Route de vin

Château Haut-Kœnigsbourg

Beautiful Alsatian countryside

Finally, after two weeks of orientation classes, we started our ACTUAL classes today!  Before I get to that, though, I have to talk about the weekend, because it was pretty busy.  On Saturday, Jill and I took full advantage of the Jours de Patrimoine, basically national pride weekend, when almost all museums across France are open free to the public, by visiting the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame.  The cathedral is absolutely gorgeous, and resembles its namesake in Paris in more ways than one.  I put this as a caption for one of the photos on Facebook, but I'll repeat it here: say what you will about the Catholic Church, but we sure know how to make beautiful churches.  There was lots of stained glass, which I love (I could look at stained glass all day!), and there was an enormous timepiece to one side of the altar that was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.  As usual, there were the usual souvenir stands inside the cathedral that reminded me that nothing is safe from commercialization these days, but, aside from that, I really loved the cathedral.   Then we walked to La Petite France, the most beautiful part of the city (and thus, the most touristy and most photographed part).  The buildings there are very historic, and every corner you turn presents a handful of new photo ops.  We walked around for awhile more, went back to my neighborhood to stop at the grocery store, and were heading back downtown to go out to dinner when we ran into our friend Bettina.  She invited us over to her house to cook dinner, and so we ran back to the grocery store to get supplies and arrived at her house an hour later.  And by house, I mean her room in a student residence.  It was a lot of fun, though, and nice to do something different, because it feels like we're constantly going out to eat on the weekends!

We had to get up EARLY (7) on Sunday for our route de vin day trip.  There were some very groggy twenty-somethings on that bus (although I don't think the Spaniards had slept at all the night before and were still going on the bus- I'm seriously starting to doubt that they have an off switch!), but with the Spaniards and Italians giving each other language lessons and singing what I can only assume were soccer songs in the back of the bus, it made it pretty impossible to fall asleep.  Luckily, it was a sh

ort drive, and after many twists and turns up a mountain, we arrived at the Château Haut-Kœnigsbourg, an old castle.  I don't think anything

 could have prepared us for the shock of frigid air (in reality, probably somewhere around 40 degrees) that hit us as we left the bus.  It was really beautiful, but not at all equipped for tall people (I hit my head in the first major doorway I went through)!  And the scenery from the highest towers was absolutely picturesque, with a myriad of mountains in the distance and several hamlets in the valley below.  

After a stop for some much-needed hot drinks, we got back on the bus and drove to one of the aforementioned little hamlets, a tiny village 

called Riquewihr.  We were still in Alsace, so we remained in France, but, as with anywhere in Alsace, there was definitely a strong German influence.  We had a picnic and walked around the town for a couple of hours, and were definitely provided with some good photo ops (case in point: the Hansi Museum and the Torture Museum

, as well as "Santa's house").  Then, the group reconvened and went on a tour of a winery, followed by a wine tasting.  It was really fun, but, predictably, the only wine I could even tolerate was the fourth, whose name is escaping me right now.  Let's just say that it was the fruitiest and girliest of the 4 types of wine they gave us, and Jill and Jinah teased me to no end about it.  Afterward, our now red-faced group of 55 staggered back to the bus (some staggering more than others) and drove back home.  We decided to humor Jill and pay another visit to the falafel man, and we were not disappointed by his delicious falafel creations.  Since we started classes today, I think we all crashed pretty soon after we got back from dinner (although I was lucky in that my first class today wasn't until noon, so I could stay up a little later!)

More in my next post about the first day of classes, because this post is getting a little bit long!

Sending you my love,

Kristen

 

Wine tasting!