SECTION THE FIRST: Strasbourg

Well. Strasbourg. That was a really long time ago. I’m really sorry for the fakeout on this one. I know some of you were probably checking the blog obsessively for days because I promised to put up a new entry within the week. Sorry to crush your dreams, guys. I hope this makes up for it.

To get from Brussels to Strasbourg I had to take a train, and it was a five-hour trip. In fact, most of the blog about Belgium was written on that train ride. When I got into Strasbourg it was rainy and dark and I was tired, and I wanted nothing better than to find my hostel and crawl into my warm bed. I knew the address and phone number of the hostel and knew which bus to take to get there, but I didn’t really have any idea of where it was other than that. So I asked at the information desk at the train station and this very helpful woman gave me a little map of the town and proceeded to draw an X where my hostel was- wayyyyyyyyy on the left side of the map, almost on the edge. I guess I should have figured that if I was taking a bus line to its last stop, then that meant my hostel was pretty far out of town. Anyway. I got on the right bus and rode it for about fifteen minutes, but then I ended up getting off at the wrong bus stop (I got off at Port des Deux Rives, and I was supposed to get off at Pont des Deux Rives), so I had to wait at that bus stop for the next bus, which took about 15 more minutes. Word to the wise- if you’re ever in Strasbourg, don’t get off the bus at Port des Deux Rives. It’s a little on the sketchy side.

I finally reached my destination at about eight in the evening, though, but I could not for the life of me figure out where the hostel was. There was a big park (also called Deux Rives, of course), which my directions assured me was where the hostel was, but there were no signs that said HOSTEL THIS WAY or the equivalent in French. I ended up wandering around the park in the rain until I found a road that had a sign that said AUBERGE (hostel). At this point I was soaking wet and pretty frustrated that I hadn’t been able to get anyone to answer the phone at the hostel. So I finally got to the hostel, and there was nobody at the front desk. In fact, there seemed to be no staff anywhere. There was a high school group from the Netherlands there, though, so I asked some of their chaperones where the staff was, and they told me they were eating dinner. You may be surprised to hear (though not if you’ve been to France) that it was actually pretty close to nine-thirty in the evening. But that’s pretty typically French, to have a two-and-a-half-hour dinner break. So I had to wait another half an hour for the staff to stop eating dinner, and then I finally got my room. In the meantime I had met one of the Dutch kids- she actually ended up being originally from Ohio, so she served as a translator of sorts because her teachers had only limited English and no French. When I got to my room I discovered that I was with another American named Katie who is in France for the year teaching English. We were both exhausted, so we talked a bit and decided to go around the city together the next day and promptly went to bed.

The next day (Thursday), we got up pretty early, had breakfast at the hostel, and headed into the city. It was cloudy and rainy, but we didn’t really mind. The first thing we knew we wanted to see was the Cathedral, so we headed that way.
Let me tell you. This cathedral is awesome. We didn’t really know where it was, so we were pretty much just trying to go towards its spire, which we could see from where we were. At some point I was looking at the map as we went around a corner, and I ran into Katie, who had stopped for some reason, and I was just saying “I think it’s somewhere around here” when I looked up, and whoa. There it was. It’s huge. It’s beautiful. Here’s a picture. It doesn’t nearly do it justice.

It was really hard to get a good picture of it because the thing’s massive. Looking at my pictures of it, it does kind of look like a gingerbread house, but it’s a beautiful gingerbread house. The inside is gorgeous- there are beautiful sculptures and a really huge, beautiful organ, and an astronomical clock. We decided we wanted to come back and see the astronomical clock do its thing at noon, but in the meantime we wanted to see the museums that were right next to the Cathedral.

Here’s a picture of the Palais Rohan (yes, Rohan, but there were no blond people on horses there), which is right next to the Cathedral and houses the museums:

There are three museums in the Palais: the museum of archeology (interesting, but not as cool as it sounds), fine arts (cool), and arts decoratifs (awesome). We went to all three, but my favorite was arts decoratifs, which has re-creations of the Palais from when royalty actually lived there (I’ve forgotten which king it was- maybe the Bourbons?). So there are all these gorgeous rooms full of tables and chairs and wall hangings you can’t touch because they’re so old they’d crumble to dust in your hand, but there are also displays of beautiful china sets, silver, jewelry, and things like that.

After that we went back to the Cathedrale for the astronomical clock display. The clock itself is huge and really, really intricate. It took about ten minutes for all the parts to do their thing. After that, we walked around the city some more. I really, really liked Strasbourg as a city. There are canals everywhere, which I love, and I just liked the feel of it. It reminded me a little of Lyon.

Here’s another picture. This is a high school, if you can believe it:

The next day was Friday, and my train was leaving that evening. So we headed back into the city, and this time I had my little suitcase in tow. Dragging that thing around all day got kind of obnoxious, as you can imagine.

Things we did that day:

-walked to Germany. No, I’m not kidding. The coolest thing about our hostel is that it’s on the Rhine River, which marks the border between Germany and France. So we walked across the bridge into Germany and looked around, took pictures, and walked back to France.

-outdoor market- they were selling fish, pastries, clothes, bread, anything you can think of, you could get it at this place. Unfortunately, the bathrooms that were supposed to be there were getting repaired, so we spent about a half an hour trying to find a bathroom. There are never any public toilets anywhere in France.

-the main square, which is this beautiful green space with the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture, the Strasbourg Theatre, and the Municipal Library.

The Library. Seriously.

-Petite France, a beautiful little old part of Strasbourg. You can go up on the dam and see all of it. At this point it was sunny and beautiful out, so we had a great view.

One of my favorite pictures ever. It’s a red light in Petite France.

-Strasbourg University and the Botanical Gardens. The gardens were a little less cool than they probably are in the spring, but there were a few things blooming. The university grounds are really pretty, though.

My train from Strasbourg left at about six in the evening, so when I got back to Lyon it was almost midnight. I was exhausted, but excited because it was my birthday. And that’s the end of winter break- finally!

To get more pictures of Strasbourg, follow the links to my Facebook from the end of my last post. And yes, you can see them even if you don’t have Facebook- these are the public links.