Mulhouse - french food, german buildings, and bloody annoying children

Mulhouse

Mulhouse is a city of about 115 000 people in eastern France, close to the borders with Germany and Switzerland. Brett, a friend from NZ is living here while he works as a english teaching assistant in a local high school. Just incase you thought I'd finally found someone to visit who has no AFS association, think again! Brett went to Switzerland a few years ago and was host brother to Tim from Belgium and Corine from Switzerland, so I first met him through AFS too. Mulhouse is in the Alsace region, which has an interesting history. Being formerly a part of both Switzerland and Germany, the culture is a real mixture of the different countries.



Mulhouse

 I got to Mulhouse around lunchtime and armed with very vague instructions from Brett, set about catching a couple of trams to the house of his friend Julia so I could drop off my stuff. I think my ability to arrive in a new city in a different language and still be able to navigate their public transport system shows how far I've come from arriving in Germany in December and being totally lost and dependant on Hauke to look after me all of the time. Then I headed back into town to look for food and something to do. Unfortunately in France, almost everything is closed on Mondays until either pm, or all day (and all day Sunday), so the city was dead. I grabbed a kebab from a kiosk, I think that now I have eaten so many european kebabs that I am no longer so wowed by how amazing they are compared to those in NZ, and I found this one pretty bad.

Mulhouse town hall

I found my way to the tourist centre, located in the old town hall, a beautiful old building that has been decoratively painted like many buildings I saw in Germany. The Mulhouse museum is in the same building so I wandered around it, directed by a very forceful man who keep insisting I follow the arrows and walk around the exhibits in the right order, even though everything was in German and French and I didn't understand a thing anyway. Heaps of cool old stuff there, I quite liked these really old lock mechanisms they had, they were so huge and complicated. Then I just wandered around aimlessly for ages, there is a big church in the square, as in every other European city, but I felt like I was back in Germany again, as the buildings are more their style than French. Mulhouse has some famous museums, namely the biggest car and train museums in France, and some dedicated to weird things like wallpaper and household electrical items. There was only one museum that I thought wouldn't be torturous and it's closed on Mondays, so I just stuck to my wandering.

pre-bed beers

After Brett finished work and we lugged my stuff over to his studio in the university residence, we headed out for dinner with Julia and her french flatmate, Orea (probably not right spelling!) at a restuarant that serves Alsacian food. As I said, I've really been feeling the lack of vegetables in my diet, so I had a massive chicken salad, but I tried Bretts meal, some kind of Alsacian pizza-that-is-not-a-pizza and people get angry if you try to compare the two. The food and wine was good, dessert wasn't, but the waitress undercharged us so I won't complain! We got home quite late and had both gotten into bed and said goodnight at 12.30, commenting on how Brett had to be up at 6.30am to go to work, before he asked "Claire, do you want a beer?", so we just got up again and sat around in our pijamas drinking alsacian beer and eventually going to bed rather late.

European Parliament

I let myself sleep in the next morning, and then headed to Strasbourg, the main city of the region, but I kept missing the trams by just a few minutes. I would have been in time to catch the train in five minutes, but the stupid machines in the French stations to buy tickets don't accept cash or international credit cards, and so I had to wait in line for ages, so I got there quite a bit later than I had wanted. I went first to the European Quarter to check out the European Parliament building and some of the UN buildings, its pretty awesome to see buildings that I saw in pictures for four years of study! Then I headed back to the old quarter of town. Mulhouse isn't a very pretty town, but Strasbourg is really nice, the old quarter is huge and had the first free public toilet I've seen in Europe! Amazing! There is a section seperated from the rest by rivers, its like a little park where people were playing petanque and table tennis in the sun. I was very happy to find both a Bretzel to eat and a shop selling German Christmas-tree decorations, I'd wanted some since we decorated Hauke's tree in Harste. The church here is also huge, a big gothic one like in Cologne.



Strasbourg

 I got back to Brett's place after he had already returned from work, and we went out to try and find a supermarket that was still open, most in France close around 7 or 8. We didn't have much luck, we kept arriving at each just after it had closed, so eventually we decided to just buy takeaways, which turned into us going to an Indian resturant dressed like we'd just left the house to go to the supermarket and carrying nothing but our wallets and shopping bags. But the food was great, I am really missing curries here. We were both shattered and had to get up early the next morning for skiing so we ignored the impulse to spend another night sitting around drinking and just went to sleep.

Strasbourg - Petanque

Skiing was a last minute plan! Brett's school was heading up for the afternoon and it was his day off, so he'd offered to go and help out, so we then decided to go up in the morning too, with me returning at lunchtime to catch the train to Switzerland. We had to get up ridiculously early, and I got dressed in a bizarre asortment of clothes that didn't really resemble real skiing gear, but nevermind! The skifield, Markstein, is only 20 or 30 minutes drive away, but it was a really long journey for us! We took two trams to get to the train station, then a weird tram-train (like a couple of tram carriages running along the train tracks because there isn't enough passangers for a real train) out to the end of line line, a town called Kruth, where we got a bus up to the skifield.

skiing at Markstein

This skifield is really tiny, and it was one of the last days of the season so the snow wasn't great, but the easier slopes meant I could handle the black run here. I felt like something just clicked and suddenly I was skiing properly, so its annoying I now have to wait until the next winter, either in NZ or here, before going again. The other bad thing about the place was the number of kids, and they are all little so-and-sos who have learnt the french tradition of pushing in front of anyone you can in a line. So annoying because they are small and could just duck under the rail and then pop back up in front of me in the lines for the lifts, and I can't speak french so can't tell them off about it. I was amazed that even their teachers didn't seem to care that their kids were pushing in and throwing snow around, they all needed Peggy Burrows to give them a lesson or two about representing your school's image! Alternatively, I kept thinking that a few whacks from my ski-pole might teach a few lessons about manners too, but no.

Skiing

Finally around lunchtime I headed back via all of the trams, went back to Julia's house to pick up my stuff and then headed back to the station again to take a train over the border. The train from Mulhouse to Basel only takes about 20 minutes, and when I was on it I got passport-controlled for the first time by two customs officials who opened my passport and then asked me if I needed a visa to go to France, or Switzerland. I resisted the urge to reply with a sarcastic "shouldn't you be telling me that", although I reckon if these are the guys charged with protecting France's borders I no longer have much sympathy for France's illegal immigrant problems!

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