Sickles Insight

The world is flat, or so Thomas Friedman says, but don’t tell the people who manufacture European doorknobs, toilets, electrical plugs, light switches, and all the other ephemera that normally fade into the landscape of everyday life. I find myself in these endless reveries about the parallel evolutions of the elevator button, amazed at how these common devices can look so different from their American counterparts and yet still work so intuitively. It’s nice to know that American cultural imperialism hasn’t yet conquered all these small things. I find myself constantly impressed by some of the simple differences in Europe’s way about life compared to my normal findings.

I just returned from France. Schiltigheim, to be exact. This was a business trip, so the availability for tourism and photo journalism was at a minimum to say the least, but I did sneak a few and was able to enjoy the trip just the same!

Schiltigheim is a relatively small area with a population of roughly 30 thousand, this suberb is a piece of Strasbourg. Strasbourg is the capital city of northeastern France with somewhere over a half million inhabitants in the metropolitan area. These German named cities lie only several kilometers away from the Germany/France border.

The city of Strasbourg is known for the Cathédrale Notre-Dame which held the title as the worlds largest building until 1880. Today it has been demoted to the fourth tallest church in the world. Construction of this Roman Catholic cathedral began in 1176 and the north tower was finally completed in 1439. Interestingly enough, the cathedral is off balance as the planned south tower was never built. This cathedral leaves its mark in its asymmetrical form.

Driving down the Autobahn and walking around the city I was pleasantly surprised by the brand-free streets. In the United States, you can’t walk down the street without getting visually assaulted by brand names and seductive advertisements: Nike, Coke, Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, McDonald’s, Gatorade, 7-11, Bank of America, ESPN, you name it! In France I expected a corresponding assault by French brands, but that’s not the case. You can look up and down major thoroughfares and see nothing but independently owned retailers. Shop windows don’t have the aggressively enticing displays here like they do in the States, so for example, convenience stores that carry Coke products don’t feel the need to broadcast it in three-foot-high letters.