France day 1

I'm really glad Pablo isn't dead. If he was, then my Europe trip would be ruined since ID have to spend countless hours listening to some boring guy speak about pablo in Spanish.

I spent my last few hours in bern walking along the beautiful river. The river made me realize that one of the reasons that the places I've seen in Europe are so much more beautiful than Sydney is because of safety. There are very few safety nets, gates, signs located anywhere around the city. I couldn't help but feel that safety nets and signs would poison the ambience of the city if the Australian government somehow got their way in Switzerland. I even noticed that construction workers often work without safety helmets or safety lines. It was interesting to mentally compare that to the overly safety precautions companies I've worked for during my internships.

Lastly I also noticed a lot of young military personnel wandering around the city. I found that really weird in a country that is famous for being neutral. That reminds me; I learned that the German word for 'cheers' is 'Proust'. And I'm not sure, but I'd suspect the word for cheers in Swiss is 'truce'.
OK! Now for France! I met marine in the Strasbourg train station at about 1:00pm. We drove to her house and I met her parents. They're super French. They have accents which parallel only the strongest Hollywood stereotypes. We then drove to the heart of the city where I saw the huge cathedral. The structure of the buildings supposedly make the walkway to the cathedrals very windy. The legend behind it says that the devil rode his horse (which was the wind) all the way to the town, but when the devil tried to enter the cathedral he got scared and ran away without his horse. As a result the wind circles around the cathedral constantly waiting for the devil to return.

We bought a whole bunch of escargots (snails) too which we planned to eat for supper (suppieerr). Naturally I forced marine to take me to the nearest pub where we tried a local French beer called "meteor". It was good, but nothing compared to the German beer. As we were bike riding back I took a whiff of a bakery and uncontrollably detoured inside. Sadly they didn't have any chocolate eclair, but I settled for some baguette. Soooo good.

Afterwards we went to pick up Jasper from the airport. We knew Jasper was arriving in a kangaroo onesie so marine also decided to pick him up in a onesie too. I didn't want to feel left out so I found a filthy lion costume which managed to fit marine when she was 12.

After a bit of an awkward delay we picked up Jasper and spent the rest of the day hanging out in the pool eating crapes with a whole bunch if mixers. Apparently fish eggs and sour cream is very French. I learned by embarrassment that sour cream and nutella is not.

Oh yeah I pulled the super tourist card by walking around with my oversized Texas shirt and asking randoms in English to take photos of me. I also found French goon here. Its cheaper and tastes muuuch better. They call it "wine" though.