March 14, 2003
Paris - Strasbourg
distance hiked: negligible
Shorty had the window seat. It was morning over the Atlantic, and all we could see were a few stray islands before the coast finally came into view. Determined that my IGN-903, the hiking map of France I had rush-ordered from a travel bookstore in New York, and which I soon discovered was going to be all but useless for planning a hiking trip through France, was going to be something more than extra weight on this trip, I pulled the map from my backpack. Shorty and I eyed the coastline below, and soon found that we were over Le Havre, then Rouen, following the Seine as we descended into Paris. On landing, we waited on the taxiway for a minute while the Concorde roared off.
Immigration was easy but the terminal was madness. I tried to figure out the way to the train station while Shorty got cash. At the train station none of the automatic ticket machines seemed to be amenable to any of our credit cards, so I went into the ticket office and tried out my French. Thankfully, "Two tickets, please," turns out not to be a very difficult phrase in French (or most languages, I imagine), and we were soon on the train into Paris.
We left our luggage in lockers at Gare de l'Est, then took the metro to George V, on the Champs Elysees. Coming up the stairs out of the station, the Arc de Triomphe stood before us.
"Feel like you're in Paris yet?" I asked Shorty.
But we had no time to explore. We were on a mission for maps, and rue Boetie, where the IGN store was, was eluding us. We finally found it. The IGN store is amazing--a cartographic buff's paradise. Two stories of nothing but maps, mostly of France, French territories, and former French colonies, as well as such exotic locales as Arizona. Upstairs we found what we were looking for, 1:25,000 topo maps of the Vosges region from Colmar up to Obernai (on the unlikely chance you use this travelogue to plan your own hiking trip through the Vosges, you're looking for Top-25 maps 3716 ET, 3717 ET, and 3718 OT).
We bought them, and we were back out on the street, back in the subway, and hungry on the platform of Gare de l'Est with our tickets to Strasbourg. I ordered a camembert sandwich for myself and a crocque monsieur for Shorty without mishap. We got on the train and headed East.
Night was falling when the train pulled into Nancy, its only stop before Strasbourg, and by the time we arrived at Strasbourg, it was well past dark. At the train station, signs were posted by the train schedules noting the reduced service coming up due to a work slowdown by one of the rail unions; we ignored these for now, and headed for our hotel—le Grillon (the Grasshopper), about two blocks away. The clientele here was pretty young, but the room was comfortable enough, and the TV in our room got CNN and an assortment of French and German channels, since we were right on the border.
We headed out in search of dinner, trying to find a place that Shorty and Dad had been to before their last time a Strasbourg, a place that specialized in tarte flambé, which Shorty described as looking like a Howard Johnson and which Dad said was somewhere in the vicinity of the Cathedral.
Here in the old city, it was hard to keep our bearings, since the streets were rarely straight, so we navigated by the occasion glimpses of the Cathedral tower, until after much circling and consideration of various alternatives, we finally came across our HoJo facsimile, a place called Flam’s whose sole attribute in common with Howard Johnson was the fact that the menus were orange.
It was clearly a popular place; it was packed, and there was no room in non-smoking, so we got a table in the not especially smoky smoking section. The list of combination specials on the menu was confounding at best to a not-exactly-literate-in-French guy like me, but we ordered one that came with a tarte flambé and choice of salad, with a Riesling for Shorty and a Gewurztraminer for me. When faced with the salad decision, in the spirit of being in the Alsace, I ordered the Salade Alsacienne. I had no idea what this was, but it proved to be a pile of shredded cheese and ham bits reminiscent of the bizarre concoctions all too frequently found in early editions of The Joy of Cooking.
Shorty ordered the green salad, a wise choice indeed. The tarte flambé was good, though, a rectangular piece of dough rolled thing and baked crisp, topped with cheese and mushrooms. We eventually figured out the special allowed for ordering multiple tartes, but we weren’t really that hungry, so we just ate the one.
The waitress who took our payment spoke English, and talked to us for a while about Iraq and recent French-American relations. At work before I left for the trip, I occasionally found clippings from the Wall Street Journal on my desk, breathlessly recounting rude treatment of Americans at the hands of the French. Apparently the French media were carrying a similarly overheated articles in the same genre about rude treatment by Americans.
“Do Americans really hate us?” she asked.
“Not the people we know,” Shorty said.