Easter break: Three-star dining and charming Freiburg

So, first my birthday present from Jules was a digital camera. This was "sent back" in what everyone seems to think was a) rude and b) foolish, since my current digital camera is not that great. But, in my defence, I already have a digital camera. It just seems wasteful to replace one that works perfectly fine, if a little slowly. The second birthday present idea was a January trip to Lisbon, which sounded great, but in the end we couldn't find something that didn't work out as horrendously expensive for a quick weekend break.

And then, as we were discussing options for the Easter weekend, it somehow came up that we should visit the Auberge de l'Ill in Alsace, and that this should be my birthday present. Jules had waxed lyrical about this place a few times - visiting with his grandfather, who loved to pop by on the way to business trips in Switzerland, meeting the late chef Paul Haeberlin there, who first earned the restaurant its third Michelin star in 1967 (amazingly, it has retained them ever since), and raving about the fantastic foie gras. So, half of me listening to that is like, "aw, what nice memories" and I gotta be honest, the other half is all

Ain't no three-star restaurants in New Zealand! But haters are only going to hate until they themselves get invited to said three-star restaurant, and then enthusiastically leap at the chance. So on Thursday morning, we drove down to Alsace from Luxembourg, through pouring rain and roadworks the entire way, arriving about half an hour late but still lucky enough to be given the best table in the house, right in front of a bay window looking over the river and restaurant garden.

Panorama from our table

It was all quite fancy and I was a bit nervous - Jules, of course, is more at ease and generally helps me out, although I got quite flustered with the sommelier because I always feel like a dolt for not drinking white wine even if I have fish. The service, I must say, was impeccable. I spent quite a long time in the bathroom between courses - they had Japanese-style toilets which I had to play with (heated seats - bit weird, really - buttons that made the seat and the lid go up and down, and a bidet function that I was too scared to experiment with) and pictures of some of the famous guests in the corridor on the way to the loos. Queen Elizabeth and her Mum have eaten there, along with various European royals and statesmen, and French celebrities like Johnny Hallyday and Yannick Noah etc. And now me! But anyway, as I came back into the dining room I overheard a sotto voce "elle est là" from someone, and our meals arrived about 30 seconds later, so I'd probably been stressing the chef out with my extended ablutions.

Entrée - salmon soufflé, quite different from what I imagined, with basically a whole salmon steak in there

Pigeon stuffed with incredibly rich foie gras - I'm sorry my photo didn't capture how crazy long the pigeon leg was!

My favourite course, of course, an assortment of chocolate icecream, mousse, cake etc. presented so beautifully (I'd love to own that plate too)

Happy Jules has a coffee after our feast

One of the waiters took our photo in the garden (sheltering from the drizzle, that is)

Our ultimate holiday destination was the Bodensee/Lake Constance, but we stayed in nearby Freiburg, Germany, on Thursday night since our lunch took several hours and we had already driven all the way down to Alsace that day. Even though it rained torrentially and even hailed on our way in to the city (it cleared up later), I fell for Freiburg straight away. I can't put my finger on it, but it just seemed like one of those places that would be great to live in. The streets were super-cute and charming, it seemed to have some life to it without being too busy, the lady we asked for directions was probably the friendliest German I've ever encountered, and we grabbed provisions for a hotel-room picnic dinner in an awesome supermarket. (Seriously, I love exploring supermarkets in foreign countries, who's with me?)

Central Freiburg

Awesome building

Most of the streets in the centre were covered with intricate cobblestone designs. The streets also featured the water drains you can see on the right - although many were larger than this one and a bit of a hazard to be honest!

More cobblestone art - in front of a knife shop, appropriately enough (what happens if they close down though? Just a sinister knife left on the pavement for no reason. "Oh yeah, come visit my pet store, I totally don't stab any of the bunnies, ever.")

It was forecast to rain solidly for our whole trip, so it was a lovely surprise that Good Friday was actually a beautiful day. We woke up in Freibourg and had brunch at Café Extrablatt, a chain we also ate at in Aachen, which does a good-value buffet brunch in a trendy atmosphere (and this one is right next to the river, which is nice). It seems to be a popular hangout with students, probably due to the all-you-can-eat factor - we stuffed in so much breakfast food that we skipped lunch. The waiter even asked if we were Freiburg students, which made me feel like a young dickelchen (Luxembourgish for a young chick, as in both the poultry and female versions).

We then took the opportunity to work off breakfast with a gruelling trek up the 116-m spire of the Munster, some of it on a very narrow spiral staircase, in order to see the beautiful sunlit view of Freiburg from the top. It was tough, but worth it!

Freiburg Munster

Beautiful, bright statues in the portico

View over the towers of the (?) nave

Me and Jules at the top

Looking down at the square below

Peeping through the stonework

Amongst other things, you can see the lovely red Merchants' Hall in the foreground

The Munsterplatz from ground level

I'm sorry we didn't get more time to explore Freiburg's charms, but it was such a lovely day (with rain forecast again the next day) that we were eager to move on through the Black Forest to Lake Constance while the weather held... But that will have to wait for another post!

The Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg

Last but not least on our Alsatian weekend (I always feel weird referring to things as "Alsatian", by the way), we called in to the Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg, as recommended by one of Jules's colleagues. We had both taken a quick look at the website, but it failed to really sell what, for us, was the most spectacular part of the château: the amazing, incredible, superlative view.

The clues were there: we noticed an unusually zig-zaggy road leading to the château when we looked at the route, and it has "haut" right there in the name, but I don't remember seeing any photos of the view online. The road snakes up through woodlands to an elevation of 757 metres, where you are treated with probably the best view I've ever seen from a château, looking across the Alsatian plains to the Black Forest and the Vosges mountains. If you ever get the chance, even if you don't go inside the castle, trust me that you should drive up and look at the view, especially if you're lucky enough to have perfect weather as we did.

The castle itself was old, but fell into ruins and was restored under Kaiser Wilhelm II when Alsace was occupied by the Germans. I'm not a big fan of heavily-restored sites and was mostly interested in getting up to the top of the castle in the hope of more spectacular views. So I maybe rushed us through a little too quick (I was thinking we would go down the same way we came up, but we didn't really). Still, definitely worth the visit.

Kinda gaudy, but impressive

The imperial eagle on the ceiling

Jules (actually genuinely smiling) and the dragon

Me and that view

View from the turrets

Panoramic view from the castle

Back on the ground for some more vineyard shots on the drive home

So, we really had a lovely weekend. I think we used our time wisely between Colmar and the surrounding region. I wouldn't have thought of visiting anywhere outside Colmar, but I'm so glad we did because we got to see the most amazing landscapes and had a really great, chilled-out time. As you may know, the word "lucky" irritates me at times, but this weekend I definitely was feeling like one very lucky girl.

On the route du vin

We didn't really have much of a plan for Sunday. Jules had been recommended a castle and a couple of scenic towns to visit in the region, but I wanted to wait and see Colmar first on the Saturday before deciding how to allocate our time for the next day. We had a bit of free time on Saturday morning, and decided to take one quick last look around Colmar on Sunday morning before going to Riquewihr, lunching in Ribeauvillé, visiting the Haut-Koenigsbourg castle in the afternoon and taking a leisurely drive back to Metz via the Alsatian Route du Vin. I mean, does that not sound like a nice day out?

I had heard of people driving or cycling the Route du Vin before and sort of thought "I've seen vineyards, I don't drink white wine, that's not for me". Well, I was wrong. (Hold the front page.) The Route du Vin is not only for me, I imagine it's for everyone. It's almost impossibly picturesque. I said to Jules at one point that the French government would probably have to pay people to plant vineyards even if they weren't making any wine (and thanks to subsidies, they probably effectively do).

Much as I adore the Loire Valley (and their wines win hands down, as far as I'm concerned), the vineyards there, while lovely, lose to the gorgeously terraced vineyards in Alsace. Touraine is just too flat, by and large, while the rolling hills of Alsace offer charming vistas at every turn. In the end, I think just driving along in the car was my favourite part of the weekend, even though we didn't stop off and sample any oenological delights.

View from the highway driving to Colmar

So many cute little villages

We did stop, however, in Riquewihr, a small and very touristy town. When I mentioned this to my colleagues at work, they pointed out that there had actually been a big fire (which killed someone and destroyed four old houses) there on New Year's Day this year. They've evidently done a good job of cleaning up, as I didn't see any signs of it (according to Jules, there was a house under construction, but I don't remember seeing it). Again, Riquewihr is really pretty, but also very, very touristy. I think we had thought we were getting off the beaten track and away from the tourists a bit. Ha! I think there were even more than in Colmar.

Driving in to Riquewihr

The main drag in Riquewihr

After Riquewihr, it was just a 10-minute drive to Ribeauvillé, where we had lunch at the Cheval Blanc, as recommended in the Michelin guide. Ribeauvillé was still pretty, but less overtly so than Riquewihr, and less crowded. Riquewihr was nice to see, but I think we were both glad to be having lunch in a less febrile atmosphere. We parked more than a kilometre away from the restaurant (before checking where it was), which gave us the chance to walk the whole way through the town to the "quartier pittoresque" which was indeed picturesque, but a bit quieter than further up the main street. We spent around two hours dining on the sunny terrace, sipping a surprisingly nice and not too sweet crémant and geranium-syrup apéritif before tucking in to a very nice dish of chicken leg and spätzle (soooo good) for me and baeckoffe for Jules. I definitely wanted more Alsatian food while we were here, but this was more refined (and better!) than I've had elsewhere. After the main, we were both fairly stuffed, but eventually made room for some sorbet - the lemon was to die for.

Jules in Ribeauvillé

A fiddler ("pfiffer"), the symbol of Ribeauvillé

And the symbol of Alsace - a real live stork!

It was so cool seeing this guy. We amused ourselves imagining how he must just think he's the boss with his awesome nest on top of a medieval tower

We stopped by the side of the road to take this gorgeous vineyard panorama - to die for

A very, very agreeable way to spend a day - next up, the Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg.

Charmante Colmar

I'm soon to be blogging atcha from sunny Majorca (lucky me), but thanks to the wonders of computer "here's one I prepared earlier" trickery, I'll be able to bring you dispatches from our weekend in Alsace without lifting a finger. Other than the typing fingers I'm lifting right now, obviously.

I liked Strasbourg a lot when I visited in the midst of my flatmate crisis all the way back in July 2011,
but hadn't given a lot of thought to Alsace since, even though I now live quite close by. But then I noticed Colmar cropping up on a lot of those Buzzfeed-style lists of "most charming towns" or "places to see before you die", so when I saw that the forecast for last weekend was hot and sunny, I put that together with the fact that it was one of my last free weekends before moving further away (Colmar is around a 2.5 hour drive from Metz, so around 5 hours from Brussels) and suggested a spontaneous overnight trip to Jules. He just got a new car and didn't need much persuading to take it for an extended spin (we got to make full use of the electronic sun roof), so earlyish on Saturday morning we hit the road, arriving at our hotel around 11.30 am.

I had two main goals: see the Issenheim Altarpiece, and wander around the streets taking photos of all the picturesque half-timbered buildings I'd seen online. The first goal was facilitated by the fact that it was "Museum Night" when we visited, meaning that all the museums had special late openings (for free!), so that meant that we had the whole afternoon to stroll about the city. Minus the two hours we spent sitting at a café in the sunshine, of course.

The first impression was that Colmar is, indeed, amazingly lovely and charming. Rows of brightly-painted half-timbered houses, narrow cobblestone streets, picturesque canals, ivy- or rose-covered façades: it's got it all. Cue (by the way, has anyone else noticed "que" suddenly cropping up everywhere for "cue"? Irritating) much frenzied snapping and posing in an attempt to capture the perfect shot without a million old people in the background. (Nothing against old people, but there were a hell of a lot of them cluttering up every picturesque landscape and taking a long time to move out of shot.)

My sunglasses broke :( So mission #1 was finding an H&M for some cheap replacements, but not before a couple of squinty photo opps

Statue in front of the Bertholdi museum - a native of Colmar who designed the Statue of Liberty

So many outfits

Obviously, it was amazingly cute. I have literally dozens more photos that I could put up showing the city's charms. As time went on though, we were both reflecting on whether it was too cute, too chocolate-box. It's tedious to go somewhere as a tourist and then complain that it's touristy (fair game when you live there though, as long as you're not too obnoxious about it). Although I try to pride myself on not being a "bad" tourist (talking too loudly, stopping dead in the middle of the street, wearing a backpack on a crowded train etc.), god forbid I turn into one of those pretentious wankers who like to drone on about being a "traveller, not a tourist, maaaan". I think Colmar is partly saved by the fact that everything doesn't look brand spanking new - the paint is bright, but you can tell it hasn't all been uniformly slapped on in the last year or whatever. But although it is genuinely, really really pretty and I enjoyed seeing it, it maybe lacks a bit of soul.

The plan for the evening was to grab an early dinner and then go to the museum afterwards. However, every restaurant we had scoped out online was either full or didn't appeal in person. So we decided to quickly nip in to the Dominican church - which is currently housing the Issenheim altarpiece and a few other works while its usual home, the Unterlinden Museum, is being renovated - before eating. It was actually really nice seeing these works in an ecclesiastical setting, and thanks to the free entry, the church had a lively buzz to it which you wouldn't necessarily usually associate with a museum or church.

At first, I thought just the big crucifixion scene below was the altarpiece, but it turns out that it was a very elaborate multi-part piece with folding doors over a carved wooden centre (I took a photo of a helpful model below). I didn't fall in love with it, but I think I definitely appreciated it more once I realised the scope of the work.

The altarpiece (painted panels on the left and wooden carving on the right) in the Dominican church

The altarpiece's central scene

A very green, very dead Jesus being laid in the tomb

Jesus had the grossest feet I've ever seen

Seriously.

Another set of wings of the altarpiece

Close-up of monsters on the altarpiece

A model showing how the altarpiece was put together

Another elaborate altarpiece by a different artist (there's like 8 different panels to it as well). I actually liked the vivid colours of this one better than the Issenheim altarpiece

After checking out the church, the idea was to have a quick dinner before taking a quick look at the rest of the collection in the Unterlinden Museum (which closed at 10 pm). We just decided to sit at the nearest place, which was a mistake. We had to sit outside because it was full inside, which was okay at first but got progressively colder (and neither of us had brought a jacket out), which wouldn't have been too bad except the service was soooo slow. I was feeling sick (too much bubbles of the winey variety in the bath methinks), we were freezing, and the food was fine but not good enough to make up for the service. We had taken a fixed menu and wanted to abandon before the cheese course (which took so long to come that I wondered whether they were actually making some elaborate cheese-based confection - nope, it was just a bit of munster on a plate) except that we asked for the bill several times (when we could flag down a waiter, which wasn't often) and they didn't bring it. Instead of a tip (which are included anyway in the bill in France, before anyone gets upset), I wrote "Slow service" and a frowny face on the receipt. So thanks Restaurant Pfeffel for making us miss out on going to the museum. We should have left earlier, if you have to say "I'm going to the loo, if they haven't taken our order by the time I get back, we're leaving", you should probably just leave. Well, at least we managed to see the jewels in the Unterlinden collection before dinner...