Flat heat here, dead breeze. A frenchman asks me where Im going “Germany” I say in french. He grunts a bit and smiles, just points east. I follow his finger to Neuf Brisach. A conceptual military fortification built by Louis XIV built for mathematicians and battles, a web of triangles and deep tranches, 3 metre thick walls. Google Earth it.
I move on and at a roundabout a man in a car pulls over and, I assume, asks me where I’m going. Allemagne I declare. Germany’s quite close now so walking there is almost a normal thing to be doing. He grunts and points east. I follow his finger. Neuf Brisach is the border town with Germany. It is a 17th century creation of Louis XIV’s, an eccentric exapmple of a fortified town, a many pronged star constructed out of 30foot deep trenches and 3 metre thick walls. Walking into it felt like entering another world, I felt like a pilgrim nearing Rome, amazed that men could build such things.
Geometry that is beyond my capacity to name
I slept in the campsite here, arriving after office hours and leaving before them. Exiting town via the bakery at about 8am. By 10am I was sat in Germany outside a McDonalds opposite a Vineyard, long lines of traffic crawling either way. No border guards though, barely a border at all really, just a bridge from one side of the river to the other, one side in France, the other in Germany. I just walked in. Disappointing really, I was expecting a grilling from strict suspicious German border guards. And now the language change. I had been speaking half remembered, broken French for a month of so and now, in the space of a hundred yards I had to switch to German. I struggled with this, I really really struggled. And today was a long way. Into another city on the edge of the Black Forest.
