Aachener Dom

The Aachener Dom (the cathedral in Aachen) is the freakin' best. Whenever I evaluate the beauty of a cathedral that I'm visitng, it has to be more beautiful than All Saints in Sewanee. The Aachener Dom is much more magnificent.

It's cool because the 1st part of it was built in 700AD by Charlemagne (charles the great or whatever) and it was built in an octogonal shape. There's other cool additions to it that are really pretty. The inside has this cool black and white marble thing going for it in the arches and there's lots of fun stories to go with the whole thing. One being that the black and white marble thing was used when modeling the throne room of Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings. No, that's not on Wikipedia. I learned that from watching LOTR extra footage DVDs. Yes, I know I'm a dork.

black and white arches like in Lord Denathor's throne room.

The chain holding the chandalier in the center of the octagon (pictured above) looks like it's the same size going all the way up. That's because each link is made a little thicker and a little stronger to give it that illusion (and to hold it up, I'm sure).

Here's my favoirite story about the Aachener Dom:

When the Dom was built, it was apparently so expensive to build that the people of Aachen had to make a deal with the devil in order to get it built. The devil was promised the soul of the first person who entered the completed church. Because it was a catherdral, it would be christened by the bishop and for the ceremony, he must be the first one to enter. Of course the devil thought that he was getting a great deal out of this bargain. But the people tricked the devil and sent a wolf into the church first. The devil was furious and ran to the church, but the doors were shut just in time.

It is said that the devil's thumb got stuck in the door and when you look closely at the doors, you can find his thumb. In the huge door handles, there is kind-of a thumb contructed from metal hidden where you would need to put your hand in to open the gigantic doors, if they were open-able.

Wikipedia has a lot to say about der Aachener Dom, too.


The Dom is totally pimped out with gold.

I was pretty efficient today. There's this thing called Schützenfest (an old hunting festival that's now all lame march parades. as you might guess, I'm not interested in celebrating it.) going on right now, so the kids didn't have school. The mom stayed home, though, so I didn't have to look after them. Instead I did about 5hrs worth of laundry and ironing (the fam's, not mine!). I also made two collages, went on a run, read some book (I'm reading "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. It's really well written! and also Le Petit Nicolas en francais, bien sûr!!) and I didn't fuck around on the internet except for a few e-mails answered, but that's all. Okay, maybe I wasn't so efficient, but the laundry really was a lot.

Do I use brackets too much? I could try footnotes. I like footnotes. It always feels like I'm finding something while reading.