An Evening in Colmar

Colmar is a beautiful medieval German town that isn't in Germany. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, not long after taking over my ancestors in the French-speaking Franche Comte, Louis XIV of France conquered German-speaking Alsace. During the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Alsace went back and forth between France and Germany, but is now firmly French and French-speaking. At the time of the French Revolution, Alsace was divided into two departements, Haut-Rhin (Upper Rhine), with its capital at Colmar, and Bas-Rhin (Lower Rhine), with its capital at Strasbourg. The small part of Alsace that was originally French-speaking (containing yet more of my ancestors and many, if not most, of the other French-speaking settlers of eastern Stark County, Ohio) was separated out from Haut-Rhin as the Territoire de Belfort in the 1870s (around the time my great-grandfather left for America) and has since always remained French.

My father and I were in Colmar, after visiting our ancestral village, a little farther south and west, in 1991. I liked Colmar very much, with its half-timbered houses, canal-side "Little Venice", pedestrianized center and world-class art, and always hoped to come back. In the rather haphazard way that we put this trip together, at the center was arriving in Switzerland by a particular date. Due to airfare quirks, we decided to fly into Copenhagen, then get to Switzerland by flying EasyJet to Basel. With a few days available for a side trip and since Colmar is not far from Basel's airport, we decided to spend those few days here, before going on to Switzerland.

After checking in at our hotel, Mary Joy and I headed for the old town and, after wandering its charming streets, visiting the cathedral-sized church of St. Martin, and buying some macaroons, we went to la petite Venise for dinner, deciding to eat on a tiny deck out over the canal, at Le Petit Gourmand, a restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet.

Alsatian cuisine is basically germanic, but with a strong French accent. I told Mary Joy that choucroute is not the same as sauerkraut, that the French version is much subtler in taste. After having a dish consisting off choucroute with fish, as well as tasting my choucroute garnie (choucroute with ham and sausages), she agreed, but, unfortunately, decided that while choucroute is different from standard German sauerkraut, she doesn't like either of them. We finished off with a plate of three local cheeses: a goat cheese, a young Munster and a strong aged Munster. Then we wandered through the old town again before going back to our hotel.

I woke up around 1:30, and not being able to sleep (jet lag?), I sorted out some hardware problems (relating to uploading pictures to the blog from our new iPad. I'm still not able to move them around in the text, but at least I've figured a way to get them there. Mary Joy's CenturyLink e-mail doesn't coordinate very well with this machine, but she has been coping, despite inconvenience.