Strasbourg

Today Strasbourg is the home to the European Parliament and a huge student population. Nevertheless it is a charming city with a small town feel. Over the last century it has changed from French to German at least four times so one gets strong German and French influences on this capital of the Alsace. It’s location just off the Rhine on a smaller tributary for defense purposes means one can even take a canal boat tour of the city. We did not do this but even on a cold day in December people were lined up for the tour. 

The highlight of any visit to Strasbourg is the magnificent cathedral. One is first struck by the delicacy of this huge building. Gothic use of flying buttresses changed the look of cathedrals from the ponderousness of the Norman architecture to a lighter and loftier look inside and out. The use of the buttresses meant that the support columns could be smaller and the building itself could be wider and taller. The Strasbourg Cathedral, completed in 1439 is a magnificent example of the Gothic style. 

Inside, one is immediately overwhelmed by the stained glass. Every bit of light that enters the building enters through one of the stained glass windows. While almost every cathedral has some stained glass, Strasbourg is one of the very few with no clear windows at all. It is interesting that some of them are painted and then fired in a kiln while the glass in other windows was created by adding minerals directly to the glass as it was manufactured. You have to look closely to see the difference and I don’t notice it unless it is pointed out. 

The other highlight of this cathedral is the astronomical clock. This is the third clock built on the site, the first two being built in the 14^th and 16^th centuries. The current one was completed in 1843 after five years of labor by 30 workers. Besides the actual clock, it includes a perpetual calendar, a planetary and a display of the sun and moon in their real position including eclipses. At 12:30 each day a life-size cock crows three times and 18-inch figures of Jesus and the Apostles parade around the façade. We missed seeing the procession as the line was already too long by the time our tour of the city ended. 

The sculpture work on cathedrals is always interesting, especially the gargoyles.

For Christmas we also got to view a 100-foot long Nativity scene that filled one side of the left nave.

We had a very nice lunch at one of the old restaurants in town before wandering the Christmas markets and taking the bus back to our ship. 

Flowers in memory of the Paris shootings

For me an added highlight was watching the construction of a new bridge across the Rhine. We were delayed about four hours by the work. The bridge will consist of two spans each of which was constructed on shore and then had to be maneuvered into place. They were placing the first of the two spans on the day we were there. Of course the job took longer than expected so we had to wait while they finished. The span was already on a barge, but supported only in two places so maneuvering it had to be done with great care. I watched for about two hours as it would move a bit and then stop for a while. The bridge just upstream offered a great view of the progress although it was impossible to see exactly why they kept stopping. I had to leave before they were able to place the span on its new piers which was disappointing, but the whole process was interesting nevertheless. 

Portland is using an interesting technique to replace a bridge over the Willamette River. Since this is a replacement and the approaches are limited, the engineers decided to build a set of temporary piers next to the old bridge and then slide the old bridge onto those temporary piers. That way they could build the new one completely in place without disrupting traffic too much. It took them three days to slide the old bridge onto those temporary piers at a speed measured in inches per hour.  The new Sellwood Bridge is now in place.

Colmar and the Black Forest

A barn in the Black Forest area

On our first day aboard the Viking Kvisir, we took a bus trip to the Black Forest in the morning and a tour of the Colmar World War II area in the afternoon. All  the Viking longships are named for Norse gods. Kvasir was born of saliva from Aesir and Vanir. He traveled around spreading knowledge until he was killed by the dwarfs Fjalar and Galar. They drained his blood and mixed it with honey to create the Mead of Poetry. This mead imbues the drinker with the gift of poetry, thus introducing poetry into the world. I’m not sure that this means our trip will be one of knowledge-seeking, but it does seem like a good plan since we will be entering new areas of Europe for both of us. On another note, Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware brews a Kvasir which they developed from evidence derived from a 3500 year old Danish birch bark drinking vessel found in a tomb of a leather-clad woman who was probably a priestess or dancer. The brew includes wheat, lingonberries, cranberries, myrica gale, yarrow, honey and birch syrup. This is something I will have to try.

An old church in the Forest

Our visit to the Black Forest did not include a walk in the forest, something I was looking forward to. Instead we had an hour-long bus ride to a village on the edge of the forest that consisted of two stores, a town hall, and a hotel restaurant where Marie Antoinette spent one night on her way to marry Louis the 16^th and eventually lose her head.

The hotel

Remembering Marie Antoinette

One of the stores is all about glass-blowing and exhibits some wonderful examples. The store includes a forge and also has a blower heating glass with a blowtorch before doing the actual blowing. The other store demonstrates the building of the famous Black Forest cake on the lower floor while the upper floor is devoted to cuckoo clocks. Cuckoo clocks may or may not have been invented here, but they have certainly come to be identified with the region. The front wall of this store is itself a giant cuckoo clock. Inside you can purchase clocks at almost any price from a few Euros to several thousand. The intricacy and beauty was enticing, but we limited ourselves to a simple Christmas tree ornament that doesn’t even keep time.

The entire wall is a cuckoo clock

Closeup of dancers whirling by

About 200 yards from the village is an old chapel that we also visited. It sits on the road (path) that used to extend from Austria to France which explains how Marie Antoinette happened to stop here. You can still walk parts of the path, but in this area the path has been replaced by the highway.

The chapel

The old road

A road marker

In the afternoon we chose the World War II tour to the town of Colmar instead of visiting Colmar’s famous Christmas market. Colmar is where Audie Murphy won the Medal of Honor at the age of 19. 

Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in WWII

 He single-handedly held off a German attack for an hour while calling in artillery shots on his own position. Then while wounded he led the counterattack that won the day for the Allies. After the war Murphy wrote a memoir titled To Hell and Back which was made into a movie where he played the title role. Our guide was a young Czech woman who was so passionate about the story and the role of the Americans in liberating Europe that she was close to tears as she recited a veteran’s poem.

Our young guide

The road where Murphy held off the Germans

 After visiting the battle site we traveled to a cemetery atop a nearby hill and then t a small but remarkable museum in another nearby town. The museum housed in a former wine cellar has only two rooms, but they are filled with artifacts from the actual battlefields and a dozen or so full size dioramas showing the soldiers from both armies in the field and in their camps. After seeing almost nothing in Italy related to either World War I or II, it was nice to see this monument to Murphy and the museum.

Nothing special here, but it is a Mustang in a small town in France