Uniqlo shirt
Zara jeans (similar)
Chanel flats
Chanel handbag
RayBan sunglasses
Celine necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Chanel earrings
Location: Rue des Orfèvres – Strasbourg, France
Strasbourg, May 30, 2023
Dear friends,
Bonjour from Strasbourg. We took the train here just this morning, arriving in Alsace around lunch time.
We took our first train trip within France, to Lille to see a musical, in 2011. When we moved to Paris eighteen months later, we took advantage of discounted train fares whenever we could manage it. The summer of fifteen euro roundtrip excursions to places we’d never have chosen otherwise was a glorious one. I still remember it vividly, especially our day in Dijon. Train trips in France are a wonderfully effortless experience when compared to air travel (which is virtually the only available option in Canada.) It’s enough to show up two minutes before departure with your bags and climb aboard.
And so, every time we’re in Paris, we take a little trip. In recent years, we’ve been to Bordeaux and Marseille, but there were dozens of destinations before those two. We’ve loved every one simply because getting to them was so easy, but an adventure at the same time.
It’s important that I acknowledge that part of what makes these trips so easy is that, in general, we travel outside of high season. The trains run year around, but there are a lot less travellers in mid-October and early March than at the end of May. This is our first time taking a holiday at a peak travel time. And in the year of “Euro summer,” no less. Everything, I discovered quickly, is less simple when you’re trying to do it at the same time as everyone else.
For a while, it looked as though our little holiday within a holiday might not happen at all. Another part of what makes these adventures so simple is that we most often stay in the true city centre, near the main train stations, Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. We’ve fallen in love with the sixteenth arrondissement this year, but there is no train station here anymore, and even metro service starts relatively late in the day. Taking a train trip becomes rather more complicated when you aren’t sure you’ll be able to make it to the station for that magic two minutes ahead of departure.
And then, of course, there were the prices. There’s no reason to dwell on this subject for long, we all know that inflation is rampant and the cost of everything is up, way up; that includes the cost of train tickets. I wanted to go back to the south this year – there are dozens of places that I visited too briefly as a teenager in this region that I want to see again, Avignon, Aix and Nimes notable among them. But between the departure times and the wild cost, I discovered quickly that my beloved southern France would be out of reach this year.
Where did that leave? That was the question. And the answer is a long list of places, very few of which are reachable by TGV, or train grande vitesse. It’s the high-speed train network in France that really enables us to take these trips. And that network is only so extensive.
So we searched. And we searched some more. It likely won’t surprise anyone to know that Ian and I don’t always see eye-to-eye on destinations. After all, he wants to eat good food, while I love stylish, elegant destinations with lots of history. In many cities, there is overlap between those two things – but there isn’t an intersection between the two in every city in the world. Strasbourg has always ranked high on Ian’s list, while barely making it into the ranks on mine for that exact reason. It’s a food destination. And while, like everywhere, it has history, that history does not feature in any of the books I loved so much growing up.
Strasbourg is, and always has been, a contested place. It’s belonged to Germany just as often, and for just as long, as it’s been part of France. And while it’s been French since 1945, it still feels, to me, when we step off the train, like we’ve arrived in Germany. Or, at the very least, like we’re left the country we departed from this morning. Paris, I remind myself, is not France, and France is not Paris. Nowhere is that more apparent than here. There is still so much of my adopted home that I don’t really know. The walk to our hotel reinforces that for me.
On our way to lunch, I stop at a stall selling used books and pick up a thin volume about the romantic age of Alsace. Mostly because it looks lovely. But also, I think, because it might give me some insight into this strange city, which is, perhaps, neither French nor German, but simply Alsatian. It’s own place, with an identity that is tied to both countries but belongs, uniquely, to it. There is, of course, only one way to find out. It’s time to go exploring.
