Yeah, France!

My friends and I decided that since we are in Europe, we should probably see some other countries. The only rub is, we're all kinda poor. Not poor in the sense that we cant eat anything but lentils (thought Katie actually does). We're poor in the sense that we'd rather not spend money if it can be avoided, what with that blasted exchange rate and all. But I digress. So far, I've made two trips out of the country. In both cases we bought Länder tickets or a Schönes Wochenende Ticket. The first kind let you travel all over whatever state youre in with 5 people for like 27€. The second is essentiallz the same thing except it applies to all of Germany and only on weekends.
Our first trip was to the Bodensee, and then we walked across the border (it's nothing spectacular, just a bike path with a sign that says 'Landesgrenze') to Switzerland. Before you cross the border there is a little building with the crests from both Germany and Switzerland, and as we were walking by the sign I heard a little Germany kid say the words 'Schweiz' and 'krieg.' Schweiz is sort of what you would expect him to say; it means Switzerland. The other word is what gives me pause. "krieg" can either mean 'to get' or war i.e. Blitzkrieg. In either case, I think that child was planning WWIII.
We did a fair amount of sign seeing, and then decided to make dinner in the park before catching a train back. I'm not going to further embarrass myself by going into details, but let's just say if you ever see the label "Ausländisches Erzeugnis in Deutschland auf Trinkstärke herabgesetzt" Don't drink whatever's inside, especially not alone.
The second trip was to Strassbourg, France. Technically we got a train to Kehl and the walked to France. There isnt a whole lot to see in Kehl. At first we wandered into the industrial section of Strassbourg. So my critique on France was that is was even worse than Missouri. Eventually we found the nice part of the town and dicked around there for the day. The best part though by far was the return trip. The trip is supposed to take about 3 hours, BUT I single-handedly stretched it to almost 7 hours. My first fuck-up was to misread the train time totally, so we missed that one and had to catch another one in Kehl that was an hour later. The next part of my devilish trifecta, was to confuse the departure and arrival times of our next train from Offenberg. That is, the time that it was supposed to reach its destination, I took as the time it was supposed to leave Offenberg. Anyways, that killed an hour and a half. The crowing glory of my Reisezerstörung occured on the way to Eutingen im Gäu. Now I had been sleeping for most of this train ride (my nefarious mind has to recharge, you know). I woke up about 10 minutes before we reached a little unmarked train station, which we would come to know very well as Hochdorf bei Horb. On the train I knew that our destination was supposed to be this Eutingen im Gäu town, and as we reached Hochdorf, we heard the conductor announce something, so we looked outside to see what the stop was really called. Seeing now sign I looked to the back of the train, and on an electric display it said "Eutingen im Gäu." My conclusion was that we were in fact in Eutingen im Gäu, and that we should get off the train. So amidst much confusion we get off the train only to find out that it isn't Eutingen im Gäu, but rather Hochdorf bei Horb. I apologize for my mistake (read: cackle with glee) and find that there is a train to Tübingen, which will get us there only a few minutes later than normal. We wait for this train for about 20 minutes before we hear some German rail workers talking about the construction on the lines and the reduced schedule that's happening because of it. Turns out that Hochdorf bei Horb has almost no trains running through it that night, in addition we missed the only bus that could get us to a bigger town. We called Craig who figured out that there would be a train about an hour and a half later. During the wait we found a mannequin that looked like Death, Jake nearly murdered me, and Miriam realized that I should have been someone's little brother. They also resolved never to trust me with train tickets again.

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