Living museum

This place, the Ecomusee, is a 'live' museum that brings together various features of the Alsatian culture over the centuries in one place (of course, you could simply take the 'route des vins' through our villages and get the same...). We decided to go on a grey and reeeeally cold day and were pleasantly surprised.  This house, a farm, dates back to 1529.

An added bonus was that most of the exhibits focused on what life was like in Alsace in the first World War (during which my grand parents were kids): sobering... Most of our war monuments only say: "to our dead" (instead of "died for France" as is common for monuments for warriors) because there were so many casualties among the civilian population. One exhibit talked about food, specifically shortages, and I recall my grand parents talking about that. Fats and meats were the first to go after just a few weeks into the war; potatoes were a main staple - until they too became too scarce; then grass, nettles, even stuff like tree bark, leather, zinc, ashes, and other available materials were put in soups -- often at the risk and peril of the eaters...


Just yesterday, in our daily walkabout, we saw a memorial near my mom's place that was put up for the 17,000 Alsatians who were forcefully conscripted in the German army in WW2, sent to the Russian front, where, when they escaped or got caught, they ended up in Russian forced labor camps where they died of starvation... Sobering reminders...