Soooooo…. This weekend turned out to be quite the high powered adventure through central Europe. I met up with one of my GSPIA friends, Chansonette, in Strasbourg, France… we then headed out to the country side and visited Selestat and Comar. That was followed up by a trip to Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, and from there we parted ways and I stopped off in Koln (Cologne), Germany. The reason for the post being the long way home was that I was supposed to get back into Hamburg at around 9 on Monday morning… I looked all the trains up and had it all planned out rather well… what I didn’t look up was lay-over times… turns out that if I took the overnight train I wanted to take, I would have been stuck in Cologne from midnight to 6am… so rather than blow off Luxembourg, I opted to stay the extra night, and got to see Cologne the next day… which, while being the long way home, was a great decision on my part.
Strasbourg, France
I rolled into Strabourg just after 1 in the afternoon on Friday. The train ride hadn’t been half bad, and I got a lot of much needed sleep after only 3 hours the night before. (There was another stammtisch, and I didn’t get home till about 12, and needed to be up by about 4:30 to catch my train at 6… plus pack at some point in there). Strasbourg is the capital of the Alsace region of France, and also one of the three cities that makes up the governing bodies of the European Union. You may recognize Alsace from your world war history. It’s the region between Germany and France that has been passed back and forth between the two for several hundred years.
The architecture is a mix of both German and French; this was an aspect that both Chansonette and I both noticed. For me as soon as I got there I was like, “this is sooooo French,” she on the other hand found everything to be very German. We got a full view of this mix of French/German… Old/New… atmosphere as we took a boat tour through the city. This, was an excellent idea. We saw everything, got a good dose of history and lots of random anecdotes… things like how one bridge was where they dunked people, and when they became more humane, they started using cages, and the women would come and mock the prisoners while doing needle work (because these prisoners were adulterers and prostitutes). We heard about the sauerkraut factory that was turned into a theater, and about how sauerkraut is originally from China… Or about how there was a fire in a hall with only a window as the way out and 20 people died b/c a fat monk couldn’t fit through the window and got stuck… and we saw the house where spinsters and widows were kept… There were lots and lots of these amusing tidbits during the tour… lots of them sort of caused your jaw to drop open. I would recommend the tour to anyone going to Strasbourg.
We of course did all the touristy things… cathedrals, cathedrals, more cathedrals… and ended up in a cathedral listening to a live organ concert. Followed by crepes (not just desert crepes, but the kind you can eat for dinner)… and bottles of wine of a game of cards.
Selestat and Comar
Saturday we headed away from Strasbourg down further south into wine country. The original goal was maybe to do a wine tour… Personally I liked the one that talked about riding horses through the vineyards, Chansonette had some objections to this. But it turned out wine tours were expensive so, we just grabbed a train to Comar, which at one point Chansonette was like, lets get off here, so we did… b/c you can do that when you’re on a random adventure. The area we were in had a ton of castles in the distance on top of every little hill. And the actual village of Selestat was very picturesque.. a lot like wandering around Bush Gardens w/out the rides.
From there we went to Comar… with several goals in mind. First, we wanted to get to the tourist office, second, we wanted to see Voltaire’s house, third, we wanted to see (or I should say I wanted to see) what the House of Heads was. We’re easily distracted, by things like… food. Comar was even prettier than Selestat, making for more great pictures. Voltaire’s house turned out to be a private residence… that you couldn’t go in… in fact it turned out to of just been a house that Voltaire rented two rooms from at one point… with a plaque outside. The House of Heads, turned out to just be a really old hotel… I didn’t even take a picture. By the time we got to the tourist office, it was getting late, and most things were starting to close. But we did do a wine tasting. Just a little shop, and not so much wine, as schnapps and liquors. The woman just kept asking if we wanted to try another, and then another… all for free, though I did end up buying some.
Luxembourg
Early morning Sunday, we headed out to Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. It was an appropriately grey and cold day… appropriate for two reasons really, first b/c Luxembourg has more of a medieval feel to it, and dark and dreary works for that, and second b/c I was in a skirt and tank top… it can’t be hot and sunny when I’m in a skirt and tank top…it would violate the Murphy principles. There was a marathon going on when we got into the city… but it just seemed like people were running, walking, or Nordic walking everywhere and not really in an organized manner. After dropping off our stuff we hiked our way up a giant hill (as hour hostel was in a valley) and started crossing into the town. On the way there, there were these Casemates, which is basically old underground fortifications of the city that you could climb through… with lots of random passageways, and twisty staircases (climbing through caves also falls under murphy’s law when wearing a skirt)…
After some time we wandered the city, saw the sights, opted not to pay a fortune for a city tour, found a museum that went through the whole history of Luxembourg and how it developed. Random tidbits, Luxembourg has its own language… not quite French, not quite german. They use French for business, German for media, and then Luxembourgish for everyday things. The city is protected by a fairy/siren/mermaid. The founder fell in love with her and asked her to marry him, which she did on the condition that she get one day a week where she wasn’t to be bothered. Years went by, they had kids, built the city, etc. but the king got jealous, and peeped through a key hole into his wife’s room on her off day, where he saw she had scales for legs, gasped, scared her, and the rocks came and ate her, with the key to the city in her mouth. Lesson: Give girls their space when they ask for it. I learned all this from a rather bizarre museum exhibit… but it wasn’t as strange as the exhibit about tourists… and what the characteristics of tourists are and things like that… I can’t even describe it right. It seemed very tongue in cheek, seeing as I would think mostly tourists would go to the museum… Oh and then there was a room that had mirrors on the floor and walls… also inevitable when wearing a skirt…
Later that evening we headed to a free concert in the main square, Rock um Kneudler. The first band we stayed and listened to was a African cover band… who played the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and lots and lots of Led Zeppelin. Which was great for me. Then the second band came on… now I knew I know the name, Supertramp (actually it was just the singer songwriter from supertramp, Roger Hodgson) but couldn’t for the life of me remember what they sang… He opened w/ Take the Long way home… and followed it up with other popular songs you’d recognize like: Give a little Bit [of your love to me], The Logical Song, Dreamer, Take a look at My Girlfriend, and … I love free random concerts.
Cologne
Not much here, we headed off early in the morning on Monday. We were headed in the same direction, so we took the same train until I jumped off in Cologne. While there I wanted to check out the Dom, one of the most famous Cathedrals in all of Europe… probably one of the most visited ones in the world. I had studied it back in my Medieval Art and Architecture class. Lucky for me, it was literally just outside the train station. Now we had been walking for 3 days straight now, but something possessed me to climb the 509 stairs to the top… Oy… and the way down… spiral staircase (w/people still climbing up) It built “character” or at least that’s what I told myself, and gave me a chance to grab some nice pics. I didn’t do the rest of the city, mainly b/c I didn’t know what else there was to see… judging from my guidebook, I didn’t miss much except a chocolate factory. But it had been a long trip and it was time to head back home.
Other Random Updates…
Just a few things to report. I caught a cold, but thanks to some uber strong meds was only out of it for about a day. I also now have another American here. Her name is Jodie, went to Harvard for university and Columbia for law school, where she was journal editor, and is now on the tail end of a Fulbright that she used to do research in Cambridge, England… despite the background she’s one of the nicest people I’ve met here, and to my amusement has no idea what she wants to do w/ her life… we click. I don’t have any big traveling plans for the next two weeks, if I do anything it will probably be locally (no more than an hour or 2 away)… so don’t be expecting too much in terms of posts… w/out football things have sort of slowed down around here…
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