Barcelona Part I

Yah, it looks like blogger is back online so I do get to put up some of my Barcelona stuff after all, though I really should be going to bed as I'm going to have to get up at 5:30am tomorrow morning to catch my train. No sprinting through train stations for me this time!

I headed off to Barcelona for the May Day long weekend, along with half of France, so as you can appreciate a long weekend corresponds to a long blog entry. So instead I'm going to break this post up into a few entries, it's just too long for me to write all at once.

The photo to the left is the view over Barcelona from Mount Tibidabo.

I really loved Barcelona, it was my first trip to Spain and all I can say is if the rest of the country is like Barcelona why the hell aren't all Europeans living there! It's like the Australia of Europe, and you can't get a much bigger compliment than that :), except that you actually have a sense of history there, as opposed to Australia. The weather is fantastic, the people seem relaxed and friendly, they have a beach and all these massive parks, and wilderness too, not these fussy English gardens you get in Paris and you are allowed to sit on the grass in these fussy English gardens. What more can you want!

I found the Spanish weren't as freaky with their language either, I've had a few bad experiences recently with the French and them refusing to understand me. Yes I know I get my conjugations wrong sometimes and I have a bad accent but I find it hard to believe that that means you are completely incapable of understanding me at all. When I'm calling a hotel there are only a certain number of things I'll be asking so which one does my French sound closest too?

I think the only possible excuse or reason for that behaviour is that perhaps the French are not so used to hearing French spoken with an accent. I know that it can take a little while to get used to how different language speakers sound when they are speaking your language and granted English speakers probably are a lot more used to hearing English spoken with an accent then other countries. But still, it seems like the French want people to speak French, they are trying to protect their language after all.

The latest furore in France was that their Eurovision contestant's song was pretty much entirely in English, you have a better chance of winning if that's the case. So the French culture minister was talking about how the French need to protect their language and that this contestant shouldn't have been chosen to represent their country.

You would think that in this climate of wanting people to speak French that if someone was really trying to make a good go of speaking it you would try your best to encourage them. But no, some people prefer to grind your fledgling confidence into the ground rather than to bother trying to understand you.

The Spanish I found were fantastic with their language, they speak a lot less English than the French, but that never seemed to be a problem, they always seemed to want to communicate with you so you could find ways around it. Perhaps they don't get as many English-speaking tourists here and so are not yet completely jaded by our arrogance, I suppose give it time and they will roll their eyes with the best of the French. Sometimes I would try with French words just to try and have a guess, because their languages seemed to be so insanely similar, and instead of looking at me in a fit of incomprehension they would understand that I wanted a bag or a sandwich or something, point to it and say the word in Spanish. Now that's how you encourage foreigners to speak your language! It was totally awesome.

The other little language/culture point that I loved was how you were greeted everytime you walked into a shop. In France it is always bonjour (good day) which I think is nice that they take the time to greet you, but it is rather formal. Whilst in Spain it was always "hola", in a shop or out in the countryside. The Spanish also have a good day word but they use this instead. It always gave me the feeling of "I would love to get down and party with you, but I would just need to get to know you a little better first" rather than the more formal "bonjour" where you know everything is just a business transaction.

Their metros were pretty cool too, I'm certainly turning into a bit of a public transport connoisseur over here. The first thing that struck me was the train both to and from the airport was free! Yes, free. That's just crazy. Every city seems to have realised that the trip to and from the airport is both their first and last chances to stick it to the tourists, and usually they take full use of it with crazily inflated metro prices. In Paris for example it is usually about 4 euros to go from the centre of Paris to the furthest zone, zone 5. But if you happen to be travelling to the airport, also in zone 5 and not that much further than the last suburb on the line, than it is at least 8 euros. Orly airport is really awesome for that too, this is the second main airport and is actually closer to Paris than Charles de Gaulle. But the only way to connect with the suburban metro line is by taking their special Orlyval metro service. And I'm not kidding, for a 6 minute trip, one stop only, it's more than 7 euros! So when you get off the plane at Barcelona, expecting to pay at least 5 euros to get into town, and instead there is a conductor standing there giving out tickets, it's a pretty nice feeling. Even if you were going to buy the ticket it is only 2.60 euros, that's just insanely cheap for a trip to an airport. In fact the whole metro service was incredibly cheap, sure it's not as comprehensive as Paris, but for 0.76 euros for each trip I'm willing to walk a little further.

The other cool thing was their clocks they had on each station platform that would count down to the second when the next train was going to arrive, and it always came in about 20 seconds before the time, you then had 20 seconds to get on or off, and then it was off again, pretty much always on time.

They also have projectors and sound systems on their platforms, true they are only ever showing ads and have one of the biggest chains I have ever seen locking the thing down, but it still implies that they mustn't get too much trouble on the metros. Which is a bit funny, as before I left I did a bit of reading on Barcelona and I found all these web sites saying beware of the pickpockets and bag snatchers. And they all felt it necessary to give their top 10 tips on to how to avoid getting your stuff stolen. So that certainly freaked me out a little before I left. I had these visions of being on the metro and the only people are either tourists or bag snatchers, and that the bag snatchers would be all glancing shiftily around just waiting for their chance to grab your stuff and run. Or that they would slice your bag open and steal your stuff from inside. Seriously though, I never had even a hint of a problem.

Maybe it's because I travel alone, and most tourists travel in groups, plus I have cultivated a pretty good public transport, "don't come near me, I'm really not interested" face. Unfortunately because of all these horror stories I read I didn't take my iPod, which is normally a complete necessity, especially if the trip involves any sort of public transport, as I thought I really didn't want to get that stolen. But then it turned out it would have been completely normal and fine to take it. Oh well, I'll know for next time to take people's paranoia with a grain of salt. Obviously you have to be careful, but then I don't have any wealth to obviously flaunt, even my iPod, my one luxury, is about 3 years old, and is one of those massive minis, that really aren't so mini anymore. I mean it doesn't even have a colour screen.

What was obvious though of the other people around the place, was who were the tourists and in particular which ones had read the same websites as me. One of the number 1 tips was to wear your backpack on your front. So any one you saw doing that may as well have been carrying a massive sign saying "rob me, I'm most definitely a tourist".

My first task once I arrived in Barcelona and had dropped off my bag, which no I didn't wear strapped to my front, was to take advantage of the first glorious sunny day I had seen since I was last in Australia, seriously not a cloud in the sky, just that wonderful clear blue. I just had to spend it outdoors, so it was off to the north of the city to the Parc de Collserola, though it's not really a park, but more in line with the nature reserves they have in Canberra, massive areas of bush with tracks running through them. And it was real bush in Barcelona too, not forests, but good Aussie-style bush.

In the middle of this "park" is Mount Tibidabo which has an amusement park at the top (which is the strange castle-esque thing in the photo above) as well as a massive mobile phone/satellite dish, as shown in the photo above that (kind of like Telstra Tower in Canberra). It felt a bit strange to see these really obvious signs of humanity in what felt like nature. There were heaps of runners and mountain bikers around as well as just run-of-the-mill walkers like me, it would have been an awesome place to go for a really long ride, but I don't have a bike with me.

After wandering around this park for ages it was time to move on and so I crossed to the other side of the city to check out the Parc de Montjuic. This was another really big hill, on the south side of the city though, they held the Olympics here in 1992 and so there is the big stadium and some other weird pseudo-art stuff on the very top of the hill. The view in the photo to the left is Barcelona looking back towards Mount Tibidabo and in the foreground is the Magic Fountain of Montjuic, I didn't see any magic though.

The first thing you notice when you get to this place is the National Museum of Catalunya art which is housed in what looks like a massive palace. Unfortunately the day I went there was the 1st of May (May Day) and along with Christmas and New Years was one of the only days it is closed during the whole year. May Day is a very important holiday still in Europe, perhaps not so much in England, what with the union busting they've been doing over there. So I couldn't go into what is considered the "finest art museum in Spain". Instead I went for another wander around this massive park.









Yes those are escalators, they go all the way up from the street level, past the art gallery to the top of the hill where the Olympic stadium is. It's pretty funny that they built these escalators for the Olympic games (I'm assuming) so that the spectators wouldn't have to do any physical exertion in order to watch athletes at the peak of their physical fitness.














And here it is, the Olympic stadium!


















This park was more of a formal garden, at least in parts, and overall it was certainly less wild than the Mount Tibidabo park, with a lot more roads all over the place here as well. There were a lot of really formal gardens with the obligatory European massive fences around them. Perhaps they have problems with gypsies setting up camps in Spain as well. These massive fences are really annoying, especially if you are a pedestrian, as there were only ever 2 entrances and so unless you knew where they were you were forced to walk along the road next to the park instead of inside it where you really wanted to be. All you could do was look through the fence at everyone else enjoying the flowers and grass and shade while you had the bitumen and the cars. I really don't understand why they can't change the law so that people can't just camp anywhere, I mean that right is surely not enshrined in their constitution is it?

I eventually came across the Barcelona botanical gardens, which really has to be one of the better botanical gardens I've been too. It had all the plants from the world which also had a Mediterranean climate, so there was Australia (yah!), South Africa, Chile, Spain, Canary Islands and a whole stack of others. I'm not sure if it was a Mediterranean climate or rather just semi-arid, or maybe that's what a Mediterranean climate is. It wasn't a very big garden, everything was really compact, but that meant there was no wasted grassy areas, but rather every plant in there was some freaky thing from somewhere round the world, and there were some pretty strange plants in there.

A little pond at the entrance to the botanic gardens.























Looking over the botanic gardens, which of course was also built on the hill, but it was nice and compact. Easy to see all the strange plants.

















Like this freaky tree. What's this doing in Spain?
























My obligatory single colour flower shot

























These win the prize for strangest plant there. They were like sunflowers gone wrong, sunflowers in that their heads all followed the sun, gone wrong because they looked like a cross between an artichoke and a rose.






















After the botanic gardens I continued my wander around this massive nature reserve, it was strange how much space they seemed to have in Barcelona for all this greenery. It has a population of almost 2 million people and instead of spreading out like they do in Australia, into these cities with some of the worst urban sprawl in the world, they all live in big apartment blocks and so have space for these nature reserves. Another bonus of them all living on top of each other is that they have effective public transport with metros leaving once every 3 or 4 minutes in the non-peak times.

After wandering around for a good while I eventually made it to the Castle Montjuic, this was not as impressive as what I thought it was going to be. The ramparts were not particularly big, but then I guess the fact that it is built on a 170m tall cliff probably helped in the defense aspect.

The not so big ramparts and some of Barcelona in the photo to the left.




View of Barcelona and the port from the castle.

















The coolest thing about the castle is how you get down to the city from here, it's via cable car which gives you a fantastic view of Barcelona. It did freak me out a bit, it travels quite fast and is a looong way from the ground and as you are travelling down you are thinking about all the terrible cable car accidents you remember seeing in the news. Though looking at google now, the one recent accident I was remembering, in Austria, occured because a helicoptor dropped a massive concrete block onto the cable, so not really a fault of the cable car. But I've never liked the moment when the cable car has to travel over the poles when it makes that scary clunking sound. I knew that the next day I was going to Montserrat too, and was going to have a 15 minute cable car ride up the mountain and I was thinking "why didn't I choose the rack railway!". But I survived my brief 5 minute journey and enjoyed the view.



















Check out this sandwich I got in Barcelona, pretty boring right, but how many slices of bread are there in what you think is two sandwiches? Pretty much all the sandwiches were made this way, a new take on the old tuna salad sandwich.

What's going on?

I've just noticed my photos from Strasbourg are back, perhaps Blogger has decided it didn't hate them after all. Or perhaps they had to go through some sort of google censorship filter first and have only just been approved. Or perhaps google was adding them to one of their databases on everything they seem to be collecting.

Blogger the art critic

I was hoping to get at least something up from my long weekend in Barcelona today, but it looks like Blogger really doesn't like my photos, so it's going to be a little bit longer before you hear about my first experience with fantastic Spain. I also wanted to try and fix up my Strasbourg entry as I've noticed that Blogger didn't seem to like any of those photos either and has decided to delete them all. I don't ask you to critique my photos Blogger, just let me upload them, damn you! It will now have to wait until next week as tomorrow morning I'm off to Nimes and Avignon to check out some Roman artifacts. About 20kms from Nimes is the second biggest Roman structure in the world, it's only 6 feet smaller than the Colosseum in Rome, and is a 3 storey aqueduct that's been around for 2000 years. Impressive. So I'm looking forward to checking that out and the Avignon walls as well. That city name really sounds like something straight out of a King Arthur story to me.

I can tell you about my latest experience with the French health care system though, which is bloody fantastic. Don't worry there are no photos associated, Blogger won't let me upload them :). I received a note at work telling me I had to go get a check up at the uni health care centre, or infirmary as they call them here. Which surprised me, which uni in Australia checks up on everyone? The check is to find out if you work with lasers or chemicals or any other freaky science things. I suppose the difference is that here you don't seem to have to do any safety courses so I suppose they have the health care check to make sure you aren't poisoning yourself or blasting your eyes out with lasers. The health check isn't really preventative though which is a little scary. But what is awesome is that you don't have to pay and you don't have to wait or make a booking. So I got my vaccinations done, for interest it was 10 euros for polio, tetanus and diphtheria combined and then 70 euros for my combined hep A and typhoid, not bad. It's cool because it is just the nurse who gives them to you, so you don't have to wait for the doctor, I was a little worried as she told me a lot of stuff in really rapid-fire French and I was a little worried that perhaps you weren't meant to get 5 vaccines in one day, but she didn't seem to be too concerned and I haven't fallen over sick yet, so I think it's going to be alright. But bring on Egypt I say, now the only thing I have to contend with is projectile vomiting and diarrhoea, and unfortunately there are no vaccines for that.

Vueling.com

I had my first experience with ultra-budget airline companies when I went to Spain the other weekend. There was nothing really wrong with them, the plane home was delayed by about 40 minutes but apart from that the whole trip went smoothly. The only thing I worry about when flying ultra-budget is that if anything serious did go wrong, you would be on your own, there would be no overnight hotel stays or food vouchers or anything like that. It would be a night in the airport until the security staff kicks you out at 3 am as those Jetstar passengers discovered recently.

The lack of a security net is fine if you are only doing the short-haul flights, or have comprehensive travel insurance, but I think I would be real hesitant to fly for longer than a few hours with them. I've learnt my lesson about budget airlines when I flew KLM from Paris to Canberra, it took 60 hours, involved 3 stop-overs and 2 nights in hotels, not pleasant, but I guess at least they put us up in hotels. On the bright side of that horrendously long trip home I got to experience my first, and probably last, Hilton hotel. It was alright, the bathtub was massive, but I don't think I would pay the 5 star prices myself.

I knew I was in for a budget experience when I was booking my ticket, once I had booked everything and thought the price had been finalised, they then start adding on all these extras. The first was a seat guarantee for 2 euros each way, which you get because it is only 4 euros, but as you are paying for it you're thinking "what's the 400 euro ticket price if that's not a seat guarantee?". Then they charge you 10 euros to check in a suitcase and will charge you more if you turn up with hand luggage that's bigger than regulation. Good I say to that, I hate it when people take in massive hand luggage and then there is no room for your regulation size bag in the overhead compartments.

So once I had bought the ticket I was still a little nervous that it would all go wrong before I get to the airport. Another way Vueling saves money is that there isn't really any customer sales centre, everything is done via the internet, so you really do have to trust them, and the seat guarantee only really serves to make you more nervous. So I make sure I get to the check-in a little earlier than usual, which for me is like 2 hours early. It turns out that I was actually on the best Vueling flight that morning as mine left last, 25 minutes after a plane to Malaga and 10 minutes after a plane to Rome. What that means is that all the Barcelona passengers slowed down the people to Malaga and Rome and as Vueling were too cheap to pay for efficient security staff all these people were all mixed in with us Barcelona people. I saw passengers go up to the security staff and say they were flying to Malaga, which at that time was meant to have departed about 20 minutes ago, but the security people just tell them to go to the back of this immensely long, ultra-slow moving line. Eventually they started to try and hurry the Rome and Malaga people through, but it wasn't very effective as us Barcelona people kept milling around and getting in the way of things, that's people really, we're great millers.

The attitude I have noticed with these inter-European airlines is that they will wait for all the passengers no matter how late they are. My experiences with air travel is that if you are late by 5-10 minutes they immediately start the PA announcements saying "Proceed to the gate immediately as we have started to off-load your luggage". Granted I have only traveled in Australia or vast international distances and they seem to be a bit tougher. Which is strange when you think about it, when you are going to be flying for 23 hours what's an extra 15 minutes on one end really matter, percentage wise. And yet if you are only flying for an hour that 15 minutes is actually a significant delay. I suppose the reason is that these international flights always have to make tight connections which don't exist for these inter-European flights, or if they do, tough, you shouldn't have gone budget, seems to be the attitude.

Anyway my flights all went off without a hitch, due to my plane paranoia, though I am starting to worry about my flights to Italy. I had to book them through an external internet site as the actual airline web site wouldn't accept my Australian credit card numbers for some reason. I'm flying out in a bit over 6 weeks and I still haven't received any ticket number or anything, so fingers crossed that all works out.

Having Trouble with Trains

I had a little trouble with the Eurostar a couple of weeks ago, well actually it wasn't me with the trouble, but rather friends visiting me from England who had to catch the train back home. I was naughty and nearly made them miss their train as I was late in getting them to the station. I'm so bad with catching trains and I really need to learn my lesson sometime soon.

When I went to Germany in March I went there with my work people, including my boss, for a workshop, and we were all taking the same train. They all got there with plenty of time and were starting to get worried that I would miss the train. My boss had told me the day earlier that the train left from a different station and so they were worried that I had gone to the wrong station. I never went to the wrong station, but perhaps I should have told them that so I didn't look so slack. The thing is I'm justincredibly complacent about train travel for some reason. So anyway it was a sprint through the station to get to the platform on time, though in the end I was there with plenty of time, maybe a whole 5 minutes :). Everyone was quite relieved when I turned up just before the train pulled out. I've had other instances like that when I'm going away for a weekend and have tours and hotels booked and I'm sitting in the metro trying to think of a plan B if I miss the train, but then I haven't missed one yet.

The problem is I have my watch set to the Paris train time, and I know that the trains ALWAYS leave on time, without fail and so long as I'm at the platform with at least a minute to spare I'll be fine. I really need to miss a train, then I'll learn my lesson. This complacency has now, unfortunately, spread to how I treat my visitor's travelling. I had friends visiting from England, the land of the random train timetables, and they had to catch theEurostar home, which involves customs. Once we got to the station with about 13 minutes to go, I was fairly confident that they would make it, but perhaps they were not so sure. Anyway it wasn't a very pleasant ending to a holiday, running through Garedu Nord in the middle of Paris rush hour, I don't mind doing the sprint myself but I must learn to be better with visitors. So if they still read my blog I'm really sorry about that and for anyone else relying on me to get them to the train station, I will do better with you, I promise!

The weird thing is I am completely paranoid with airports. There I like to be hours early, I don't know, maybe I just really like airports plus the security checking always freaks me out. I'm also always sure there will be some problem with my booking, I don't think I fully trust electronic ticketing yet. It is true though that I do prefer airports, train stations are normally cold, hard and full of strange/scary people. Whilst because airports are so far from town you only go there if you work there, are meeting someone or leaving somewhere, you don't go to an airport just to hang out. And they are so shiny and new with fancy shops and places to eat, as opposed to the rushing commuters and a few benches, normallycompletely full, in the train stations.

Anyway I think my guests had a good time, at least up until that last hour in Paris. We did a wine tasting on one of the days, which was my first Paris wine tasting and it was really awesome. If you are visiting Paris I recommendO'Chateau , it was given by a Kiwi who had grown up in wineries and so was really relaxed and casual, not pretentious at all. He went through the different French regions and we had 7 different wines and now I can slurp with the best of them. There is also a company that does a wine and cheese tasting, so I might have to try that before I leave as well.

It was pretty funny doing the wine tasting though, the group seemed to be divided into the Americans, who had written books about wine and were seriousconnoisseurs and then the rest, who's relationship with wine consisted of "I drink too much of it" or "I have no idea about wine". I don't know why you would go to something which is obviously aimed at complete tourists if you had studied wine, maybe you like to feel superior every now and again. Though honestly they weren't bad at all, especially once you got stuck into your 7 wines you don't really notice the other people there.

One thing I have noticed with American tourists and I don't know the reason for it, is that typically when tourists in a group are asked where they are from everyone else always says just their country, whilst Americans always say their state only, or even just their city. Is itbecause in America you are really different depending on which state/city you come from? The problem is I don't think the rest of the world really knows the difference between say Wisconsin and Missouri. At best the rest of the world would perhaps be able to pick between maybe San Francisco and Alabama, so really they are only broadcasting to other Americans rather than the natives. Is itbecause they are the superpower of the world that the assume everyone else knows all 50 US states? Does that mean that in a few years time when China takes over Chinese tourists will simply give their province? Perhaps I should start sayingNorthern Territory when people ask me, I mean Australia could be a superpower too :)

Oh and that random photo above was taken when my friends were visiting, we went to Luxembourg Gardens and as it was one of the first nice days here all of Paris was outside trying to sit on the tiny patch of grass available to them. We had been sitting round the corner on a lovely, almost completely empty, patch of grass when the park policeman came around to shoo us all off. Apparently that patch was not for sitting on, there was no sign up though. I don't think we would have fit on the grass available for sitting so we settled with a park bench.

Blue Skies and Barcelona

I went to Barcelona for the May Day long weekend just gone, I'm not going to say anything yet, hopefully I'll get something up in the next few days. It was definitely one of the best holidays I've had over here so far though, mainly because the weather was so perfect. Those of you living in Australia forget what it's like to go for months on end with only sporadic blue skies. You forget how beautiful just a plain, clear blue sky can be and it is only when you have such good weather for 4 days in a row, with no sign of a cloud at all, that you realise just how much you've missed that. It's weird how something so simple can make you feel so good too, perhaps I've been lacking Vitamin D in the past few weeks. I certainly overdosed on it this past weekend.

Just to give you some idea of what it has been like, here in Paris I have suddenly gone from wearing 4 layers to one, in just a weekend. This tells you that we have basically just had winter until now and suddenly it is summer. That's one awfully long winter. I hope the summer is as good as the winter was bad, that's only fair right?

The photo to the left is just a teaser for what's coming, I took it in the botanic gardens. I couldn't make myself go into any art galleries the weather was that good, you guys living in Australia perhaps can't appreciate how beautiful that blue is when you haven't seen anything like it in months.

Strasbourg

I've been up to a few adventures since I last posted, so it's hard to know where to start, I guess I'll just post what I did first, before I forget what I actually got up to. So one of my last weekend adventures involved a day trip out to Strasbourg, perhaps in the past this wouldn't have really been possible, but now that the TGV (France's fast train network) is linked with Strasbourg, from late 2006, you can cover the approximately 400kms in a little over 2 hours.

Strasbourg must be an impressively rich city, it is so amazingly clean, I don't think I've seen such a clean city before, even in Germany. Even the homeless people there were really neat, well most of them anyway. On a canal ride I did we went past one homeless person's house under a bridge, he wasn't in, and every thing was stacked and folded neatly on shelves, and he had a table and chairs and all the shoes put away properly too. It looked like a real home, just without walls. I wonder if the council make the homeless live like that to keep the bureaucrats happy.

The reason for the richness is it is home to the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Council as well as all the associated bureaucrats. In the photo above you can see these EU buildings, they stand out a bit amongst the traditional architecture. They did do a smart thing with choosing to build these modern buildings about 2km away from the lovely old centre of town, so unless you went searching for them you wouldn't even know the EU was there. Except when the parliament is in session and then the whole town is probably seething with suits.

You can see in the photo to the left one of the many cockroach-esque boats cruising along the canals with the numerous half-timbered houses of the old part of Strasbourg.

I don't know how the EU chose the city to hold their parliament but whichever one they chose was going to get a massive amount of money pumped into it, and lucky old Strasbourg won. I was a little surprised that it was only linked to Paris with a fast train so recently, being home to the EU and all, but then it has only been recently that air travel has become such a hassle what with all the security checks and so the bureaucrats haven't needed an alternative until now.

Strasbourg has had a funny history, being in the middle of a tug of war between France and Germany since the 16th century. Up until 1681 Strasbourg was ruled by it's own council of citizens, apparently giving the city a democratic feel. Johann Gutenberg lived here between 1434 and 1444 whilst he worked on his printing press and a number of members of the Reformation lived here as well.

From 1681 Strasbourg was ruled by the French though it has oscillated between France and Germany throughout the centuries. In fact this area of France seems to always be the first area annexed by the Germans in any war. Because of this swapping Strasbourg has a real German feel. It is known to the rest of the French as a city that is well-organised, tax paying and hard working, which I suppose are not typically French traits. The food in the restuarants also seems to be very German-esque what with the sauerkraut and massive amounts of pork and potatoes.

The photo to above is apparently the most photographed building in Strasbourg, it used to be the tanner's building, nice place for such a smelly occupation, and it is right in the middle of Petit France, which is an island linked with locks and bridges in the middle of the river Ill which runs through Strasbourg. Here is really the main concentration of half-timbered houses. This area used to be the tanners district so the houses didn't use to have roofs, I guess to let the smell escape. I'm guessing Strasbourg wasn't so pretty back then.

Even though it has swapped so much between Germany and France, the Germans really wanted an outpost on the other side of the Rhine, it seems as if the city hasn't been damaged much at all between the various interchanges. Which is really lucky for the tourists as it means the whole of the old city is still almost entirely the half-wooden houses. The cathedral is also pretty amazing, it is still very much in the usual gothic style like every other church I have seen in France, but this one is made from a particular stone which must be common around Strasbourg as quite a few churches had this striking pinky-red colour from the red standstone. What was also most spectacular was the trouble the builders had gone to on the outside, really lacy. It was actually really hard to get a good photo of the church because it was so big, so instead you only get part of the front, though perhaps the next photo is a little better to see the lace aspect.

Just opposite the church they had an art-gallery/museum of the old religious art, so I just had to show you the freaky religious art again. This painting is of one of the Mary's and some other lady and they have shown the little babies inside them through their dresses, strange.




























As well as all the old-school art, they also had a brand new contemporary art gallery, also a little out of the old part of town. And some of the stuff there was pretty cool. I liked this weird ice-cream man sculpture outside the front entrance, though I guess you could say that he is meant to be made from something not so nice as ice-cream.



















Then there was also this piece of cut-up guitars, it was titled something like response to cubism and it is true that Picasso did seem to have an obsession with guitars.






















I also had to show you the strangest modern art piece, but I don't think it is as strange as the ladies with embryos, on the TV was playing a movie of waves breaking on the shore. I suppose it is an artists representation of the beach, I guess Strasbourg is a long way from the ocean, so perhaps they don't know any better there, but really, this is no representation of any beaches I know.