Alsace le Soir

As a historian, Helene has lots of interesting things to talk about. She told me lots about the history of the area we were going to – Alsace. It was an area that was taken over by the Germans during WWII and so had a lot of German influences. She also told me about the Saint-Laurent cross which is on a few mountains around here (thought I might be able to find more info about it online but Google is failing me). Her husband Benoit was from Ventron and that he told people he was German. I was really interested about this. It seems odd to me that an area outside of Germany would want to call themselves German after the atrocities of the war. She kept saying that the area didn’t have national pride for any particular nation before or after – yet she was saying that people from that area call themselves Germans…

The Alsace region looks very German. I think if I didn’t know any better than I would have thought it was Germany! It also seemed quite old and a bit rundown; most people hadn’t repainted their shutters, broken garden fences etc. but maybe that’s just rural France in general?

It’s an interesting area though. Apparently the schools in Alsace don’t have to follow the French National Curriculum and can adopt the German version if they want to, or just make something else up entirely. Lots of schools also teach in German. Very strange!

As we travelled through, Helene promised to take me to visit lots of the local villages properly. She said that somewhere near they made the proper German pretzels, and that there was lots of local German sausage shops too. There was also apparently lots of interesting historical sites which, again, she promised to take me to visit.

We arrived in Saulxures-sur-Moselettes at around 5:30pm. Helene decided to stop at the shop on the way to the house as we needed food. I decided to go in with her as I needed a few things – face wipes and paper etc. I didn’t realise but France doesn’t really make basic things like lined paper so I had to buy squared paper (like the stuff we use for maths in UK) instead - very annoying. I did manage to get myself some more fruit juice though.

It was around this point that Helene told me that there wasn’t any internet at her house. Not impressed. Apparently they sometimes went to the ‘Maison de Tourisme’ (Tourist House) to get internet but as we drove past it we saw it had been burnt down… Helpful.

We finally got to their house at around 7pm. It was in quite a pretty area next to a farm and was a very old house. More to come about the house later…

Helene was very tired but we still worked out way round all the bedrooms making beds and vacuuming the rooms (well, I vacuumed the rooms). We then, finally, got to have something to eat!

Helene told me all about how her sister was very strict and hadn’t let the children eat with the rest of the family in Corsica. She had thought it very mean (I didn’t) and said that her children were all very constipated from eating too much pasta and bread, but not many vegetables. It’s for this reason that we ate pretty much nothing but vegetables for the next week.

For dinner we had a really nice creamy vegetable soup, followed by lentils with hot dog sausage bits in it. For desert it was natural yoghurt (which all the kids put 4-5 teaspoons of sugar into – disgusting) and I had a peach.

Apparently her oldest daughter, Alienor, is allergic to just about everything – almost all types of fruit, nuts, some vegetables etc. Helene says it is because she let her try everything before she was 1yr old and so for her other children she only gave them plain potato, milk and bread (or something super plain like that) until they were almost 2! Therefore, the family didn’t eat much fruit and continued to eat not much fruit for the whole time I was there…

No pictures to cover this part I'm afraid, and I didn't take that many pictures during most of my time in the Vosges either - sorry!