Zug and Strasbourg

 On Sunday, September 24th, we checked out of the Ibis and took the train to Zug, where we had a very nice breakfast with Eva, Andreas, Silvia and Kurt.

Andreas is raising a particular type of butterfly, feeding the caterpillars his carrot greens.

We went for a walk up the hill with Eva and Andreas, visiting a small pilgrimage chapel, dedicated to St. Verena.  There is a cute little organ there.

Eva took us to the station and we said goodby and caught the train to Strasbourg, via Zurich and Basel.

We had never been to Strasbourg before.  We checked in to the Hotel des Vosges, and rushed to the Cathedral, hoping to catch the 6:00 mass.  The usher at the door was very rude, skeptical that we were there for mass, since we were fifteen minutes late.  Eventually, he let us in, though when Mary Joy went back for a program, he told her we wouldn't need it, since it was in French.  Mary Joy told him, in French, that we speak French, so he gave her one.  You can see how they would want to avoid having tourists wander in and out during services--quite a few people left early as it was.  But this usher went much too far--at one point he told Mary Joy "Tais-toi!" ("Shut up!").

Afterwards, we had dinner at La Table du Gayot--very nice, though the waiter started out a little snarky--does Strasbourg have problems with politeness?  But, as always with wait staff, Mary Joy eventually had him eating out of her hand.

We went back to the hotel by way of the Cathedral, which looks very impressive at night.

Lucerne

 On Saturday, September 24th, we went across the street to the Von Rotz pastry shop for a continental breakfast.

It was raining, and the weather for the whole day didn't look promising.  Eva had suggested some indoor activities in Lucerne, so we got on the train.

First stop was the Bourbaki Panorama, which we had never heard of.  Wikipedia says:

"The Bourbaki Panorama is a circular panoramic painting depicting the internment of the French Armée de l'Est in neutral Switzerland at the end of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. The army, led by General Charles-Denis Bourbaki had been defeated in the field while attempting to raise the Siege of Belfort and fled to Switzerland. The Swiss admitted the French soldiers, and local villagers and the Swiss Red Cross provided aid.

"In 1876 the Belgium Panorama Society commissioned Swiss artist Édouard Castres, who had accompanied the Armée de l'Est as a medical volunteer, to produce a panorama for display in Switzerland as a tourist attraction. Castres and a team of ten artists produced a circular painting, measuring 115 metres (377 ft) in length, to be viewed from the centre. The work was intended to make the viewer appear as if within the scene, an effect heightened by the use of three-dimensional figures and objects placed in front of the painting. The work was exhibited at Geneva from 1881 but transferred to Lucerne in 1889 where it remains today. The painting was twice cut down and its current height of 9.8 metres (32 ft) is around a third less than the original."

Such panoramic paintings were fairly common in the nineteenth century, most showing landscapes or battle scenes.  A few survive today.

The Bourbaki Panorama, with a narration sometimes in English, was more interesting than we expected and we spent a lot of time there.

Since we wee in the neighborhood, we visited the Lion Monument, dedicated to Louis XVI's Swiss guards, killed defending him and Marie Antoinette when the Paris mob and National Guard stormed the Tuileries Palace in 1792.

We wandered back to the Art Museum, in the Kultur- und Kongresszentrum, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, who designed the renovation of the Lyon Opera and, of course, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.  However, the Museum had a special David Hockney exhibition, which raised the entry fee to 25 francs, too much for us, considering that we aren't special Hockney fans.  A World Band Festival was going on, and we listened to a brass band outside for a while.

Lunchtime.  Back across the river to a pizza place attached to the Migros store.  They didn't have pizza, but they did have Flammekuche, a sort of pizza made with pretzel dough, cheese, onions, bacon.

To get back to the station, we crossed the wooden, covered Kapellbrücke, the Chapel Bridge, which we had, of course, done every other time we've been to Lucerne.  

We got back in time to take a walk with Eva in Zug (umbrellas at hand but unneeded), ending up at the Freiruum, a huge food court, where we met Eva's sister Silvia and brother-in-law Kurt (Andreas was away on business) and had a fun dinner of mezes, beer and gelato.

Schaffhausen

 On Friday, September 23rd, we ate breakfast at our hotel, then tried to take a river cruise, but it turned out that they were not operating until nearly eleven a.m.  So, we checked out, left our luggage, and took the train to Schaffhausen--somewhere nearby that looked interesting.

Scaffhausen is most famous for the Rhine Falls.  While the biggest waterfall in Europe, it is more akin to the Great Falls of the Potomac than to Niagara.  We saw it in 2006, on the way from Tuttlingen to Bern.  We would actually have a pretty good view of it from the train both coming and going.  In the end, we decided not to spend the time to walk or bus out to the falls from Schaffhausen.

We visited the Tourist Information office to get some ideas what to do, including a self-guided walking tour of the Old Town.  While an English-speaker would assume that the name of the city is pronounced SCHAFF-hau-sen, with the accent on the first syllable, it sounded to me like the Swiss were actually pronouncing it schaff-HAU-sen, with the accent on the second syllable.

But now it was time for lunch.  The salad at La Piazza was the best we had on this trip.  Nothing else lived up to that.

We went to the Münsterkirche--a romanesque abbey church with a modern interior, then down to the Rhine, then up and up to the sixteenth-century Munot fortress.

We caught our train back to Zurich, passing the Rhine Falls again.  After picking up our luggage, we took a train to Baar, in Canton Zug, where we checked in at the Ibis, right across from the station.  We know Ibis; we are used to Ibis; they are all the same: spare but comfortable.

That evening, we took the five-minute train ride to Zug, where we met Mary Joy's cousin Eva and her husband, Andreas, for a nice dinner at Löwen.