Strasbourg, or The Joys of Travel

I just got back from three days in Strasbourg, "The Capital of Noel" - a city in the Alsace region with a complicated history of being passed back and forth between the French and Germany governments. It now houses the European Parliament and European Court of Human Rights.

Christmas markets in Strasbourg are "legendary", meaning that they are now flocked to by American, Canadian, French, German and Italian tourists by the thousand each December. I was looking forward to a break from Paris and a chance to enjoy some of the Christmas market charm that I had experienced in Hamburg when I visited my brother for the winter holidays four years ago.

Fate was against me, sadly, and between forgetting my carte 12-25 at home (the card that allows me to use my youth-rate, 50% discounted train tickets), selecting the camera battery without any power, and having my trip coincide with a cold-front that brought freezing rain to the Alsatian region, I almost didn't have a good time.

Strasbourg is a beautiful city...it's historic center encircled by the narrow river Ill, with low, grassy banks that have a sort of primordial charm about them. On my last day, I took a trip around the city on a glass-covered boat (heated, with clean toilets and Mozart playing in the background of the audio tour!). We got to go through two sets of locks as we navigated different levels of the river, and although bumpy it was fun. Probably the most enjoyable part of the trip.

Also cool was the astronomical clock in the Strasbourg Cathedral. It goes off around noon each day (you must buy tickets and wait in line for about half an hour and then get inside the church and stand around waiting some more). As I sad, my camera was nonfunctional, but here's a picture from the web.

The Christmas markets themselves were kind of a disappointment. Lots of kitsch, and about a billion varieties of vin chaud and tarte flambée (a kind of pizza-like item that the French Strasbourgeois consider a meal... take a baguette, slather in cream, top with shredded cheese and lardons, and then grill until melted. I could feel my arteries hardening just watching people eat these things.)

Fortunately, there were enough other delights to prevent the trip from becoming a total failure - a choral concert of English carols, sung by French women in an overly-colorful protestant church; the bredel market, where hopeful vendors offered me bites of gingerbread and other cookies; an exposition on French photographer Doisneau, with photos of Alsace taken by the artist on his trip of the region in 1945; the utter joy of a spinach-and-cheese galette from Bertani, an outdoor crêpe stand in the Place Broglie; the utter joy of a vegetarian galette consumed on the same spot the next day.

My shoulders may still be sore from toting around a useless camera, and there's a good chance that I'll have caught a cold from spending the good part of three days outside in the freezing rain, but I'll never forget the taste of those Bertani crêpes, or the beauty of the Half-timbered houses along the River Ill.