We benefitted from this August quiet, one year, by checking into Le Hotel Grand, which is just across the street from the railway station. The train journey from Paris to Strasbourg
used to be awfully tedious, although the TGV, with some upgrades still to come, is a big improvement. You can also fly
from Paris to Strasbourg, with flying time taking an hour.
Anyway, we found the wholly delightful Le Grand Hotel really comfortable with an excellent breakfast area. Yet if we had tried to book in at any other time of the year, it would have been close to impossible because of the Eurocrats in residence. The whole European Union as it is presently
constituted, fills me with horror because of all its bureacracy and as for the European Parliament, it strikes me as one of the most useless and irrelevant nstitutions ever devised, although great for
members and their expenses! As you can guess, I'm a fan of neither!
But as for Strasbourg itself, we went as high as we could up the cathedral, fuelled by a rather boozy lunch, which helped our climbing abilities, and saw the marvellous spread of the city, the River Rhine
and then just across the river, Germany. We also marvelled at the great horological clock.
In the vast square close to the cathedral is a fantastic restaurant, the Kammerzell, where we had had a spectacular vinous lunch. The building was constructed in 1427 and today, you can both dine and
stay there. The area around the cathedral is most interesting, with so many of the medieval buildings preserved, but other parts of the city are much less interesting and look very hick, like a dull provincial city, Kilkenny, Ireland, in the 1950s. However, it is easy enough to get round Strasbourg using the relatively new tramway system.
In terms of eating out, we also had a very pleasant meal at the station restaurant and had a great chat with one of the waitresses, who was full of bonhomie and fun, great for practising our French. How often could you say those kind of things about a railway restaurant in Ireland or Britain? Also
in Strasbourg, we went on a boat trip exploring the Petite France district of city, with its waterways -but watch out for mosquitoes!
Alsace is such an interesting part of France but we only had time to see a few other places. We went to the wine town of Riquewhir, one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, only to find it absolutely jam packed with tourists. But its a very attractive medieval town, including its ancient Main Street. I've always had a soft spot for Alsatian wine, not so much the Reisling, but most certainly the Gewurztraminer. Gewurz comes from the German for spices and in a good quality
wine, you can taste both the spicy flavours and a certain sweetness.
Our best trip outside Strasbourg was to Mulhouse, a dull industrial city with two incredible museums. The national automobile museum, founded by the Schlumpf textile industry family, has literally hundreds of vintage and veteran cars in pristine condition. I've no great interest in old cars, but this museum was really wow! I was really hooked! Then we discovered an even more astonishing museum that was much more to my taste, the Cité du Train railway museum, the largest such museum in the world.
The old locos and the old carriages were so thrilling to see and the museum really brought back the best days of the old Wagon-Lits service, when you could travel by across Europe and beyond in
magnificent style and enjoy the most magnificent meals and scenery.
As we travelled around Alsace, storks, one of the region's symbols, were very much in evidence, perched on the chimney tops. We also enjoyed getting to know the work of Hansi (1873-1951) one of Alsace's great artists who loved to draw and paint many traditional scenes in Alsace, including the
ubiquitous storks.
Alsace has very much a German as well as a French heritage and over the years, the region has changed hands on various occasions between the two countries. We travelled across the Rhine by rail
into the German spa resort of Baden-Baden, on the edge of the Black Forest. It's a delightful town, very clean and well presented, with the Kurhaus at the centre of its spa business and a host of other delights such as the Fabergé Museum. This is very much a part of Europe where countries and
cultures merge. We also visited Basle, the Swiss city on the Rhine where Switzerland, France and
Germany meet.
I can't recommend Alsace highly enough, one of the most distinctive parts of France, with strong traditions of its own in food and wine, but with its own very strong cultural tradition.
Back to more usual quarrels. I was rather astonished by the outburst of the novelist Hilary Mantel about the poor, put-upon Duchess of Cambridge. While Mantel's speech might have been plain speaking at its plainest, she treated the Duchess almost as an automaton, rather than as a real, living person with feelings and thoughts of her own. No doubt the row will rumble on in the red tops for days if not weeks to come, with both sides of the argument making the most ridiculous statements.
I was also interested to hear the other day of ongoing progress in Birmingham, with the new Library of Birmingham and the new theatre for the 100 year old Repertory Theatre both nearing completion. Add to these Symphony Hall, opened in 1991, and Birmingham is soon going to get an amazing variety of cultural institutions in the heart of its city centre. Incidentally, it was in Birmingham where as a young teenager I got my introduction to Irish culture and customs, in the Irish Centre, and I've never lost my fascination with Ireland in the decades since. It was pure concidence that I got to know
some of the people in the Irish Centre and it opened up a whole new world for me. If I had depended solely on the curricula reading at school, I would hardly have known that Ireland even existed, it was like a country that just didn't figure in the English imagination. It still doesn't, to a large extent. Irish
people like to know everything that's going on cross-channel, but an awful lot of English people live in blissful ignorance of what's happening in Ireland.
As for Ireland, in three years time, the country is due to commemorate the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which led to two-thirds of the island of Ireland being granted partial independence, all of which has now been handed to the EU. I reckon we could have a quite spectacular 'rising' before all this happens, when the hated property tax comes into being in Ireland and people have to start paying this new tax early next year. It's a very unfair tax, because its based on the value of people's houses. Naturally, this means that people in Dublin are going to be paying the top rates, even on very modest homes, while owners of palatial mansions in the country are going to be paying next to nothing. There might be plenty of fireworks long before 2016 comes around!