Queen of Cuteness, Colmar Takes the Cake

COLMAR, FRANCE – June 10, 2006

Ah, Colmar! Another picturesque little medieval town that tugs at your heart with its can’t-help-itself charm, until it works a little soft spot in your memory. And you’ll remember it as a town that filled you with the warmth of small-town smiles, the sounds of genuine laughter, and a beauty so tangible, it managed to be spared from the destruction of World War II bombs because the Allies didn’t want to destroy a place so … well, charming.

A visit here would have been more complete had my mother been standing right alongside me; drinking in all the sights and sounds and smells. My mom and I have always been close; we both have a love for natural beauty in all its forms, and for places that just scream of old-world “cuteness.” Colmar fits the bill on the second count, and I only hope, Mom, that you and I can make it here together sometime. (That goes for so many places I’ve visited in Europe, but don’t worry, I’m keeping a running list!)

Half-timbered houses decked with filled-to-the-brim flowerboxes.... a quartet of accomplished strings musicians playing to a gathering audience in the shadowy bellows of a dome-topped stone building… a tanner’s quarter with tall, narrow buildings and strangely skewed rooftops where animal skins dried in the sun in days gone by… La Petite Venise with its meandering canals, canalside cafés with blooming umbrellas, and the occasional boat winding gently downstream (merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily)… these are the images of Colmar.

I munch on avocado and cheese sandwiches from my perch next to a lively street lined with restaurants, where I have a front-row view to the enormous cathedral rising majestically before me into the blue sky. Afterwards, I enter another holy house, a Gothic Dominican church, where, surrounded by stained glass and high vaulted ceilings, Martin Schongauer’s masterpiece, Virgin of the Rose Garden, rests in glory.
I stop at an ice cream stand and indulge myself with a two-scoop cone… and about go out of my mind when I taste the passion-fruit ice cream. It has to be the creamiest, fluffiest, most intensely exotic ice cream I have ever tasted. And leaving the charm of Colmar behind me for the gobs of giddy tourists to enjoy, I head back to the train station, content that I couldn’t have spent my day any better than here in Alsace territory, eastern France.
~Melanie