European holiday: Strasbourg

From a diary I wrote in 2011:

Strasbourg

Strasbourg used to be part of Germany, but ever since the second world war the Franco-German border has run sensibly down the centre of the Rhine. Either way it doesn't seem to matter which country the city is in since every sign and restaurant menu is written in French and German. The city centre feels more Germanic than French, although I'm not quite sure what a typically French city is supposed to be like these days. A sense of twee cliche national architecture persists more in Germany, Switzerland and England than in France.

On first impression Strasbourg didn't seem to me like a very substantial place. The autoroute ended in a large roundabout with boulevards running off of it towards unseen destinations. Only a couple of traffic lights stood between the visitor and being directed back onto road back out of town again. Blink and you'd miss it. The actual city centre and the old town is hidden behind layers of traffic filled boulevards and modern pedestrianised shopping streets. The dominant feature is the cathedral, brown, gothic and missing one of it's spires, (it was planned but never built). Oddly from a distance a small flat roofed building could be seen sat on top of the stump where the second tower once stood. We didn't go into the cathedral but instead took refuge in one of the restaurants opposite, a nice place in a secluded courtyard.

The next morning we walked back to the cathedral square and made our way into it's gloomy innards, ignoring the beggar camped on the steps. It was Sunday and mass was in full swing inside. The sides of the nave were roped off keeping all the tourists in a crowd at the back. We walked back outside to find the steps up to the roof level. The steps went up to the roof where the incongrous modern structure sat. It turned out to be the building where the clock and the bell were kept. The remaining spire towered solidly above the roof area but on closer inspection it was more fragile and spindly than it appeared from a distance. Looking inside revealed it was hollow and being held up with internal scaffolding. We trekked back down the steps and went back into the cathedral where services were still in progress. However it appeared that the restrictions on the public had been lifted as lots of people were milling around the sides. As if the service had reached the optional post-service coffee and Q&A session. After a few minutes some suited security staff emerged from the shados and herded everybody back out of the ailes and back to the back. Why they had managed to let so many people into the forbidden area and created so much additional work for themselves is a question only they could answer.

The old town in Strasbourg is surrounded by a river and boat tours run on the river so we walked down to the dock and bought some tickets for the next tour. The tour boats were long, rectangular and covered with a low rectractable canopy in the style of the Bateau Mouches in Paris. We took tickets on the covered, air conditioned, tour since the open tour boat was packed full. On the covered boat there were about fifteen other people with us so everybody got a window seat if they wished. It seemed like a no-brainer to me; a choice between a window seat, with cooling breeze blowing up from air conditioning vents under the arm. Or sitting on a packed boat baking in the full Alsatian summer sun and being splashed by river water. But it seems most people prefer the latter, which is odd because it's completely the opposite how people behave in pavement cafes. In a cafe everybody will head for the shaded tables, and try to find a table not too close to other people. But take food and drink out equation and suddenly lots of people are quite happy to sit in the full midday sun for an hour packed shoulder to shoulder with the same strangers they are so keen to avoid in cafes.

The tour boats didn't have a tour guide and instead had audio commentary in many languages via headphones in the seat. The English commentary was a reasonable effort given that in Strasbourg French and German are the first two languages. It was presented as a conversation between an old-timey boat captain and his (American) cabin boy. The captain's accent was somewhere between Ireland and west country and personally I would've preferred something a bit more grown up but it was still interesting enough to listen to. The tour route took in the centre of the old town, where the river would have once fed mills via sluices. The sluices were still there but more modern buildings had been built over them. A lock raised the boat up a level to the higher basin where the landmark fortified bridge crosses the end of the old town. Another lock took the boat back down again and the pilot then opened his throttle a bit to take us several miles down to where the modern European parliament buildings stand, in the process being amused by watching the river's water birds riding boat's wake like a rollercoaster.

In the afternoon we walked through the centre of the old town, the 'Petit France', had lunch on the river bank under a huge tree (that saves that particular auberge from needing umbrellas) and walked over Les Ponts Couverts. The original wooden structure of the bridge has long since disappeared but the towers remain. We walked along the riverbank to the botanical gardens of the University of Strasbourg. The gardens were quite a small area behind what looked like halls of residence. A closer look revealed that the most sinister looking of these buildings actually belonged to the gardens and was evidently some kind of advanced hothouse, with large shutters hanging over all the windows from an external frame. It clearly dated from the 1960s and looked a little worse for wear, with patches of rust on the backs of the shutters. Squatting in it's shadow was a large greenhouse housing all manner of tropical plants. It was quite a hot day in Strasbourg but a few minutes in the tropical greenhouse confirmed that the weather wasn't really hot in the grand scheme of things.