On playing in the woods and walking on bridges

Before my Grandfather died, my mum had always wanted to go back to Brittany one day. She lives in Alsace, where I grew up. Just recently, she realised that she could not give up her job, and that in all likelihood she would remain in Alsace for a while.

We live right on the border to Germany. When I was a kid we'd go to Karlsruhe, the next big city, to do some shopping. We also knew the villages immediately across the border for their ice-cream parlours and their French-German gymnastics classes, but we'd never explored them in much depth. The area is quite beautiful, with lots and lots of artificial lakes. So today, I was spying on Google Earth to see if I could find a good waterfront pub on the other side. I already know the ones on the French side and I get bored of them.

Google Earth sometimes has random photos, and I recognised pretty much everything. I clicked on one. It was a picture of the uneven terrain right in the forest. I always loved these uneven terrains as a kid. They were fun to play around. On Easter morning, several families would join together for a walk. The parents had been hiding tons of Easter eggs the day before and designed some "challenges" for the kids. Once they had made some floating boats out of styrofoam. These were loaded with the most desirable chocolate eggs on them and we had to fish them out with a hook.

So I clicked on one photo, and up popped that uneven terrain, it's so typical of where I'm from. I never asked where it came from. As we all know, nature is full of oddities. Until the title of the photo alerted me to the fact that these were war trenches. The kind you hear about in WW1 movies. To me they only looked like childhood challenges as in "can you jump over that hole?" Or like holes filled with water from which to recover little boats with chocolate eggs on them.

Back in 2003 I was in Strasbourg on November 11th. Since it's a national holiday in France everything was closed. I had meant to get my teeth checked for a while, so I thought: hell, I'll just pop over to Germany. I walked. I crossed the Rhine on the pedestrian bridge. Right in the middle of the bridge the weirdness of the situation dawned on me: "You are crossing the Rhine on foot to get your teeth checked in Germany, on November the 11th". I stood there, right in the middle of the Rhine. I didn't know whether it was incredibly sad or incredibly joyful. I settled for joyful and I held back my tears. The dentist checked my teeth -no problem there-, I got to the shop to get some German brand products which I like, and I walked right back.

If you'd like to see the photos I'm talking about look for Neuburg am Rhein on Google Earth and then venture into the forest on the top left corner for the pics. You can see the pedestrian bridge in Strasbourg here.