In praise of benign neglect - where France looks more German than Germany

Western Europe spans one (1) time zone. The fact that the UK is holding on to GMT is merely symbolic and unrelated to geography.

Getting into the car or boarding the train in the morning for a trip to a neighboring country is no big deal. Breakfast in Paris is optional.

Within the Schengen accord countries (the Europeans have a habit of naming a treaty after the city where it was signed), border controls were abolished.

In theory, that is. In practice, you may arrive at the border by car and be forced to go from three lanes of traffic to one because a police vehicle with its flashies is creating a bottleneck at the slowly decaying checkpoint.

The police vehicle may well be empty.

Just some government demonstrating that they can. The border patrol equivalent of the middle finger.

Anyway, we got into France without fuss and meandered along the departmental roads of the Alsace region along the Rhine river. After carefully traversing some small towns with very German names, free parking beckoned, and we took a stroll along main street.

Alsace was hotly disputed between France and Germany for a while and changed hands once again at the end of the Second World War, but the place names indicate a much closer affinity to the Alemannic tribal areas of Switzerland, Germany and France than to the romance French culture.

To our surprise, many of the small towns in Eastern France look so much more German than the vast majority of towns in what was West Germany.

This photo illustrates our point:

This could be Germany or Switzerland, were it not for the drab colored house on the far right, which has not seen any remodeling for many decades. The other item that indicates France: metal gates and metal or concrete fences.

Benign neglect, said the architect.

Not having lots of money for several decades helps save historic buildings. It gives a new generation enough time to appreciate their heritage. You see the same phenomenon in East Germany, although more buildings were lost there once the bulldozers from the rich West rolled in.