Visitors from Canada

Last Monday we walked my sister Barb and her husband Pat to the train station to see them off to Paris. They had just spent four days with us in Strasbourg and were heading to Paris for a few days before returning to Canada.

We had a great visit with them, finally doing some of the touristy Strasbourg things that we had saved up for visitors. We toured two churches, including Strasbourg’s famous Cathédrale Notre Dame, where we trudged up the 332 steps to the platform with its amazing view of the city. We were first in line, and we really felt the pressure on the way up until we let a few people go ahead of us – with the narrow circular staircase, there was only room for one at a time.

We went to Kehl, Germany, by train (only 11 minutes), but it was a cold and blustery day, so it wasn’t as enjoyable as it could have been. We left Barb and Pat and the kids in separate department stores and then Mark and I walked further up the street to see if we could find some German wine.

We also took the Ill river tour, and the kids and Mark had fun furtively switching everyone’s pre-recorded audio guide from English to Italian in mid-explanation. After a few months of staring down at the tourists in the boats, it was fun to be the ones that everyone was staring at. We tried waving at a few people but just got some weird looks… except for the “boys” under the bridge near our apartment, who all waved at us from their beds as we glided by their makeshift community.

We took the train south to Barr (the village with the wine festival) and hiked up the mountain again but took a different path on the way down. We had a wonderful view of Barr from a different angle and even spotted a few castles. Barb’s boots had a bit of a heel, so I teased her about hiking in her stilettos – something we had watched another woman do on our first trip up.

During the visit we christened our party grill, or raclette. We had had such a fun supper in Birkenwerder with Horst, Eva and Matthias that we decided to buy our own raclette. When we first heated it up and put oil on the grill, we thought we might have to feed the people from the fire department as well – it made so much smoke. It’s a good thing that the grill creates a lot of heat, because we had to warm the apartment back up after leaving the balcony windows open for so long! After things settled down, we had a very memorable meal with different meats, vegetables, cheeses and of course, wine.

I will remember their visit as the one with bretzels and wine. On more than one occasion we left the apartment late, and bretzels served as lunch. Then there was the wine – all over Strasbourg, people are selling glüwein (vin chaud or mulled wine) from stands in the Christmas markets. Every time we passed the market at the train station (and we were there a lot!), we tried another variety. Every time we went to the grocery store, we bought a few more different kinds of wine to try with supper. It certainly expanded my knowledge of the wines of the area!

So we waved them out of the train station, with their seats backward to the motion of the train (I’ll have to ask Barb how that went for her!) and then went home to relax for half a day before packing for our Italy trip. We haven’t heard from them yet but are optimistically assuming that they didn’t get lost on the Paris metro…

Thanks so much to Barb and Pat for coming all this way just to visit (I'm sure that's what it was!) and for all the treats that you bought us. Now that we're back home to our apartment and email, I've heard from Barb that they got home safely.