Thursday, September 23, 2010

Field Trip #2: Bliesbruck and Reinheim


For our Metz culture class with the ever comical Madame Serafin last week we visited the European Archaeological Park in between the French town of Bliesbruck and the German town of Reinheim. The Gallo-Roman town (constructed between the first and fourth century AD) is located on the French side while the Roman Villa (thought to belong to a Celtic Princess whose tomb is located near the villa remains) is located on the German side of the border. As you can imagine, this leads to some interesting contrasts in how the digging is gone about.

Regardless though, it was a very interesting day. We took a guided tour of the Gallo-Roman town with a very excited archeologist. She pointed out stoves, potters' wheels, trash receptacles (the Romans knew how to live!), streets and public squares and at the end of the tour we got to visit one of the most impressive examples of roman ingenuity, the public bath house. After the French-side visit we walked the quick jaunt across the border to see the built-up remains of the villa, the tomb, and to walk a bit through the cute German village of Reinheim. Admittedly though, we were more intrigued by a flock of sheep.

Since blogger is being a pain in the a** and not allowing me to upload photos at the moment, a facebook album will have to suffice. You can click HERE to view the photos; you'll just have to click through the Robert Schuman pictures first.

We are off for the weekend to Germany! Somehow we managed to get a bed in large sleeping tents during Oktoberfest in Germany so we will hopefully be spending our weekend with large mugs of beer and pig knuckles.

À Bientôt!

2 comments:

  1. Maria-Isabel CarnacialiSeptember 23, 2010 at 11:22 AM

    Erick and I ran into this place totally by chance one weekend. It was quite nice. Glad you got to see it.

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  2. We did have a great visit, this class that Mme Serafin has planned has been very eye-opening! I'm only sorry I couldn't do the subject justice; I recently used up my photo quota through google and was struggling to get the post out by the time we left for Oktoberfest.

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