hello alsace

So money doesn’t grow on trees, but it sure can burn like a bush. I’ve been in Paris since December 21st, but I’ve been spending my own money since the 29th. Meagan and I have been staying in a decent hostel with 6 others in our room for 27 euros a night, and it’s been awful. This morning I was woken up at 6am for the third morning in a row by the asian girls that get up so early. Two girls were out of the door by 6:04 this morning and the other two were rummaging through their bags and making incessant noise for 2 hours straight, it was miserable. So, after taking a shower at 7am just to get away from the annoyance, I went back to sleep. We woke up to the old man that cleans the rooms basically kicking us out (very nicely, of course) at noon. Unfortunately, we were rather late for the train that we wanted to take to Reims in the Champagne region. We were going to get there on the later train after the champagne tours were over, so we just decided to go someplace else. We’re at the train station with our daypacks, but we left our guidebooks back with our luggage. Oops. This is how the decision went:
“Dude, where should we go?”
“Um, how about Munich? Nope, that’s a 10 hour train ride”
“Luxembourg?”
“Nah, there’s probably nothing there”
“Well, Strasbourg seems cool, I went there in middle school, there’s a lot of pickpocketers”
“Straight, let’s go”


So we hopped on the four hour train with no plans, no idea about the town, and no place to stay. It’s actually a really cool town, all the streets are lit up, one with a big arch that says “Strasbourg, city of light.” We walked around, looked at all the German architecture and the big cathedral, and got Meagan’s favorite, Döner Kebabs. We heard from people on the train that there was a youth hostel a busride away, but we took our chances downtown and found a hotel with bathroom, toilet, and tv for 48euros for a double room. If you can recall, that’s 3euros cheaper than our plywood bunkbeds for 8. We love it. Now we’re going to get sleep in beautiful, cheaper Strasbourg.