A bit more about Strasbourg:
The city is pretty, perhaps a bit too pretty. It looks like a movie set for a film filled with rosy-cheeked chubby boys and their fathers with big mustaches and noses happily reddened by kitsch or schnapps or something and mothers yodeling while they cook over an open fire.
I'm assuming that everyone in this town loves sausage, but this is merely speculation and is a completely untested theory, sort of like evolution.
Perhaps I could come to love this place with time. It certainly has its charm, and maybe I could live a quiet life here and eat warm, hearty bread every morning and ski in the winter and drink thick red wines and write and read and always have a fire in my fireplace.
It is hard to tell, really, because in my continuing state as a cripple, all of my thoughts are colored by the excruciating pain I feel with every step that I take, and so the beauty of the earthy-brown cathedral and the smell of freshly baked bread and the 700-year old buildings are all less interesting and amazing to me than they would normally be.
I have noticed, however, that the attitude of this place is much different from that of the rest of France. This is the Alsace, after all, a region that is historically closely tied to Germany (sometimes more honorably than others) and one feels this cultural difference very strongly. There is a certain Germanic sense of order here, of organization and cleanliness and quiet that one does not feel in Paris.
The climate here is quite different as well--snow and frost and chilly rain seem to be always present and yesterday's small amount of blue sky was heralded as a "beautiful day, a lucky day."
This may be my last post from abroad, as I catch the train to Paris tomorrow morning at 6:16 am and will be traveling nonstop until I reach home. Thank you for reading while I've been away, and keep on checking for more news upon my arrival in NYC.
Bike through window frames
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