à Strasbourg pour un jour....

Our driver was Nat., a French/German woman who was the sister of a former colleague and whom I had met only the night before, and her friend Thomas was riding shotgun. My friend A. got the corner and I got to ride in the middle between her and Mark. Thomas, tall and thin, looked strangely American with his white sneakers, knew his way around a US map and asked lots of questions. Mark, jovial and boisterous, had a bit of surfer dude, a bit of hobbit to him, spoke in dialect and went barefoot in town. He had spent a semester studying in South Africa, where everything was in English, and said he can speak English more easily than high German. Ai yi yi.

A. and I had received an offer to go to Strasbourg for the day and, having nothing better to do and wanting to enjoy the weather we went. After determining whether or not a café frappé came with ice cream or cubes we sipped our drinks, sauntered on over to the cathedral, and divested quite a bit of time in finding a particular store selling 200 kinds of beer (did you know they make banana beer in Belgium? Say that three times fast: banana beer in Belgium. Banana beer in Belgium. Banana beer in Belgium). We walked along the bank, we ate ice cream, we went shopping. A. and I split off on our own, got lost in a soap store, and managed to find our way back to a jewellery store we had visited last October where the eifrig proprietor babbled on in mixed French and German (j’ai une très petite tête, isch habe ein kleines Kopf). He gave us a map and complicated directions to some particular cafés and squares, culminating in a secret message scribbled on a corner of a piece of paper for the owner of said café for unknown purposes.

On the search for a particular kind of yoghurt, whose exact description Mark had on a piece of paper from his roommate, complete with packing diagrams and visuals, we picked up wine and cookies, and on our way back to the car were offered to try some of the delicious treats featured in French patisseries which are not seen on the German side of Alsace.

We tried to have a barbeque in the evening, the first of the summer, but it mostly involved smoking ourselves. Still, the German barbeque/campfire experience lacks a certain staple: the s’mores , of course! So, next time I will initiate my German friends in the wonderful gooy goodness that are s’mores.

Sunday was a lecture on ,,The End of Capitalism as we know it”, an interestingly constructed speech with a couple of logical faults, I think (he equated the oil business with capitalism, as a direct manifestation of capitalism, as if there would be no need for oil if we were all communists or something; he also, in my opinion, confused capitalism as an economic system, as a political system, and as a philosophy). And the ice cream afterwards made it all better, and the hiking that followed was the best. Unfortunately someone had forgotten to tell our host for the evening’s dinner that I am vegetarian, so instead of lasagne I ate noodles with carrot-tomato sauce……..

…and now it is Monday, and I work, except for the part where the semester starts today and I go back to the university.