I have returned from my weekend in Strasbourg and been greeted by...exactly what I expected...rain and other dreariness. Paris, you are beautiful on a sunny, windy day. But the other 83% of the time, I'd rather watch you from inside a toasty salon du thé with a book, a pastry, and a good cup o' Mariage Frères Marco Polo.
Strasbourg, on the other hand, offered the most beautiful 2 days of spring I've seen since....Florida in January. The French always perk up a bit when I say I'm from Florida. They know Miami. They see pictures in their heads of sandy beaches and sun :P oh if Tallahassee were on the beach.
Anywho, so Andrea (the other EDUCO student going) and I took the TGV from Gare de l'Est Friday afternoon, only a 2 hour ride from Paris to Strasbourg. Very comfy train, cool view on the way there...I actually go to see a bit of what we're learning(or trying to learn) in my archaeology class...saw the little towns all centered around a church (looked it up, this is called "un plan d'enveloppement" the roads kind of make circles around the center of town, and all the houses are grouped closely together centered around the church, which is the highest point architecturally). It completely bores me in class, but is interesting to see.
So when we arrived, the husband from the family she stayed with picked us him (his name was...Jean-something...its always Jean-Luc or Jean-Louis or Jean-Jacques or Jean-anything-you-feel-like-adding). We drove to the house I was staying at and all had dinner together. Jean-whats-his-name told us repeatedly how Alsacian everything we were seeing and tasting was. The wine, which is made unlike other wines in France, but more like wines in the US, is only made from one type of grape. We had a couple very fruity white wines, tasted like apples. He insisted on a different wine with each type of "tarte flambée" that came out of the oven. This also is tradition Alsacian cuisine...a cross between a flour tortilla and a thing pizza crust for the bottom, some type of thick cream sauce, with onions, mushrooms, (ham, bacon), and sometimes cheese, all baked. Very yummy. I was pleased to find that, unlike parisians, these families eat very messily, more than we would in the states. Everything was hands-on, crumbs all over the table, and then we left everything on the table for hours after the meal. We also had a delicious onion/egg tart, salad, and fruit salad. Dinner went till like 10:30, no surprise, and then we went to bed.
The family I stayed with consisted of Brigitte Blum, the mom, Laurent Blum, the dad, and their four children, two of whom are off in Africa (cairo and burkina faso), and the other two, Alphonse, 18, who is about to take his BACs to go to commerce school and apparently is a trouble-maker, and Mila, 8, who makes me want to be that young again so badly! She has all sorts of dreams and interests - she loves learning about other religions, she acts and does a bit of flamenco, she "meditates," she asks all sorts of questions and wants to learn about history and every other subject...and then she watches the simpsons before going to bed, haha. Needless to say, she taught me a good bit of French (and made it clear to me how much I still have to learn) and in exchange I taught her a tiny bit of english (how to say "8 years old," etc.). Oh, and how can I forget, their cute slobbery bulldog Calame.
Saturday: Woke up bright and early, the former being good, the latter not so much. Mila was sure to come knock on my door towake me up. We ate a little petit dej of chinois(think cinn bun and a coffee cake mushed together) and pain au chocolat, tea and bananas. Tea was really the theme of the weekend. Then Brigitte, Mila and I went and took a tour of the island. The centre of Strasbourg is encircled by a river all the way around, and then they have three trams that cross all through the center. We walked all through La Petite France(which apparently used to be a mental hospital for women), and into town. At one point we stopped at a tea shop where Brigitte knows the owner. We sat and had a cup of tea (or more like multiple tiny dishes of tea, she did the whole tea ritual (i dont know if you'd call it a ritual, and I dont know if its chinese or what the origin is, but first she rinsed the leaves, then rinsed our dishes, pouring the water over the head of the frog sitting on the drain-like part of the table. then she poured tea into little flute-like cups, put a small dish on each, then flipped them.). Brigitte was telling me that there are only three places in France that sell fresh tea, rather than the dry stuff we're used to. I wish I could remember the name of the tea we had, but she let us smell three of the different fresh teas, and they smelled amazing and all very different.
So after hearing about the owner's love life problems (she has many guys who work nearby chasing after her, but doesnt seem interested in any of them, lol Brigitte was very insistant when one of them walked in and talked forever, that she had gotten a very bad vibe from him, haha.) we left and kept walking. Eventually the two of them stopped at a library to rest (which apparently was on strike, surprise surprise, so they could only read magazines) and I walked around for another hour, and paying homage to dear Strasbourg, I had a mini-kougelhopf. Not anything spectacular, but a necessary experience I suppose. Pretty though~
After that we met up with Laurent who had been out of town with his sick sister :( We were going to have Fish and Chips (they were insistant upon this) but the place had closed, so they had Donër and I had a vegetarian plate with couscous and eggplant and such. yum. EDUCO had told them I was a vegetarian, so they were always very cautious (it was cute) to find meat-free options. 
After lunch we rested at home, had tea(yep, thats three times today) and chocolate, then Brigitte took me over to the border where we crossed the big boat-like bridge into Germany.I can't even begin to say how beautiful of a day it was. Sunny, breezy, warm and cool, everything was green, trees everywhere, and in Germany there were a bunch of little residential neighborhoods we walked through, so cute. Brigitte kept saying that she and Mila always pick which houses they want to live in so they can move and she can put Mila in a german school. I would do the same if I were her. I dont remember the name of the town we were in, but she insisted we stop and get ice cream, which was delish. I had karamel and vanille. Havent had ice cream in a cone in forever. What with that and Mila and riding the carousel and all the kids running around, I felt like I was young again...not that I'm about to pull out my walking cane or anything. But, oh yes, forgot about that, Mila had us ride the carousel or "chevaux en bois" (wooden horses) twice~
Sooo after Germany(i feel like i earned some cool points, being able to say i've been there and all, haha), we rested and had dinner. Dinner was the only time I ever saw Alphonse, but his parents werent happy since apparently he was out till around 5AM the night before :-\ He seems like a nice enough kid though. Anyways, they made pasta for dinner with eggplant and tomato sauce, mmm, and grated beets w/balsamic and apples, yum, and they put out a plate of sardines, lol, which I tried for the first time since Dad and I used to eat them when I was little. I always looked forward to that, weirdly enough. I dont have much of a taste for them anymore :P too salty. And then salad, and cheese, and bread, and wine, the works.
After dinner Mila and I watched the Simpsons in French~
Sunday: They are in the "Communauté du Chemin Neuf," the "New Way" community, an ecumenical group (Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, etc) that meets once a month. We met for this month's service at a lutheran church in one of the cités (an area with a lot of housing constructed for the poorer communities). The pastor preached a sermon that infuriated Brigitte. She immediately got up and went outside afterwards to vent...it was interesting to hear how strongly she felt. The sermon was on a parable of these chickens and an eagle that is raised with the chickens and a voyager who comes and tells the eagle that it needs to fly free. And the moral is supposed to be that we need to look up to the sky, up to God and fly freely. But the way the pastor preached it was very much in a victorious, above everyone else sort of flight. Everything about the service actually used a vocabulary full of power-obsessed, almost warlike words - victory, power, destroying, etc, all which have their place in relation to Christ and in the service, but it was all nuanced in a more degrating, hierarchical sort of way. And then Brigitte kept bringing up the relation of the eagle with the Third Reich. And I did agree with her, it was not the type of sermon I want to hear every Sunday morning nor one with which I agreed. But I was just happy to have understood it of course, being that it was my first French church service :-)
Anywho, so we sang a lot (literally before and after anything we did) and had a potluck lunch, and watched a movie about witnessing in the cité, and then we talked for like 20 minutes with someone we didnt know - easy for me :P - and fortunately the person i found was from england, so we had a nice convo. Then we had tea at home on the patio, and then it was train time. All in all a nice weekend, numerous long silences due to the slight(more than slight) language barrier. My french gets worse when I'm around real french people, lol, and my accent becomes atrocious, but it just shows me that I need to work on my vocabulary a LOT. I want to like tape words all over my wall like in preschool with the matching pictures.
I think this post might be long enough now. maybe. Still room for one last picture, this one's a test to see if anyone made it to the bottom, haha, actually, its for katie if she still reads this, an awesome sign I saw:
woot. Three Chevaliers! One for you, one for me, maybe we can auction off the third one and make enough $ to pay for two lovely southern homes and some pretty Scarlett-style dresses~
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