Observing the Obvious

From weather.com's current conditions in El Paso...

Florida Mountains

El Paso, of course, boasts its own joys. Yesterday I looked out the window to the west and saw on the horizon, north of the Potrillo Mountains, what looked like an approaching cloud bank in an otherwise uniformly blue sky. A second glance revealed that this wasn't a cloud bank at all but rather the snow-covered peaks of the Florida Mountains. So here's a picture of the view of the Floridas rising from the New Mexico mesa lands above the valley of the Rio Grande.

Home for a While

As I post this, I'm back home in El Paso after the preparation trip in anticipation of our longer stay later this spring. I'll resume posting more fully when Susie and I return to Metz in several weeks (I hope). In the meantime, here are few pictures of the trip.

The TGV station with direct service to the Paris CDG airport is about 30 minutes south of town, roughly midway between Metz and Nancy. On the way out of town, the shuttle from the central train station to the Lorraine TGV station crosses the Seille River, which joins the Moselle in Metz. The city really grew up around the Seille rather than the Moselle, in fact.





Many of the trees throughout the region carry a lot of mistletoe.







The countryside is largely open and agricultural, with fields that, I imagine, supply the big grain towers line that the Moselle just downstream from Metz.



As the road to the station passes through villages, you can see old farm buildings. I can't tell if this was a fortification or a dovecote.




The station sits pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It's not even as big as the grain towers and other agricultural buildings in the area that define the skyline as the road reaches the station.

The TGV Est from Strasbourg pulls into the Lorraine TGV station.

And at the TGV station at Paris CDG airport, the train leaves the station to continue its journey toward Lille.

A highlight of the flight home: a view of Greenland's rugged coastal mountain ranges lit by the morning sun (with thanks to fellow passenger Craig Massey for taking the picture).

Changing of the Seasons

The removal of the holiday lights from above Metz's streets has signaled that the season, culturally anyway, has definitively changed. On the street around the corner from our apartment, the lights are being replaced with banners indicating that the neighborhood is a 30-kph pedestrian-friendly zone.

Contrasts

More Snow

My GTL colleague Gunter Sharp kindly sent me some of his photos of the snow in Metz that show different parts of the city.

A sculpture in a park near the Porte Serpenoise.

Barges on the canal along the Moselle.

City buses waiting for the roads to clear.

Rhenish Romanesque

Getting ready to head back to El Paso, I stopped by the Metz Central Station, which I've previously mentioned as an example of Rhenish Romanesque (i.e., a romanticized German interpretation of the Romanesque style). As shown in these pictures of the station, the style features large sections of ornate decoration that recall an imagined medieval past.

In the frieze above this arch, the central coat of arms is that of the city of Metz, half white and half black. I interpret the figures as, not particularly subtly, depicting the relation of the martial and domestic arts. With their robust physiques, casual poses, and joined gaze, the couple are resolutely modern, for the turn of the 20th Century, anyway. The surrounding decorative details--leaves, flowers, faces--set this modern pair in a medieval frame.



Some of the details straddle medieval and art-nouveau motifs. For example, the knotted stonework of the side windows references a medieval theme yet adds a more modern and organic fluidity, particularly in the ends of the "cords" at the bottom of the windows.








A short distance from the station, both physically and stylistically, stands the tower that held water for the steam engines.