The last time I wrote you from Haguenau. Seems like ages ago now. The last thing I wrote was about a very nice bike ride through a forest (mostly). That was to go to the pottery village of Soufflenheim, apparently famous in this Alsace region. I was there around lunch time and all the shops were closed. This was okay for me since the pottery was nice and typical for the region but not really my thing. The best bit of this trip was the forest and the tiny little deer I saw there. I made some other bike tours, but they were not as nice as the first one. I also took the train to visit Strasbourg. It is a rather big city but it was all about the historical center which was not that big, you could easily visit the places to visit in (less than) a day. Apart from the big cathedral where I missed something special to do with its clockwork, it was mostly about the colourful timbered houses for which not only Strasbourg but the whole region is famous. The colour comes from the painted walls and the abundance of flowers with which the houses and the city are decorated. And it had a small but decent Museum of Contemporary Art with a rooftop terrace where from where you had a nice view. It is also the city of the European Parliament by the way.
Some days here were a bit rainy and I felt I wanted something more to read so I went to the bookstore in Haguenau. Yes, big enough a city to have a bookstore. I choose two books from contemporary French writers. The first one I read was so beautiful, I could not stop reading it and finished it in a day. It is the kind of book you want to keep for a while and read again because it fills you with joy. ‘Le prince à la petite tasse’ by Émilie de Turckheim. A story about a young Afghan refugee who was taken in by a French family with two boys. It was very well written, and full of love for all human beings and a genuine desire to understand where people come from and how you can contribute to growth and happiness of another person. The second book was totally different but very interesting. It taught me all of today’s slang! It was the story of a young girl, not being sure if she was a girl or perhaps a boy, growing up in a community of free minds from various backgrounds, secluded from the ‘real world’. No internet either (being one of the reasons she came there was that her mother suffered from hypersensitivity to electro-magnetic waves). Too much of a story to tell in a nutshell but in the end it was also a story about the happiness of being allowed to be who you are and the respect for being different, or living a different life. All in all the city of Haguenau and the environment was not that interesting but I loved the camp site, and the bookstore.
The next stop was in Lièpvre, where I found another nice and green camp site, a village with a small river running through it and a few ‘Voies Vertes’ (bicycle lanes), so good for cycling! There was a young woman with a child on the camp site, and every time she walked or drove past me she said hello in a very friendly and warm way. Or she would wave at me as if we had known each other for years. It made me reflect on a question asked earlier: what is home for you, what makes a place feel like home? For me one of the things is if people wave at you, like they know you, and you matter to them so they say hello, how is your day? Even with people you have only known for five minutes. There were many pine trees at this camp site and a carpet of pine needles on the grass, which made me think of a lovely place in pine woods where I lived when I was a child, this also contributed to feeling at home. This village had an Auberge where I had a very tasty French lunch on Sunday.
