Weekend in Alsace

Dec. 11-13:

Wow, time flies when you're having fun!  Between getting up early and staying up late, it seems I have let my blogging slip.  I'm going to try to get us all caught up in one fell swoop today.

Dec. 11:

The dominating feature of Strasbourg is, of course, its thousand-year-old cathedral.  It's hard to get a good photo of it, since the neighboring buildings are so close.  But our hotel has a scale model.  The142 meters of height are scaled down to 2.82 meters for this display.

Strasbourg loves to decorate for Christmas.  Some of the shops choose a whimsical theme, like these bakers.

Others like a theme associated with their business, like this clock shop.

And still others just choose simple elegance.

All in all, you get the feeling of walking around under a huge Christmas tree.


Dec. 12:

Today we took the train down to Colmar, described to us by our Parisian friends as having an even better Christmas market than Strasbourg, mainly because all the wares are local.  Indeed, we noticed a total absence of the "imported" disclaimers we had noticed in Strasbourg.  Colmar is a very picturesque city in a way that doesn't depend on Christmas.  The old part of the city of about 70,000, where the Christmas market is, is just chock full of colorful, half-timbered houses, many of which grew sideways as they grew vertically.

An oddity of Colmar is the House of Heads.  A previous owner put 106 gargoyle-like masks on the facade of the building.  This sort of thing makes me appreciate people with a normal sense of humor.

Dec. 13:

Today we treated ourselves to a sleepin, something our parents would have called "backsliding".  But we made up for that with a glorious concert at the Church of St. Paul, described as a "Gothic Revival" church.  It has almost the look and feel of a traditional Gothic cathedral, except for two interesting architectural features, both related to its original purpose.  Built after the Prussian (German) defeat of France in 1870 and the annexation of the Alsace region by Prussia, it was built to accomodate the military garrison, including nineteen doors and an unusually broad nave, so the soldiers could enter and exit quickly in proper military fashion.  Tonight it had gotten into the Christmas season with dancing snowflakes projected onto its rose window.

The attraction for us, though was a concert featuring young singers from the Rhine Opera and the University of Strasbourg.  The program included Britten's Celebration of Carols and Saint-Saens' Christmas Oratorio.  The oratorio included instrumental support from strings and organ.  I guess we felt like that was a pretty good end to our Sunday.

Tomorrow, we'll try to get to one of the smaller towns of the Alsace.