Visit to Lucie in Strasbourg, France (June 8-10, 2007)

Complete Set of Photos

Well, last weekend I visited Lucie for probably the last time. This time, I met her in Strasbourg, which is where she studies. This city is right on the border with Germany (it actually was part of Germany about a hundred years ago or so), so it was only a two hour train ride.

Lucie picked me up at the train station and we then walked through the city to her apartment. Strasbourg is really nice - it wasn't completely destroyed in WWII and there's a bunch of rivers/canals going through the whole place. The downtown area is actually and island and Lucie lives just on the edge of that (but not on the island, across the river).

After a quick tour to get my bearings, we met up with some of her school buddies at their apartment for the pre-party (some of them were done with exams, so there was a party tonight!). This was a cool apartment - it was in a nice building and had an overhand over a pedestrian street. After a while here, we headed to a different apartment on the 5th floor of a big tall apartment building at the university. Her friends were very nice and even tried to speak some English to me (Europeans always seem to know enough English to complain about our government!). I let them pass my camera around to take pictures - that explains the wierd ones!

The next day, we woke up... to rain! Luckily, that stopped after an hour or so and we dried out walking around. We checked out the huge cathedral tower (with a viewing deck halfway up!), walked around the whole city (there are very cool buildings and cobblestone alleys everywhere), checked out the medieval towers, and even took a touristy boat tour around the island! Here we got to see the seat of the EU Parliament.

Lucie's oven was broken (does anyone have an oven that works here!!!???), so we had to sample the local cusine in restaurants. We ate a Flammekeuche (a kind of pizza, but with cream instead of sauce and cheese, but I was told to never compare it to a pizza!), and then, with two of Lucie's friends, we tried escargot (snails)! Of the four of us, only Lucie had ever tried them, and the other two were also French! We found them at a fancy restaurant - we (four poor students) sat down, ordered one dozen snails (one entree) to split 4 ways, along with the free bread and water! What bums! They actually were good - there was a nice herb sauce on them too. You did not have to suck them out of the shell like I was expecting! Afterwards, we went to see Zodiac (the movie about the Zodiac killer), in original English with French subtitles.

The next day, we bummed around some and then I got on the city bus to head to Kehl (the first train station in Germany, from there I can get the cheap ticket back to Stuttgart). Well, there was a big fair because Sunday was the first day of TGV service between Paris and Stuttgart (the TGV is the super fast French train that goes 320 kph or so). Well, the bus got stuck in a traffic jam before we were out of Strasbourg, so the driver told us to get off and walk, it would be faster! So, after getting off the bus and wandering through this party, a security guard (who couldn't speak German or English) talked to me in French. I picked out the one word I knew (pont = bridge) and walked to where he was pointing. Well, I found the bridge and walked from France to Germany! I still find it amazing that on one bank of the river, they speak French and on the other, German (and not each other's language)! Just like that there's a huge cultural and linguistic divide! In the picture, looking south, Germany is on the left, France on the right.