Strasbourg Marché de Nöel

Michael is finally taking his final final of the semester (phew!) and boy are we excited for the coming month of relaxation and a visit from his parents. While he is off racking his brain for 3 months worth of Wave Propagation knowledge that he stores somewhere in his brain, I thought I would take a few minutes to highlight a few of our favorite times in Strasbourg the weekend before last.





By the time we arrived and settled into our hostel on Friday afternoon it was already starting to get dark and since the market didn't actually open until Saturday morning, we just spent our time wandering the city by night. The Strasbourg Cathedral was completed in the 1400's and was the tallest building in the world at that time.

Once the sun came up Saturday morning and we were able to see the amazing Germanic architecture, we both immediately fell in love. For the longest time I thought this kind of architecture only existed nowadays in the Christmas village of Disney World, to see the original buildings, dating back to the 15th century, was incredible. We would build a house just like the orange one in the picture above if it wouldn't look to ridiculous back in the states.

This little cone of roasted chestnuts certainly put me in the Christmas mood although they were roasted in a drum roaster rather than over an open fire. Oh well...*sigh*. They were still delicious and much easier to peel than the ones we had to boil for our Thanksgiving sausage and chestnut sausage.

I'm mostly showcasing more of the beautiful German architecture in this picture but I also wanted to point out the buildings built right up against the water. This is a very common thing in Europe but I am still quite uneasy about it, I have a hard time restraining day-mares of them collapsing into the water.

As you can gather from the picture, Michael's hot, spiced wine was too hot to handle, so he walked around for quite awhile with only one glove on. For lunch, we both enjoyed some warm spiced wine (he had red, I had white) and a tarte flambée. Tarte flambée is a traditional alsacian food (we were in the Alsace region) consisting of a round, flattened piece of bread dough (similar to pizza) with crème fraîche (similar to sour cream), lardons (cubes of bacon), and cheese. For portability reasons, ours was made on a baguette rather than the bread dough.

Above is a daytime view of the interior of the Strasbourg Cathedral.

With Michael's finals completed, we will be getting to work decorating our Christmas tree, working on some homemade goodies, and finally furnishing our "apartment"; stay tuned for updates.