02-18-06 Switzerland, here we come!

We left Saturday morning for Paris by train from my parents house. Making it to Switzerland was quite an adventure! We took the regional train into Paris (RER), then took the subway (Metro) to a central train station. I thought we were taking the TGV from there but it turns out it was a slower train (still around the 110 mph). We took the train into Basel and switched trains and hopped on a different train to Lucerne. The ride in was beautiful, the mountains were appearing little by little.

Lucerne is a city right in the middle of Switzerland, right in the German speaking area. I took 6 years of German and all I can remember, are the first few lessons of my 1st year of German. In those lessons, we followed the life's of young kids. They got invited to a birthday party and brought the girl a gold fish. And that is all the German I could remember. Needless to say, Katie and I were not invited to anyone's birthday party and I couldn't find a place to buy a gold fish! All those lessons didn't come in handy!!!
I managed to remember the basics of German and my French and our English came to the rescue. The Swiss are really gifted in that area. Many of them can jump between the different languages.

When we got there we heard some sort of marching band across the lake so we headed over there using the famous covered wooden bridge. It was a carnival festivity! Beer was flowing like water and bratwurst were grilling. It was pretty cool to catch a glimpse of this street party!

We then walked around the old town and found a nice small Italian restaurant.