Strasbourg, France

Strasbourg is a pretty little city, wreathed with canals, and was very cold the weekend we were there. The center of town is dominated by the towering gothic Cathèdrale Notre Dame de Strasbourg, built over a period of 400 years or so and never completed. The stone carvings on the outside and the stained glass are well worth a visit. You can see the tower in the background of this photo.

We arrived early Saturday, meeting our friends at the train station, and made our way to the hotel to check in. Then we headed out to wander around the city center and find a place to eat lunch. We decided on crepes, and the little restaurant we found specialized in them. They were absolutely delicious! No surprise there, we have found the food in France to be the tastiest in Europe so far. Unfortunately I didn't make note of the name of the restaurant, but it is not too far from the cathedral.

After lunch, we headed to the Salon des Vins des Vignerons Indépendants for which we had free tickets. It was huge! I think there were over 600 different tasting stations, and people were routinely walking out towing dollies with crates of wine. We ended up with only two bottles of red wine, a bottle of cognac, but everyone had fun tasting and comparing. I think we made it through less than a quarter of the stands. You could definitely see why wine is one of the biggest businesses in France.

Sunday we went to the Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg in the Palais Rohan. There are a number of museums in this former Archbishop's Palace, and we spent the morning roaming through them, staying in out of the cold. We happened upon an exhibit of Albrecht Dürer's prints that was a temporary exhibit, quite a special treat, then wandered through a number of the other museums. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs was interesting, as many of the rooms had been furnished according to records for when the archbishop was in residence, and using period furniture whenever possible. Photographs were not allowed, unfortunately.

We will most likely be making another trip to Strasbourg in the future, as we did not make it out to the intriguing Musée Les Secrets du Chocolate, or the castle of Fleckenstein.

Here are some photos from around the town, and of the cathedral.

Looking up the street at the front of the cathedral. This is a truly massive building, photos just don't do it justice.







Detail of the front, you can see little beasties cavorting amongst the saintly figures.



View of the back, where you can see the flying buttresses.








Gargoyles along the side of the cathedral.



Sun through the stained glass windows inside the cathedral.




View up one of the canals in Petite France, a neighborhood in Strasbourg.

Fasnacht!

Chienbäse, or the burning parade at Liestal Fasnacht.

This fiery event could and would never be able to be held in the U.S. Or at least I have never heard of such a thing happening. They parade huge burning objects through the town for a couple of hours. No ropes or barriers, just firemen standing around to douse the helmets and hats of the people carrying the big torches, and the crowd when they got too hot!

A group of around 10 or so of MrB's colleagues got together to go to this. It was nice to go with people who knew where they were going, though if you just followed the crowd, there was no doubt where the event was happening. The people were packed so thick that you could barely move along the sides of the road. We stayed back about 3 rows, and it was probably better there than at the front, because those fires were HOT, but it did make it hard to see a lot of what went on, and take good photos.

The most impressive were these huge wagons stacked full of wood, with huge tongues of flame and sparks shooting into the sky. There were also people carrying huge torches, which I didn't get any good photos of, but the links at the bottom of this have some nice shots. They came through in groups of about 3-10 torch bearers, then one of the big wagon torches would roll by. The torch bearers marched along for a ways, then had to stop and set the torches down for a rest and a dousing, then pick them back up and go running along to a great cheer from the crowd, then settle back in to a walk.

One group of torch bearers even had little 'spits' set up on top of their hats with real sausages to roast on them! And they were roasting away! Quite a few had metal colinders as their protective hats, some had felt pointy hats, though most had hard hats or firemen hats. One group was dressed up like mariachis and had decorated sombreros, but they were pulling a wagon, so didn't need the fire protection as badly as the torch bearers.

The street was lined with burning embers after the event, and covered with confetti from an earlier parade. The firemen did their job well, because the confetti didn't go up in a wall of flame along the street. The crowd getting back to the train was insanely packed, you could only shuffle along the entire route back to the train station, somewhere between a quarter and a half a mile I think. And getting on to the train there were no orderly lines, everyone just kind of shoved like mad and popped through the bottleneck at the doors, very crazy.

Basel Morgenstreich

We planned on going to the Basel Morgenstreich as well, which was at 4am, and we figured by the time we got home it would not make sense to go to bed. So we stayed up all night, and headed out to see the Basel festivities at about 3:15, settled in to a spot and proceeded to freeze (it was about 25°F/-4°C) for couple of hours while we watched them parade their colorful satirical lanterns by, accompanied by screeching piccolos and crashing drums. Each group also had miniature lanterns attached to their hats.

Thankfully, where we were, near Schifflände, was not quite as crowded as the street in Liestal, but I think if we'd braved the Marktplatz or Barfusserplatz it would have been. There were bus-loads of tourists being shipped in all day for the event. I didn't bring my camera to the 4am parade because the only light was from the lanterns, and the camera has too long a delay to take good photos at night. Or I haven't figured out how to take good photos at night, I'm not sure which.

I plan to take photos later at the Munsterplatz when they display the lanterns, and possibly as we wander around downtown these next couple of days, so will hopefully have a few more to post. The costumes are very colorful and bizarre, with huge caricature faces and bright poofy hair and clothes, characters of all kinds, animals and fantastical creatures as well.

Two links to other pages with description and images of the burning parade.
English Forum, with the description and pix at the last post.
Photographer's website, great pix