Strasbourg - Capital of Christmas

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Strasbourg has lived up to all our expectations. It calls itself the capital of christmas, and they really go all out for it here. All the streets are decorated differently and in themed, and the markets have been wonderful. Our hotel seemed to be ages away from everything, but when it came to actually walking into town in the morning turns out everything is very compact; it only took us about 15 minutes to walk into town (and that was with mum stopping to ooh and ahh every 2 minutes). There are 3 main christmas markets, one we ended up getting a whole lot of christmas lights at, they had rows of them, another one had the most awesome food and was set right outside the cathedral (which is immense), and the other one is mostly clothes (which we are going back to, cos most of them are open til the 31st). We even managed to find a ridiculous christmas hat for each of us, which had been our mission for the day. After spending the day in the markets, we then relaxed at the hotel for a few hours before heading back into town for midnight mass at the cathedral. We had to get there early to ensure that we got a seat, the church doors opened at 11pm and there were already people lining up at 10.30pm. The service went from 11:30pm til 1.30am, and we not only had the magnificent organ playing and a choir, but a small orchestra as well, which was lovely. The traditional carols were mixed in with some Mozart and organ compositions; and the service was in a mixture of french and german (as both are spoken here), with the occasional bit of latin thrown in. There were tourists galore, as well as a lot of locals, and the seats were all taken and people were filling the aisles at the side of the church as well. However i am not sure how many people were there for the religion, for a lot of them it seemed to just be an excuse to be seen parading around in their huge fur coats. But it was all a great experience, and my first catholic mass in a foreign language, so it was interesting. We even had an archbishop or something conducting the mass, he was very big and important and everyone was taking photos of him as he left the church. We were too tired for the morrison tradition of opening xmas pressies after midnight church though when we got back to the hotel around 2am, and fell into bed leaving that for the morning.

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