Strasbourg and the museum

We took the train yesterday from Interlaken to Strasbourg, changing at Basel, as the gauge of the railway changes at the border between Switzerland and France.

The train was fast, on time, comfortable, and had a restaurant car, which made me nostalgic for the Australian trains. Not.

The French (SNCF) train seemed particularly fast, although it was not one of their high-speed TGV trains.

Arriving in Strassbourg we took a moderately lengthy walk to reach our hotel, at least we didn’t get lost this time and arrived after about 20 minutes.

The room is pleasant, although they have a rather odd system of the room doors opening outwards into the corridor. One worries when opening the room door whether you are going to bang a nearby passerby in the face.

We walked past a rather magnificent cathedral.

Then we reached and entered the Strasbourg Historical Museum.

if you are interested in museums, it had a rather interesting way of presenting information. You are given a free audio gadget plus headphones, which worked automatically. They gave you one suited to your native language, in our case English, and as you walked around and stood near certain exhibits marked with some footprints on the floor, it would automatically play some information about the thing you’re standing in front of.

They also permitted photography, as long as you did not use a flash. For some particularly delicate items, such as pictures, they were in a darkened box with a button next to it which indicated that you should press it to see the object. Then a light briefly came on so you could observe it.

To say that Strasbourg has a deep and rich history would be an understatement. It is located on the border of Germany and France, and is also close to Switzerland. Being on the Rhine it was an important trading city.

The photos below are only a fraction of what we saw.

Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type, lived in Strasbourg for some time.

Finally, there was this fantastic, large room with a 3D miniature of the city made in 1727 which shows how the city looked in that year in great detail.

Apparently it was made for military reasons, and after 50 years or so it was deemed “useless” because canals had been filled in and city walls moved. However, thankfully, it was not destroyed, but preserved, so that now in the 21st-century we can see how the city used to look in the 18th century.