September 21st 2009 :

Wow! First day in France..... Our flight from Taiwan to Paris was a little bumpy around Japan, but other than that, it was a smooth flight. It took us around 13 hours and I got a little sleep. Not much, but enough to get excited about going to France.

We landed in Paris a little ahead of schedule. Since it was early in the morning, the queue for immigration was not that long. It took us around half an hour to get through immigration.

After immigration, we had to go to the baggage claim. Wow, the escalators are in tubes.

No problem. We took the escalator to our baggage claim level, got our luggage and stepped out officially onto French soil...... Our first step....

We have schedule a TGV (Europe Train) to Strasbourg at 10.45a.m. It was around 8.30a.m. when we got out with our luggage. Wait, what is that.... Paul..... Yes, that is Paul, the French bakery that we go to eat in Taiwan. It is in the airport terminal. We must have something there.

We got 2 pastries. Well, I think Taiwan's is a little better and the price is about the same, maybe a little more expensive here in Paris, but I think that was due to the increase in the Euro's strength. Yes, we should check on our TGV. We took the monorail to the Train Station (Very convenient, the monorail connects the airport and the train-station, stopping between parking lots). When we arrive at the check in at the train station, we saw on the screen "supprimer". What is "supprimer"? We went to a ticket agent and asked. He said "cancelled". What! Cancelled? Our train to Strasbourg is cancelled. He told us that there is a strike going on in a town and our trains goes from the Paris airport train station to Strasbourg and then to that town, and thus, our train is cancelled. They said that the next train to Strasbourg would be at 1.15pm. We have no choice but to wait.

We went to a restaurant in the airport called "Maxim's". We heard that it is a very famous restaurant in Paris. Since we are not that hungry, my wife decided to have a cup of tea and I ordered lunch to share. I ordered "Steak Tartare". The waiter looked at me and said "Ok!" He gave me a suspicious look. I am ready... Steak..... What came was a little shocking....

Steak Tartare is not "Steak"! It is raw ground beef with a raw egg on top and some spices at the side. You are supposed to mixed these ingredients and eat it with bread. Good thing it came with French Fries. Those fries are good. Actually, after taking a bite of the mixed up steak tartare, it taste not bad, I must admit. Raw beef is really not bad. Also, the accompanying salad is pretty good too. I ended up also ordering a cup of hot tea, since the raw beef still lingered in my mouth. My first trial on eating raw beef. I had steak which is medium rare, but never raw.

After lunch, we shopped a little in the airport's gift shop. Then we went back to the train station to board the train to Strasbourg. We did not realized that we need to stamp the ticket in a ticket stamping machine before going onto the train. Fortunately, our ticket was 1st class tickets, so the conductor said it was okay and stamped the tickets for us.

This is the friendly conductor. We got ourselves an apple pie and also an orange juice and the train took about 90 minutes to get to Strasbourg.

When we finally got into Strasbourg, we decided to walk to our hotel. The Tourism Office said that it takes about 10 minutes walk and if we felt like it, it could give us a brief view of the town. Below is the train station of Strasbourg.

After walking in circles, we were still not that fimilar with Strasbourg, we finally got to our hotel in about half an hour. It was a nice hotel. Our room was nice. However, the choice of food in the hotel is very limited. There is only 1 restaurant and they serve a limited menu. This is the hotel that we stayed in, "Hotel Sofitel".

After checking in, we decided to walk around town. There is an area called "Petite France" and it is a nice area to walk around. The river divides "Petite France" from the rest of town. We focused on Petite France that night.

We had dinner in "Petite France" that night and it was pretty different. We used to think that portions are small in France, but this restaurant.... I would say that the portions are American size. The restaurant name is "La Corde a Linge". This restaurant specialize in "Spatzle". This is a special kind of pasta. We both ordered vegetable soup since we crave for soup. To our surprise, the size of the soup was like double that of the size of a bowl in US. But I have to admit, the soup was good. After finishing the soup, I was like of full.

I had ducked. The pasta below the duck is Spatzle. THe Spatzle was good, but the duck was a little hard. I think it was first fried then baked.

My wife had the pork knuckle. That was good. The meat was not too hard and the skin was done to perfection. That is a dish that I would recommend. Again, it comes with Spatzle underneath the knuckle. Just as a side note, please note that a Lemonade in France is actually Lemon scented sparkling water.

The decoration that was used in the restaurant is pretty special too. They use a laundry background as part of their deocration. Below is a snap shot of the background wall paper that the restaurant uses. Also, there are laundry hanging from the wall for decorations.

After dinner, we retired early back to our hotel. We slept early to prepare for tomorrow's trip....... off to Switzerland on train..... but an unexpected event occurred and we did not make it to Switzerland, or we did make it into Switzerland "illegally" and and got back to France... Please stay tuned.