Lodging Aside:
We found this hotel via Booking.com which had a better selection than Expedia in Northern Europe and included Youth Hostels which is a blessing if your free youth hostel app was worth every penny you paid for it. If you use Booking.com, you'll want to note that it is different from Expedia in that you only give your credit card to hold the room, but you pay during checkout. So, you won't want to question the staff too thoroughly like I did when the clerk wanted to charge our credit card in person. Luckily, my daughter had charmed the desk clerk by saying "hello", "thank you", and "goodbye" in German, French, and English every time she saw him, and the clerk had charmed my daughter by telling her her accent was perfect in all three languages. (I can't confirm that anything other than her English is quite good.) In any event, if you pay your bill at the end of your stay without giving the clerk a "you're trying to swindle me" look, you'll leave a better impression than I did.
If you can trace your heritage back to the Alsace Region and you are confused as to whether this makes you French or German, take heart. The region seems to suffer from a similar confusion which is evident in streets named "Rue Kuhn" or "Quai Jacques Sturm". I know this is rich coming from a person with a French first name and a German last name, but I just didn't expect to meet so many people with the exact same problem. A nice side-effect is that the region doesn't take language or culture with a seriousness that can make other regions seem closed or inaccessible.
Language Aside:
I might have mentioned this before, but if foreign languages scare you, we suggest you visit an area which borders another language or is a crossroads for many cultures such as Vienna, Slovenia, and Croatia. In these areas, English appears to be the lingua franca...which is both ironic and advantageous. In Alsace, it was nothing to hear Italian, French, German and English within a block or two, but the sound you'll notice the most is the bells tolling for 15 minute intervals.
As beautiful and distracting as this sounds, the scenery in cities like Strasbourg is more compelling, especially after dark. Below are a few pictures as proof.
My husband ventured out after all of us went to bed, and was rewarded by finding the Strasbourg Cathedral light show with accompanying live music. So drunk on beauty was he, that he didn't find his way back to the hotel easily, but the proximity to the train station helped....even if his propensity to turn a map to suit his direction did not.
We stayed in Strasbourg for one night, but this was far from enough. We stayed in Colmar for two nights and--as far as I'm concerned--this was far too much. My husband won't agree with this (at all!) which is why I probably won't let him proof read this post before I publish it.
Now, you're probably thinking that all the guide books say Colmar is prettier than Strasbourg, and they do. You may also be thinking that Auguste Bartholdi is from Colmar and his/the French Government's gift of The Statue of Liberty is pretty great, and it is. However, I prefer Strasbourg, and I say this with full knowledge that I may be blinded with anger at a Colmar resident who ran onto the sidewalk and launched French insults at my family and myself for sitting at an outdoor table when we ordered our food "to go". My husband said he knew there was one price for take away and another price for eating at the tables, but he didn't mention it and I swear I didn't know. Also, in our defense, we were planning to take the food away, but the cook/cashier/yeller took so long to make it on the other side of the window that we sat down to wait, then decided the chairs were comfortable enough to stay once the food arrived. So, it was with a good deal of surprise that I saw the dirty bib-wearing cook/cashier run around the corner and launch an avalanche of angry French at me for ripping him off.
Now, I see how it should take more than one angry Frenchman to ruin an entire city, but I'm just not that forgiving, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. In fact, I have a theory that the reason many Americans describe the French as unfriendly is because we tend to visit Paris, and Parisians tend to be rude. In fact, they're especially rude to people who speak English, although one can understand this if you're trying to force them to speak English too.
In any event, the irony of experiencing the worst foreign relations episode of our trip in the city where the Statue of Liberty creator lived is not lost on me.....and it makes one wonder what went wrong with French/US relations on a larger scale. Now, I'm not a foreign policy expert, but that's never stopped me from speculating on this. Apart from high points like French Navy backing us up in the Revolutionary War and the US aiding the French in two world wars, Americans and French display a remarkable tendency to turn our noses at each other and drift apart.
When the average American thinks of the British, they feel a sibling level of closeness. The kind of relationship where you jump into a fight if you see the other one take a hit whether or not you agree with why they're fighting. When the average American thinks of the French, they feel a distant cousin feeling--the kind of cousin that out-dresses you at weddings and won't let you cut through their yard on the way to school. (Yes, I'm referencing the French unwillingness to let us fly through their airspace when we attacked Libya after the Pan Am flight 103 bombing. I will let this go before I die, but I'm still annoyed, and it's only been 24 years.)
It also annoys Americans that although the French government denies paying ransoms, somehow their citizens are freed from folks who generally require full payment. In the mind of an American, if you can't develop an effective SEAL-type military force, don't let your citizens out of the country.
But, this is the French government and most people don't like their own government much less someone else's, so there has to be another reason for the visceral dislike between the French and the Americans. You can say it's because the French government never backs us up and that feels more true than it is since the French sent troops to Afghanistan and they did do us a "solid" by taking a major role in removing Quadaffi.
You hear people say that the French are rude, but only 19% of Americans have their passports. So, unless we're basing this on the French people who make it to the States, we're trusting a small minority of Americans to decide how we feel about the largest country in Europe. At the risk of sounding like a traitor, in our two months of traveling, more Americans were rude to us than French (imagine Paris Hilton wanna-bes and Wall Street tycoons) and we actually found ten reasons to like the French:
1) They will never give you a compliment you don't deserve. On a related note, if you really want to know if you look fat in that dress, now is the time to find out.
2) If you at least try to speak French, they're some of the nicest people you'll meet in mainland Europe. The toll takers, the cashiers (well, most cashiers), and the people on the street are extremely grateful if you just put in the smallest amount of effort into speaking their language.
3) They're highly principled. They buy French cars (mostly Renault) and French tires (Michelin), and they will stand in line at the grocery store or at a toll plaza to save the job of the cashier instead of running through the self-checkout or credit card only lanes. As an Economics major, I find this ridiculous, but as a human being, I find it admirable.
4) If the Gendarme/police are running radar on the road, you'll know about it ahead of time when the oncoming traffic flashes their lights at you. This is a 100% certainty.
5) After 9/11, the Le Monde newspaper headline read, “We Are All Americans".
6) The French have the best roads and signs in the world.
7) Even the gas station food is fresh.
8) They sell Cherry Coke and ice. It seems few other places do.
9) There are more American flags in Normandie on the average day than in DC on the Fourth of July.
10) There are more streets, buildings and hospitals named after Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy than in the average US land area of a similar size (another unscientific study on our part).
If you're still not convinced that you want to bury the hatchet with the French and you want to go out of your way to annoy them, let's agree not to walk up to a Paris kiosk and demand to pay in dollars while yelling in English that you want a cup of coffee (we actually saw someone do this once). Aside from giving the French more reasons to feel superior, it's unimaginative. If you really want to tick off a French person, you should consider one the following:
1) Pass them from the right lane. This makes them nuts!
2) Tell the Pharmacist that you want to buy one type of toothpaste for you and your children. They have toothpaste formulated for every age group and tooth sensitivity and they will be horrified to know you don't and you don't care.
3) Let your kids go outside without scarves on in temperatures colder than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Better yet, let them play in the sea. My French friend nearly needed a sedative when we let our son jump into the waters off the coast of Nova Scotia in mid-April a few years back. She invoked the Saints and warnings of pneumonia while yelling at me for laughing. In her defense though, the boy did get sick enough to moan all the way down the East Coast. In fact, just the other day he said, "Mom, remember that trip to Canada when I got leukemia from jumping into the cold water?" Yes, he was so sick that he remembers it as leukemia. So, in this limited case, the French may be right.
4) Butter your bread. The French don't do this, ever, and they'll be watching your table to see if you do because if you're trying to annoy them by not talking, this is one of the only ways they can determine if you're an English speaker.
5) Drink Coca Cola with your meal instead of water. In fact, drink a Coca Cola with your dessert too. To the French, Coke is dessert. So, they would never eat dessert with dinner and dessert with dessert. Watching someone else do this may blow their mind.
6) Send back your vegetables and tell the waiter they weren't fresh. Better yet, tell the waiter that you prefer food which is genetically altered. I have no idea what the response will be, but I believe the staff will need oxygen, and/or inhalers.
7) Tell a French person you agree with the death penalty, you own a gun, and you taught your children to use it when they were in diapers.
8) Give a grocery teller exactly €20 for a bill which costs €10.05. (This actually works for every country we visited except Austria.) We don't believe there is an actual change shortage in Europe, but they act like there is, and asking for €9.95 cents in change will be greeted as an act of war.....especially if you jingle the change in your pocket.
9) Switch lanes across a solid white line. The French will never do this, and they won't appreciate you doing this either. In fact, the French won't even turn left over a solid dividing line to enter a driveway on the opposite side of the street. So, street parking like the below in DC would be out of reach for the average French driver. In fact, if you parked a French car in a spot like this, I'm pretty sure the owner could never get it out.
10) Do what my husband did and bring the French a gift of cheese in a can. Before you ask, there is no French translation for "cheese in a can", but we saw three generations of French people poke the contents with a fork while discussing its likely properties.
Just so you know, the rest of my family loved Colmar even though the second day was spent in an unairconditioned hotel room sorting and repacking our luggage so we would only need to remove one bag from the car for our last night in Bern, Switzerland. Well, Brian and I were packing, the girl made friends with the front desk clerk in the hotel and, when not bothering her, she spent the day reading a book on the grass below our balcony. The boy walked around the hotel too, but he was high on visions of the Lamborghini he met the night before and he couldn't stop commenting on how Colmar was the best city in Europe because of it. So, if you work for a European tourist bureau, you are wasting your time and money with friendly staff and exciting attractions. If you really want the 11 year old American boy vote for best place to visit, you need only park a Lamborghini on a prominant street and let him take his picture beside it.
Author of: Letters to Salthill
