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More Travel and Some Harry Potter

We went to Elsaß, France last weekend for the day which was pretty cool. The city was similar to Freiburg in that all the buildings were super old and the city surrounded a big church. Since I felt like I had a tapeworm last week and ate anything that wasn’t moving, of course my first order of business was to find food. We finally settled on the Markthalle – basically an indoor, slightly fancier, farmers market. At one of the places that was selling food, they had a glass case with all the different food we could eat. There was the obvious pasta, salad, and quiche, but then I saw a magnificent food that I didn’t think would have been socially acceptable to eat anywhere but America. A LATKE SANDWICH. Yes. Cheese and meat in between two latkes. For those of you that are not familiar with the gloriousness that is the latke, its basically a hashbrown. Do you think I even looked at any of the other food stalls? Nope. I ate that latke sandwich like there was no tomorrow and enjoyed every single bite.
There was a bit of a problem with getting food though. I don’t speak French. See, I kinda thought that my German wasn’t very good and when we were in restaurants I was just embarrassing myself because I didn’t know what to say. Now I know that I have pretty good German after literally no being able to say anything to the waitress at this stall. I had to point to what I wanted and when we had to pay, she gave us a questioning look and said what we owed in English. It’s so debilitating not being able to speak at all to the general populace. I don’t think I’ll complain about how bad my German is anymore.
So I realized that I somehow forgot to write about when we went to Switzerland! It was the weekend before Elsaß and we drove somewhere between two and three hours to Engelberg to take a cable car up to the Alps. It was about negative a million degrees at the bottom, but oh my god, it was like seventy once we got above the clouds! The mountains were stunning (obviously) and we walked sliding up and down a cross country skiing path wearing tank tops and throwing snowballs at each other. We got to meet the full-year students which was cool and because my shoes didn’t really have traction, I ended up holding my friend Fiona’s hand doing snow-ballet down the hills. All in all, it was a pretty amazing field trip.

I bought “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen” last week. I figured that I should improve my reading comprehension because it’s probably my weakest area of German and HP would be a good place to start. I wasn’t really expecting much. I have a copy of it in Latin too but that was really tiring to read; it felt like work not fun. In German, on the other hand, it’s so easy! I really didn’t think I would get past the first chapter but within the first three days, I’m 200 pages in! I’m ridiculously proud of myself and I think my might get a library card so I can read the rest…

I’m off to Prague tomorrow, then Dresden, then Munich for a few days. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to report after that!