Welcome to Day 6 of Janet and Randy's European Christmas Market tour 2018
Wednesday, December 19th, 2018
Fell asleep easily last night, but woke up after midnight and couldn't get back to sleep until 4:00am. Arghhhh! Timezones are killing us.
The alarm went off at 7:00am and we got ready and headed down for breakfast. Eggs Benedict was the feature item on the buffet, but the one I had was way over-cooked and very dry. So far, it is the only bad thing I've had to eat on the cruise - everything else has been quite delicious.
Our tour of Strasbourg left at 9:00am. It started out with about an hour bus tour around the more modern part of Strasbourg. I didn't realize that the European Parliament was in Strasbourg, so that was interesting to learn. Then we got off the bus and had a 1 hour walking tour. Due to the European Parliament being in Strasbourg, we went past a number of consulates and some very expensive residences.
For the Strasbourg tour, there were 3 types of tours - the gentle
walking tour, the regular walking tour, and the active walking tour.
The gentle tour was for people that moved a little more slowly.
The active tour didn't do the 1 hour bus tour, and instead dropped
people further out from the centre of town, and had a 2 hour walking
tour instead. As it was rainy and cold, the 2 hour tour did not
appeal to me, so we went with the regular tour.
However, our tour guide was a bit of a dawdler, and we moved at an irritatingly slow pace. We would walk 10 feet, then she would bather on about something for 10 minutes, then we would walk 10 more feet and stop for another 10 minutes. We were moving so slowly that the Gentle walking group passed us, and we never did catch up to them. Some good information being shared on the walking tour, but I have to agree, when it's cold, I want to keep moving.
We finally finished our tour at the spot we were to meet for our ride back to the ship at about 11:00am. (we had some free time after the tour). We had an option of taking a shuttle back to the ship at 12:40pm, 2:40pm, 3:40pm, 4:40pm or 5:40pm. As we wanted to wander around for a bit, we decided to eat lunch in Strasbourg and take the 2:40pm shuttle back. We couldn't stay any longer if we wanted to take the 4:00pm tour to Gengenbach (which we did).
We had been given tickets to go inside the Strasbourg Cathedral and see the Astronomical Clock, but we had about 45 minutes before they allowed people in. So we went wandering around some of the Christmas Markets. We came across the market where the shooting had happened just a couple weeks ago. There was a touching memorial there for the victims. We stood for a moment of silence in honour.
I also stopped into a pharmacy to try to get some drugs for my cold. The pharmacist gave me some lozenges for my cough, and what appeared to be some herbal type medication for my sinuses. The ingredients included grapefruit, so not sure how effective it was actually going to be. Sounded a bit witch-doctor-ish, but thought it should be tried before judgement.
Close to the market we saw an Apple store. As we had been having trouble uploading our journal and photo album from the ship, we had brought our laptop with us. So, we found a bench just outside the Apple store and hopped onto their wifi. We had no problem uploading. So, we might have to do something similar every few days to keep our journal up to date (at least until the end of our cruise). We didn't want to go directly into the Apple store with our Microsoft laptop.
After that, we went back to the cathedral. There was a movie shown
that explains the various details about the astronomical clock. It
was in French (& German), but had English sub-titles.
Unfortunately, the clock itself had scaffolding around it (I assume it
is being restored in some way - which seems to be
the way with anything that we want to see). The presentation was interesting,
but I it was cold in the cathedral and I had to pee, so I left the
cathedral to use some public restrooms nearby. As I couldn't get
back in again, I just wandered around the Christmas Market outside
waiting for James, Judith and Randy to come out when it was finished.
Apparently I missed the clock making some crowing and cuckoo (& crowing) noises.
Oh well. The clock was developed to identify
our orbit around the sun (elliptical) and the moon and other planets.
Pretty amazing considering it was built in 1350 something.
It was cold and rainy when everyone came out of the cathedral, so we went to a nearby restaurant called Le Gruber for lunch. This place was recommended by our cruise director and served typical Alsatian food. Randy had a vol-au-vent chicken, and I had a chicken in Riesling dish. Both dishes came with spatzle. The food was very good, but it was very filling, and we only got through about half of our meal. I think we were lured into a false sense off size when the couple next to us completely finished off their meals and we had basically ordered the same dishes.
When we came out of the restaurant, the sun had finally broken through, so we were glad we had decided to stay in Strasbourg a little longer. So, we wandered around some more until it was time to catch our shuttle at 2:40pm.
It was a bit of a hike to get from the meeting point to where the bus was parked, so we didn't actually get back to the ship until 3:15pm. We had time to just chill for a little bit until it was time for us to go on our tour to Gengenbach at 4:00pm.
Gengenbach has the world's largest advent calendar. Every day they unveil a new 'present'. This year the theme was Andy Warhol. We arrived in Gengenbach around 4:45pm. It is a cute little village. We had time to wander around and drink some (pretty high-test) gluwein before the festivities began at 6:00pm.
At
6:00pm there was a little performance by some local kids, then they
revealed the artwork for Day 20. As it was all in German, we
weren't quite sure what all was going on, but it was cute.
The kids did sing "oh Tannenbaum" which was
adorable ! Right after the performance, we met up with our
guide, who walked us back to the bus.
We had another great meal in the dining room (tonight, there was rack of lamb on the menu. the most tender lamb I've ever had, so delish, I had a second helping), and watched a bit of the live entertainment they had brought onboard. It was a one-man band - where he sang and played, but he also had backup recordings of him playing other instruments. He was pretty good, but we were tired, so we just headed off to bed.
The ship departed Strasbourg at 11:00pm. We heard that people were enjoying the entertainment and wanted him to keep playing, but he realized that it was almost 11:00pm, and had to scramble to get off the ship before it left Strasbourg.
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