As soon as we got there we sat down for a two hour lunch at a fancy and fun Art Nouveau restaurant--this is apparently What You Have to Do when you go to Nancy, in order to appreciate both some regional dishes of Nancy and the history of Art Nouveau, which has scrawled its leafy elongated lines all over the city. The restaurant had a high ceiling with garish gold flowers branching across the white plaster, and the windows were all stained glass and metal curls. Our end of the table (Tara, myself, and three enjoyably argumentative boys) decided to take a chance and order "le Douceur du Roi Stanislas" for dessert. We were encouraged to this chance both by the glass(es) of lovely white wine we'd had and the excellent dead birds we'd been served. I was imagining a kind of cake, Tara was hoping for a sort of mousse, and the boys, lacking imagination, said they just hoped it would taste good. We were all wrong.
The waiters (wearing slim suits and shiny shoes) slipped into the room with trays and a cloud of sharp alcoholic stink. They set before us big white bowls containing a kind of bready thing (crusty on the outside, soft on the inside and shaped like a mushroom) which was accompanied by an artistic cushion of creamy white fluff and was bathing in a lake of liquid (most of which it had already absorbed). The liquid explained the stink: our boys debated whether it was rum or gin, but Tara and I agreed that it just smelled like nail polish remover. We took some tentative bites only to conclude that it also tasted like nail polish remover; the boys finished most of theirs, and I recovered my taste buds with un petit cafe creme. Tara and are willing to make this charming dessert for our friends back home--all you need is to deep-fry a stale muffin and put it in a bowl with a cup of rubbing alcohol and a dollop of Cool Whip!
Then Alex took us for a short walk. (It was going to be a longer walk, but he thought we'd like to return to Strasbourg without wind burn or frostbite.)
This is Place Stanislas, named after the Polish fellow who became king of the region after many intrigues involving fathers-in-law, daughters, nieces, and hunting lodges. He loved food, and actually invented the dessert which we attempted to eat.
We enjoyed seeing buildings which were neither brown nor gray, as most are in Strasbourg.
One of the old gates in medievalish Nancy--the motto of the region is "Ce qui se frotte se pique" (no dirty jokes Diana! I already made them all hehe) which means "If you brush up against me you'll get poked", and their symbol is the thistle, which you can see here. And if you're wondering why there's a cross of Jerusalem--well, it's a long boring story, you can look it up yourself on Wikipedia.
Alex's second-youngest son Oscar is maybe not so fascinated by the history of the region . . .
. . . so instead he sits on his dad's shoulders and is distracted by singing us adorable French songs he learned in school.
And then we went to an Art Nouveau museum!! Our tour guide unfortunately was talented enough to pick the ugliest pieces in each room to lecture on, so I just listening with one ear and did lots of drawings until I was artnouveau'd out. (I'll hopefully be able to post them soon, once I find a scanner.)
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