Yesterday, an old friend came to visit me and she stayed the night in my appartment. Today, because neither of us had any plans, we decided to go to France for the day, to the Alsace.
It really does not take very long for us to get to the Alsace. Quite honestly, I don't think it even takes 20 minutes. And we can get to the famous pottery villages of the Alsace in about 35 minutes.
We had barely reached the Rhine, which is the divider between France and Germany, when the Difference that is France started to become apparent. At one junction, a makeshift traffic light hung from a similar makeshift and rather rusty traffic pole and my friend said, "Oh, it looks like we are in France already, judging by that primitive apparatus".
There is no doubt about it, France is a Very Different Place. Many things do not seem to work so well and if they do, they often seem to be on their last legs. However, everything looks beautiful and romantic, even when it is falling to bits. And it definitely looks French. Even in the (multiple) cafés and restaurants we visited (at least 3, yes we were a lazy, not to mention greedy pair!) the waitresses and other staff were instantly recognizable as French.
In one pottery, we started off by speaking French to the owner, but he obviously heard our accents and so replied in English. We ended up speaking German to each other as it turned out that was the language we could all converse in best. And he spent at least half an hour giving us a very interesting history of the Alsace, with the help of historical art books on the region, which was very kind of him and also in a way very French.
It is strange how you sometimes only need to travel a very little way to experience a completely different culture. I think the only possible explanation is one I learned at University, when I was studying politics and social institutions - a country always looks to its central place of administration for its direction, and this influences every part of its daily life. So that even at the country's borders, life is essentially oriented to that which radiates from the center.
This is why the Alsace in France is French, and so different from Germany (with the exception of some remnants of the language from the times when the Alsace was occupied by Germany), while on the other side of the Rhine, the influence from France is negligible, with the exception of some German dialect words that are French spoken with a German accent.
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