Dateline: Strasbourg, France. I suspect a French person looks at a map of Europe and sees a large France surrounded by small peripheral states. If you limit your view to Western Europe - the part that stayed outside the Soviet orbit during the Cold War - there is some justice to this view. France is geographically central to Western Europe, and Western Europe started the EU and nurtured it through the early years.
Strasbourg is an interesting town, site of a monument to French selfishness. The main headquarters of the European Union are in Brussels, Belgium – a good choice as Belgium is a small bilingual country that nobody will mistake for the power center of the continent. However, in order to get France to join the European Union, it was necessary to create a second EU administrative/legislative power center on French soil and it is here in Strasbourg. Ironically, Strasbourg is the capital of the department of Alsace, territory that has been German almost as much as it has been French.
Enough geopolitics, let us observe this corner of France and its people. You’ve heard the French love their dogs? This is no exaggeration, they take them everywhere. I don’t think I’ve seen a single cat, but hundreds of dogs – all sizes and shapes and all looking well-cared for and sleek. These are for the most part city dogs, apartment dwellers which take their masters for walks in the park or alongside the canal. Inevitably some places smell of dog, too, although it would appear most owners are picking up after Fifi.
Yesterday I was going to write that Europeans are a race of apartment dwellers, today I must modify that view. Today we drove through the wine country of Alsace and in the small villages most folks live in individual homes with steeply pitched roofs, stucco walls, and amazing flowers hanging from every window box. In the States farmers tend to live on their farms, in much of Europe they live in farming villages and commute out to their farms. This makes the farms look tidier but I wonder where the farmers stow their equipment when it is not in use?
This is pretty country, growing the grapes that make the famous white wines: Gewurtztraminer, Riesling, and the white Pinots. When you get out into the flatter land, the region grows thousands of acres of maize, what Americans call “corn.” Europeans tend to view maize as animal feed, but most corn grown in the States is fed to non-humans, too.
