Kehl!!!!!

Crossing over into Germany was like walking into a dream land. See, the walk to the bridge from the last tram stop in Strasbourg to the bridge was way way waaaaaaay longer than it looked on the map, and was along this sidewalk with a freeway on one side and alternating construction sites and empty lots on the other. I thought I was going to pass out from exhaustion and hunger. And when we finally got to the "garden" around the French side of the bridge, and it was barely more than a patch of grass! There were like some signs about where different planets would be if they were on the scale of the distance from the gate to the foot of the bridge. Eh, it was not great. Plus it was all cloudy and gray. Bleh.

But then, we started to cross the bridge to the German side, and the sun came out, birds sang, and we were suddenly surrounded by the cutest town ever!!! Seriously, around the bridge at least, the Kehl side was soooo much nicer than the Strasbourg side. They had an actual park, with lots of statues and benches and an observation tower. And the area past the park wasn't an industrial wasteland but pretty European-y houses, and there was a pedestrian shopping street only like five minutes away.¹

Here we are approaching from the Strasbourg side. Grim.

Boom! We get halfway across, and the sun comes out!

The bridge itself is so cool!!! There's two paths you can take to cross, one is up and sort of curves out horizontally, and the other is like a big hill, you walk up and then down on one big curve. The two paths meet in the middle, and there's a space with picnic tables, so you could even eat lunch right on the border! The two columns are at angles instead of straight up, which I think makes the bridge look longer and even more impressive. And of course with the sun out, everything looked even better!

Nom Central. Welcome to Nomsville.
Capital of the Kingdnom of Nomnomington.²

At the shopping street, I made a beeline for the nearest bakery in order to get my hands on some authentic German soft pretzels. OH. MY. GOD. SO GOOD!!!!!!!!! The pretzels were seriously amazing!!! They were crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, lightly sprinkled with salt... I was in heaven!! Plus, two pretzels and two Cokes was only like 3-something euros, so cheaper than a single Coke in Geneva. And the Coke bottle was pretty cool itself, it was like super thick plastic, it was weird! The bottle was so heavy, it felt like there was still liquid inside it when it was empty.

We walked around a little, and ended up getting seconds on the delicious pretzels!!! I just couldn't resist!!! Christophe wanted to split one, and I was like noooooooooo way, buddy. Some things in life are too good to be split in half.

I am seriously so hungry just looking at this picture.

The observation tower

Then we started heading back to the park, and on an (ultimately unsuccessful) hunt for a bathroom, we ended up going up the observation tower.³ The tower was like a huge free-standing staircase. At first, I was like, this is kind of random, there are no major sights to look at around here, but we thought it'd be cool to go up and be like, "There's France! And there's Germany! And there's France! And Germany! And France! Germany! France! Germany! France! Germany! France!"⁴ 

The view was so beautiful!!! Kehl is such a pretty town, and you can see the river and a lake that was next to the park, and all the houses with red roofs. We got an awesome view of the bridge too. You can even see downtown Strasbourg and the cathedral in the distance.

Soon though, we headed back so we could make it to Christophe's wine basement cave tour. And that is the story of Kehl. I liked it so much, I wish we could have spent a few days there too!

À bientôt!

1. This contrast was kind of weird/relevant because I had just been reading in the news about how Germany's economy is doing so much better than France's, which is a big talking point in the election. Germany has a 5.7% unemployment rate, versus 10% in France, and the disparity is even greater for young people. I remember reading this article right afterwards.
2. I'm cackling at myself right now.
3. No, we did not expect to find a bathroom at the top.
4. Maybe the chanting part was just me.
5. To clarify, this isn't to say that I didn't like Strasbourg! I loved downtown Strasbourg! Just the area between the edge of downtown and the bridge was kind of crappy.
6. Epilogue: I did finally find a bathroom in a McDonalds. No toilet seats though. :/

Strasbourg!!!

Guten tag everybody! After our day in Geneva, we got up early to take the train to Strasbourg. The scenery riding through Switzerland was really pretty; we saw the stereotypical rolling green fields with cute little chalets and the Swiss Alps in the background. I was so moved, I almost started yodeling right there on the train.

We actually had to take two trains to get to Strasbourg. First, we took one from Geneva to Basel. Geneva is in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, but Basel is in German-speaking territory, and the announcements and message boards on the train actually changed languages halfway through our journey! The train station at Basel is gigantic, like airport-size, and everything was in German! Crazy! Luckily, we managed to run through and make it to our train to Strasbourg without getting too lost. Christophe did insist we take a detour to look through a store that sold only beer. (So German! And Strasbourg is literally right on the border with Germany, so everything there was pretty German too!)

When we arrived in Strasbourg, we got hella lost on our way to find our hotel.¹ Despite glowing online reviews, it ended up being in kind of a sketch area. Like, we had to walk through an abandoned lot and squeeze through a hole in the chain link fence to get to the tram stop. We were further discomforted by the 20ish security camera feeds at the front desk. But, you know, the room was fine. And luckily, the tram was pretty easy to use.²


By the time we finally found our hotel and got lunch, it was late afternoon. We decided to go check out Petite France, which is a little island in the middle of downtown Strasbourg (because the Ill River³ runs through downtown) with cool/cute medieval houses and some restaurants with decks on the river. Very pittoresque.⁴

We also saw the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg! Of all the billions of European cathedrals I’ve seen here, this one was one of my favorites. I really loved the brick-color of all the stones and how they were all slightly different shades. There are like hundreds of statues and carvings on the outside, and tons of little spires, all very intricate and detailed. Also, the lighting inside was really dramatic⁵ and there was a really cool colorful organ. Unfortunately, it was getting dark, so we didn’t really get the full effect of the stained glass, but we decided to go back the next day. 

For dinner, we tried to eat local and have some Alsacien food. We both ended up ordering some kind of potato and cheese dish. It had some long German name that started with a B. It was pretty good, but nothing could match how delicious the appetizer pretzels they gave us were! The Germans truly are the master of the pretzel! (And the pretzels were free! Free appetizers in Europe?? Je ne comprends pas!)

Our first stop the next morning was the European Parliament buildings,⁶ continuing our theme of international cooperation after visiting the UN in Geneva. The buildings were all really sleek and modern, which was a big contrast with the quaint, medieval buildings in Petite France. We sort of made up for missing out on the flag walk in Geneva by walking down the all the European flags lined up in front of the main building. I felt very international.

Next, we headed back to the cathedral, but it was closed! I think it closes in the middle of the day to get you to buy the tour of the belltower instead of visiting for free. Pshhh. So instead, we headed to some random wine cave Christophe had found on the internet. He did not however, look up specific instructions, despite reading that it was hard to find.⁷ So we wandered around this huge medical complex for a quite a while, then figured out the vague directions on the map we had were wrong, and eventually found it. Surprise! It was also closed for a very long lunch break.

Well what to do when everything is closed but hop over to Germany?! Since Strasbourg is literally right on the border with Germany, there is a pedestrian bridge over the Rhine, and on one side, you’re in Strasbourg, France, and on the other you’re in Kehl, Germany! So cool! The bridge itself is really cool and sort of twists and curves. And obviously, it was pretty chouette to be just casually walking over international borders.⁸ Anyways, this is getting long (how shocking), so I'll put Kehl in a different post.

After our brief venture into Deutschland, we headed back to that wine cave Christophe wanted to see. It was smaller than I had expected, and there was no real visit or tour, you kind of just walked around this dank basement and looked at big wooden barrels. We did see the (supposedly) oldest wine in the world though, from 1472!!! Sadly, there were no tastings...

Then, we headed back one more time to the cathedral. And there was a movie being filmed inside!! :O Luckily, the production was only using one side of the cathedral, so we could visit the rest of the inside. It was pretty cool because they had all their professional lighting set up, which made everything look really cool and dramatic. And we got to watch them film a couple scenes! Couldn't really tell what was going on though except a lot of pacing and yelling...

Awesome organ

We grabbed some crepes for dinner and headed back to the hotel exhausted! The next morning, we were off to Paris!

À bientôt!

1. Eventually we took the road that I originally wanted to take but that Christophe had insisted was not a real road. Didn’t someone work for a prominent mapping company for several summers??

2. The stop announcements were awesome because they used different music and a different person’s voice every time!

3.  River, why you illin'?????? Hahahahahahahaha I had to say it
4. I literally forgot how to spell that in English haha

5. Ohh, foreshadowing!

6.  Strasbourg is the seat of the European Parliament.

7. I roll my eyes.

8. Yay Schengen zone!

Genève!!!

On to Switzerland! I was super excited to go to Geneva because I'd never been to Switzerland before, and also because I love chocolate. And watches. And international diplomacy. And there was plenty of all of those things! We arrived around 10:30 and checked into our hostel, which was walking distance from the train station. The city of Geneva gives you a free public transportation pass for the duration of your stay if you're a tourist staying at a hotel or hostel, which was pretty awesome.

After leaving some of our stuff in a locker at the hostel, we hopped on the tram to visit the United Nations building! Geneva is the European headquarters of the United Nations, and the main building is the Palais des Nations (Palace of Nations) which used to be the headquarters for the League of Nations. There's also a lot of UN and other international orgnizations based in Geneva, like the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization. The Palais de Nations has a really cool walkway of different countries' flags in front of it. Usually, you can walk down it, but unfortunately it was closed that day because there were a lot of protests going on outside the gates. Oh well, c'est la vie... it still looked pretty cool!

Next, we used the rather crappy map the hostel gave us to go to the Parc des Bastions, where there were giant chess and checkers sets! I admit, when I saw it marked on the map as "giant," I kind of expected them to be even bigger, but they were still fun. Christophe and I played checkers. After a while, I nobly sacrificed myself¹ so we could finally go eat. My stomach was about to claw its way out to search for food on its own, so something had to be done.

Leaving the park, we walked by the Reformation Wall, which is a monument to the Protestant Reformation and has statues of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and John Knox (these guys are in the photo on the right), as well as other major Reformation figures. In case you don't remember you last European history class, Geneva was a major center of the Reformation movement, especially for Calvin (his ideas are the basis of Calvinism).³ 

Our search for food was when we realized just how expensive Geneva is. (It's the second most expensive city in the world, right after Tokyo!) The cheapest lunch we could find was in a bagel shop,⁴ where I got a bagel with cream cheese for like $6. Christophe bought a Coke for 4 Swiss francs, which is like $5. When I heard the price, I decided to stick with water. Better have been a good Coke!⁵ Really though, the prices were shocking.⁷ On the plus side, a Swiss franc (CHF) is not as expensive as a euro ($1.10 vs. $1.33), but that did not help much. Also, most places let you pay in euros, since Switzerland is surrounded by the Eurozone, but they usually give you your change back in francs without converting to the exchange rate. So we lost some money there, since we decided it wasn't worth paying ATM fees to withdraw francs when we were only there for one day.

After savoring those bagels we paid so dearly for, we decided to splurge on some fancy Swiss chocolates. SO GOOD OMG. I cannot express in words how delicious Swiss chocolate is. If you ever go to Europe, you have to try it!! We got three truffles each, and I chose dark chocolate, mocha, and champagne flavors.⁸ Délicieux!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mocha, Champagne, and Dark Chocolate :D

Next, we headed to the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Genève (where John Calvin used to hang out!). The cathedral was really beautiful and well-maintained. The wooden pews were really pretty, and there were a lot of cool engravings and statues. There was also some amazing stained glass (of course) and a really interesting-looking organ. Architecture-wise, I really liked the look of the spire on the north tower, which is made of copper that's now all green (understandable since it was built in 1405). We climbed up the tower and got a beautiful view of the city and Lake Geneva.

My new friend :]

View from the tower - Lake Geneva!

We then walked around the old town area and headed toward Lake Geneva. We passed a ton of watch stores and swiss army knife stores. Sadly, these were a little out of our price range! Luckily, walking around Lake Geneva is free. The lake is really blue and pretty, with a lot of boats. There's a concrete walkway where you can walk out pretty far and then look back at the shore. Usually, there is the jet d'eau, this huge jet of water 140 meters high (459 feet!). It started out as an occasional thing to relieve water pressure in the city's hydraulic system, but everyone loved it, so it became permanent. Unfortunately, it was off that day for some reason (maybe it was too cold?), so we didn't get to see it. It's too bad because it looks pretty impressive in pictures.

Afterwards, we walked around a little and tried to be frugal by splitting a pizza for dinner. I enjoyed overhearing these two chatty flight attendants who were at a nearby table make conversation with the waiter, who I'm pretty sure was only pretending to understand what they were saying. The next morning, it was off to Strasbourg!

À bientôt!

My extended ramblings:
1. Some would say I "came in second out of two."²
2. Okay, fine, some would say I lost.
3. Very long story made crudely short: It all started when Martin Luther and others found that the Catholic Church and its clergy were getting way to corrupt. Luther was particularly offended by the sale of indulgences (you could buy forgiveness of your sins, basically pumping ridiculous amounts of money (and therefore power) into the church), and he also felt that the clergy should have no special religious authority; Christians should have a more direct relationship with God. Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the local church 1517, protesting this moral degradation, and Reformers used the recently invented printing press to spread the word quickly and effectively. Around the same time, John Calvin was establishing his own ideas, which were also a rejection of certain aspects of the Catholic Church but which focused more on predestination and total depravity; basically, humans are essentially evil and have no free will; God determines everything. Calvin eventually became the religious leader of Geneva, which became Protestant. The pope was not pleased, people got excommunicated, politics got involved (rulers were tired of the Church having so much power), there was a lot of violence, and ultimately Protestants broke off for good from the Catholic Church. 
4. First time I'd had a bagel since leaving California! :O 
5. Christophe probably spent like $50 on Coke during our trip. Exchange rates, European sales taxes, and the many other reasons soda is so expensive here, were not friendly to him.⁶
6. Fun fact: France has a 19.6% value-added tax, reduced to 5.5% on food. (If you don't want to get too technical, a value-added tax is like a sales tax.)
7.  I went into a Starbucks, just to see how expensive it was, and the cheapest smallest Frappuccino was $9! What would Claire do! :P
8. Champagne-flavored Swiss chocolate in Switzerland?? How much more high-rolling can you get?!!

Le Soleil!!! :O

FINALEMENT, on a eu du soleil aujourd'hui!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ça fait des semaines qu'on n'en a pas eu!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Quel miracle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Et si vous pouvez le croire, demain, on est encore en vacances! Le 1 mai est un jour férié en France parce que c'est la fête du travail! Quel beau jour! :)

À bientôt!

Lyon!

Place Bellecour

So, Lyon! My dear cousin, who is known as C-SPAN in the US but goes by Christophe when in France, came to visit me for a week over my break at the end of February/beginning of March.¹ I took the train to meet him at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, and we caught a train² right after that to head to Lyon!

We were slightly confused by the metro/tram/bus system when we arrived (too many options!!), but we figured it out and got to the hotel, which was right next to a delicious bakery and like two minutes from the metro station. Then we headed downtown, to the main square Place Bellecour. So pretty!!! It’s a huge open square, kind of like Quinconces in Bordeaux, except surrounded by shopping and restaurant streets on all sides. There’s a huge Ferris wheel and a lion. Okay, not a real live lion, but a giant red silhouette. So cool!! I think sometimes, they have letters out that spell out “ONLY LYON,”³ but we just saw the lion. We didn’t have a map yet, so we just walked around on the different side streets and found the river and this cool sculpture of a tree with giant flowers. Back in February, it still got dark super early, so we walked around and looked at all the buildings and bridges lit up at night. The buildings in Lyon were that beautiful stone architecture that’s everywhere in France. I think it will be weird⁴ to go back to the US and have all the downtown buildings looks so modern.

The flower tree!

Painted lion outside of Chez M'man - maybe lions like this are Lyon's version of San Francisco's hearts?

Saône River

We got dinner at Chez M’man, a delicious restaurant my friend Sam recommended. She studied in Lyon last year, so she gave us all the insider tips! Merci beaucoup, Sam! I had macaroni and cheese and pork. I don’t know how typically French it was, but it was délicieux!!!

The next morning, we grabbed croissants at the boulangerie next to our hotel and headed out for some whirlwind sightseeing. It was cold but sunny. We stopped by Place Bellecour again and got a map from the Office de Tourisme. Then, we took quite the hike⁷ up to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière which is all the way up on a hillside overlooking the rest of Lyon. By the end, I was barely crawling, but the view was amazing!

The Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière was also very cool. I forgot it was Sunday morning, and we walked in as a mass was ending, so it was kind of awkward to take many photos inside.

Heading back down, we took a different route, and stopped at the (partially restored) ruins of an old Roman amphitheater. I told Christophe that with some careful cropping, he could tell people he went to Rome and the Colosseum too! It was not quite as grand as the Colosseum in Rome (but really, what is??), but you could climb all over them, which was fun.

Eventually, we made it all the way back down and walked along the river, where we saw this awesome pedestrian bridge, the Passerelle du Palais de Justice! I thought the one column suspension design was really interesting, especially since said column is all the way to the side instead of in the center. The design and the color and the beautiful weather all made the scene very striking, and I took a tonnnn of photos.

Passerelle du Palais de Justice

 Next, we headed to the Musée des Beaux Arts (Museum of Fine Arts), another recommendation from Sam! (Actually, pretty much everything we did was recommended by Sam!) There were a lot of really cool sculptures and paintings there, including some by Monet and Renoir. It’s always awesome to see paintings by people you learned about in school in real life.

Fontaine Bartholdi outside the Musée des Beaux-Arts

Musée des Beaux-Arts at the Place des Terreaux

After the museum, we went to the Parc de la Tête d’Or, which is a huge open park that turns right into a public zoo. (Free admission! Well actually, no admission since it’s just part of the park. Cray-cray!) The park was really pretty and filled with families and kids playing, picnicking, and strolling around on a Sunday afternoon. Most of the animals in the zoo part weren’t outside since it was pretty cold, but Christophe did see a giraffe for the first time!⁸ When we left the park, we also saw a building that looked like a spaceship.

Spaceship.

Nomnomnomnomnomnom

After a long walk back to the hotel and resting our feet for a while, we headed out to Lolo Quoi, an Italian restaurant, for dinner.⁹ I got this delicious pasta with chunks of cheese and roasted vegetables and pine nuts in it, and it was so so so so so so good. However, I had to wait for-freaking-ever to eat it because I am oh-so polite as to wait for everyone to be served, and someone had to exaggerate their aversion to pine nuts all the way to telling the waiter he was allergic, so that when the waiter accidentally brought his pasta with pine nuts on top, the whole thing had to be taken back to the kitchen and remade. Couldn’t just pick them off instead of complaining… -_______- East-coasters can be so high-maintenance.

The next morning, we got up and caught the train to the city of unparalleled delicious chocolates and $5 cans of Coca-Cola: Geneva! À bientôt!

1. I really still don’t know what to call that break. It’s not winter break, because that’s over Christmas, and it’s not spring break because that’s right now. I guess the French just have so many breaks, Americans don’t know what to call them!

2. There is a train station right in the airport.
3. SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE

4.  And maybe a little depressing.⁵

5.  Not depressing however, at school. Quite frankly, the buildings at the fac⁶ here look like they were built in the 60’s and have had no maintenance done since then. It’s not attractive. I miss all the modern, state-of-the art buildings at UCSD. I wouldn’t describe them as “pretty” the way I would the historic stone buildings here, but they are cool-looking in a different way. Also there’s a house on one of them now!!!

6. “Fac” is short for “faculté” and means university campus. Yes, it sounds like the F-bomb.

7.  The hike was made longer by the fact that we got lost like 5 billion times. For some reason, the Office de Tourisme chose not to mark the names of the roads around one of their major tourist sites on the map they give to tourists. Also, Christophe, despite coming from a family of cartographers, did not feel the need to trouble himself with the map.

8.  Apparently there are no zoos in Maine. Wut.

9.  Merci encore Sam! Also, Lyon is close-ish to the Italian border, so it’s totally justified that we were eating Italian food in France. Also it was vachement délicieux (hella delicious).

Une Petite Mise à Jour

Today, I am trying to do the French thing by writing this from a café, where I bought one drink and proceeded to hang out for hours. Oh la la, Kah-tee, que tu es française! I know, I know. But really, I guess I’m making like any hipster typing away on a Mac in any Starbucks in America. All that’s saving me from that cliché is that my jeans aren’t skinny enough, I’m in The French Coffee Shop¹ instead of Starbucks, and I have a real computer.²

So this week, I am on spring break! I know, I know, when are the French not on vacation? Shockingly, I don’t have any huge travel plans this week. I’ve just been hanging around Bègles/Bordeaux reading, going to some museums, doing a little shopping, and yesterday, I went on a solo trip to Périgueux, a small town in the Dordogne region. I was slightly hesitant at first to go alone, but it hardly seems like a big deal when I remember that I went from Walnut Creek to Bordeaux by myself while dragging a year’s worth of belongings eight months ago.

Pictures from Périgueux to come! And some long-awaited posts from my last week-long break. À bientôt!

1. Yes, I know, the fact that its name is in English kind of undermines its titular claim. But it is next to a Gothic cathedral, so it’s French enough.
2. http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvhpoqZH7o1r1ektro1_400.gif

Les Élections Françaises!

So as you probably know, yesterday was the first round of the French presidential elections! In France, the presidential election happens in two rounds. In the first, there are like 10 candidates, and then the two with the most votes advance to the second round of voting, which is two weeks later. The precincts work like in the US, the local one here was a big meeting room just down the street. Obviously, I did not actually vote, but I did go in the evening as they were closing to watch them count the votes. (Can you do that in the US???) I'm pretty sure the voting system is that in the booth, there are stacks of paper with each candidate's name on them, and you pick one, fold it, and put it into a little blue envelope, which you then put in the ballot box. No huge scantron forms that I saw. I'm pretty sure write-in candidates aren't allowed.

The voter turnout is really high in France. At the local bureau de vote, it was like 82%, and a lot of people are saying this isn't even a very exciting election for most French people. My host-family and some other French people there watching the vote-counting told me that voting is considered a really important responsibility in France; a lot of people, especially older people, get dressed up to go vote, and parents take their children to set the example of being an active citizen. Meanwhile, the US managed 57% in 2008. That's embarrassing...

Watching them count the votes was interesting. There were a couple employees from the mayor's office, and the rest were volunteers. They set up tables of four people, with one person opening envelopes, one person reading off the ballots and organizing them into piles, and two people keeping tally sheets of the votes. At the end, they compare the two tally sheets and recount the piles to make sure it's all correct. I felt kind of weird being an American and watching like the behind-the-scenes of the French elections, but it was also cool to see. Yay transparency of the democratic process!

Anyways, Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president, and François Hollande, the main challenger from the left, are advancing to round two. Hollande had more votes this round, but it all depends on how people who voted for candidates who didn't make it change their votes.

We'll see how things happen in two weeks! À bientôt!