we were walking past though, the door was open. We were surprised because it is almost never open to the public - or so we had heard.
The inside is covered with artwork on the walls.
All of them religious, of course.
We exited that church, amazed by a structure built in 1180 AD being in such good shape, and are faced with the following structure - first built in the year 300 AD! Clearly there are multiple generations of the structure, as they did not use uniform bricks in the year 300 - and you can see differences in the building technology used throughout, but still amazing.
On the other side of the church and attached to it was this line of pillars that are clearly the same vintage. Romans?
We then made our way to the Metz Cathedral. We had seen it last night from the outside, but now intended to see the interior.
Extraordinary height, and more stained glass than we have ever seen in a church. The knave is apparently the "highest in Europe".
These are some of the more modern glass, that was painted by Chagall in his distinctive style.
We then walked about taking in some of the other grand buildings in the city, including this enormous train station - where we just arrived yesterday. It was scaled to be able to move 20,000 troops in a day during WW2, and is outsized for a city of this population.
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There are legends of this town being terrorized by some monster, and a dragon chasing it away (I think I have that right, it was in French after all), so you see dragon images here and there. This dragon was hanging over dragon street, as seen from a street car.
We ended the day with a drink overlooking the beautiful jardin in the heart of the city. This visit is over, but we will be back.
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Tomorrow we bike to Perl, kind of a way stop on the way to Trier. It will be our first ride along the Mosel river, and we are looking forward to seeing the difference from the Rhine. The Mosel is smaller, and we expect a little quieter - we shall see! The day is forecast to be much cooler (yay!), so we won't stress about starting early.
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