Today we went to Metz, France for the Christmas market there. When we went to Paris we took the train from Metz so we had been there before but we hadn't checked out the city. Metz is about and hour and a half from where we live so it made for a quick day trip to see a Christmas market in another country besides Germany. We got there around 11:30am and we had a bit of a walk from our car to the first section of the market but it wasn't bad. The market was spread out over 8 different sections and we made it to 6 of them because we couldn't find the others and being in another country we didn't have cell data to look it up.
Neither Bill or I speak French but I know enough to get me through a conversation. Bill doesn't feel as comfortable with his pronunciation so I do most of the talking when we are in a French speaking country. It seemed like a lot of the people in Metz don't speak english or they don't know it very well because we ended up having to do hand signals with most people we tried to communicate with. The first section of the market that we found had an ice skating rink and a building filled with disney ice sculptures. The ice sculpture exhibit wasn't free and we are going to one in Belgium next week so we decided to skip it. Around the city had maps of the market and showed where you were on the map but it didn't show any directional markers so we ended up going in the wrong direction a few times.
We finally made it to the next section of the market where they had food and wine stands and people selling the usual Christmas market items. Since being in Europe Bill has found a love for macarons. We have had them in Paris and in Brussels so when Bill saw a stand selling macarons he jumped on the opportunity to get some.
The next section of the market was in front of the Metz Cathedral a historic Roman Catholic cathedral that was built in 1220. This section had a huge ferris wheel that Bill tried to convince me to go on but I'm afraid of heights. after looking around this section we were starting to get hungry so we went to the next area which was all food stands to see what they had. We couldn't read the signs so we mostly looked at what others were eating and none of it looked like it was up our alley. So we decided to go to the McDonalds we saw while walking to part of the market. With how expensive the street food was and not knowing if we were going to like it this was our best bet.
After lunch we made our way to the rest of the market. We were walking down this road and it didn't seem like we were going to find the market but according to the map we were going the right way so we kept on walking and eventually in the distance we saw the carousel. This was the largest section of the market that we saw and it had many food and wine stands and vendors selling items. Up to this point we hadn't seen anyone with a glühwein mug and it seemed like none of the stands were selling them. On our second walk around the area I saw a stand that had the mugs. The guy didn't speak any english but we managed to get the mug we wanted and Bill got some glühwein. This glühwein had chunks of fruit in it and Bill said it was really good.
While Bill drank his glühwein we made our way back up the markets to the first one we saw. We did one last lap around to make sure we saw all that we could and then we headed for the car. surprisingly we had no trouble finding our way back to the car. We ended up being there about 3 hours. It takes us longer at the markets that are spread out around a city because your doing a lot of walking between them. It was a nice quick trip to see how another country celebrates the holiday season.
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