I've been here in Switzerland for 133 days and I have another 206 days to go. It seems like a lot, but January is actually the half-way mark for my exchange and this exchange has gone by so quickly. Saturday the 14 December Edna and I went to a place called Colmar in France -- which is here:
and it was really fun! I got up at 6 because Edna thought it would be a good idea to chose the train that left at 6:43 AM (!!). We got to the train on time and took for about two hours until we got to Basel. There we had 20 minutes to catch our train but before we could we needed to buy our tickets cause it was with another train company. We got some breakfast first and then we went to the information centre, waited on line for five minutes that we didn’t have and then got directed to the SBB office in the train station. When we got to the SBB (the Switzerland Train Company) we had two minutes to get to our gate which was not gonna happen because it’s always very slow in the office. We took a number and found a seat. Edna wanted to leave soon just because it’s not what the plan was, so I looked at the SBB App (I honestly love this app. This app is my life. The new Snapchat/Facebook) So...next train to Colmar was in two hours. Yay.... We had to wait about twenty minutes in the office and I swear these dumb looking college girls took our spot. We made jokes about stuff though because Edna was sitting beside an orange suitcase that...looked like one of those construction cone things.
Edna also has so many croissant crumps on her it was embarrassing.
So...I got bored and walked around the station and found a dictionary I had already bought that has German to English and to SWISS GERMAN!!! I haven’t learned a lot of the words yet because they are so weird. It is really hard to understand Swiss German but I‘m getting a bit better. There is no dictionary (other than this one apparently) and they don’t really reach it anywhere because it’s not a language. Edna got the tickets and then we decided we would do the the Salvation Army here which is called Heil’s Armee. I wanted to buy pins for my coat and we totally did!
I did get some pins there after looking all over for them they were on this little strip of cloth by the door. They were 0.90 CHF compared to the usual 4.50 CHF. So I went wild. I got a pin from the grocery store Migros here - because why not, I got a Cheese pin, a Swiss cow bell, and two from the Basel city. We went back to the train station and just walked around. I got for the first time a Brezel from Brezelkönig a Brezel company that does actual ones. I was shocked to find out that Prezels are actually called Bretzels. Even the tiny ones that I hate. These were the actual bready ones and they were good. We got to our train which on the outside was really disgusting and I was nervous getting on it cause it was so sketchy but inside....still a bit sketchy.....BUT the seats where the most comfortable things in the world. They were set up like couches and they had I swear 30 cm of just soft foam.
The train was an hour and we did a Sudoko completion. Edna won. I messed up so bad I couldn’t come back from it. We got to Colmar and it was so pretty! The town was like this little old French town. It’s like East Coast (Canada) met 1800 France.
We walked around because in the middle they had these like big Farmers market set up things but in sheds. Edna got me some hot apple juice (fantastic) because I know Glühwein is now just hot wine and I’m not a big fan of that. We started to get hungry at around lunch time and Edna wanted this burger that we saw and she was hung up on getting this Burger. The thing is we were on the other side of the market and it was at the beginning. Oh! There are five different markets here each themed different. So I remembered where it was and when we were at the market just before it Edna started to get hangry (hungry and angry) so I told her just follow me but she kept saying stuff like, “there’s no point. Let’s just give up. It’s not there.” Lucky for us....I found it. And honestly it was the best burger I have ever had in my life.
Okay, the picture may look disgusting to some but even Edna said it was the best she ever had. It was so good. We then went back and went to this other part and found this cute little coffee shop. I got a got chocolate. They had these books for sale and there was this one book that Edna loved and, it was obviously in French, and um....a....the drawing.... lets just say, very European. She loved it but didn’t get it. The thing was, I am her Secret Santa so I got her the book. I was trying to go buy it by making her go to the washroom but she would not go! I was like, “you gotta check out the sink! It’s so weird!” And it was by the way; there was a long tube sticking out from underneath but you had to move it to the side to get the water to come out. Weird. She finally went and I tried my beat French and bought the book. My best French was not good enough. I can’t speak it anymore. We left and went to this other festival there. At around four though we were kinda done and found the next train was leaving in forty minutes so we took that one. We went to another cafe near the station and played card games. We took the train home even and it was so crowded! We luckily found seats. We got home at about 8 and we were exhausted.
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