We’ve tried to end up each of our travel blogs with a summary of impressions we gained from the trip. We look for insights that transcend one or two days’ activity, developed during our total immersion in the area or only realized after we got home. Our trip to France was different from many of our others, in that we stayed put for most of the time rather than moving along every few days, so we did get a chance to soak up quite a bit of insight along the way.
As always when we visit a place where we’ve been before, there will be a lot of compare and contrast. Add to this the fact that we’ve been around a good bit longer, had lots of other experiences along the way, and easily could find ourselves tuning in on different aspects of things than we had on earlier visits to the same area.
If history is any predictor, we will be getting back to this post a few times to incorporate new thoughts that just occurred to us. These will be just mixed in with the existing impressions and not otherwise highlighted, but we will try to keep up a brief list here of the topics that we’ve added. Check in from time to time and see what might be new.
Although we’ve titled the blog Alsace Trip, there really were four distinct phases, of which Alsace was indeed the central focus. We’ll take them one at a time, and then discuss more general stuff
Ireland
We hadn’t seen this as any sort of a focus in our trip; it was simply where the cheapest airline flight stopped on the way. We had never been there before, nor had we ever flown on Aer Lingus, their national airline. There is the ethical question which asks whether one can claim to have really set foot in a country if said foot has not touched dirt, but we’ll go with the more relaxed criterion that if that country could have arrested you for some sort of offense, then you have indeed been there. Not that we offended anybody. So we claim to have been there, and we’d like to get back.
We weren’t that far away from Ireland during our three years in England, 1980-83. But our travel focus then was on the beautiful local area where we lived, a few trips up into the north and to Scotland where Bruce had family history, and over to continental Europe for a wide ranging set of trips built around Bruce’s annual Army Reserve tour in Germany. The Army provided the nucleus of two weeks in either Berlin or Munich (‘Good duty’ we call these places!), and we built lots of good stuff around it. This was also the time of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and that probably influenced our travel plans as well.
The views of Ireland from the plane were very pretty. The locally grown food in the airport restaurants was delicious. Our wee sip of Irish whiskey would be well worth repeating. We’re sure we’ll be back, and we will truly set foot in the place.
Paris
Certainly a bucket list destination for everybody. We had been there quite a few times before, both individually and together. It’s always worth a visit. So much life, so much history, so much beauty. Our evening walk along the Seine was a special treat. Here’s Bruce’s impression. We’re not sure whether he clicked the shutter button at the wrong time or attempted a handheld shot when the lighting really demanded a tripod. Or whether the red car interrupted something already underway. But it ended up being art of the highest quality! There’s a lot of vibrancy there.
We got to know the Métro pretty well on this trip. The more modern parts of it are equipped with elevators and escalators, but the older ones use only stairs. And those are the stations we used on most of the trips that involved suitcases. Enough said about that.
We were quite surprised at the number of roving security people we encountered in train and Métro stations, and at major tourist locations. Some were just dressed in casual blue uniforms and armed with nightsticks, while others were in full combat gear with automatic weapons. We didn’t want to risk provoking any of the latter by taking their pictures. They appeared to have been well trained, as all were practicing good trigger finger and muzzle position discipline.
We were very happy with the two English language guided tours we took in Paris, sponsored by pariswalks.com out of London. They were both run by British expats who appeared to have lived for quite some time in France and had a very good understanding of the place. The company proudly notes on its website that all its guides are university graduates. It also offers tours in lots of other cities throughout Europe, and in a few other places in the world as well. Prices seem to be pretty constant at €12. Thanks to Aimée for putting us onto them. Check them out!
Our AirBnB apartment near Place de la Bastille was quite ample for the two of us, but it would have been a squeeze for the originally anticipated five in our party. And the four flights of stairs with suitcases were a challenge. Noted, all this was pretty well disclosed in the AirBnB description. The location was quite pleasant and convenient, especially when the big market was underway in the boulevard. Though it was troubling when we learned that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, scene of a terrorist attack just three months after our visit, was located only a few blocks away.
Alsace
We were there for two weeks, and it certainly was the focus of our trip. We had both passed through the area briefly, many years back (1960s and 70s), but our impressions then were pretty much limited to appreciating the scenery and not really absorbing much of the history or culture. This time we were able to get pretty deep into many aspects of the place.
Bruce’s European background is primarily with Germany from his Army time and from continued involvement through his career-long civilian job, while Sue Anne’s is with France, going back to her student days. Though there’s been plenty of cross-pollination on both our parts. So we were fascinated by this place that was without a doubt legally in France but had so many features that clearly traced to Germany.
We learned that the area had swapped back and forth between the two countries four times, the results of all sorts of wars and invasions, some even involving the Swedes. Town names, family names, other names—all were pretty much in actual German or a slightly Frenchified version of German. Those were the strangest. They grated on our linguistic senses as speakers of both languages. The two languages were given pretty much equal billing in interpretive signs throughout the area, and we got the impression that most of the people were bilingual—French and German—with very little English in signs or spoken. Analysis of license plates showed quite a lot of German and Swiss tourist traffic throughout the area, especially over the October 3rd weekend of the German Unification holiday.
One exception to the lack of English was plaques gratefully commemorating the World War II liberation of towns by the US Army. All of these featured English, often identifying the Army units involved and displaying their unit crests.
Here’s a good example of the language dichotomy—a bottle and a glass from the same brewery, same logo, same words. But the name of the brewery is in German on the bottle and in French on the glass. The beer tasted good in both languages.
Houses were painted in bright colors, tracing back to the trade or religion of the original occupants, in contrast to the fundamentally dull, beige, exterior appearance of houses and towns that we knew from our previous experiences in the rest of France. Though we learned long ago not to dismiss the beauty of a French home till you’ve seen it with the gate to the courtyard open. It’s often a whole other world in there from what you see out on the street!
Railroad gauges in Alsace were different. Religious history was different. We even read that many laws are still different, though we didn’t penetrate any understanding of this aspect of things.
The countryside was gorgeous. Both sides of the Rhine are mirror images of each other. There’s a wide plain on each side, and then a quick rise into mountains. It’s the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) on the German side, and Les Vosges in France. Stand most anywhere in the plain and you can take in the entire sweep of things. Les Vosges were of modest height, far from Alpine but very lovely. It was rainy the day we drove up in there and we didn’t get too many pictures. But our photographer friend Carolyn who was coincidentally in the area at the same time hopes to get a lot of hers up on her website once she gets past a few technical problems with it. We’re sure that it will be well worth a visit.
And let’s talk about the overflowing abundance of flowers in Alsace. They were everywhere in window boxes and along village streets in waist high boxes on railings. Villages and cities compete for awards or ratings—we are not sure which. But the signs told the tale: Our village was Un Village Fleuri ****. four stars, so to speak.
The roads were busy not only with tour buses, but also with tractors and farm equipment signaling the end of the harvest in the vineyards. Roadside booths overflowed with bags of nuts, pumpkins, apples, and honey.
We very much enjoyed our two days in Strasbourg. Its island location makes for marvelous views. We reached a point on our boat tour when we simply had to stop taking pictures lest we run out of bits. We learned a lot from its city museum.
A day trip across the Rhine to Freiburg, Germany led us to an area not that different from what we had come to know in Alsace. And as we noted in the blog, the entire German influence had disappeared by the time we got to the first town after crossing the département (state) line from Alsace into La Franche-Compte on our way to Dijon.
Here’s a pair of trivia questions regarding the Alsatian composer Émile Waldteufel, mentioned earlier in the blog. They might only be suitable for readers dating to our era. Check out these two pieces of his music on YouTube, Estudiantina and España, and see if you can identify the unlikely places where these two tunes were reused during our lifetime. The answers appear at the bottom of this post.
Dijon
A special place to both of us. Sue Anne spent her UNH junior year there, her first time immersed in a foreign culture and her first time out by herself as an independent young adult. Bruce was then in the Army, stationed in Frankfurt a mere five hour drive away. It was also his first time in a foreign culture (though with a fallback to the local American military community), and also his first time out by himself as an independent young adult. With the added responsibilities of being an officer in the US Army. Those are special times that make for lifelong memories! We were able to get together on a number of occasions. We became engaged on Bruce’s first visit to Dijon, shortly after Sue Anne had arrived. We’ve gotten back there a few times since, but this trip really produced the greatest opportunity for compare and contrast of any of our visits.
We were very impressed by the splendid job that Dijon had done in creating such a pedestrian friendly area downtown. A four or five block stretch that used to be horribly clogged with cars and featured very narrow sidewalks is now totally dedicated to pedestrians. The execution of the project was very nicely done; it wasn’t just a simple matter of putting up a few signs and barriers and leaving everything else untouched. There was new paving everywhere, all very harmonious with the buildings and the open areas at the Place de la Libération. The Place with its restaurants, shops, and fountains attracted a lot of action. And the new streetcar system was very well integrated into the new traffic patterns.
France in General
Opening hours of smaller stores were pretty much what we have been long accustomed to: closed for a long lunch, closed after 5, closed on Sundays. We tended to go to the hypermarket (a rather small one, but still relatively hyper by neighborhood standards) in Ribeauvillé at times that would have been risky at the other places. And even the hypermarket turned out to be closed on Sunday. The Lavandière restaurant in Bergheim didn’t open up for meals till 6, and even at that it was only Tarte Flambée till 7. But you could drink all afternoon.
France has long had a reputation for being highly protective of the sanctity of their language. As new concepts arose, particularly those of a technological nature originating in the US, the Académie Française would stomp down on any attempt to integrate them into French usage and would quickly manufacture a mandatory French language equivalent. Many of these took up lots more words than the original English versions. English is so very adaptable!
Franglais, mixing of the two languages, was a linguistic sin of the first order. No more! We already documented the Undiz lingerie store in Strasbourg. Here’s a picture of an ad we saw in Paris; note the Nouveau Slim Can product description over at the left side.
We had been informally accumulating impressions of this phenomenon throughout the trip, but on our last day Sue Anne made a concerted effort to record lots of them. She quickly filled two pages at the back of her sketchbook with Franglais and other examples of desecration of La Langue. Here they are!
Untours
We wrote briefly about Untours earlier in the blog. This was our first experience with them, and we were very satisfied. They make all the fundamental arrangements (or as many as you haven’t already worked out yourself), they maintain and enforce their standards for the various accommodations that they deal with, they provide a welcome lunch and orientation to the area and a free emergency cell phone, and then they leave you alone unless you need to call on them for assistance. The people at the home office in Pennsylvania were very, very responsive in rearranging things when Aimée, Steve, and Nate had to cancel out, and the two staffers we dealt with in France were both American expats with a great command of the area. Highly recommended!
Here’s one fascinating piece of information that we learned from the very informative part of the Untours orientation meeting that dealt with medical situations. French pharmacies are like little medical clinics in their own right. They don’t just dispense pills; they diagnose minor conditions and prescribe the treatment and/or medication. And during mushroom picking season, you can bring in your harvest and they will sort out the poisonous ones from the tasty ones. Our Maryland friends will probably remember Dart Drug (R.I.P.), with its weekly specials on car parts, lawn and garden accessories, small electronics, and the like. French pharmacies ain’t Dart Drug, and Dart Drug ain’t a French pharmacy!
One downer about French pharmacies—they are customarily marked with a green cross for easy identification, and they have gone utterly wild with animated green LEDs on their signs. These are a horrible affront to the genteel ambiance of a typical French village. We’re hoping that a protest movement will emerge and stomp them out.
Money
We were concerned after our experience in Paris of not being able to get money from an ATM because we had a striped card rather than a chipped one. This led us to an old-fashioned change shop, which exacted a pretty hefty commission. Fortunately this turned out to be a one-time problem. We were able to use a striped credit card or ATM/debit card pretty easily throughout the rest of the trip. Only occasionally would one not work, but the other one then rescued us so we were never stranded. Bring two or more cards if you have them, just in case.
Ambiance
People were friendly, drivers generally courteous, dog poop rarely in evidence (a major change from the past). All very nice. And no cigarette smoke, except in a few outdoor locations. Phew! The Loi du 1 Février 2007 (Défense de Fumer - No Smoking) is now right up there in the Hall of Fame with the famous Loi du 29 Juillet 1881 which is cited on all the Défense d’Afficher (Post No Bills) signs around the country. That latter date is even said to be celebrated by some as a minor holiday. Any excuse for a party!
France finally caved in to the standard of the rest of the world and posted yield signs at every entrance to the roundabouts. They did the same at most every intersection between a minor road and a major one, immensely softening the rigid priority from the right concept that they had so strongly clung to for years. Only occasionally, in very small towns, would there be a Priorité à Droite sign at the edge of town to remind us that things hadn’t changed there. It is hard to imagine what the scene must have been at the roundabouts for the first month or two after they got rid of the horrid concept of right of way to those entering the roundabout, but it seems to have worked out fine. We never saw anybody challenging it.
Computer Stuff
WiFi at the apartments in Paris and Alsace worked fine, as did the free service at the airports in Dublin and Paris. Free service at the airport hotel in Paris was deeply throttled, but still quite sufficient for normal email and web work. One caution, which we learned in Europe last year and encountered again at the hotel in Dijon, involves an Internet service where the clerk at the hotel desk presses a button on a little machine, which then spits out an ID and password for you on a slip of paper. That worked fine, but those credentials can only be used by one device. After that, you would have to try to negotiate for a second account if you wanted to use something else. So, if you do have multiple devices with you such as a tablet and a laptop, it would be wise to consider one to be primary, and set that one up first. Just in case.
Our little Pandigital wand scanner worked fine at transferring Sue Anne’s drawings from her sketchbook to our laptop, using either a USB cable or a micro-SD card and a USB adapter. It did tend to create gray backgrounds, but it was easy to clear these out using our standard, free, image processing program IrfanView. It’s a regular part of our arsenal at home and on the road, useful for color adjustments and for editing out stuff like edge effects (especially sketchbook binder rings), cropping out the vacant space that comes from scanning something narrower than the scanner, getting rid of inadvertent smudges, and the like.
The scanner comes with a cradle that also includes a motorized sheet feeder, but we didn’t need that so we left it at home to save space and weight. We commandeered one of Bruce’s socks as its traveling case, to ensure that nothing would accidentally mar the scanning surface.
Upon reading the detailed information in the users manual, we discovered that there is a calibration procedure that should be invoked from time to time to adjust the scanner’s color rendition. We didn’t want to tamper with things during the trip, but we did run the procedure when we got home and it helped a lot. There is still a hint of gray in the background that’s easily removable in IrfanView, and the colors are now much closer to true without the need for very much tweaking at all.
Electricity is 240 volt 50 Hz everywhere, though with an occasional 120 volt outlet in the bathrooms. I wouldn’t recommend trying it with a US hair dryer, as those outlets have a reputation of being set up only for electric shavers and similar devices of very low current demand. Bring adapters, and be sure to verify that your devices are specified up through 240 volts. Most computer stuff is, but read the label to be certain. The French recently converted to 3-prong grounded outlets, but most existing 2-prong plugs or adapters still fit fine.
Art
Sue Anne filled her sketchbook with a wide array of images from throughout the trip. All of them have appeared here in the daily blog posts, and they will make a reappearance in her monthly art blog www.colorfuljourney.us over the next few months, with possibly a different slant in some of the commentary from the orientation we had here in this travel blog.
She was very happy with her little portable watercolor set that she learned about from an artist friend here at home. Thanks, Gretchen. It was great. Here are a few more details for anybody who would like to pursue this. It is called the Koi Water Colors Pocket Field Sketch Box. It is perfectly designed for on-location sketches in a sketch book. No easel, no palette, no need for a third hand. And my new water brush worked great too. It has a reservoir of water in the handle, so there’s no need to have a water cup with you. So handy and fun. You can see descriptions of a few different models of the paint box at Amazon, and I’m sure they’re also available at art supply places like Jerry’s, Dick Blick, and Utrecht. Amazon also lists lots of the water brushes.
We’ve already mentioned our satisfaction with the wand scanner. It produced so much nicer images than we could get from photographs of the drawings. It will definitely be part of our kit on future trips.
We had originally expected that we might have to rescan everything on our flatbed scanner when we got home, but now we’ve decided that most of those from the wand are great the way they are. Its minimum resolution is greater that what we normally use on the scanner at home, and our editing program did a fine job clearing up the gray backgrounds and tweaking the colors.
As always when we visit a place where we’ve been before, there will be a lot of compare and contrast. Add to this the fact that we’ve been around a good bit longer, had lots of other experiences along the way, and easily could find ourselves tuning in on different aspects of things than we had on earlier visits to the same area.
If history is any predictor, we will be getting back to this post a few times to incorporate new thoughts that just occurred to us. These will be just mixed in with the existing impressions and not otherwise highlighted, but we will try to keep up a brief list here of the topics that we’ve added. Check in from time to time and see what might be new.
Plaques commemorating WW II liberation · French Pharmacies · Waldteufel
Although we’ve titled the blog Alsace Trip, there really were four distinct phases, of which Alsace was indeed the central focus. We’ll take them one at a time, and then discuss more general stuff
Ireland
We hadn’t seen this as any sort of a focus in our trip; it was simply where the cheapest airline flight stopped on the way. We had never been there before, nor had we ever flown on Aer Lingus, their national airline. There is the ethical question which asks whether one can claim to have really set foot in a country if said foot has not touched dirt, but we’ll go with the more relaxed criterion that if that country could have arrested you for some sort of offense, then you have indeed been there. Not that we offended anybody. So we claim to have been there, and we’d like to get back.
We weren’t that far away from Ireland during our three years in England, 1980-83. But our travel focus then was on the beautiful local area where we lived, a few trips up into the north and to Scotland where Bruce had family history, and over to continental Europe for a wide ranging set of trips built around Bruce’s annual Army Reserve tour in Germany. The Army provided the nucleus of two weeks in either Berlin or Munich (‘Good duty’ we call these places!), and we built lots of good stuff around it. This was also the time of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and that probably influenced our travel plans as well.
The views of Ireland from the plane were very pretty. The locally grown food in the airport restaurants was delicious. Our wee sip of Irish whiskey would be well worth repeating. We’re sure we’ll be back, and we will truly set foot in the place.
Paris
Certainly a bucket list destination for everybody. We had been there quite a few times before, both individually and together. It’s always worth a visit. So much life, so much history, so much beauty. Our evening walk along the Seine was a special treat. Here’s Bruce’s impression. We’re not sure whether he clicked the shutter button at the wrong time or attempted a handheld shot when the lighting really demanded a tripod. Or whether the red car interrupted something already underway. But it ended up being art of the highest quality! There’s a lot of vibrancy there.
We got to know the Métro pretty well on this trip. The more modern parts of it are equipped with elevators and escalators, but the older ones use only stairs. And those are the stations we used on most of the trips that involved suitcases. Enough said about that.
We were quite surprised at the number of roving security people we encountered in train and Métro stations, and at major tourist locations. Some were just dressed in casual blue uniforms and armed with nightsticks, while others were in full combat gear with automatic weapons. We didn’t want to risk provoking any of the latter by taking their pictures. They appeared to have been well trained, as all were practicing good trigger finger and muzzle position discipline.
We were very happy with the two English language guided tours we took in Paris, sponsored by pariswalks.com out of London. They were both run by British expats who appeared to have lived for quite some time in France and had a very good understanding of the place. The company proudly notes on its website that all its guides are university graduates. It also offers tours in lots of other cities throughout Europe, and in a few other places in the world as well. Prices seem to be pretty constant at €12. Thanks to Aimée for putting us onto them. Check them out!
Our AirBnB apartment near Place de la Bastille was quite ample for the two of us, but it would have been a squeeze for the originally anticipated five in our party. And the four flights of stairs with suitcases were a challenge. Noted, all this was pretty well disclosed in the AirBnB description. The location was quite pleasant and convenient, especially when the big market was underway in the boulevard. Though it was troubling when we learned that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, scene of a terrorist attack just three months after our visit, was located only a few blocks away.
Alsace
We were there for two weeks, and it certainly was the focus of our trip. We had both passed through the area briefly, many years back (1960s and 70s), but our impressions then were pretty much limited to appreciating the scenery and not really absorbing much of the history or culture. This time we were able to get pretty deep into many aspects of the place.
Bruce’s European background is primarily with Germany from his Army time and from continued involvement through his career-long civilian job, while Sue Anne’s is with France, going back to her student days. Though there’s been plenty of cross-pollination on both our parts. So we were fascinated by this place that was without a doubt legally in France but had so many features that clearly traced to Germany.
We learned that the area had swapped back and forth between the two countries four times, the results of all sorts of wars and invasions, some even involving the Swedes. Town names, family names, other names—all were pretty much in actual German or a slightly Frenchified version of German. Those were the strangest. They grated on our linguistic senses as speakers of both languages. The two languages were given pretty much equal billing in interpretive signs throughout the area, and we got the impression that most of the people were bilingual—French and German—with very little English in signs or spoken. Analysis of license plates showed quite a lot of German and Swiss tourist traffic throughout the area, especially over the October 3rd weekend of the German Unification holiday.
One exception to the lack of English was plaques gratefully commemorating the World War II liberation of towns by the US Army. All of these featured English, often identifying the Army units involved and displaying their unit crests.
Here’s a good example of the language dichotomy—a bottle and a glass from the same brewery, same logo, same words. But the name of the brewery is in German on the bottle and in French on the glass. The beer tasted good in both languages.
Houses were painted in bright colors, tracing back to the trade or religion of the original occupants, in contrast to the fundamentally dull, beige, exterior appearance of houses and towns that we knew from our previous experiences in the rest of France. Though we learned long ago not to dismiss the beauty of a French home till you’ve seen it with the gate to the courtyard open. It’s often a whole other world in there from what you see out on the street!
Railroad gauges in Alsace were different. Religious history was different. We even read that many laws are still different, though we didn’t penetrate any understanding of this aspect of things.
The countryside was gorgeous. Both sides of the Rhine are mirror images of each other. There’s a wide plain on each side, and then a quick rise into mountains. It’s the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) on the German side, and Les Vosges in France. Stand most anywhere in the plain and you can take in the entire sweep of things. Les Vosges were of modest height, far from Alpine but very lovely. It was rainy the day we drove up in there and we didn’t get too many pictures. But our photographer friend Carolyn who was coincidentally in the area at the same time hopes to get a lot of hers up on her website once she gets past a few technical problems with it. We’re sure that it will be well worth a visit.
And let’s talk about the overflowing abundance of flowers in Alsace. They were everywhere in window boxes and along village streets in waist high boxes on railings. Villages and cities compete for awards or ratings—we are not sure which. But the signs told the tale: Our village was Un Village Fleuri ****. four stars, so to speak.
The roads were busy not only with tour buses, but also with tractors and farm equipment signaling the end of the harvest in the vineyards. Roadside booths overflowed with bags of nuts, pumpkins, apples, and honey.
We very much enjoyed our two days in Strasbourg. Its island location makes for marvelous views. We reached a point on our boat tour when we simply had to stop taking pictures lest we run out of bits. We learned a lot from its city museum.
A day trip across the Rhine to Freiburg, Germany led us to an area not that different from what we had come to know in Alsace. And as we noted in the blog, the entire German influence had disappeared by the time we got to the first town after crossing the département (state) line from Alsace into La Franche-Compte on our way to Dijon.
Here’s a pair of trivia questions regarding the Alsatian composer Émile Waldteufel, mentioned earlier in the blog. They might only be suitable for readers dating to our era. Check out these two pieces of his music on YouTube, Estudiantina and España, and see if you can identify the unlikely places where these two tunes were reused during our lifetime. The answers appear at the bottom of this post.
Dijon
A special place to both of us. Sue Anne spent her UNH junior year there, her first time immersed in a foreign culture and her first time out by herself as an independent young adult. Bruce was then in the Army, stationed in Frankfurt a mere five hour drive away. It was also his first time in a foreign culture (though with a fallback to the local American military community), and also his first time out by himself as an independent young adult. With the added responsibilities of being an officer in the US Army. Those are special times that make for lifelong memories! We were able to get together on a number of occasions. We became engaged on Bruce’s first visit to Dijon, shortly after Sue Anne had arrived. We’ve gotten back there a few times since, but this trip really produced the greatest opportunity for compare and contrast of any of our visits.
We were very impressed by the splendid job that Dijon had done in creating such a pedestrian friendly area downtown. A four or five block stretch that used to be horribly clogged with cars and featured very narrow sidewalks is now totally dedicated to pedestrians. The execution of the project was very nicely done; it wasn’t just a simple matter of putting up a few signs and barriers and leaving everything else untouched. There was new paving everywhere, all very harmonious with the buildings and the open areas at the Place de la Libération. The Place with its restaurants, shops, and fountains attracted a lot of action. And the new streetcar system was very well integrated into the new traffic patterns.
France in General
Opening hours of smaller stores were pretty much what we have been long accustomed to: closed for a long lunch, closed after 5, closed on Sundays. We tended to go to the hypermarket (a rather small one, but still relatively hyper by neighborhood standards) in Ribeauvillé at times that would have been risky at the other places. And even the hypermarket turned out to be closed on Sunday. The Lavandière restaurant in Bergheim didn’t open up for meals till 6, and even at that it was only Tarte Flambée till 7. But you could drink all afternoon.
France has long had a reputation for being highly protective of the sanctity of their language. As new concepts arose, particularly those of a technological nature originating in the US, the Académie Française would stomp down on any attempt to integrate them into French usage and would quickly manufacture a mandatory French language equivalent. Many of these took up lots more words than the original English versions. English is so very adaptable!
Franglais, mixing of the two languages, was a linguistic sin of the first order. No more! We already documented the Undiz lingerie store in Strasbourg. Here’s a picture of an ad we saw in Paris; note the Nouveau Slim Can product description over at the left side.
We had been informally accumulating impressions of this phenomenon throughout the trip, but on our last day Sue Anne made a concerted effort to record lots of them. She quickly filled two pages at the back of her sketchbook with Franglais and other examples of desecration of La Langue. Here they are!
| Franglais and other desecrations |
American |
| Le Sup |
Magazine
supplement |
| Delookeur |
Stylist
for a new ‘look’, hair salon |
| Divia |
Dijon
streetcar system (Actually the Roman word for Dijon, but a great play on words) |
| Toutounet
|
Mutt
mitts, translates to ‘doggie clean’ |
| Sucx |
Name of
candy store |
| Slim Can | Container for Perrier water |
| Duketown Cupcake | Now defunct shop in Dijon |
| Tex A
Way, c’est Mexi Frais |
Tex Mex
place - Frais means fresh |
| Jennyfer |
Fur shop |
| Maxi
livres |
Bookstore |
| Pourcent
Aĝe - 56% off over 56 |
Eyewear
store with discounts by age |
| Body
Slim, Cure Minceur Express, Booster de Caféine |
Diet
supplements |
| Vous
pouvez nous faxer votre ordonnance |
You can
fax us your order |
| Dojo Zen
|
Some sort
of exercise |
| Kit Cake
Pops |
A variety
of candy |
| Moule à
Angel |
Cake |
| Popcorn | Popcorn |
| Quizzine |
SNCF
(national railroad) food quiz online |
| Kidexpo |
Upcoming
big sales event for kids |
| Cyclable |
Bicycle
shop |
| Musculation |
Vitamin
supplement |
| Un pull |
A
pullover, a sweater |
| Undiz |
An
underwear store |
| Hotel
Cheap Beds |
Self
explanatory! |
Untours
We wrote briefly about Untours earlier in the blog. This was our first experience with them, and we were very satisfied. They make all the fundamental arrangements (or as many as you haven’t already worked out yourself), they maintain and enforce their standards for the various accommodations that they deal with, they provide a welcome lunch and orientation to the area and a free emergency cell phone, and then they leave you alone unless you need to call on them for assistance. The people at the home office in Pennsylvania were very, very responsive in rearranging things when Aimée, Steve, and Nate had to cancel out, and the two staffers we dealt with in France were both American expats with a great command of the area. Highly recommended!
Here’s one fascinating piece of information that we learned from the very informative part of the Untours orientation meeting that dealt with medical situations. French pharmacies are like little medical clinics in their own right. They don’t just dispense pills; they diagnose minor conditions and prescribe the treatment and/or medication. And during mushroom picking season, you can bring in your harvest and they will sort out the poisonous ones from the tasty ones. Our Maryland friends will probably remember Dart Drug (R.I.P.), with its weekly specials on car parts, lawn and garden accessories, small electronics, and the like. French pharmacies ain’t Dart Drug, and Dart Drug ain’t a French pharmacy!
One downer about French pharmacies—they are customarily marked with a green cross for easy identification, and they have gone utterly wild with animated green LEDs on their signs. These are a horrible affront to the genteel ambiance of a typical French village. We’re hoping that a protest movement will emerge and stomp them out.
Money
We were concerned after our experience in Paris of not being able to get money from an ATM because we had a striped card rather than a chipped one. This led us to an old-fashioned change shop, which exacted a pretty hefty commission. Fortunately this turned out to be a one-time problem. We were able to use a striped credit card or ATM/debit card pretty easily throughout the rest of the trip. Only occasionally would one not work, but the other one then rescued us so we were never stranded. Bring two or more cards if you have them, just in case.
Ambiance
People were friendly, drivers generally courteous, dog poop rarely in evidence (a major change from the past). All very nice. And no cigarette smoke, except in a few outdoor locations. Phew! The Loi du 1 Février 2007 (Défense de Fumer - No Smoking) is now right up there in the Hall of Fame with the famous Loi du 29 Juillet 1881 which is cited on all the Défense d’Afficher (Post No Bills) signs around the country. That latter date is even said to be celebrated by some as a minor holiday. Any excuse for a party!
France finally caved in to the standard of the rest of the world and posted yield signs at every entrance to the roundabouts. They did the same at most every intersection between a minor road and a major one, immensely softening the rigid priority from the right concept that they had so strongly clung to for years. Only occasionally, in very small towns, would there be a Priorité à Droite sign at the edge of town to remind us that things hadn’t changed there. It is hard to imagine what the scene must have been at the roundabouts for the first month or two after they got rid of the horrid concept of right of way to those entering the roundabout, but it seems to have worked out fine. We never saw anybody challenging it.
Computer Stuff
WiFi at the apartments in Paris and Alsace worked fine, as did the free service at the airports in Dublin and Paris. Free service at the airport hotel in Paris was deeply throttled, but still quite sufficient for normal email and web work. One caution, which we learned in Europe last year and encountered again at the hotel in Dijon, involves an Internet service where the clerk at the hotel desk presses a button on a little machine, which then spits out an ID and password for you on a slip of paper. That worked fine, but those credentials can only be used by one device. After that, you would have to try to negotiate for a second account if you wanted to use something else. So, if you do have multiple devices with you such as a tablet and a laptop, it would be wise to consider one to be primary, and set that one up first. Just in case.
Our little Pandigital wand scanner worked fine at transferring Sue Anne’s drawings from her sketchbook to our laptop, using either a USB cable or a micro-SD card and a USB adapter. It did tend to create gray backgrounds, but it was easy to clear these out using our standard, free, image processing program IrfanView. It’s a regular part of our arsenal at home and on the road, useful for color adjustments and for editing out stuff like edge effects (especially sketchbook binder rings), cropping out the vacant space that comes from scanning something narrower than the scanner, getting rid of inadvertent smudges, and the like.
The scanner comes with a cradle that also includes a motorized sheet feeder, but we didn’t need that so we left it at home to save space and weight. We commandeered one of Bruce’s socks as its traveling case, to ensure that nothing would accidentally mar the scanning surface.
Upon reading the detailed information in the users manual, we discovered that there is a calibration procedure that should be invoked from time to time to adjust the scanner’s color rendition. We didn’t want to tamper with things during the trip, but we did run the procedure when we got home and it helped a lot. There is still a hint of gray in the background that’s easily removable in IrfanView, and the colors are now much closer to true without the need for very much tweaking at all.
Electricity is 240 volt 50 Hz everywhere, though with an occasional 120 volt outlet in the bathrooms. I wouldn’t recommend trying it with a US hair dryer, as those outlets have a reputation of being set up only for electric shavers and similar devices of very low current demand. Bring adapters, and be sure to verify that your devices are specified up through 240 volts. Most computer stuff is, but read the label to be certain. The French recently converted to 3-prong grounded outlets, but most existing 2-prong plugs or adapters still fit fine.
Art
Sue Anne filled her sketchbook with a wide array of images from throughout the trip. All of them have appeared here in the daily blog posts, and they will make a reappearance in her monthly art blog www.colorfuljourney.us over the next few months, with possibly a different slant in some of the commentary from the orientation we had here in this travel blog.
She was very happy with her little portable watercolor set that she learned about from an artist friend here at home. Thanks, Gretchen. It was great. Here are a few more details for anybody who would like to pursue this. It is called the Koi Water Colors Pocket Field Sketch Box. It is perfectly designed for on-location sketches in a sketch book. No easel, no palette, no need for a third hand. And my new water brush worked great too. It has a reservoir of water in the handle, so there’s no need to have a water cup with you. So handy and fun. You can see descriptions of a few different models of the paint box at Amazon, and I’m sure they’re also available at art supply places like Jerry’s, Dick Blick, and Utrecht. Amazon also lists lots of the water brushes.
We’ve already mentioned our satisfaction with the wand scanner. It produced so much nicer images than we could get from photographs of the drawings. It will definitely be part of our kit on future trips.
We had originally expected that we might have to rescan everything on our flatbed scanner when we got home, but now we’ve decided that most of those from the wand are great the way they are. Its minimum resolution is greater that what we normally use on the scanner at home, and our editing program did a fine job clearing up the gray backgrounds and tweaking the colors.
Answers to Trivia Questions
Waldteufel music
- The major theme of Estudiantina was used in an ad jingle for Rheingold Beer.
- Perry Como’s 1953 hit Hot DIggity was sung to the tune of España.
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