living on the Rhine
I’ve heard so much about the Rhine, and the Alsace and Lorraine regions. Seeing them in person is so weird, and I hardly realized it the first day we moved here.
The Rhine River’s name means “raging flow”, but it’s quite still where we’re at. We’re just a twenty minute walk away from Germany, and I can hardly believe I can just walk along a bridge to get to another country. It’s also been called the “heroic Rhine”, because of the beautiful scenery accompanying it, along with castle-lined cliffs.
Alsace-Lorraine, as an entity, was created in 1871 by the German Empire. It had been gradually become part of France when Metz ceded to the Kingdom of France, and when the Republic of Mulhouse joined the French Republic.
But the Alsace-Lorraine I know from history concerns World War I, when the French invaded Alsace-Lorraine and they won it back in the Treaty of Versailles. During the reign of Nazi Germany, the region was annexed in 1940, but again, France took it back at the end of WWII.
Because of this territorial tug-of-war, the region swarms with cultural diversity; many of its inhabitants speak both languages, and have also come up with a cross-bred dialect of their own.
I’m glad to be out of the city.
