Up to this point, when I have visited cities my friends and I have chosen to explore on our own. We go in with a basic plan, but we leave most of the details up in the air and make spontaneous decisions once we arrive in a new city and get a feel for the culture. This weekend, however, we took two day trips to Strasbourg, France and Rheinfalls, Switzerland, and we decided to go in with a well-researched plan.
We knew the tours to take and the places to visit and I learned a lot about the history, culture, and people of the two towns. First, on Friday we headed to Strasbourg, France which is a beautiful city in Elsass. We took a free city tour and our tour guide provided us with a ton of valuable information about the city.
Strasbourg, with a population of over ,, is the capital and largest city of the Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region in France. However, the town has not always been French.
In fact, in its history the region has switched between being a part of France and Germany four times since Therefore, the city has both German and French influences and represents the relatively new friendship between the two nations. Additionally, given our lack of knowledge of the French language, we found that German was much more widely understood than English. The city itself seemed to have several regions.
We started our day in Petite France which boasted beautiful canals and pristine houses. Originally, I thought that the area received its name for its quiet and calm beauty, but our tour guide told us differently. During the Napoleonic Wars, the area was home to a hospice housing soldiers injured during the war and brothels which generated many cases of Syphilis.
