Sorry readers, you were probably starting to think I'd forgotten you. It's like this - I went to import the pictures from our weekend into Picasa and noticed it can look for faces. It's not perfect but it's very cool. So I then spent the next three days identifying all four thousand unrecognised faces. Call it being severely sidetracked. Then we had visitors (our first ones yet!) and then another adventurous weekend. So this is all about the week of the 17th to about the 23rd. I'll post again very soon about the weekend just gone.
Strasbourg
I was pretty shattered after my fortnight back in the UK - going from a zero commute time to two hours each way kind of wiped me out; so I didn't feel like doing much at the weekend. We decided to drive to Strasbourg. How cool is that by the way? That we can just think "let's go to Strasbourg for the day"? So off we set, about elevenish I think and one hour and twenty-three minutes later we were parking in the Sainte Marguerite car park (just outside of Petite France, near the modern art museum, and a very short walk to Petite France. Also very reasonably priced.)
Into Petite France and it's lovely - incredibly old buildings, little streets, picture postcard lovely. [I know I keep using that term in my posts, and it's becoming a bit overused. Any suggestions for alternative phrases would be welcome!]
First stop was lunch. I was extremely peckish by now and was prepared to commit various crimes in order to get my hands on a croque monsieur. Claire had a quiche lorainne. Both were exceedingly nice - the pastry on the quiche was paper thin - and washed down with a Kronenbourg.
Fortified, we took off towards the cathedral which, as is usually the case, was beautiful. Hard to get a decent picture of it because Strasbourg is so densely constructed but it's open to the public and has many information placard things telling you all about this and that. The most impressive part is the astronomical clock which is massive and a work of art and not only shows you the position of all the heavenly bodies and the current time but also seems to be able to work out when religious holidays are (which to me is most impressive!)
We bimbled around a bit more, tried some wine and chocolate tasting, which is apparently the "new way to taste wine" and I have to say the Gewurzstraminner went ever so well with the 80% javanese cocoa chocolate. We didn't buy any.
We checked out some of the shops. Now neither Claire nor myself are what you'd call "shoppers", but we are in the market for a new camera. Claire's is old and getting knackered now whilst mine is just plain bulky. So we're kind of half-heartedly looking into what to get next. I fancy a Panasonic Lumix but there seems to be thirty-five different models which makes it really hard to do price comparisons.
Bizarrely, Claire decided to strike up a conversation with a frenchman by shoving her camera under his nose whilst he was looking it it's newest incarnation (cannon powershot) and saying "I've got one of those!"
I say bizarrely because Claire actually speaks less French than I speak German, so we then had a twenty minute conversation about, naturellement, the english and french football teams and digital cameras. Very odd, but it felt good to actually be able to a) understand and b) make myself understood in french considering how long it's been since I spoke it at any length. I could almost feel my brain's language centre changing shape.
We then spent half an hour or so trying to work out where the heck the car was, and headed home. Because we can pop back any time we like!!!
Kelim for dinner. I notice their website's currently "down for maintenance". I hope that means they're gonna get rid of the music on their homepage! I had kushbasha, marinaded chunks of lamb on flatbread with vegetables and Claire had the same meat but on a bed of vegetables. Lamb was perfect for me but Claire would I think have liked it to be cooked for a little bit longer. It can't have been too bad though, because we both ate every scrap of food on our plates.
Rhineschwimmen und Grill
I have finally plucked up the courage to swim in the Rhine! OK, it was a blazing hot day and a drifted about 50 metres before getting out, but I've done it now and I know what to expect from the current and the next time we get some decent weather I'll be doing the whole thing!
We attended a little BBQ / chilling / swimming party beside the Rhine on Sunday. And I got wet. I didn't want to, I really didn't want to, but it was so hot and I had been told by several people not to be such a pussy, so I did it. We met about a thousand people, whose names of course I cannot recall, but it was a very nice few hours. I think I may have had one Ueli beer too many as cycling home was a little tricky but on the whole, a very excellent weekend.
Visitors from home
Claire's very good friends Lawrence and Nigel drove down to visit us, which was very nice. We had a thoroughly enjoyable couple of days, even if it was unbearably hot and humid - a storm was brewing. We could tell.
We ate out both nights - first at Papa Joe's [also plays music at you! Must be a Swiss thing!], which is right on Barfusserplatz. Kind of tex / mex / american cuisine. Excellent service I must say, and decent food to boot.
The following night we just kind of wandered until we were hungry and stopped at the first place which did food, which was a Swiss restaurant very close to the english bookshop and called... no, can't remember. It's another one I'll have to get back to you about. I had calf's liver and rosti, which was delicious, and Claire tried a local dish which we thought was going to be a nice crispy rosti with bacon and raclette but actually turned out to be the whole thing is kind of fried up together; basically a kind of sloppy potato omelette is the best was to describe it. Unfortunately, Claire hates sloppy food and she couldn't eat very much of it so once I'd finished mine [yes I did offer it to her but she doesn't like rosti or liver] I swapped plates with her and tried my best to eat some of hers. It was actually very nice but very rich and I was already stuffed. So the waiter gave me some grief when he collected the plates. [See? I'm a gent.]
We had intended to go for a nightcap at Chill am Rhy, the open air bar, but just as we were heading that way the storm which had been threatening all week finally broke so we dashed for one indoors in Mr Pickwicks before heading home.
