STRASBOURG!!! Day 1

Improptu vacations are the best.
This week, all the French students I have classes with are doing internships (thus no classes), so I decided to take the opportunity to travel. Where else to go but Strasbourg to visit my lovely friend and former host sister Oriane Kopp?! The train ride is only 5 hours and picnics in Germany are possible from here. Plus, I've heard nothing but good things about how beautiful the city is.

So I got up early, got lost on the way to the train station (a very kind deaf individual helped me find it), and spent the entire ride doing homework, attempting to ignore the growing pangs of hunger in my stomach. Oriane met me at the station, and we walked to her appartment. Before her afternoon class, she made me an omelet to fight the oppressive hunger and walked around the downtown a bit. It was absolutely gorgeous!!! I cannot wait to explore it some more this weekend :)

L'Ill is the river that runs through the center of the city. I must have brought the cloud cover with me from Angers, but here are some shots of the city from the bridge:

I am going to love it here, I can tell.

We meandered into the cathedral for a bit (which is FANTASTIC!!! pics later) and will be exploring it more thoroughly tomorrow. Then Oriane showed me around the campus of the University of Strasbourg. It is much bigger than the campus in Angers, and the buildings are more modern. Funny thing happened there yesterday: right outside le Patio (pronounced as passio)-- which is where Oriane has most of her classes-- construction workers found 3 undetonated aerial bombs from World War 2. They had to cancel classes while the shells were removed.

I met several of Oriane's friends and went with her to her afternoon class. By the time that was over, we were both starving, so we rushed home and dug into the tarte aux pommes and cupcakes that Oriane's mom had made for us in honor of my visit. They were absolutely delicious!

The apartment is lovely, with a sun room terrace on the second floor.

This is the den:

And this is a view from the front door:

There was much drama over getting to internet to work on my jenk-ass Tangent, but I obviously succeeded.

Dinner was also super-duper delicious, and tomorrow Oriane is going to take me exploring!!! I will be sure to take lots of pics and post them here. It's going to be nothing but Strasbourg for the next few posts, so if you don't like it, deal with it.