Freakishly Happy

We finally got out of bed, and went to France!

 We went with a group of girl friends, (the same people that we went to St. Peter with)to Strasbourg, France. Wow. What a gorgeous city!! We left Friday morning around 11, and arrived in Stasbourg around 1:15. There were beastly children on the first train, who yelled and screamed who I thought stole my waterbottle (but luckily I'm just a spaz, and left it at home.) The second train was much better, and quieter and it was a lovely ride in to Strasbourg.

After arriving we hung out for a while in the hotel lobby, before exploring the city. Pretty much right after we arrived, our group divided into two, (my group was being a little pokey and the other two girls were anxious to explore). Our group wandered around, went to a costume shop and tried on funny hats, went to a chocolatery where we had great hot chocolate and a mini chocolate pie (what a great idea! a pie made of SOLID chocolate) and went shopping where Caitlin found the pants that she's been dreaming of all of her life. I'd say we had a good time.

We reconviened at 4, and we went upstairs and took a nap, which was REALLY nice because John hadn't really slept at all the two nights before the trip. We woke up starving, and went downstairs to meet the group for dinner. We walked around for a long time before deciding where to eat. We found a cute French cafe, and decided that it was inexpensive enough, and French enough to go to. John and I had escargo, which was EXCELLENT. Who knew that bugs in garlic sauce could be so tastey? Quiche Lorraine (we decided to eat the bacon as a "cultural experience") and onion soup (I think in the US it's "French" onion soup, haha). Everything was quite good. The waitor was a little snooty. It was definitely not the restauraunt in St. Pete where we got free cake. Then we wandered around for awhile, and looked in shop windows and skipped down the streets and pretended to be ninjas (only Caitlin, John and I participated in the ninja fun). We then went back to the hotel. John and I had a great night. We ate chocolate, drank a nice bottle of wine that we had brought with us and had a great time just being with each other.

As usual, John and I slept until the last possible second this morning, and were a little late to meeting the group downstairs. We rushed through breakfast and had a meeting to decide what to do for the day. We wandered around the city, and found a book market at the food of the cathedral. We stopped there, and Caitlin and Andrea both bought really cool books. Then we went to the cathedral. The inside was beautiful ( but the outside was even better due to all of the gargoyles (I love gargoyles!!!!!!!!) it had wonderful stained glass windows, and a huge coo-coo clock, that wasn't really a coo-coo clock, because it had apostles instead of coo-coo birds.

Then we climbed to the top of the tower. It was a little scary because for some reason, we all started climbing the stairway really fast. There was a father and small son behind us who were also climbing really fast. Now, I don't like stairs and I REALLY don't like winding small stairs. I got a little freaked out, and Lorrie started having asthma problems, so we slowed down and decided to take it easy up the rest of the bizillion stairs. The view from the cathedral was pretty, but disappointing because I didn't see any gargoyles.

We then went to a little cafe for coffee and a little lunch.

After lunch, we went on a boat ride around the city on the river.  I think that John and I had the best experience, because we cheated and listened to the guided tour in English instead of German, so we got to hear fun random things like "During the Renissance, this bridge was used as a tourture device. People were put in cages and dunked in to refuse, while the town's people cheered and did needlepoint."  What is that supposed to mean?!?

We wandered around (we did a lot of wandering) and did some more shopping.  We were all pretty tired, so we found another cafe to have some drinks.  We sat there for a long time and gathered our strength to go back to the hotel and gather our stuff.
We took a fun trek back, and went alongside the river through the somewhat muddy/marshy grass.
We decided that we were all too tired to really do anything else, so we hopped on an early train back to Freiburg and we came home and I wrote a blog! Yay!