Couchsurfing in Strasbourg

Note: Since I'm still playing catch-up on important events that have happened in the past couple weeks, things are going to look king of travel-bloggy around here for a while. Hopefully I'll be caught up after this weekend, which means I can talk about things more pertinent to everyday life, such as the fact that I've been working for the last month. But for now, just enjoy the pictures of pretty buildings in Europe.

Strasbourg basically looks like a Disney movie.

Strasbourg Cathedral is wildly impressive.

The cathedral also has a giant, overwhelmingly informative clock inside. This is just the 24-hour clock part of it, but it also tells you the position of the planets and the phase of the moon. 

I'm not saying that there's any place where it's really appropriate to be playing the fife and lyre these days, but if such a place existed, it would probably be Strasbourg.

The most exciting animals in Strasbourg are the giant water rats in the canals (seriously), but since I couldn't get a good picture of one, here's a donkey instead. 

I haven't really gotten into the overwhelmingly positive experience I've had CouchSurfing in Europe so far, but seeing as this is the first weekend that I've taken advantage of the site for vacation purposes, now seems like a good enough time to bring it up. For those of you who aren't aware, CouchSurfing is a site that allows users to send requests to potential hosts all around the world. The hosts are locals who offer a free couch or bed to visitors, and the system is self-perpetuating in a kind of pay-it-forward manner—I can surf in Europe for six months and then, as a nice gesture, host other travelers when I get back to the States.

Since I couldn't move into my apartment until mid-June, I used CouchSurfing as a rich (or, more accurately, poor) man's hostel service—not only did I have places to stay, but I also met some locals in the process, which has allowed me to avoid spending all of my time with other American interns from BASF. For someone traveling alone in Europe, a resource like CouchSurfing is tremendously useful—this weekend I'm going on a solo bike trip around the Rhein-Neckar, but thanks to CouchSurfing I'll have places to sleep and shower in Worms and Speyer when I stay overnight.

Rewind to last weekend: Strasbourg is essentially the French version of Heidelberg—old, beautiful in a stereotypically French way, and touristy as hell. Since Strasbourg is right on the German border (just an hour and a half away by train), I decided to devote an early weekend to this rather straightforward trip. I went out there with another guy (Paul) from my program, and we stayed with a CouchSurfer (Manu) who grew up in France and came to Strasbourg a year ago after his company moved his job from Alexandria.

This is where kids in Strasbourg go to school. For free.

Of course there's an old-timey-looking carousel in the middle of Strasbourg.

Sightseeing-wise, Strasbourg is a genuinely beautiful town, and it's small enough to see in a weekend. The cathedral in the town center is magnificent, and the architecture is strikingly reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast (actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that Beauty and the Beast is reminiscent of Strasbourg). Through some random stroke of dumb luck, this town also happens to be of huge political importance in Europe—the EU Parliament and Human Rights Council are both located on the outskirts of Strasbourg—and it has one of the largest Jewish communities in France (although we didn't end up making it to services on Saturday). Just a few hours into our stay, Paul was already joking that he needed to find a French girl who would be willing to give him a marriage of convenience so he could stay there indefinitely.

The European Union Parliament building. The globe in the center was a gift from the Polish.

You can't really see it all that well, but somebody dropped 30 Agurot into the middle of the EU Parliament globe, which will probably lead scores of tourists to say, "hey, isn't there one of those Jewish things on that coin?" (This is exactly what Paul said when he looked inside the sculpture.)

A semi-sacrilegious photo I took on Saturday. It's the largest synagogue in Strasbourg.

But in my mind much of our trip's success had to do with CouchSurfing. Manu lives in a trendy-yet-semi-Bohemian three-story apartment with a rooftop terrace and a random hammock in the living room. He was very friendly (although, like many of the guys I've met on CouchSurfing, a bit too sex-driven—I think it would be a lot harder to use this site as a girl traveling alone), and he spent a good deal of his time showing us around. On Friday we met up with a friend of his for ice cream, wine and tarte flambée (I have no idea what the English equivalent of this would be other than flatbread pizza. I do know that in German it's called flammkuchen, and it's a traditional Alsatian dish). On Saturday he took us to a picnic and outdoor concert on the Rhein (I'll probably write about this in more detail tomorrow since it really deserves its own discussion) and then brought us back to his place for a party—although because of the French people's general inability to speak English, we ended up being those guys who go upstairs to smoke weed and play guitar, only without the weed. It rained on Sunday, which, on a day when the shops are all closed anyway, essentially meant that the city was dead. Thankfully, we were able to hang out at a café with Manu and another CouchSurfer from Strasbourg, so the day wasn't a total waste. Without a local host, we would have had difficulty replicating any of these experiences, and the trip would have felt very different—much more touristy, much less authentic.

As the world becomes more international, it's only natural that our social spheres will expand to encompass new areas. But what's even more fascinating now is that the internet has allowed us to create networks out of thin air. Sure, it takes a good deal of trust to actually commit to a project like CouchSurfing, and I realize that, despite my love for the site so far, one bad experience is already too many. But the ability to come to a new place and not feel like a total stranger is incredibly important. In fact, this is the way I travel to cities in the US: if I go to New York City alone, I'm not going to stay in some hotel, I'll stay with a friend—why shouldn't I be able to do the same in a place where the only person I "know" is some dude I saw on the internet who lives with pharmacy students and plays a little guitar? Because there's a chance he could rape and kill me, of course. But you get the point.