Our first tour after embarking. Strasbourg, which is actually in France, is big. Our date of arrival was auspicious, being Unification Day in Germany (the fall of East Germany and the Berlin wall, the end of the cold war), a major holiday. We were warned. It was really crowded. Half of Germany seemed to have come over the border to visit.
Strasbourg sits right on the Rhine. Over the centuries, it went back and forth, back and forth from being first in “France”, then in “Germany”.
“In 2020, the city proper had 290,576 inhabitants and both the Eurométropole de Strasbourg (Greater Strasbourg) and the Arrondissement of Strasbourg had 511,552 inhabitants.[8] Strasbourg’s metropolitan area had a population of 853,110 in 2019,[4] making it the eighth-largest metro area in France and home to 14% of the Grand Est region’s inhabitants. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau had a population of roughly 1,000,000 in 2022. Strasbourg is one of the de facto four main capitals of the European Union (alongside Brussels, Luxembourg and Frankfurt), as it is the seat of several European institutions, such as the European Parliament, the Eurocorps and the European Ombudsman of the European Union.”
We all got bused over from the boat. Our tour guide, a young female, tormented us on the bus with impossible to understand trivia, delivered at crushing volume. Her inanity continued once in town. I didn’t wear an earpiece, so I just tagged along, taking pictures. The Old Town offered up the same kind of old architecture and ambience as Zurich and Basel. The main attraction was Cathédral Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, a very old church of enormous proportion. So large it was hard to take a picture of it.
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