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Strasbourg
Friday, November 7 2025
location: Cabin 102, MS Grace, port off the Rhine River, Strasbourg, France
This morning after breakfast, Gretchen and borrowed bikes from the ship and rode them into the heart of historic Strasbourg, a city that has changed hands several times between Germany and France but has been French since the end of World War II. Temperatures were in the low 40s Fahrenheit this morning, which is cold for bike riding. We bundled up with multiple layers before setting out, but, unlike Gretchen, I had no gloves. So to keep my hands as warm as possible, I rode one-handed with a balled fist on a handlebar while keeping the other hand in my pocket like Alanis Morissette. Gretchen was doing the navigation but had no way to keep track of her phone as we rode, so she'd have to stop periodically and see if we were on route. But we kept being off-route, wildly overshooting intersections somehow, even though it looked on the map like we needed to have done what we did. Once she paid closer attention to her phone, we got back on track, but we burned up at least a half hour being lost on the way into Strasbourg.
At some point, when the architecture started getting pretty (there's a lot of half-timbered structures) we parked the bikes and started walking. As we did so, I saw gothic structure looming over the side of the narrow street we were on, and when that street opened up and I could see what it was, I was astounded by how intricate it was. The structure was the Strasbourg Notre-Dame Cathedral, and it was a fractal explosion of high-gothic executed in red sandstone. It also features an incredibly tall spire, and the cathedral was the tallest building in the world for 227 years ending in 1874. Today was a foggy one and the spire looked even more imposing because it vanished into the clouds. I kept marveling at the details, which in some cases consisted of mesh of fine stonework set a few inches out in front of the load-bearing stone of the cathedral. Gretchen remarked at how wacky some of the carvings were, which, over the door, featured numerous angelic figures standing on smaller downtrodden creatures they were poking with spears. What the fuck was wrong with these people?
We had the misfortune of wanting to enter the cathedral just as a large group of high school students were trying to get in. Security was pretty lax and Gretchen and I were waved through, though I'd seen the security guy telling a gentleman to take off his hat, so I'd removed the knit cap keeping my head warm (schwag we'd gotten with the cruise) so as to project suitable reverence. Inside, the cathedral was less fancy than I expected, though it's possible that much of the fanciness was stripped away or painted over during the Reformation. There was, however, one thing in the cathedral that caught my fancy: a huge clock featuring a circular (and reasonably accurate) map of the Earth's northern hemisphere to automatically keep track of some sort of events, probably those of a religious nature. But the cathredal dates to a time when religion and science were more intwined, so it might've had a mostly secular purpose. In any case, it resembled the clocks I used to fantasize about building as a kid, ones that would contain a real globe rotating correctly into night. (Of course, these days, such clocks would be fairly easy to create as apps, but we live in a golden age of computer wizardry.)
After seeing that amazing cathedral, we continued a considerably less impressive church, the Église Saint-Thomas, that turned out to be Protestant. The only interesting things in there were related to organs. They had a very old one whose keys were the color-opposite of what we think of when we think of a piano keyboard, and those keys had been played by Mozart. While we were there, someone started playing the bigger, newer organ, and that felt special.
From there, Gretchen somehow guided us to a part of Strasbourg that where canals (some with complex lock mechanisms) replaced some of the streets, and it all looked like a post card because the buildings were mostly in the half-timber style that suggests Shakespeare had stayed in them. In one place, the "canal" was more of a raging river, which seemed out of place with all the old buildings so pressed up against it.
We had an easier time making it back to the boat than we'd had leaving it. At lunch I tried the risotto, which a chef prepared right in front of me, and it was very good. But then I tried a penne dish and it was the first culinary disappointment of the cruise. (Penne is, of course, the worst shape of pasta, though I am not sure why.)
I ended up sleeping for hours this afternoon, possibly because my body needed to restore itself after biking in the cold fog.
This evening Gretchen didn't like what she saw on the menu for the big restaurant. So she arranged for us to eat with Kelly and Brian and the young Swiss couple ("the Swissies," as she'd begun to call them) in Arthur's, the small causal restaurant in the back of the boat on the third floor. We all met up there and those of us who drink (Brian, the Swissies, and me) all ordered beer. But somehow I made the mistake of ordering a beer that turned out to be a shandy, that is, an unremarkable lager adulterated with syrup (like had happened at Tibits back in Basel). The mistake I was making was ordering a random unknown beer off the menu and thinking it would be fine. You just can't do that in this part of Europe. Another mistake I made was ordering the chili instead of one of the two vegan burger options. I didn't want the burgers because they came with sweet potato fries, a form of fries for which I have absolutely no patience. The chili was an couple spoonfuls of beans in a matrix of too much tomato, and was as bland as porridge. I ended up also eating half of Gretchen's veggie burger (the option that was not a faux-meat burger) and it was a bit mushy. Also, the service in Arthur's was very slow, so we sat there for a very long time between courses. Making matters worse, I wasn't much enjoying the conversation. When were finally waiting forever for the dessert that I didn't want, I mentioned something about how miserable it was to Gretchen, and she said I could go. Often I feel obligated to stay in these situations but it turns out that I often don't have to. With Gretchen signed off on me leaving, I bid the others adieu and headed back to the room.
Earlier this afternoon Gretchen and I had put on our bathrobes and headed up to the top of the boat to use the hot tub only to find others in their bathrobes coming down from it, saying it was way too hot. But by this evening it seemed like maybe it would've cooled down. So I put on my bathrobe and headed up. I found it to be the perfect temperature, and I sat there for awhile by myself enjoying being sandwiched between the hot water and the cold evening air. At some point there was a belch of diesel smoke and the ship started to move. I was soon joined by a couple from the Toldedo, Ohio area. He was some sort of software development manager and she'd just retired. I said that I was probably retired too, as I'd just been fired from my job as a software developer. We then discussed how artificial intelligence might be affecting the software development job market. I used to be pretty glum about the future for humans there, but my experience with ChatGPT and seeing the brick wall it seems to have run into has made me more bullish on the prospects for human software developers, especially senior ones. Especially now that all the junior ones have been replaced by AI and thus the supply of senior developers has been cut off. (These feeling have also led me to tell our investment guy to sell all our AI-related stock positions.)
The Strasbourg cathedral as we approached it from the northeast. Click to enlarge.
Buildings in the square in front of the Strasbourg cathedral. Click to enlarge.
The entrance to the Strasbourg cathedral. Click to enlarge.
A fish-eye view of the entrance to the Strasbourg cathedral. Click to enlarge.
It turns out the humanoids with the arrows are the virtues and the critters they are stabbing are the vices. Click to enlarge.
The big crazy clock in the Strasbourg cathedral. Click to enlarge.
Half-timbered buildings in the ye olde part of Strasbourg. Click to enlarge.
A building with visible lean in Strasbourg. Click to enlarge.
Water raging past Gretchen in one of the Strasbourg canals. Click to enlarge.
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