Christmas come early

I spent today in Colmar, in France. It's a very pretty Alsatian country town of seventy thousand people. I was there to see its famous Christmas market, one of the first to open for the year. Judging from Wikipedia, most other people who end up in Colmar are there for the same reason.
By very pretty, I mean that even the suburban residential neighbourhood we (Emily and I) accidentally wandered through made our eyes pop, and also our brains tickle. (Why were the roofs so pointy? Indeed, practically equilateral . . . . Were those actually heart-shaped holes that we'd just seen in that house's window shutters? And who, on earth, was affording to live in these streets and streets of rather quaint old mansions?)

By Christmas market, I mean what Der Spiegel describes as "an oversized crafts and bake sale": shiny balls on every evergreen in town, stalls selling Christmas toys and deca-ations and cakes and biscuits and cheeses, a nativity, mulled wine. We wandered, and got plump off free samples. I encountered a craft stand selling framed, illuminated nameplates, charming because of the funny French first names -- Sandrine, Didier, Enzo, Aude -- they were providing for. And before heading home we also hit the coffee shops (for Emily), the bookshops (for me), and the cathedral (for the sake of the amazing stone it's constructed from, red and brown and bluish-grey as well as pink, that makes it look like Freiburg or Strasbourg gone quilting).

Further to last post's complaints on workload, I should mention that perhaps I was being unreasonable. Or naive. I'm beginning to realise that maybe Emily and I are the only ones in the classes who actually do all the homework.

• Helene submits assignments jointly with a friend, and the tutor doesn't bat an eyelid.
• Philippe only bothered doing one question of model theory last week, because he was "busy".
• Leander's assignments are typically a couple of pages long; either his writing's five times smaller than mine, or he makes judicious skips.
• Achim does no homework whatsoever; he's going to be assessed on the course later on, during his final Magister examination, and only needs to know the material well enough to withstand ten minutes' oral questioning.

Of course the assignments are a delightful challenge. But slacking's increasingly tempting.