Some interesting English in Strasbourg

We saw this on a menu in Strasbourg, France and had to smile: "the softness of instant." It's a rather strange dessert (which was actually a sweet flammkuchen with seasonal fruit).

December's Adventure: Day 3, Part 3, Strasbourg

Seeing the weird and abused mannequins earlier wasn't the end of seeing unusual store displays. As we continued visiting the Christmas market and strolling through Strasbourg, we came across an extremely odd window display in a pharmacy called Pharmacie de la Rose: gnomes who appeared to be attacking each other! No, seriously! They were bandaged and bloody.

 Are the gnomes in a battle?

 Oh my goodness! The gnome on the right has a broken leg and the one in the back has a knife.

 This poor guy has a bloodied foot and is about ready to be stung by a bee.

Dude has a head wound!

I'd love to know the backstory on this place. Does someone have it out for the gnomes? Did the gnomes get sick of Christmas cheer and go crazy on each other? If you know why this display is like this, leave a comment!

We found the display somewhat amusing, but definitely disturbing! To our relief, a sidestreet offered a window display that was charming and drew us in: bubbles were softly blowing and we stopped in front of the following window. The picture doesn't really do it justice. It's "La Maison de Hanssel & Gretel" and there were beautiful ornaments in the window.

It was a nice way to end our Strasbourg trip after the strange gnome window! Tired, we took the tram back to the car and then I drove us back to Kaiserslautern. However, next time I would definitely pick a better route home instead of where my GPS took me: we drove through narrow, winding roads literally in middle of the forest (Pfalz!).

December's Adventure: Day 3, Part 2, Strasbourg

Here's part one of our trip to Strasbourg.

After visiting the Cathedral, I took my cousins to see Petite-France, a lovely district in Strasbourg full of medieval half-timbered and Baroque architecture. It is truly worth a visit, even though the name of the area does not have such a charming provenance. According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know, not always the most authoritative of sources):

"The name Petite-France ("Little France") was not given for patriotic or architectural reasons. It comes from the "hospice of the syphilitic" (Hospice des Vérolés, in French), which was built in the late fifteenth century on this island, to cure persons with syphilis, then called the "French disease" in German, Franzosenkrankheit."

Preeeety.

 Well, even with that bit of not so pretty history, it's still possible to enjoy the very scenic neighborhoods. I wanted to visit the Square Louise Weiss, which is on a quay that forms a pleasant little island. There was some sort of official person and an open (removable) gate at the entrance to the island. I watched several other people walk in so we did too. Farther in the park we saw a crowd of people and some sort of elaborate set-up. Of course I was incredibly curious (nosy) so we drew closer and realized that some sort of tv show was being filmed! We joined the crowd (and thus probably ended up on French tv. Hi, mom!) and watched the hosts cooking something.

There was another segment being filmed in a different area and a guy was holding some sort of chicken. I could see the writing on the wall for the chicken! I just hoped he wasn't going to off the poor bird where we could see it. 

We left to walk around the neighborhood some more, then have dinner. My cousins chose a restaurant in the tourist area and they had cheese, wine, and snails (!). My cousin had finished the snails and left the butter sauce. With hand signals, the French waiter showed him the importance of eating the leftover butter with bread since I'm assuming that one who would like the taste of snails would also like the remaining butter on bread. Oh goodness. 

I let go of the thought of snails when we left to find my dinner: I wanted to have a burrito at La Cocina, a Mexican restaurant near Petite-France. I ate here last time I came to Strasbourg. The burritos aren't bad but they're a little bit bland. However, the ingredients still taste good and it's adequate for someone needing a Mexican food fix (which I pretty much need all the time. sigh). Plus, I wanted to show my cousins the crazy steep stairs to the bathroom. Seriously, I feel as if I should crawl up them instead of walking up them. The tread is also narrow so I kind of walked sideways since my boots make my feet seem even bigger. 

This picture doesn't do the steepness justice!

As we left the restaurant we saw yet another Santa Claus attempting to break into someone's house. Naughty Santa!

Even better yet was a store's display farther down the road. There were the weirdest mannequins inside and we spent five minutes examining them and giggling furiously (while being a little weirded out by them, too!). The clothes were odd as well.

Bald mannequin, poorly painted on facial hair.

Uh...dude's face is broken, and why on earth does he have super long girly eyelashes?

This sweater is ridiculous.

Leather shirt, anyone?

The jeans were really the worse: ruched, distressed, and weird. So is his facial hair: it's shaped like an anchor!

That wasn't the last of weird mannequins, either. Another nearby store had mannequins who were taped back together. How weird! Maybe the mannequins from the two stores got into a fight with each other when the humans had gone to bed?

Her arm is held on with tape. Why??

This wasn't the last store with a strange display. Tomorrow I'll write about the gnomes who had met misfortune.

December's Adventure: Day 3, Strasbourg, France

On our third day of our trip, we hopped into the car for a two hour drive to Strasbourg, France, which is south of Kaiserslautern. I've visited Strasbourg once before this spring but never did get to writing about it (oops!). The nice thing about my prior visit was that it saved me some research for this visit since I basically already knew the layout of town. In other words, I knew exactly where to go since I had already bumbled through some wrong turns during the previous visit. Yay for learning!


From my last visit, I knew that the wise thing to do with my car was leave it in the Park and Ride lot on the edge of the downtown. I chose the Rotonde parking garage which is just west of downtown. It's super convenient because the tram is just outside the parking lot and it's a quick journey into town. Even better yet? It's super cheap! To park in the garage and ride the tram into downtown and back is only 4 euros for up to seven passengers. It's sooo much cheaper and less stressful than parking in the city (more P+R Strasbourg info available here).

We didn't have a set plan other than visiting the cathedral and the Christmas market. After we took the tram into town, we came across the first Christmas Market at Place Kléber, a square. There were just a few booths and they were all non-profit organizations. We decided this would be an excellent place to drink some vin chaud ("hot wine"), the French version of glühwein. After all, once must drink hot, spiced wine at Christmas markets and supporting non-profits by purchasing it from them is even better!

Lovely vin chaud. Now, how to get the deposit back?

My cousins both speak a bit of French from learning it in high school so they ordered successfully. I tried to order some wine using French and it was a mess. Some of it came out in German and instead of 3 glasses of wine we received 2 glasses instead. Eep. We finally got everything sorted out and my cousins had their glasses of red wine and I had white. It was tasty and similar to glühwein. Finishing our glasses, we were then left to figure out how to get our deposit back. We even had to figure out if we had paid a deposit for the cups. It's pretty standard practice if the cups aren't the cheap disposable ones. We spent a while watching other people to see what they were doing and finally just took the cups back to the stand and handed them back. We were rewarded with our deposit being returned. Success!

We learned that each year, there is a special guest country to the market. This year, the guest was Croatia, being honored for recently joining the EU (as of 1 July 2013). There were some stalls in the Place Gutenberg set up with Croatian food, crafts, and information.

Then we moved on to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, a major landmark of the city. Part of the building was started in 1015,  but the Gothic spire was not completed until 1439, according to Strasbourg's Tourism website. We marveled at the amazing church, noting the astronomical clock inside and the elaborately decorated facade.

I made special note of the super creepy stained glass window showing scenes from Hell. I was especially alarmed by the white devil (? I think that's what it is) that bears some resemblance to Bumble the Abominable Snow Monster from the children's film Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Freaky.

Creepy creepy! Bumble, is that you?

Beautiful church facade, evil gnome poisoning the vin chaud outside (maybe not).

That was enough of creepy stained glass windows. As we toured the rest of the town, we found something else that I've since seen repeated in other European towns: Santa Claus in various stages of breaking into people's homes. More pictures of this phenomenon will follow, of course.

There is more to the visit to Strasbourg but that will be another entry since this one is super long as it is. The next entry will be full of additional excitement (! maybe): how we ended up (sort of) on French television in Petite France; saw gnomes gone bad (and it was bloody!); went mountain climbing in the French burrito restaurant; and went into giggling hysterics over weird mannequins. I'm sure you can't wait.