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March 8, 2009
France for a day!
I had a great - if somewhat museologically frustrating - day yesterday!
I woke up to much nicer weather than predicted - cold but blue and clear. I had been talking about heading to Colmar in Alsace all week and my friend Brenda agreed to go with me. On the platform at the train station (train to Breisach at the Rhein, then bus to Colmar) we ran into two other students from the Goethe-Institut. The excursion far I had already bought was good for up to five people for 24 hours anywhere in the Alsace, so they came along on our ticket - suddenly reducing the price to 5 euros per person (I still need to find the key combination for EURO).
So we get to Colmar at 11.35 and split up - Brenda, who's seriously Francophiliac, needed to eat something and went omelet-hunting. The Ukrainian girls were wandering. I went to the Musée Unterlinden to see the Isenheim Altarpiece, one of the most amazing things in Late Medieval or Northern Renaissance art. Closed from noon till 2 - last admissions at 11.30.
So I went in search of the former Dominican church, which has Martin Schongauer's Virgin in the Rose Garden altarpiece. Closed for the winter months.
So then I had lunch myself - a nice piece of Quiche Lorraine (after all, when in Alsace-Lorraine) and sat outside sketching - it really was that warm in the sun!
At two Brenda and I went into the museum and dashed to the Isenheim altarpiece. I spent 30 minutes wandering around the room - they have disarticulated the wings and mounted them very well - click to see a general view of the room, which was the former chapel. We left at 2.30, met the Ukrainian girls, and took the bus back across the Rhine to Breisach and the train to Freiburg. The next bus wouldn't have been until 7 p.m., and that would have been a bit much museum-going even for me.
So, alas, I didn't get to see the rest of the splendid collection, but I did get to wander around Colmar, which is charming, and see some evidence of the Alsatian Language (the 2nd most commonly spoken regional language in France after Occitan, according to Wikipedia). Click to see a poster celebrating unseri Sproch, which would be unsere Sprache in Hochdeutsch.
All in all a great day out of Freiburg - and in France within in 30 minutes!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at March 8, 2009 9:39 AM