After spending every last Swiss Franc to our name, we hopped over the border and spent a few days in Colmar, France. Colmar is in the Alsace region, very close to the border with Germany. In fact, it has been part of Germany a time or two.
After a busy few weeks in Switzerland, our time in Colmar was a bit of “chill time”. Colmar had lots of things we love in a city – pretty buildings, the ability to walk everywhere, and, of course, crepes!
So – this blog post should be pretty short – just a bunch of pretty buildings.
But they were very pretty!
There is a small area of town called Little Venice (La Petite Venice), presumably named for the small river that runs through it. There was one family we saw on a boat through the river, but mostly the crowds were flooding the streets to get a view of the houses near the river. And no wonder…
I’m not exaggerating when I say we didn’t do anything in Colmar except walk around the city for three days (and eat crepes)!
sometimes we walked around AND ate crepes at the same time! And if you read my earlier post about Switzerland, you would recognize “keychain guy” in this picture!
However, the break was nice, and I would recommend going to Colmar and walking around if you ever get the chance.
While in the area, we also spend a few hours in the nearby village of Riquewihr. Like Colmar, the town was full of quaint, colorful houses. But, Colmar felt like real people lived there, going about their everyday lives among the quaint buildings (and crepes). In Riquewihr, it felt like the town was just there for the tourists.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of the crowds when we first arrived. A few buses full of tour groups had left by the time I took this picture.
There were American tourists everywhere. It was strange to hear so much “American” after a few months in Scotland. The tourists seem to be part of big tour groups, and I felt like that town was in a tour brochure stop that said “see an authentic French village in France’s Alsace region”. The population of Riquewihr is only 1,000 people. There had to be at least double that in tourists. I doubt there was a Riquewihrian in sight, if we exclude people working in the shops. 
That said, I can’t really blame Riquewihr for taking advantage of its adorable-ness by catering to tourists (hey – we were there, weren’t we?). It just wasn’t as good of an experience as some other places we’ve been.
One last thing I really liked seeing all over the Alsace region are the amazing colored tile roofs. They are unique to the region, and we saw some tile roofs like this in Dijon as well. (note: I feel like the plural of “roofs” should be “rooves” but I know that isn’t right, so I’m keeping “roofs”, but googling just to be sure).
PS – to save you the trouble of googling it yourself, I will share what I learned: “The plural rooves is uncommon and is usually considered incorrect. … Rooves as a plural of roof is dated, but not incorrect. The Oxford English Dictionary lists “rooves” as an alternate to roofs, one of several outdated spellings used in the UK, and in New England as late as the 19th century. ”
PPS – don’t ever read the comments on grammar websites – those people are brutal!
As much as we enjoyed spending time in Colmar, it was getting a little bit cold, so we packed up and headed south. Next stop, Avignon.
