Oh hey, it’s evidence that I’ve been negligent.
No, really, this is entirely unexpected; I had zero clue that I have been lacking in the motivation department, and I certainly didn’t realize that we had gone to Strasbourg the weekend before last, not when this past weekend was spent on such amusements as sitting in an emergency department for several hours on Saturday (the positive side of a universe ambivalent to all of our existences: sometimes things turn out well enough), but hey, what can I say?
Oh, right. Strasbourg.
A pleasant two-hour-high-speed-train-ride-in-an-easterly-direction away, Strasbourg originally earned a place on our to-visit list after a visit to canal saint-Martin, in which we interacted with a shopkeeper with a strangely clear, later-to-be-identified-as-Alsatian, accent. True to our expectations, listening and understanding French in Strasbourg is an oddly clear experience, owing to the crisp German influence on the normally compressed French pronunciation. That said, I had no occasion to try out my likely-abominably-decayed German (not that being told in college that I had managed to pick up a farmer-quality accent has made me eager to speak again in the first place), though I did manage to confuse the hell out of myself after zoning out at lunch and wondering why the weather in Italy was so cool at this time of year (in my defense, we were in a pretty authentic pizza place, and Strasbourg is apparently a popular stop for Italian tourists, because there were inordinate numbers of them).
The highlight of the trip was probably our first meal in town; acting otherwise irrationally and following the advice of a schlubby Youtube personality whose other videos on Malta made us laugh (they’re awful, but the guy has a genuine enthusiasm that’s almost infectious), we ate at Maison des Tanneurs and were introduced to the utter magic that is Alsatian choucroute (sauerkraut cooked in Riesling) with magret de canard (featuring a cinnamon sauce, which is, in my mind, desperately fucked-up but was ultimately tasty). Ka being a wheel, we later suffered food-related lowlights such as a different but supposedly-good Alsatian restaurant being inedibly awful and then an almost-complete inability to find anywhere to eat Sunday evening, owing to the fact that eating out on Sunday is impossible without a reservation (though I will admit that this led us to eating at an unexpectedly-good Italian restaurant with decent pizza, a good vegetable soup, and a bottle of the elusive Lambrusco [sparkling red wine]).
Food aside (paragraphs about food aren’t normally what I would consider my oeuvre), there were a large number of now-indistinguishable churches, museums, pigeons, tourists, random crap emblazoned with storks (the stork as a fertility symbol is apparently of Alsatian origin, and they’re judgy fuckers, even in modern times; no roosting on the house of divorcés allowed), and a nice red sandstone cathedral, which I did not climb and thus am unlikely to remember.
Perhaps when I feel less petulant, I will revisit the gallery and add captions. Perhaps not.
Fezzik In Paris 