Thanks to Ben and his very accomodating family, we spent last weekend hanging out in the amazing city of Strasbourg. For the uninitiated, it sits just inside France on the border with Germany, and has changed hands a few times, so has a flavour of both countries. It’s the capital of Alsace, and as the locals will tell you also “the capital of Europe”, being the seat of the Council of Europe.

We got a train from Stuttgart, which was entirely painless, I love German trains. Ben had organised for us to stay at the hotel of a friend, which was sweet, right near the train station and easy walking to town.

Ben’s dad picked us up and drove us to Ben’s mum’s apartment, where we drank some nice wine and admired the view from the 12th floor. Then we headed to the uni bar and met some friends of Ben, before heading to town for some awesome food. We started with bone marrow, mmmm, and then had famous choucroute (ours had more meat than that!). Needless to say we were full as several googs by the end of it all. Oh, and I forget the 7 bottles of excellent Riesling!

Afterward we headed to the restaurant of Ben’s friend, yes Ben knows everyone in Strasbourg, and had crazy beer with Orange in it, strong! Some of us made it back to the hotel after that, and some of us went somewhere else? A good night indeed.

Saturday we hung out at Ben’s dad’s place for the 18th birthday of Ben’s little brother. Much wine, cheese and other good things were eaten. Ben’s family were all there, and all spoke excellent English to us while tolerating our apalling attempts at French, it must be painful. Spent the afternoon walking around town, climbed the Cathedral, took lots of photos.

For dinner we hit the best Cous Cous restaurant in town, and boy was it good. If, like me, you’ve only ever had cous cous while hiking then you have no idea how good it can be, boy! Well I guess it’s really the stuff you have with it, but still, we need more of it back home! We weren’t really up for another night out, so just had a quiet beer at Ben’s old haunt, suprisingly similar to a certain pub in Kingston.

Sunday began with more walking, particularly around “Petit France”, the really old part of town. As opposed to just the very old part. We also popped into one of the churches, not the biggy, and I couldn’t resist taking a photo, it was so nice. I guess that’s probably blasphemous …

To round out the weekend we popped into Ben’s dad’s monkey farm, a logical progression. The monkeys were really cute, well except for the ones trying to eat each other, and really inquisitive. Some of the stories Ben’s dad had to tell were a little eye opening, monkeys aren’t always so cute!

Perhaps it’s just that I’m an Aussie, and from Canberra as well, but being in a city that’s nearly two millennia old was pretty mind blowing. The amount of stuff that’s happened there is just hard to grasp. And that cathedral, my god! It’s so damn huge, it’s no wonder it was the world’s tallest building from 1493 until 1874.

A few photos from the adventure, but nothing like being there …

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Last week we all headed for a bit of a drive to the nearby town of Tübingen. It’s a bit bigger than Böblingen, around one quarter of the population are students, and it also happens to be where Arnd lives.

Apart from being a very nice town, with a gorgeous river and lots of cool old buildings, it’s a pretty amazing place for those of us whos country is less than half of the age of Tübingen University. Gotta love it.

As it got dark we headed back to Arnd’s place, with a truck load of Döners and several boxes of beer. As you can imagine chaos ensued, Segher even cracked a Forth joke, but got it wrong .. who could guess why.

Thanks to Arnd for letting us trash hang out at his place, and to all and sundry who gave us lifts to and fro.

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Flying is fun … flying for 50+ hours door to door is less fun … not having any pants when you land is a little less fun again … having no pants two days later is well, kinda sucky.

Still, this is a photo of Norway!

And a few more shots from along the way, including a few beers with Queeny.

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Spring has not quite sprung.

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