The French city of Metz was certainly a pleasant surprise.  I'm not sure that I had ever even HEARD of this city, and it turned out to be a particularly nice little side-trip.

The water that you see on the left is the Moselle River, which becomes the "Mosel" when it enters Germany.  So I certainly have seen a big stretch of the same river on this trip!

On the picture below and to the left, you can see the roofline of the Cathedral of Metz, where the Chagall windows are. 

These are more pictures from my friend Jen's camera, by the way--I can't take credit for the good composition and lighting.

So I have got to say, this is one CLEAN cathedral!  I have no idea how they do it.  In the coming days, I'm going to be sending some pictures of the cathedral at Cologne (the "Dom"), and while the Dom is bigger and older than Metz, Metz sure wins the prize for having scrubbed centuries of crap off their cathedral.

And I have got to say that their cathedral has a LOT of gargoyles, too.  The Dom has over 100 gargoyles, but most of them are more than 150 feet off the ground, so it is pretty hard to enjoy them the way you can at Metz.

So, we were only in Metz for a couple of hours, and the cathedral was certainly the main site there anyway.  We also walked around the cute downtown area and got ice cream at McDonald's.  (I know, you're thinking that there just HAD to be a cute little ice cream place there, but sometimes a guy just has a craving for a "fruit and yogurt parfait" from McDonald's!)

Getting OUT of Metz was a bit of a challenge.  We didn't really have a good map of the city, and it was pretty hard to find an on-ramp for the freeway headed in the right direction.  But eventually we pravailed without having to resort to actually ASKING anyone for directions!