Bonjour Strasbourg!

As you can probably guess from the title I went to Strasbourg last weekend. Strasbourg is in the far east of France on the German border and very beautiful. It is also quite a distance from Dresden! To begin with this involved a five hour train journey from Dresden to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt I stopped to have a cigarette, which was rather stupid because I missed my connection. This then meant an hour long wait before catching the train to Karlsruhe and then the TGV to Strasbourg. I went for a wander and sat outside drinking an overpriced beer at an ice cream stall watching some sort of football promotion thing with loud music and passsers by invited to take shots at an inflatable goal. Once again I was struck by the differences between the west and the east. There are the obvious differences; the eastern Ampelmänner, the accents, but then there’s a general feeling that you’re in a slightly different country as well, rather like say, crossing between England and Scotland. I got a bit of a song by The Doors stuck in my head where Jim Morrison sings “The West is the best”, in strange slow voice which makes the line sound like a mantra that he’s trying to convince himself with rather than a statement of fact. I felt the same; maybe it is, if you repeat it often enough, but I still like Dresden. Frankfurt is an international, strangely generic western European city, while Dresden is somehow more “gemütlich”, and couldn’t be anywhere but Germany. Frankfurt is faster and louder and has shiny skyscrapers, but there’s something about the station which makes one think that, barring the signs in German, one could equally well be at Gare du Nord in Paris or Kings Cross in London.

The journey continued and I finally found myself in Strasbourg, having paid an extra thirty something Euros because the TGV conductor refused to accept my Deutsche Bahn pass (logical I suppose given that I was now in the hands of the Societé Nationale des Chemins de Fer, but quite annoying though, because for most of the journey I was still in Germany). Strasbourg station consists of a nice, 19th century stone building which some joker surrounded in a glass bubble for no apparent reason. Presumably the EU had cash to burn at the time! After starting my journey before 10 in the morning, I had finally arrived at about 8:30 in the evening, grumpy and thirsty and having missed my trains and been ripped off by the SNCF. However having bought myself some water in fast grumpy French I crashed out on the grass by the station where a jazz band was playing and gradually calmed down, so that when the fair Carrie arrived half an hour later I was actually in quite a good mood!

Anyways Strasbourg was very cool. Carrie was excited that she could finally understand what was happening, thanks to a Canadian education which taught very good French. (Are foreign languages actually taught in the US? – except for Brendan, one of the Rise guys in Dresden, who has now left, I don’t think I’ve heard an American who speaks a foreign language convincingly all summer – Please prove me wrong guys!). Meanwhile I was amazingly happy because of all the delicious food. I didn’t have a single non amazing meal in Strasbourg. If you were wondering I ate as follows: Steak frites for supper on the first night, yummy coffee and sticky buns Saturday morning (which makes me wonder, why is coffee in Germany so crap? It’s more or less lightly flavoured water, unless you’re willing to pay €2.50 or something insane for an expresso) Tarte Flambé for lunch (a sort of Flemish pizza, with no tomato sauce but lots of sour cream instead, delicious, but strangely unfilling). Amazing Italian Pizza for supper, coffee and Pain-au-chocolat for breakfast on Sunday and then crevettes poêlés followed by some fish in Provencal sauce for lunch. Then I had to head home to Dresden, which was very annoying, because I was just getting into it!

I avoided the Alsatian speciality (Alsatian as in the province of Alsace, in which Strasbourg lies, not as in German Shepherd dogs, silly!) of Choucroute garni (garnished sauerkraut). It never seemed to cost less than €14, and while the servings looked gigantic I was pretty convinced that you could get the same thing in Germany for half the price. Which brings me on to my only complaint; goodness France is expensive! The meals were all about €20 + per head (although that includes wine, and they were really worth it), while drinks in bars were anything from €5 to €10, which is a little cheaper than Paris, but still daylight robbery by German or even English standards! All in all I ended up spending way more than I’d intended.

As far as sight-seeing is concerned we checked out the cathedral, which is very impressive and has a cool clock, and the European parliament, which was very unimpressive and didn’t even have a cool clock (see pictures). It’s basically a large round glass building in an industrial estate in the middle of no-where. Because it was Saturday it was actually locked up – which to me seems bizarre; surely at the very least there’d be a few minor burocrats in writing laws for next week? or maybe guided tours or something, but as the home of the most important Pan-European organisation it just seemed rather dead and parocial.

The EU Parliament (it was closed)

Other than that we spent our time wandering round and generally seeing stuff. Neither of us had a guidebook so I’m sure there are lots of very important yet somehow fatuous sights and museums that we didn’t see, but it was just fun being and soaking up the atmosphere. Strasbourg has loads of lovely old buildings, especially in Petite France and the place is wonderfully hyper French (amusingly too, given that it has spent large chunks of time as part of Germany). My main impression was just how lovely it was being “on holiday” in another country. The only bad side (apart from the prices) was that it was all over so soon. Added to that for the first time ever German railway efficiency broke down and there were multiple late trains on the way home, with me eventually getting back into bed in Dresden at about 1:30 in the morning. This all combined to make me rather pissed off, so I spent Monday in a deep sulk. No France, no Carrie (who was back in Aachen), no more French food, it was raining and, for the first time, there were no trams because the trusty number 4 to Laubegast had broken down. Just to rub it in I went to the Mensa and they were serving pork and potatoes.

Since then I’ve recovered my mood. I’ve started going to the other Mensa which is cool and emphatically un-Soviet and you can eat pizza and sushi every day if you want. I was even given some cool new work (trying to get the instruments to give funny readings by putting loads of salt in the water). Unfortunately Carrie is off home though, but that is the nature of limited summer placements and transatlantic travel and stuff. Oh well.

Anyways, Tschüss bis next week, and try to find a song called “Strasbourg” by The Rakes on youtube, which got stuck in my head all weekend and harks back to Germany’s darker but arguably more glamourous Cold War past. The openning lyrics go: “I’ll meet you in West Germany/October 1983/I knew that freedom was a lie/and your husband was a spy”