Strasbourg, and technical difficulties.

This morning I trundled off to the Bibliothèque Nationale at 9:30 in the morning, weighted down with a bag full of books and my trusty laptop, ready to do some serious paper-writing. (Of course, I spaced out on the subway -- a guy came on and started to play a set of bagpipes that was shaped like a sheep, with a fuzzy outside and a little sheep face on the front -- and went a few stops too far, and had to get off to catch a train going back in the opposite direction. Probably, in retrospect, a sign of how well the studying was going to go.) Met a friend at the BNF, found our respective rooms, and settled in. The place was packed with French students diligently working away. I took out my computer and plugged it in, and... nothing.

Whoops! My charger has been acting funny for a few weeks now, taking five or six minutes to start working or needing a good firm shove into the outlet, but today there was just nothing. I decided I couldn't work on my paper (since I only had about two hours of battery life left, and if I couldn't get the charger to work, the whole computer would just die after two hours), so I did some reading instead, then left around 1 pm to go to a Marx seminar at the Sorbonne. Long story short, the seminar didn't quite work out, and instead I went to a café to try out my computer again and do some work.

It still didn't work. I freaked out a little. Mom helped me figure out that the FNAC (a huge, overwhelming chain store here, with electronics, DVDs, video games, cell phones, books, lectures, a café, and ticket sales) has an Apple store in it, so I packed up my things and headed over. There, a very very nice man tested my charger and determined that it was, in fact, completely dead. He also sold me a new one for an exorbitant price. But, now I can use my computer again! Paper-writing, here I come.

Well, paper-writing, here I come later; how about some pictures of Strasbourg first?


The day I arrived, the town was putting up its enormous Christmas tree in the Place Kléber. Strasbourg is famous for its Christmas market, and the whole town was in the process of decorating the weekend I was there.


I was just walking along, and a giant cathedral came out of nowhere!


A view of the cathedral from the front. It's so big my camera couldn't capture it all at once. We decided to go up to the tip-top of the spire, which turned out to involve hundreds of harrowing stairs on a tiny spiral staircase.


On our way up!


Continuing my theme of "me standing in front of a panoramic view," here's me and Strasbourg, from the top of the Cathedral.


Rachel and I took the boat tour of town in the evening. It was dark, so I didn't get many pictures, but I think this is a nice, artistically blurry bridge.


Here's Petite-France, a ridiculously quaint part of town, with lots of these very old, cute buildings.


Someone had made a tiny snowman.


A snowy French garden, part of the Orangerie park. Extreme symmetry!


We climbed up the rocky outcropping that overlooks this pond (and took a picture!).

I had a great time in Strasbourg; Rachel made an excellent hostess and showed me all around town. It even snowed a magical, wintry snow while I was there! We went to see a Molière play (Le Malade Imaginaire, which we actually read together in senior-year French class!), and I ate some choucroute, the Strasbourg specialty dish of sauerkraut, five kinds of sausage, potatoes, and bread. I will not be eating choucroute again.

However, I'll write more about Strasbourg next time, because now I really do need to work on some homework. Or maybe I should just do as the French do and go on homework strike...