First Day in Europe

After arriving in Germany on a sleepless red-eye flight, we found a train to Freiburg.  While on the train, the kids met a girl and her father from Russia.  We invited her to play go fish with us.  They had a good time and she learned a new game and a few new words.  Our kids did not try to learn any Russian!

Our friends, Martina and Jaouad, invited us into their home, where we stayed for a week.  We visited several small villages, along with the big city of Freiburg, where we walked around the downtown area and saw the inside of the Cathedral.

The small towns of Germany have so much charm, and we even spent one day at a "Stadt Fest", which is the town's special festival day celebrating their 1200th anniversary!  There were lots of fun activities set up for children, lots of wonderful food booths, along with free-flowing wine and beer!  I even shared a glass of wine with a Roman soldier.

Since Martina and Jaouad live in the black forest near the French border, we spent one day in the French city of Colmar.  It was another beautiful city with interesting architechture.  Some of my pictures were taken on a video camera, which I can't upload while I am here.

While in Germany, we bought a car that would fit all 5 of us plus luggage.  It will help us to get comfortably from one place to another.  

We started on our journey to Italy.  at the first filling station, we inadvertently put diesel in the gas tank, since we couldn't read italian.  There were 3 pumps: sensa plomb, diesel, and gasolio.  Well, we didn't know what sensa plomb was, we knew what diesel was, so we thought gasolio sounded most like what we needed.  All the pump-hoses were the same size.  Within seconds of filling the tank, the engine started smoking.  So we went back to the mechanic, and tried to explain what happened.  There was one attendant who knew enough English to tell us that we had put diesel in the tank and they would take it out for us.  It was a costly error, to say the least.  The car is driving fine now and we will never make that mistake again!

Italy is beautiful, but the language barrier is difficult, so we are trying to learn a few words to help us along.