We woke up at around 4.30a.m. It must be the jet-lag. What to do? We decided to take a train to Switzerland, yes, that is what we will do, we will go to Switzerland today and spend a wonderful day there. We looked at the train schedule and they have an early train around 6.10a.m. We got to the train station by taxi and discovered that the ticketing office opens at 5.45a.m. So we got the 6.10a.m. ticket to Switzerland. We went onto the train around 6a.m.
After a while, there was an announcement saying something in French that we did not understand and everyone was alighting the train. We asked someone in the train and they said "Sortie" which meant exit in French. So we followed the crowd out of the train, down the stairs and up another step of stairs to another platform and waited for another train.
There was a nice gentleman there after hearing us speaking in Chinese asked us whether we were visiting Strasbourg and we said yes. He explained that the original train had some mechanical problems and we need to wait for another train. However, this train that is coming needs to stop on all stations and probably we will be delayed. The thing was that we were planning onto going to Interlaken(Switzerland) and had to change trains in Basel. They said that we are kind of pressed for time. The initial train had a 20 minute interval for changing but there is a huge chance that we will not make it to change the train. We however decided to try anyways.
We got onto the train.
We had breakfast on the train. The nice gentleman took a seat across our seats just to help use translate announcements and help us communicate with the train conductors. The train conductors told us there is still a chance we might miss the train, but we could also change to a later train when we get to Basel.
The nice gentleman needs to get off before Basel so he asked another passenger to tell us how to transit to the train in Switzerland. This is the picture of the 2 kind people.
After the first gentleman got off at Mulhouse, we talked with the 2nd gentleman and then did we only find out that we need our passport to get into and out of Switzerland. Switzerland did not join the EU. We then decided that we have to turn back, but the next station is Basel already. At that point, what time the train will get into Basel was already irrelevant, since we will immediately turn back and not go into Switzerland that day.
We got into Basel and to our surpise, there is no ticket office. We need to buy a ticket from Switzerland! There is no ticket stand on the France side. The kind gentleman talked with a conductor in the station and he said that it is very early, and thus, the immigration officer should not be there. We should "sneak" into Switzerland, buy our tickets and sneaked back out into France. So the kind gentleman told us to wait and he went first in Switzerland and came back out again and asked us to follow him.
This is the immigration door into Switzerland. It was too early for any immigration officers to be there. We bought our tickets from Basel to Colmar (A city between Basel and Strasbourg). And quickly entered back into French soil and took the next train to Colmar.
We reached Colmar station. We walked and came to downtown. It is a beautiful town. We stopped by a bread and pastry shop.
We had hot chocolate and 2 eclairs. They were good. Then we continue to shop around. There are many shops there and there are also a lot of tourist. English was almost heard everywhere around us. Some say they were from Australia. Others from England. Yet others from Japan. People in Colmar are pretty friend. We decided to have lunch at a restaurant called "Chez Hansi". This is definitely a restaurant that I would recommend.
We both ordered the set menu. I started off with a Quiche and my wife had the Foie Gras. I believe the Foie Gras was an excellent choice. It was extremely good. Hey, we are in French, who cares about Cholestrol at that time.
Next came the main dish. We ordered a steak (beef) and a chicken.
Following that delicious main course, we was asked to select our desert. We ordered a sorbert and also a famous Alsace desert called Kougelhopf (Some like to mousse with alcohol sprinkled around it).
What a wonderful lunch! We then walked around town some more to digest our wonderful meal. Below is a picture of a convenient store in Colmar. It is small, but the variety of goods sold is wide.
It was a wonderful afternoon stroll down the streets. Goods were sold everywhere and tourist were everywhere. I kind of wonder, Europe is currently in recession, but the activities that is happening here surely did not make it feel as though it was in recession.
This is just a glimpse of the street in downtown Colmar. We finally decided to go to the southern part of downtown to take a short boat trip. It will show us a little more about Colmar. The boat trip was short.
There was one disadvantage of the boat trip and that was that we needed to go under bridges. When we passed under the bridge, we saw a lot of spiders, and I mean big spiders. It was getting late but we were still full, so we decided to go back to Strasbourg and have our dinner there. But when we reached Strasbourg, all the restaurants that we wanted to go to were closed, so we decided to just eat in the hotel.
Coming up............ September 23rd..... Switzerland!! Stay Tuned!!!
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