016 : travel : Europe : notes from a train ride between Basel and Strasbourg

Basel to Strasbourg

I kept notes of impressions of my day trip to Strasbourg and its Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (http://www.musees.strasbourg.eu). I wrote them in a tiny notebook I keep with me while traveling, and then dictated the descriptions to my phone. Some of the dictated text is quite mysterious to me now, and some charming: "half-tempted houses" (rather than half-timbered), Maderran (for modern), infrequent lights in the fog damn relative to the black for lesson tubes (for lesson = fluorescent, but some of the rest is a mystery), sick fog (thick)... I don't have the little notebook handy, so I'll do my best to interpret my second-hand communication to myself.

My photographs from this trip can be found in my Google photo album here: 2014.01 Strasbourg, France.

train to Strasbourg

• Suburban houses
• Brown fields
  edged with young leafless trees,
  lining tiny, deep creeks
  which appeared to have been permitted to keep their defined courses
• Flooded fields of dark green
  A white egret wades there
• Towns with industrial buildings, unpainted cinderblock walls, and plaster houses painted in soft, muted colors
  --(excluding that aqua house)
• A recreation center
  with water slides
• High-rise apartments, 1950-ish
• An Office tower and a cathedral spire
  -- we are at Mulhouse
• An old-fashioned building's end wall
  has been replaced
  with a modern green glass curtain wall
• Public housing,
  or badly designed apartments
• Mansard roofs galore in a nicer area
• Election posters with giant portraits covering the building,
  wishing all
  bonne annee
• Soccer fields with urban graffiti on the outbuildings
• Forest without,
  then with,
  underbrush
• Piles of rail segments
• A small river
• A concrete water tower
• A layered berm
  of the sort
  that hints at a buried landfill
• A layer of fog between the train and hills to the left
• Fields with stubble,
  recently plowed,
  with pale green / light yellow grass,
  with primary green, precise rows of shoots
• Long rows of tiny pieces of firewood
• A pink castle far up on a hill
• A modern yellow tower with a clock
• Colmar station, with a massive double level bike parking back within fenced off area
• A round, red tower I could see as we approach the station, but couldn't glimpse once we pulled out
• Vineyards
• Colmar's buildings after the train station have elaborate roofs
• Lumberyard
• A small river, again defined by trees
• More concrete water towers, but these have the legs enclosed
• Another, more complete pink castle on a hill
• A dog obedience class -- look at that husky!
  People, about 50,
  with their dogs on leashes in a circle,
  walking in parallel for 'heel,'
  and so on
• Another elaborate around brick tower marks our arrival in Celestat, where the bike parking compound is smaller, [with] single-story racks
• Roof angles here are more pitched, roof intersections are Dutch farmhouse, not as fancy as Colmar
• A very old cemetery, unadorned
• One of those deep creeks
  winding through the fields,
  had its narrow banks lined with patterned clay bricks (!)
• a fresh field, rows planted so close together, perhaps clover, alfalfa
• Grain elevator with a tall outbuilding, a spiral stair mounted to each side
• Into thick fog
• Hay rolled into rounds
• Partly hidden brick tower
• Metal recycling facility
• Wire cage-wrapped stacked white crates
• Tiny orchards and vineyards, just a few rows wide
• In the fog the fields, hoed, brown
• A play area with wooden crate fort, and a bright yellow swing seat hanging from a cantilevered fallen log
• Warehouses
• A house under construction, pink cinderblocks with stucco layered on
• A small pond covered with green algae
• a much larger, tree-lined pond
• a boxy apartment
• we slow down
• a youth hostel, the symbol huge on the wall
• Public community garden along a canal with many tiny sheds
• French only announcement: we are at the Strasbourg Terminus.

Strasbourg

• [The station house] is in a glass tube
• Young confident soldiers with automatic rifles, with strangely geometrics Stocks
• The tourist office is closed - no paper maps for me
• I cross the crescent square in front of le Gare and head toward the most interesting looking buildings, which coincidentally lead to the grand cathedral
• Kebab shop owners
  stand in the cold on the tourist street,
  smoking
  - it is Sunday, nearly everything is closed
• The Cathedral, improbably elaborate, very close to the shops that face it
• Half-timbered houses
• Alleys leading to the river and its locks.

musée d'art moderne et contemporain

(I captured impressions of this building in photographs, so the notes are light.)

• It has a good café and,
  somewhere,
  a German menu
  which inspired me to order in German,
  and tip four euros,
  to the thrill of my young waitress
• The downer of one room
  dominated by morbid religious art,
  but just one,
  (and it wasn't especially modern, either).

The return to Basel (Bâle in French)

• Exiting into thick fog and cold, bluish night air
• The towers along the Ill river are lit - red
• Holiday lights still decorate the commercial street
• Trees in the park at le Gare [the train station] have round lights that cycle through a lovely burst - so charming! (I filmed it)
• My warm, first class train compartment, with its comfy, deep red seats
• The countryside,
  dotted with infrequent lights in the fog,
  so dark
  relative to the fluorescent tubes at the train stations we quickly pass through
• The rocket-on-stilts bridge over the canal
  at Mulhouse
• Bâle!

images and original text Copyright © 2014 - 2019 A. E. Graves

(posted November 29, 2014 refreshed January 2019)

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