2024 Christmas Markets Rhine River Cruise - Day 5 - Strasbourg, Germany

13 December 2024

According to our tour guide, Strasbourg has changed hands between France and Germany several times in the last 100 years. There are more French speaking areas of the city and more German speaking ones. I suspect most residents are bi-lingual, at least.

We arrived at Strasbourg in the morning, and our walking tour of the city started mid-morning. While we walked through some Christmas Market locations, most of the stalls didn't open until after 11:00. Many still weren't open by 11:30 and we had to catch the bus back to the boat's location at 12:30. So, Christmas Markets weren't a big part of our stop in Strasbourg.

One thing we remember and liked about Strasbourg was the bakeries. There were quite a few as we wound our way through the city and the one below caught our eye so we circled back to it when we were given some free time between the walking tour and our departure.

There was another Christmas Market with some stalls open in an older part of town that used to be a lower-rent district. It was a place where hide tanning and treatment was done, so a few hundred years ago, it was a pretty smelly place to be. Now it was nice and clean, but note the moss covered roofs.

We stopped at Lafayette Department store. Galina likes to window shop and look for interesting things at the different famous department stores when we hit a new port if she can.

We missed the walk back to the bus and had to rush to find out where to catch the bus back! I'm not happy that I didn't think to capture some photo's or video of our harried run to catch the bus. 😦 It was like one of those reality show moments that always seem made up for some drama, but it was real!

We thought the tour guide said to meet back at 12:15, and thought we were a minute or two early, but they had said 12:10. We panicked when, after a few minutes of searching, we figured out our mistake.

We figured out, when we tried to call our tour guide, neither one of our phones worked in Strasbourg! We saw another tour guide and asked if she might know where we could catch our bus, and she said "Oh yes, all the busses go to the same spot. Just follow the stream of tours heading away from the Christmas Market."

We had to hurry, because we had no idea where our boat was either. We would have had a very hard time catching them and would probably have missed a night on the boat and have had to catch it in the next city.

Thankfully, they hadn't left yet, and were actively looking for us. Whew!

I'm kind of burying the lead in this article, but no supporting photo's or video, it may not be as interesting as the things shown before.