Day 6 - The worlds BIGGEST Christmas Market
The photos that were missing from Day 5 have been added! Please revisit the Day 5 post to see Heidelberg!
Yesterday was our second to last day, which meant it was time for the farewell celebration and dinner (more on why its the 2nd to last and not last later). Because of this, and the fact that we had to go through SEVEN different christmas markets, we did not have enough sober energy to make a post. Also we were still embarrassed about accidentally sending the e-mails to everyone from our wedding (oops!). For today, pretend we sent this whole thing yesterday:
We had to wake up very early today to get on an 8:30 AM bus to Strasbourg. It was VERY foggy! The general vibe has been take a tour then go on our own to do Christmas Market stuff. Today was no different: We had a bus tour followed by a short walking tour of old town Strasbourg, which is an island. If you didn't know, Strasbourg is a key EU city, but also home to a MEGA Christmas Market where they close the whole old city island to cars and do a giant 7-zone market.
The tour was fun, and our guide was very good at giving us the grand tour. We saw a lot of interesting parts of Strasbourg that highlighted the switches from German and French control. After the tour finished, we climbed thousands of steps in the big Notre Dame church (they're apparently ALL called Notre Dame in France) to get to the bell fry. The view was stunning and we got to really appreciate the architecture of the city. It was also good we did that because the experience closed down later in the day.
Then it was time to hit the markets. Omg you guys, there were so many different booths. We started in the southwest and worked our way back to the pickup point. One of the first markets we went to was the hipster artist market, which was great because they had a 100% vegetarian food booth with vegetarian Christmas hot dogs. I guess I should mention that Strasbourg, being in France, has a weird blend of German Christmas market foods with Alsace (the French region) cuisine. So basically Lauren had a vegetarian Christmas hot dog and it was amazing. Note: We still arent sure what made it "Christmas."
Next we basically waked around for 5 hours shopping and drinking more Gluhwein. Nick ate a weiswurst in a baguette the size of Lauren's head, and we split some potato pancakes with apple sauce. The last "market" food on our list is the tornado potato, which we hope to get in Lucerne when the ship isnt stuffing us with food.
In Strasbourg, it's very hard to shop in the Christmas Market booths and not ignore the actual shops which are also technically part of the market but are just store fronts. Unfortunately, both the stores and the booths in some of the markets (NOT the hipster market though!) were factory-made products. Also the French really don't like you trying to speak French if you can't. But Strasbourg is weird because they have French and German on all signs and menus, but they really don't want you to ask for anything in German.
Strasbourg also has a low-waste initiative going on. As such, their gluhwein mugs are just plastics cups you recycle afterwards. This was extremely disappointing for us and our mug collection. BUT it turns out that two booths had real mugs for us to collect! The most stressing part for us was the last 20 minutes before the bus picked us up. We were chilling close to the bus pickup when we saw a bunch of people from our cruise with BOOT MUGS (little mugs shaped like boots!). We have no boot mugs so far so this was a very serious situation. We only had 15 minutes before the bus picked us up. A quick google search revealed the mugs were only 4 booths away (and very hidden), So in the end we went from zero mugs to four mugs!
We have something embarrassing to admit: For some reason both of us keep answering people in Spanish. No idea why. We know oui is oui, and si is si, It's gotten us in embarrassing situations a few times now. I guess our brains just think "foreign" and go straight to Spanish.
At the end of the day we found a memorial for a 2018 attack on the Christmas Market. It was a very sad answer to our question as to why there were so many soldiers and police officers with bullpup files and G-36s.
That's all, I think. Strasbourg is very cute and a good blend of "Europe" and also had so much Christmas.
We finished the day with a farewell happy hour and dinner in the ship. The waiters switched to black tie and we "had" to dress fancy. It was bittersweet but we met some nice Australians. After dinner, we went to karaoke where Nick was the only one who sang well (which is saying something btw), and now people know us as the honeymoon and singing couple.
No Q&A this time since we're sending the Day 7 e-mail right after.
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