Travelling from Berlin to Strasbourg is not genuinely fast (I think) even though we were taking a bullet-train-shaped, white, speedy Inter-City Express, which peaked at over 245 km/h during our trip.
It was before 10 a.m. on a cloudy morning when we passed the dandelions, red deadnettle, daffodils and grape hyacinths in front of the train station, found our platform, and then eventually pulled out to our first stop: Wittenberg.
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| Platform at Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, April 11th, 2023 |
After that: Leipzig, Eisenach in terrain that began to be pleasantly hilly in comparison to the flat floodplains of Brandenburg, Frankfurt am Main with its characteristic cluster of skyscrapers.
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| View of farmyard from Berlin-to-Strasbourg train, April 11th, 2023 |
We paused there for 15 minutes, in a riveted, steel-framed hall typical of pre-WWI railroad architecture, with restaurant advertisements on electronic billboards.
The family and I were seated in 1st class, not so much because we wanted to live like kings, but because it was the best way to book seats close to each other. It also serendipitously meant that my siblings could order chili con carne and coffee for lunch, and have it be brought to their seats!
Then we pulled out of the station again, in the direction we'd come, and curved around to the southwest.
But before we left Frankfurt: a train employee announced on the public address speakers that a freight train had been abandoned on the tracks, so we would be rerouted past Darmstadt. The final stop of Zürich was also cancelled: the train would only reach Basel. (But this was more a problem for other travellers; we wouldn't be going that far.) This led to incremental delays adding up to over 30 minutes, and the employee kept checking in on connecting trains at the various stops to see if they'd wait for us or not.
At Baden-Baden, whose railroad station looked nothing like the grand, imperial edifice I'd been expecting given the town's opulent history, we switched to a French TGV (très grande vitesse = high-speed) train upholstered in patriotic blue.
Crossing the border was fuss-free, and we never had to show our passports (or even our tickets, after leaving the Deutsche Bahn), thanks to the Schengen Agreement. We just rolled over a broad arm of the Rhine between Kehl on the German side and Strasbourg in France.
We reached Strasbourg in the early evening.
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We were booked in a hotel near the city centre, at a bridge over one of the canals, in a four-storey half-timbered apartment building that had been painted yellow and adorned with Easter decorations.
It was possible to walk there from Strasbourg's main train station, the Gare Central, with its restored, early 20th-century, red sandstone front façade almost unblemished, encapsulated in an egg-like bubble of glass.
But it was clear that Strasbourg is a touristy city, with students and EU diplomats as well, and we almost had to use pointy elbows to navigate past the pedestrians and cyclists, who were generally moving at speed. (That said, the restrained use of perfume is popular in Strasbourg and I liked catching in the streets; I was also intrigued that the men generally had neatly trimmed hair, which seems like a lot of upkeep but quite dashing; and I gazed for a while at the bicycle paths and the pillars with green and red lights and the ubiquitous zebra stripe crosswalks to try to figure out how the traffic works exactly.) T. had been there before, and conducted us unerringly to our residence.
Checking in was fast, and then we were in our rooms.
The others were staying in a courtyard room: despite its modern aesthetic, the blue and white wall-to-wall carpet, linen-patterned walls, and coloured photo print of three young girls wearing the massive traditional Alsation headgear in fashion from the late 19th century, all tributes to the region in which we were staying. The exposed, varnished wooden beams of the half-timbering (colombage) were also a tribute.
As I'd only agreed to join the trip to Strasbourg after she'd made the original arrangements, T. had booked me into my own small room, which I grew to like a lot. It had a comfy, white bed. The bathroom was also nice: it had a little sewing kit, a hair net and scrunchy, as well as a wooden tablet with artisanal soap and hand cream and body wash. And I appreciated the view of the street below, with an épicerie and a bakery at the corner, old dormer windows, the spire of the Strasbourg Cathedral, pigeons, a clock that always pointed to 6:05 no matter what time of day it was, the comings and goings at the foot of a bridge, and a nice slice of sky.
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This first evening we went to dinner in a wooden building in the city centre, right above a bridge where the water was thundering through a disused mill run, with more classic white-plastered half-timbered houses above the cobblestones.
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The tables were covered in red and white plaid tablecloths, then a pebbled white layer that looked a little like a bib and which spoke volumes about the experiences the restaurant had been through with spill-prone tourists...
The restaurant's menu featured Alsatian casserole (Elsaesser Baeckeoffe) with beef or duck or lamb in red pottery dishes. It also had varieties of Flammkuchen which is a type of super-thin-crust pizza that is also popular in southern German-style restaurants in Berlin. Choucroûte is part of the typical smells that waft through the streets of Strasbourg: a meal of sauerkraut, potatoes, and sausage. There were also other odds and ends — including the Salade à chèvre chaud (warm goat cheese salad) that I ordered. It's not really a useful or endearing quality, but I've become a bit precious about food and was a little disgruntled for example that there weren't more vegetarian options...
The coffee I ordered as an inexpensive substitute for dessert was nothing to write home about. But I think I figured out eventually as we stayed in Strasbourg that French restaurants seem to offer cheap café rallongé as a regular thing that's about 2.50 to 3 Euros, and then special gourmet coffees that are 7 or 7.50 Euros. Maybe the gourmet coffees are the ones that taste like the ones we can make in Berlin.
We did share two bottles of sparkling mineral water amongst us. I did feel tempted to get sirop à l'eau, but in the end decided against it.
I'd felt prudent for taking along travel candy in the train to France, knowing from past experience that when my blood sugar levels drop and my travel anxiety kicks in, I become like the snobby city person in Hallmark films before they have a Scrooge conversion.
But for visiting restaurants, the travel candy didn't suffice. I considered this one a tourist dive. — Meanwhile my mother was taking undoubtedly a better view: seeing things through rose-tinged glasses, reminiscing wistfully about eating Elsaesser Baeckeoffe at her wedding reception with my father, and feeling happy that she was visiting the right places to get to know her Alsatian mentor/mother-figure's native culture...
Either way, the rest of the family was happy with their meals.
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