Strasbourg Whirlwind

It sounded too boring to just take the train straight back to Brussels after Nurembourg, so to make things interesting we took a train to Strasbourg Saturday afternoon and an evening train Sunday to reset our schedule and location back in Brussels for Monday morning.  Strasbourg is just across the Rhine river from Germany but the region has a history tied to both countries.  The street signs were in German and French, our menu for the wonderful French dinner Saturday night was in French, German, and English.  Sunday morning we packed up and left the bags at the hotel to go exploring.  There was a tasty brunch in Kebler square where we tried Flammeküche (see picture of one with cheese and bacon), an Alsace regional dish that was closer to a cheese crisp than I could find in California Mexican restaurants.  The nice picture of one of the canals doesn't do the weather justice though, there were all gray clouds above and behind us with it raining on and off all day.  Today is actually much like that but I'm in Leuven, Belgium; apparently somebody told the clouds which train we were on. 

 

Strasbourg was wonderful.  It was a short trip, but then it's a small town and I'd much rather claim to have seen a small town in 24 hours than to have seen a country in a weekend.  We'd heard nice things about the city and it lived up to its reputation.  The train ride back from Strasbourg was nice; although it was 5 hours we didn't have to deal with any transfers and we had reserved seats.  The path took us through three countries (France, Luxembourg, and Belgium) and got to watch a lot of scenic farmland and small towns going by us (but without experience the intermittent rain firsthand).  There was a delay in Luxembourg so I ran into the station and grabbed some grub and now can say I ate dinner in Luxembourg.  So Leuven is part of Flanders region, and I'm told it's better to just speak English than to speak French, even though that is most typically used in Brussels (and Leuven is only 18mi away).  There's a long-running controversy and a lot of pride at stake between the regions in Belgium and it seems even Leuven University had a split over the Language thing, it had been bilingual (Dutch/French) but that didn't work once people had few enough other problems and needed something else to worry about.  There is a Stella Artois brewery here, although Stella is from 1926, the brewery started running in 1366!  I think I might go chill with Stella tonight...