Little town, it’s a quiet village...
I spent the weekend in Alsace, which is a prefect in France on the German border (the annexation by Germany of Alsace was a major cause of pretty much every war fought by France and Germany). It’s a gorgeous area, super-remote, in a mountain range that I think is the Alps, and because it has gone back and forth between Germany and France for pretty much all time, the area is very bilingual. Unfortunately, they are ONLY bilingual. Signs, menus, etc. were all written in French and German, almost never English– which was fine, but interesting nonetheless.
Waking up to say...
Ok, enough background. The weekend was ridiculous... It started on Saturday morning, before the crack of dawn, when I had to leave my apartment with my roommate at 6am to catch our train. Yeesh. I fell asleep on the train for a few minutes, but jerked awake when the conductor came through yelling "CAFÉ CHAUDE! GAUFRES! JUS D’ORANGE!" with the breakfast cart. I awoke to see a river below us, a cluster of cows in the river bottoms, and a mountain with leaves still falling out my window... and for a moment I had no idea where I was, it looked just like the view over the river in Beattyville and I thought I was in someone’s car driving around there. I guess small towns are kind of the same everywhere. We got to the city of Strasbourg (pronounced Stroz-Booooo) around 10am, just in time to make it to Centre Ville (the center of town) before it started raining. We found a cute unbelievably girly café with pink walls and a red chandelier and lots of heart-shaped things on the walls that served us onion-lardon pie with chestnut custard cake for dessert, complete with a bag of meringues to take with us. Hitting the streets of Strozboo after lunch, we wandered the misty old town, visiting the cathedral, cute shops, criss-crossing the river, stopping in another café to warm up when it got too cold, and eventually catching a train from Strasbourg to Colmar, where we were planning on spending the night.
I want adventure in the great wide somewhere...
Now is where it gets sticky. We arrive in Colmar (where my roommate had booked us a hostel) at 630pm, but it has already been dark for, oh, probably 2 and a half hours because of the awful weather. So it feels like the middle of the night, the station is pretty much deserted except for one guy at the ticket counter. We asked him for a map of the city, and he gives us one on which we can’t find the street that our hostel is supposed to be on. So we go ask him about Rue Mariafeld, he doesn’t know it, goes into the back to ask someone else, and comes back, looks through the window at us with our soggy hair, shivering in the train station with all our earthly possessions on our shoulders, and says, "Vous etes a pied? Ca ne marche pas du tout!" ("You’re walking? That won’t work at all.") Apparently our hostel is several kilometers outside of town. And it’s already pitch dark. And we are hungry. And it is raining. He tells us we will have to take a cab... but in this one-horse town we decided that was an expensive proposition, so we leave the train station, sit outside on the sidewalk, and deliberate. Since we don’t even have the PHONE NUMBER of our hostel (it wasn’t listed on the website we booked through), we don’t really have many options. But we see a hotel sign in the distance and make our way there. We walk in, bedraggled, hungry, and wet, and ask if they have any rooms for the night (though I think we would have slept in the stable if they told us that was all they had)– "Nous avons une chambre grande lit pour ce soir." ONE King-size room for tonight?! What luck! Quelle chance! How perfect! We’ll take it! How much?
110 Euros.
Wait a minute.
Umm...
Our hostel was supposed to be 18. We can’t afford this price hike. We pick our bags back up and in an effort not to lose potential customers, the concierge blurts (in English) "But I’ll give it to you for 69!" Now, I have never paid this much to stay somewhere... but by the time cab fare each way was added to the hostel price, it would have been nearly this much... and we are splitting it... and we really, at this point, have no other option. "We’ll take it." So he gives us our key, we head up to our room, and when the elevator doors open, I realize we’ve just stepped into a 30 Seconds to Mars video...
What’s in the West Wing...?
Our key has some sort of weird contraption on the end of it, the hallway is deserted, dark, and mauve, and the I can’t help but expect Jared Leto to walk around the corner any minute. The ancient-looking pen-and-ink drawings of the hotel and surrounding buildings in Colmar posted in the hallway don’t help to lighten the atmosphere... but whatever. It’s warm, and dry... for now... and we have a place to stay, so that’s the important thing, right? Jessi and I leave soon after discovering that our bathroom has a bidet (what?? Who are these people??) And find a restaurant of "traditional alsatien cuisine" for dinner. The restaurant we settled on, we would realize the next morning, was in the heart of the canal district of Colmar, also known as "Petite Venise."
Glass of water, crust of bread...
So we sit down at tiny cramped tables in a tiny restaurant with menus in only French and German, and order Vin Chaud as an aperitif... Vin Chaud (hot mulled wine) is what Alsace is known for, apparently, and ours came in huge coffee mugs with star-shaped bits of anise, whole cinnamon sticks, and generous curls of orange peel floating in it. Delicious. We ate flammenkuechen for dinner– some kind of flamed tart thing with shredded onions, fried lardons, and chunks of munster on top of a thin crust, but again we were stuck pointing at the menu, not really sure what we were going to end up with (the French translation of the German word "flammenkuechen" was "tartes flambees"– flaming tarts. Who knows what that is??) We lingered over dinner, as did everyone else in the place, until late in the evening, when we left the restaurant with the intention of wandering Little Venise to see the canals lit up at night and of course all the Christmas decorations. Full of hot wine and armed with a useless map of Colmar, we began to walk... but we quickly discovered that streets in Colmar either don’t have signs up (because most of them are pedestrian streets anyway) or else the signs are still the German ones, and thus completely useless because they don’t match the names on our map. Oh well, we think, it’s a small town, we won’t get lost.
Come on, Philippe, it’s a short cut!
Promptly we end up lost in an Alsacien NEIGHBORHOOD at 10pm, somehow we make it back to the main road of the town (this place is legitimately no bigger than Irvine, Kentucky) and we begin to make our way back to the hotel, since by this time the Christmas lights had already been put out. We passed a building with iron gates, lit only by strange blue lights coming through the dormer windows at the top that strongly resembled Disney’s Haunted Mansion, then learned that, apparently, in the North of France, they don’t use streetlights. Maybe they have higher evolved vision than us city-dwellers, I don’t know. We make it back to the hotel, eventually, cold again, and discover that it is even more deserted (how is that possible?) than when we left it. Falling asleep that night I was sure we were going to be awoken by Jack Nicholson axing through our door with a cry of "Here’s Johnny!" The hotel was nice... just scary. In the morning, Jessi showered in the huge pink bathtub first. I walked in after her to find an inch of water covering the bathroom floor. "Uhh, Jessi?" "Yeah, I know, but I don’t know what to do about it now... It leaked out of a crack in the tiles." So I shower quickly to avoid flooding the WHOLE room, then we throw our towels on the floor– there’s a good idea. Write this down: when dealing with a flooded bathroom, wait to get rid of water till you have a wetvac or something– NOT towels that are just going to get drippy and heavy. So after flooding the bathroom of the Bates Motel, we stored our bags at the front desk and left to wander Colmar. Supercute tiny French town, mostly closed since it was Sunday morning, but we wandered the park and the areas where we had been lost the night before (much less scary in daylight) and eventually made our way to the train station to hop on a quick ride to Ribeauville. Now. Up to this point, I thought we had had an adventure. Random hotel, flooded bathroom, haunted town... how little did I know what was in store for us.
I don’t mean to intrude, but I’ve lost my horse...
We arrived in Ribeauville (pronounced REE-bo-vee-AY) around 130pm Sunday afternoon. We trip merrily off the train, ecstatic about the calm afternoon we are sure awaits us... until we look around, and realize that the train is pulling away, and we are in the middle of nowhere. Now, I have spent extensive amounts of time in Eastern Kentucky. I know what Nowhere looks like, and we were bulls-eye, dead in the center of it. I don’t know what even caused the train to stop– there was not even a platform, just a sign proclaiming "Ribeauville," and we were the only two to get off. We cross the tracks and see a tiny building about the size of a large shed, completely locked, with a map on the window of where we are. Apparently this is the train station of Ribeauville, though I use the term loosely, because I don’t see how it could possibly be useful. Now, usually in a situation like this, we could hop on the next train that comes through and go back to Strasbourg for the afternoon. But there is only one other train coming through today, the one that is supposed to take us home... at 640pm. This we know not from the train station, which is useless, but from the schedule we had taken from the Strasbourg station the day before. Consulting the map, we see that we are 5 kilometers from Ribeauville, and this, apparently, is as close as we can get with public transportation. We hitch our stuff back onto our aching shoulders, and decide to start walking. I mean, really, who knows how long a kilometer is anyway, it couldn’t be more than a couple football fields, right? We’ll be there in no time, and it’s better than spending the day sitting on the gravel of this train station. Now, wait, let’s talk about the view from this train station. To the left, I can see train tracks, all the way to the horizon. To the right, train tracks till they disappear around a corner. Behind me, one abandoned-looking farmhouse that we can’t get to even if we wanted to because there is a large ditch and a small stream between it and us. Straight ahead, a paved road... and the alps. We see from the map that it is a straight shot to Ribeauville, so we should have no problem walking there. Then we notice a tattered taxi flier. Jessi thinks this would be better than walking, so she calls, only to be told that they don’t work on Sundays. Ok. We march. So we begin. We have probably made it... well, I won’t lie. Not very far. Maybe 200 yards from the train station when we hear a car behind us. I don’t know where it came from, since the road pretty much ends at the station. But the car pulls up next to us, a guy about my age leans out the driver’s side window and asks, "Are you going to Ribeauville?" in French. We say yes, and he asks if we want a ride.
There’s something sweet, and almost kind...
I think before I learned to not take candy from strangers, before I learned to look both ways, before I learned to eat solid food, I learned to never hitchhike. But there were extenuating circumstances... Jessi and I were together, we were in the Alps of Northern France, the guy had his girlfriend with him, he drove a Peugeot, we had all our luggage with us, and perhaps most importantly, it was definitely not above freezing outside. We hesitate for a second, and the guy says, "Il est tres loin a Ribeauville..." "It’s very far..." And with that we realize the insanity of the situation. We have no idea where we are or where we are going, the map at the so-called station was all but useless, it’s probably -5 Celsius out here, and the town is 5 kilometers away. Which could be the same as 100 yards or it could be 20 miles. I don’t really know. But this town is about the size of Beattyville, nestled in the mountains just the same as Beattyville, the guy is clean-shaven and free of tattoos... even his girlfriend is smiling at us. So Jessi and I gratefully accept, and hop in the backseat together. This is the first time I have been in a car since arriving in Europe, but I still remembered to buckle up, though the thought occurred to me that if you are doing something as stupid as hitch-hiking, does it really matter if you are buckled up? We climb in, immediately aware that we have made the right decision– his car has obviously been going for awhile and the heat is blasting full-force. The radio is playing some kind of French ballad in the background, and the guy tells us it is about 6 kilometers to the town, much too far to walk on a day like this. "What if it had started raining?" he asks. Our brilliant plan had not covered that possibility.
An old beggar woman came to the door...
"Where are you from?" Here from Paris for the weekend, we tell him. "You are from Paris?" the girlfriend chimes in. "Then WHY are you in Ribeauville?" They are both incredulous at this, and interrupt our halted explanation with, "Oh, and there’s the castle..." pointing up the mountain we are passing. Eventually a Bob Marley song comes on the radio and the guy laments, in French, "Oh, you have to understand English to understand Bob Marley," plunging he and I into a discussion of the merits of being a native English-speaker when it comes to music. We make it to the town– it’s about a ten-minute drive, and he drops us off on the main street, amid our plethora of thanks. We have passed vineyards on mountainsides, and "the castle" which is apparently the only reason people come to Ribeauville on purpose. Clambering out of his car, I realized it must not have been a Peugeot but probably a Fiat judging by the trouble we had clown-carring our way out of it.
There goes the baker with his tray like always...
So we hopped out onto the street that must be a pedestrian street since it is too narrow to hold a car, standing in the middle of the cobbled road, looking at each other astounded at what we had just done until a car came and honked at us for being in the middle of the street. Apparently it was a car street. We got hold of our senses, moved out of the street, and contemplated our plan of action.
Try the gray stuff, it’s delicious...
Knowing that in small European towns, every restaurant closes between 2pm and 6pm, we quickly found a place to get lunch, and Jessi and I ordered the specialties of the house– trout with butter and white wine sauce for me; veal croustade for her. But have I learned nothing from living in Europe for 2 and a half months? My fish came whole. Like, LOOKING AT ME CUT HIM OPEN. I was never that strict of a vegetarian... But I couldn’t handle that. I covered the head with my napkin and did my best not to think about it. (I have found myself, at some point during every outside-Paris voyage, muttering in my head "don’t think about it, you’ll be fine, just don’t think about it, it’s not there.") Apparently I didn’t do a good enough job because when the waiter (who was also the cook) came out to take our plates away, he took one look at mine and asked, "oh, was it not good?" Oh well. At one point during lunch I was convinced I had found a lung because there was some sort of air pocket thing... Jessi gasped, as shocked as me, though slightly less grossed out, until she remembered that, oh, wait, fish don’t have lungs. We left lunch, not quite sure what to do next, the burning unspoken question on both of our minds "HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET BACK TO THE TRAIN STATION?" We wandered the town, which was truly about the size of Tallega, Kentucky, and about half of it was closed because the day before was Armistice Day, and it was Sunday. A café marked each end of the town, "The Black Horse" at the north end and "The White Horse" at the south end. Eventually we ended up in a bar full of locals, more to get warm than anything else, because it was simply too cold to keep walking with our bags.
It’s my favorite part, because, you see...
More vin chaud, and an attempt to figure out our next move. I thought it was too pretty not to walk, but Jessi voted for calling the cab company again. After a lot of questions, explanations, grovelling, and genuflecting, they finally agreed to pick us up (in front of "Le Cheval Noir"– the Black Horse café.) We asked them to come at 615pm, thinking that was plenty of time to make it for a 640pm train.
605pm: Jessi and Blair step onto the street corner, not wanting to miss the cab.
610pm: Blair: "Maybe we could go into that store over there to wait so it’s not so cold...?"
615pm: Blair: "I’m betting it’s not a normal cab. My money is on it being some guy’s own car."
620pm: Blair: "Maybe it’s that car coming from over there?"
Jessi: "That’s a motorscooter."
Blair: "I’d settle for a rickshaw at this point."
625pm: Jessi calls the company back. The cab driver answers, shouts that he’ll be there in a minute, and hangs up.
630pm: a sedan pulls up in front of us. The window rolls down and a middle-aged man leans out and says in German-accented French, "You need a ride to the train station?" I stand there, skeptical of whether we should get in his car (there is no meter, no cab sign, the car is not even yellow), Jessi pushes me in, and we’re off, at about the speed of the newspaper delivery boy in "Rock My World." Which, looking back, was good, because if we had missed the train, we’d have been in huge trouble. The alleged cabbie drives away with our 12 Euros, we step out near the tracks, and begin the wait.
640pm: Blair: "Wouldn’t it be a hilarious end to this weekend if the train was cancelled? Because we would have no idea. We’d just have to start schlepping back to town and hope the Golden Grape [a B&B in town] has room for us."
Jessi: "I wouldn’t say ‘hilarious,’ since it is already pitch dark and freezing out here..."
645pm: Blair: "Good point. I’m shivering. And I think this is the train station from Napoleon Dynamite."
Jessi: "Yeah, maybe. It’s hard to tell in the dark."
650pm: Jessi: "We should have rented a car."
Blair: "Neither of us know how to drive on this continent."
655pm: We see lights in the distance. Blowing on our hands, we contemplate what to do if that is not the train.
Blair: "I have that gingerbread cake we bought in my bag. We could eat that."
Jessi: "Ooh, yeah, and I have a meringue left from yesterday and half a bretzel."
Oh, a stowaway!
At this point we hear a sound, whirl around, and see a figure looming at us from 100 feet down the tracks. I was terrified. Jessi reasoned that it was probably another passenger. At that moment the train came into view for real, saving us from imminent danger.
Kill the Beast!
Our car, though, was closed. What? So we boarded, found the conductor, and he told us nonchalantly and in perfect French, "Oh, yeah, car 5 is closed. You can go sit in 12, it’s first class." First class train home from the weekend of all things insane, ridiculous.
Oh, and then the conductor knocked a day off my rail pass because I didn’t write the date in neatly enough. I hate SNCF.
Ok, that was a really long explanation. If you’ve made it through all of that, I applaud you.
Je t’embrasse,
Blair