I decided to go to Strasbourg for a couple of reasons. First, it made sense for my route through Switzerland, and second, because I knew I wanted to see small towns in France, and Strasbourg is a good base for a ton of pretty ones. Beyond confirming that it fit those criteria and was large enough to have an affordable hostel, I didn’t know a ton about the city before visiting. I’d never read a book or seen a film set there, and the couple people I knew who had visited before just went for the famous Christmas market. It was the first place I visited that didn’t carry the weight of expectations.
Strasbourg is the capital of the Alsace region of France. It’s right on the border of Germany and France, and it changed nationality 4 times between the 1870s and 1945. Half the architecture is German, and half is French. Today it’s the seat of the European Parliament and one of the 3 capitals of the European Union. It was selected because it’s supposed to be an example or reconciliation and peace between France and Germany (and post-WWII Europe in general). The culture here is totally different than the culture in the rest of France, and they operate as a pretty independent region with some different laws and holidays than the rest of the country.
When I arrived in Strasbourg, I hadn’t had a quality night of sleep in weeks, and I knew I was checking into a hostel that had no air-conditioning in the 95 degree weather. I knew also that continuing to stay in shared dorm rooms until the first private room I’d booked in Budapest weeks later wasn’t sustainable. I feared there was a real risk of me tossing someone out a window for breathing too loudly if I didn’t get some privacy, so for my third and final night there, I splurged on a private room. As it turned out, even the shared dorms at The People Hostel in Strasbourg were wonderful. In spite of no air-conditioning, the temperature was somehow totally fine the whole time. The rooms were huge, and there were privacy curtains and a ton of space, so you some privacy even though there were 5 other people in the room. But even after my great experience in the shared dorm room, when I moved into my private room on the last night and discovered I had my own bathroom for the first time since arriving in Europe, I was so overjoyed that I had a solo dance party. Like I said in my previous post about Paris—though we wish it weren’t the case, our accommodations really do play a role in our impression of a city. But I could have stayed in a dumpster and still loved Strasbourg.
I’d imagined that the small towns surrounding Strasbourg would be the places I’d fall in love with, and that I’d return to Strasbourg mostly just to sleep. I spent half a day in Strasbourg, and the next morning I went on a day trip to Colmar by train thinking I’d spend the entire day there. Colmar is one of the most famous “small-towns” in France. It was adorable but felt a bit Disney-fied (manufactured for tourism). I wandered the whole town before the crowds arrived, and then I braved the public bus system to see a smaller town nearby. Tourists typically see these towns on organized tours or by renting cars, so braving the local public bus was a challenge, but I made it the half hour away to Kaysersberg. It was much smaller than Colmar and also very beautiful, but it still had that manufactured feel. My assumptions had been wrong—it was Strasbourg I’d fallen in love with after only spending half a day there. I went back to the city early and canceled my plans for day-tours the next day.
Strasbourg is big enough to stay interesting for days but small enough that it’s totally walkable. Downtown is a winding maze of half-timbered houses and canals. The cobbled streets are lined with dozens of restaurants, all with outdoor seats, and people sat outside drinking and laughing until early morning. It felt safe. There were art installations and easy public transit. Flowers were blooming alongside the canals, thriving even in the heat. There were sunsets that felt almost painful because I had no way to capture them. I worry a lot about forgetting when I travel. Even as moments are happening, I already miss them. This kind of sentimentality and nostalgia is why I write in the first place, and I felt a lot of it in Strasbourg.
I took a free walking tour, and our guide felt less polished than those of other cities in Western Europe—like maybe he’d woken up that morning and decided he’d like to try tour guiding instead of his usual bartending job. He had holes in his clothes and smoked something that may not have been cigarettes the whole time, and he spoke with this frenetic cadence, like he wanted to pour all the information into us before we ran away. He kept urging us to ask him more questions. At one point, we all sat together on the grass, like a fourth-grade class at recess, and he told us about the trees.
My very favorite building in Strasbourg, and all of Alsace—maybe even all of Paris, is the Strasbourg Cathedral. Construction started on the cathedral in 1015 and they finally finished building it in 1439. From the 1600s until 1874, it was the tallest building in the world. In the world!! It’s impossibly huge. Like you have to lean back as far as you can to see the top of it. Today it’s the 6th tallest church in the world, and it’s the tallest building still standing that was built entirely in the Middle Ages. So of course, I had to climb it. You can’t go all the way to the top, but you can get to the platform where the top spire starts. It’s 332 steps up this tiny spiral staircase that’s half-enclosed and half-open windows, so the vertigo gets very serious once you lose your breath (due to fear of heights), but once you get to top, you have a view of the Black Forest of Germany and the Alps of Switzerland, and if it hadn’t been 100 degrees that day, I may have stayed up there for hours. The inside looks like the setting of a gothic psychological thriller—my dream come true.
I can’t emphasize how much I adored this city. I’ve written before about how much I value the capacity for awe and how I fear how easy it is for people to lose their sense of wonder as they get older. I seek out these moments of awe so I can be sure I never lose the capacity for it. I felt in the early mornings of Edinburgh and everywhere in the Isle of Skye, and I felt it every time I stood in the shadow of the Strasbourg Cathedral.
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Now adding Strasbourg to my bucket list!