Lent term approaching and Strasbourg photos

Last night my visiting friend from Grinnell, Olya, left, so today I am starting to face the fact that term is restarting Thursday. This term is called Lent term, which I feel adds a sense of penitence to course selection (e.g. "I'm planning on going to the Topos Theory lectures for Lent").

The most forceful reminder that term is restarting was getting back to rowing this morning. There's nothing like cycling 15 minutes through the dark, rain, and chill to the boathouse, and then going rowing at 7 am in the rain. Telling myself that I'm getting to be a tiny part of Cambridge's 200 year old rowing tradition helps motivate me, but only so much.
I got to test the new socks I bought over break this morning, and I highly recommend men's football socks. The artificial fibres are really warm. Mmm... toastier toes through technology.

Since I now have a backlog of photos from traveling in England the last couple days, I'm going to try to finish up posting about my trip to France.

So, after the day trip to Luxembourg City, we had a day trip to Strasbourg, which is in France, but is in the Alsace region, which has been passed back and forth between Germany and France over the centuries. So some signs and names of things were occasionally in German, but pretty much everything I saw was in French, so I could get by.

Strasbourg has a cathedral, the Cathedral Notre Dame de Strasbourg, which has the wonderful qualities of being way too huge to get into one photo, and being very pink, which just comes from the type of stone used:

Here's a photo of one of the rose windows in the interior:

Traveling in this region of France in mid-December was neat because at that time the cities we visited had Christmas markets (marches de noel). Strasbourg has one of the most famous Christmas markets. There were a lot of tourists at the Christmas markets. I could occasionally hear other Americans as I wandered through.

Every square in the city center was full of market stalls, which tend to look like cute little log cabins. The stalls often sell christmas ornaments, cookies, jewelry and seasonal food. In Strasbourg I bought a necklace, some wonderful cookies, and nutella crepes and mulled wine, which is heated wine with spices added. Here is a little bit of the Christmas market that was right by the cathedral:

Otherwise, Strasbourg was a very picturesque city. The river was quite scenic. Mostly we just walked around that day, but we also saw the city museums of art and archaeology.

It seems like all the cities where we went have little archaeology museums since whenever they build a new building or road they wind up accidentally unearthing something historically significant. Everything in the US seems so much more recent. Out here cities have been settled for centuries or millennia... one thing that I thought was particularly funny at the Luxembourg City museum was a descriptive caption about the founding of the city, saying that undoubtedly the most glorious time during the city's history was when it was a Roman city. This seems very different from the American sense of history and patriotism to me.

Here are a couple of views of the river in Strasbourg:

A fixed laptop, and photos of Metz and Luxembourg City

Happy New Year!
Right before the end of the year, my computer crashed and wouldn't reboot. The university technology office didn't open until January 5. They told me that they couldn't look at my laptop until a week later, but fortunately the computer office here at Churchill was able to look at it and fix it. But anyway, between having my computer broken and being worried about all my files and the heating being turned down since fewer students were around during the break (meaning only intermittent hot water and, occasionally, only intermittent heat), being in Cambridge was a bit depressing.
But, now my computer is fixed, the hot water is getting more reliable, I took a break from studying to go out to a club in town with friends for New Year's Eve, and I have a Grinnellian visiting, so things are looking up.
I still have another week or two until classes start, fortunately. So anyway, now that I have my laptop again I thought I'd take a moment to post another set of photos from my trip to France.

On the trip to France, at the end of the first full day, which we spent in Paris, Sandra and I took a late train out to Metz and then to the smaller stop of Rombas-Clouange to see our friend Alex, who is teaching English at a French school. This area is kind of in the northeast of France, close to the borders with Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Our first day there, the three of us went over to Metz, which seemed like a nice city. I enjoyed being outside of Paris, and it was nice to get a sense of what another part of France is like.

Metz has a particularly beautiful cathedral, the Cathedral St. Etienne. Here is a view of the main entrance.

Here is some of the stained glass at the cathedral:

I think it is particularly difficult to get good photos of stained glass, but you might be able to tell from this picture that this window looks more modern. Mid-20th century, Marc Chagall and Roger Bissiere provided designs for stained glass windows. Most of the stained glass in the cathedral is from the 14th and 16th centuries, but some modern ones have been added. The one above, I believe designed by Bissiere, was especially striking.

The next day we went to Luxembourg City, the capital of Luxembourg, a teeny tiny country which was a convenient half hour train ride away from Alex's place.

This view is from a bridge we walked over on the walk from the train station into the center of town. This clocktower was pretty, and I think this view gives a sense of what Luxembourg looked like in general.

Here is the top of the Notre Dame of Luxembourg (the main door is kind of cut off at the bottom of the photo).

Luxembourg City was very beautiful, much of it situated in a valley. Unfortunately, it was too icy that day to walk down on the steps which lead around the edge of the valley and the remnants of the city walls, but I think it would be a great place to visit again in spring or summer.

Here is a view of an area we didn't go into, but it's some of the newer, more modern European Union Luxembourg:

Otherwise, we went to the city and fine arts museums in Luxembourg City.