Europe update, June 18
Jun. 18th, 2005 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eveglassGreetings, oh my faithful readers!
Let me tell you about a gem of a city: Strasbourg. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting much. I wanted a day off from travelling, because I did a 10-hour+ stint yesterday (got to the first train station at 7 am, arrived in Strasbourg at 5:30 pm), am doing a 5-hour stint tomorrow to get to Munich, and am doing a Too Bloody Long stint on Monday to fly home. So all I really wanted was a day without a train or plane in it. Really, I wasn't expecting much, just a stopover.
I was VERY impressed by what I saw.
Strasbourg is fantastic! The Cathedral (Notre Dame de Strasbourg) ranks up there with Notre Dame de Paris and Notre Dame de Chartres. It's powerful, beautiful, and very impressive. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to get decent pictures of the facade becase the square in front of it (dating back to Roman times) is quite small. So I had to rely on postcards.
The backstreets are also great: full of character and half-timbered buildings. It's great to just wander around and get lost. You can't go too far: there's water surrounding the Old City, and if you hit it, you just turn around and try another way. It didn't take me long to get my bearings, though, only an hour or 2 of meandering.
At noon today I went to go see the astronomical clock in the cathedral chime the hour. (Well, it chimed the local hour, at 12:30 by the new universal reckoning.) THAT was quite a show! The cherubs chimed and turned hourglases, death chimed the hour, the apostles passed before Christ, the rooster crowed... yeah. It was a specatcle. It would have been even better if I wasn't standing amidst a huge crowd of tourists, but you can't have everything.
Then at 3 pm I went on a walking tour of the old city. There were only 6 of us in the French group (compared to about 20 in the German one), so it was nice and cozy. Our guide, Giselle, was VERY knowledgable and VERY competant. She did a good job of setting everything in its historical context, too. And I understood her accent perfectly. We actually started chatting for a while when I mentioned I was from Canada (well, she said, "You're not French, are you?"), and kept chatting as we walked between the various places she gave speeches. I actually learned quite a bit from her.
On Giselle's recomendation, I went (briefly) to the Cathedral Museum. It was a great museum, but I was already kind of tired, so I didn't spend all that long in it. But it was fun, nonetheless.
And now I'm here in this internet cafe telling you about my day.
Tomorrow I catch an 11 am train to Munich, and at 3:50 pm Monday my plane leaves for Montreal. (Of course, that means I need to be at the airport around 1 pm.) I get into town at about 6 pm at Dorval.
Yeah... lots of traveling in the near future. Thankfully, I found a bookstore here and picked up a copy of "Angels and Demons" (a book by the same guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code) to supplement the Heinlein book I picked up at my last hostel. Should be enough to keep me going, I think.
I'll probably send one more email / LJ from Europe (from Munich, Monday), and one when I get home letting everyone know I'm back home and safe. And ONE more when I finally get the web site up and running with my diary and pictures on it, so you can read about my trip in FAR more detail than you ever wanted to. (Seriously. WAY too much detail!)
That's it, pretty much. I shall send many hugs now and hope to have them all confirmed in person in the near future. I haven't planned anything official in terms of a "welcome-back" party, but if someone wants to host one for me, I'll show up. Any night but Tuesdays or this week Saturday (ie: the 25th) is okay. Otherwise, I'll let you know when I've got something planned.
HUGS and more HUGS!
Julie, counting down to hours now (54, incidentally)
Let me tell you about a gem of a city: Strasbourg. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting much. I wanted a day off from travelling, because I did a 10-hour+ stint yesterday (got to the first train station at 7 am, arrived in Strasbourg at 5:30 pm), am doing a 5-hour stint tomorrow to get to Munich, and am doing a Too Bloody Long stint on Monday to fly home. So all I really wanted was a day without a train or plane in it. Really, I wasn't expecting much, just a stopover.
I was VERY impressed by what I saw.
Strasbourg is fantastic! The Cathedral (Notre Dame de Strasbourg) ranks up there with Notre Dame de Paris and Notre Dame de Chartres. It's powerful, beautiful, and very impressive. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to get decent pictures of the facade becase the square in front of it (dating back to Roman times) is quite small. So I had to rely on postcards.
The backstreets are also great: full of character and half-timbered buildings. It's great to just wander around and get lost. You can't go too far: there's water surrounding the Old City, and if you hit it, you just turn around and try another way. It didn't take me long to get my bearings, though, only an hour or 2 of meandering.
At noon today I went to go see the astronomical clock in the cathedral chime the hour. (Well, it chimed the local hour, at 12:30 by the new universal reckoning.) THAT was quite a show! The cherubs chimed and turned hourglases, death chimed the hour, the apostles passed before Christ, the rooster crowed... yeah. It was a specatcle. It would have been even better if I wasn't standing amidst a huge crowd of tourists, but you can't have everything.
Then at 3 pm I went on a walking tour of the old city. There were only 6 of us in the French group (compared to about 20 in the German one), so it was nice and cozy. Our guide, Giselle, was VERY knowledgable and VERY competant. She did a good job of setting everything in its historical context, too. And I understood her accent perfectly. We actually started chatting for a while when I mentioned I was from Canada (well, she said, "You're not French, are you?"), and kept chatting as we walked between the various places she gave speeches. I actually learned quite a bit from her.
On Giselle's recomendation, I went (briefly) to the Cathedral Museum. It was a great museum, but I was already kind of tired, so I didn't spend all that long in it. But it was fun, nonetheless.
And now I'm here in this internet cafe telling you about my day.
Tomorrow I catch an 11 am train to Munich, and at 3:50 pm Monday my plane leaves for Montreal. (Of course, that means I need to be at the airport around 1 pm.) I get into town at about 6 pm at Dorval.
Yeah... lots of traveling in the near future. Thankfully, I found a bookstore here and picked up a copy of "Angels and Demons" (a book by the same guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code) to supplement the Heinlein book I picked up at my last hostel. Should be enough to keep me going, I think.
I'll probably send one more email / LJ from Europe (from Munich, Monday), and one when I get home letting everyone know I'm back home and safe. And ONE more when I finally get the web site up and running with my diary and pictures on it, so you can read about my trip in FAR more detail than you ever wanted to. (Seriously. WAY too much detail!)
That's it, pretty much. I shall send many hugs now and hope to have them all confirmed in person in the near future. I haven't planned anything official in terms of a "welcome-back" party, but if someone wants to host one for me, I'll show up. Any night but Tuesdays or this week Saturday (ie: the 25th) is okay. Otherwise, I'll let you know when I've got something planned.
HUGS and more HUGS!
Julie, counting down to hours now (54, incidentally)
