We again woke to rain & I set off with my umbrella up. I dressed a little warmer having been cold at times yesterday & wore my gloves.
We walked into the city, whilst I had a coffee, Richard went to locate the entrance to Le Cave de Vin at the hospital. After coffee we walked across to hospital & down some steps, not much signage so Richard did well to find it.
The cellars were built in 1395 as patients of the hospital frequently paid for treatment with land which was used for vineyards. In the 1700’s the hospitals patients were given two litres of wine a day. Nowadays select Alsatian wine makers can mature their wine in the cellar, about 150,000 bottles are produced by the cellar each year & the profits go towards the purchase of medical equipment.
The barrels in the cellar are huge & of course oak, no stainless steel vats in sight.
There’s a barrel that’s believed to be the oldest wine barrel in the world from 1472. The wine has been tasted three times:
1576- in honour of a delegation from Switzerland
1716- after the hospital was burned down by a fire
1944- when Strasbourg was liberated
So interesting.
Next stop was the Cathedral, actually the queue for a ticket to see the astronomical clock, the ticket office opened at 11.30am, but their was a separate queue for people with tickets, we weren’t sure how they’d got them!! As we’d seen the queue a previous day & didn’t think we could just join it at 11.30am we started to queue, there was another couple & as time went on more people joined.
At 11.30am the security guard opened a gate & then made an announcement in French, we understood bits & pieces, so after queuing for 30 mins we were in the Cathedral, we picked a spot at the back & could also see a screen where a film on the clock is screened at 12 noon, which was really good. The clock is amazing, dating from the renaissance period it was renovated by Jean-Baptiste Schwilgue from 1838 - 1842. Every 1/4 hour is marked by a figure striking a bell, from a child to an old man four different figurines rotate around. We saw all four. At 12.30pm every day the apostles parade takes place where all 12 apostles parade in front of Jesus, it was amazing.
After a look around the beautiful Cathedral we headed to the costume shop & I purchased a dress for Lynne’s 50th Birthday dinner. We stopped at a bakery, I had a pretzel which we’d seen everywhere & Richard a baguette, I’d also been on the lookout for an almond croissant, no luck with the almond but we did find a hazelnut one, which we had with a cup of tea after walking home.
Whilst writing the diary I heard beeping car horns & also sirens & then a police helicopter, we then heard chanting & whistles, yes the yellow vests had again walked past us, many more here than in Dijon last weekend, they were being followed by a large number of Gendarmes on foot but in riot gear & also in vans, something was set alight at the intersection down the road & then tyres were rolled onto the road just in front of our apartment block, next I think it was a bin was rolled into the road & set alight. Next tear gas was shot towards the protesters, they hung around moving very slowly & then stayed near the junction just up the road for a while. Amazing how many people stopped to take their photo near the burning bin. They eventually moved on & after a while the fire brigade arrived & extinguished both fires, lots of cars driving on the wrong side of the road through black smoke before this happened.

I spotted three more clouds of black smoke over the next hour so assume they were more fires lite by the protesters as the helicopter was in the same area. The street started to get busier again, next the street sweeper went along & then a couple of council trucks cleared up the debris the protesters had left all along the street & the street sweeper came back, all that’s left is black marks on the road. The news is reporting the protesters had planned on protesting at the European Parliament but they were stopped from getting close.
Richard headed out to the supermarket once the street had “returned to normal”, the 25th weekend of protests.