Sundays in France are boring, but Kehl is nice! (Becky)

We decided to stay another day in Strasbourg, because we hadn’t really seen the city yet (and, as I mentioned, our hotel room was quite swanky, and we weren’t prepared to leave the luxury of having a kitchen and space to ourselves. The hotel was also oddly charming because it looked like it had been thrown together halfhazardly, with the kitchen sink knobs too close to the wall to turn, a shower that flooded out past its flimsy curtain, and the fantastic artwork pictured here).

It turned out to be a Sunday in France, though. We had forgotten the terror of this day. Every shop was closed. We went to the train station information desk to ask if they knew any grocery stores that would be open, but the information worker onreplied with a laugh that “Non! Il n’y a pas rien!!” (No there are none!). Downtrodden, we walked around for a while and went to the few open convenience stores looking for something to cook in our hotel kitchen, but we didn’t have much luck.

So we decided instead to take the train back to Kehl, Germany in hopes of finding something that was actually open (and I still needed postcards). Kehl was closed down almost as much as Strasbourg, but did have a very nice park on the Rhein River that we explored. The highlights of the park were a couple of strange items– a huge log with holes in it and a sign attributing the holes to "Unidentified Forestrial Objects” and a large flying saucer that you could go inside, and that of course held information about flowers and local plants. The park also had an obstacle course, some treehouses, and a tall tower from which you could see the whole town and the closer parts of Strasbourg. And there was an awesome mosquito slide in the center of town!

In the evening, we went back to Strasbourg and headed to a celebration that we had seen advertised on billboards. Something about fireworks and water spectacles. We didn’t quite understand what it was, but I was in need of some belated July 4 fireworks, and we were planning to leave the country just before Bastille Day, so it seemed like a good compromise. We got lost on the way there, and arrived just after the celebration started. It turned out that it was a fountain show in the river, kind of like the Bilaggio fountains in Las Vegas. It was set to the music of famous composers and was supposed to somehow represent the history of Strasbourg. They soon added fireworks to the water show, which made for a cool effect for about 5 minutes, and then the smoke was too thick to see the water fountains anymore. We were disappointed that there was no big grand finale (it ended with some low fast fireworks), but it was still pretty cool.