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: