Eating Yummy Germaaaaan food YAA!

In case you didn't know, Strasbourg is legitimately a hop skip and a jump away from Germany. So the other night we decided to try our luck across the border and go have a wicked heavy, huge German meal, with German beers to go with it. We didn't really know where would be a good place to go, so we just went to a little town on the map right across the border, not the best town in the world....but we found some GREAT food!

Here is the German beer that they were advertising, so naturally we all had to try it!...note the little doily around the bottom and the HUUUGE head of super crazy thick foam!

All the Girls with our GERMANN beeers. We were the annoying americans saying everything in the completely overdone German accent. It made everything taste better though I swear! and really got us in the spirit of Germanyyy!

No idea what my meal was called! Couldn't even pronounce it or try and retype it here even if I vaguely remembered it. All I know was that it was roasted pork with the best gravy/sauce I've ever had with mushrooms and tomatoes...and SPAETZLE! Spaetzle is so good! and soo German!! My meal was everything I ever could have wanted out my German meal..it was sooo good!

Here are the other girls food! Cammie had German sausages...great choice! and the other girls got a traditional farmer's plate served on wooden plates with yummy pork and veggies. We all had a little potato soup too and as much as I love Panera, this potato soup owned Panera's! But on a different note I do miss Panera, and iced coffee more than I could have imagined!

After we sat for like twenty minutes and attempted to digest the monster meals we had just ate we decided to top off the night with monster desserts! We got gelato but it was more like ice cream, but still amazing none the less! Cam got a crepe, I didn't manage to get a bite before she had finished it haha but as you can see from the picture below, it looked amazing!
 

That's my giant sundae with more whipped cream on top than I've had in my entire life. Homemade, thick creamy whipped cream to be exact. Three scoops of deliciousness later, none of us could move and we went home with huge food comas! Great experience though! And next time in Germany we'll go to a biergarten and hopefully not eat as much food!!

On a completely random note, when I am not eating out in Germany, I am cooking more at home than ever. We have two hours everyday for lunch because almost everything here closes from 12-2! So it forces us to come home and make food. As I mentioned earlier I've been living off ham and cheese sandwiches, tunafish, eggs, sausage, pasta and salads. But don't be fooled and think these are stupid American foods that are not special at all. We've been making great salads with egg and ham like they do in France, and the sandwiches are on delicious French bread that we buy fresh that day. The cheeses are obviously better than anything I've had in America. What I'm trying to say is that ALLLLL the food here is soo good! Even the stuff that I cook at home, I swear it's ten times better than whenever I make anything in America. Maybe I'll come back an awesome chef specializing in French food...doubtful but I'll definitely be a specialist in tasting european food!

La Petite France

There is a little place in Strasbourg that is called La Petite France. It is the oldest part of the city and it is located on all these little waterways. On Friday we decided to check it out because we'd heard so much about how cute it was! Here are some picturesss

Not exactly the best weather...it hasn't been nice weather since I've been here. It is officially never sunny in Strasbourg...the sun tries sooooo hard to come out, I've seen a piece of blue sky once. I'm keeping my hopes up though! "the sun will come out tomorrow!!!"

This is one of the parts of Strasbourg that we see posters of. These are like some type of watchtowers I think? I know there is some story behind them and there is definitely a better view of them I just didn't find it! 

This is me Cammie and Kelsey in front of some old building in Petite France. Turns out we thought we were in Petite France and at some point we had wandered out of it for most of the day. At this point though we were still there! Seriously walking around was like walking around Disney..the buildings didn't look real at all! I felt like I was back in Epcot or something, it was soo cool. We're planning on going back and staying longer, seeing more, and eating at a restaurant we found online that is supposed to be like unreal. So stay tuned for that update!

Tapas

They were right when they told me that you can find a party every night in Europe. I'm used to being pretty low key mon-thurs in the states...I mean those are school nights! and ever since I was in middle school it was almost taboo to do anything on a school night! That didn't really apply at BC but I still usually limited my going out to Thur-Sat but that doesn't apply here at all. Every night there is something going on, some barathon or themed party or something. This week I laid pretty low because I'm getting used to my class schedule which is basically non-existent. I almost never have class its really weird but welcomed!  Anyway I went out to Tapas with Chelsea Kelsey Cammie and some other international students. It was great! We had delicious sangria..i didn't realize how much I liked sangria! We made a huge failure of an attempt at making sangria in walsh last year and let me tell you it didn't taste anything like this! haha Ordering tapas was a bit of an ordeal because they were all on the menu in spanish..but their brief descriptions were in French and we're all speaking English. Lets just say by the end of all that translating we had noooo idea what we were ordering. Even the things we thought we knew what they were didn't turn out being what we thought. Everything was good though and we got to try some random new food. They had like motz sticks but they were balls haha and basically taco meat with corn, bread with like meat on them and mussels in marinara. In the end we all got some pretty good food! Adventures of this weekend still to come!

Pizza..the Alsatian way

Qu'est ce que j'ai fait ce weekend?.. I ate delicious Alsatian pizza. After the discotech on Thursday, like I said eariler I pretty much slept my life away on friday. But I did get up to go to a big dinner with the Eramsus (international) students at Cammie's school. It was all you can eat/drink pizza and beer. I wasn't really in the mood to drink so I stuck to water that night but I ate more than my share of pizza! The pizza was soo different than what we're used to. It was on really thin flatbread, and instead of red sauce they use like this creamy kinda cheese sauce. But don't get me wrong it was soo good! We had mushrooms and ham on them. I have never had more delicious ham than I have here, and I almost never eat ham. So now I'm like obsessed and want to have ham cheese and butter sandwiches everyday. Ya the butter sounds gross but they put it on the sandwiches and I had to try it and I must say I loved it. Don't think I'll be whipping out the land o' lakes at home, but while I'm here I shall do as the French do! For dessert they brought us the same pizza with the creamy stuff on it but instead of cheese they put chocolate chips on them! This was a dessert after my own heart..sooo good!

The rest of the weekend was just going to bars, found a good new dance club...
Sunday BC paid for us to go to the movies and go to a cafe after. I saw "Pas si simple"..which was "It's Complicated" with Meryll Streep but dubbed in French. Not going to lie I didn't understand it all. A lot of jokes and sarcasm come too fast for me to catch them so all the French people in the theater were laughing while me Cam and Chelsea were a little lost. From what I understood, the movie was cute and I'll watch it here online sometime so I can get everything that happens. At the cafe after was the best. I had my first thing of MOUSSE CHOCOLAT since i've been here and it was amazing! I really don't know how all the French people aren't huge fat tubs of lard because the desserts are sooo good here! Last night since French TV is so bad I shamelessly started  watching Vampire Diaries online. Not gunna lie i'm addicted now and that's all i have to say about that!

Yaaaa da Discotech!!

So this weekend was pretty sweet and started out in GERMANYYY. Turns out Germany is a hop skip and a jump from where I am...legit I can walk there in 20 mins which is about the same as it takes to get downtown :). Thursday we went to a discotech called K3 in germany with the international program here (aka the party planning program here). It was supposed to be themed as "rep your country" so all us USA girls had tshirts with typical US stuff on them, like southern stuff or Red Sox and Superfan...turns out not too many people cared about the theme and they all looked really cute when we met to meet the bus at my school. Lucklily my apartment is 30 seconds from my school so we ran home and changed and no one was the wiser! When we got on the bus everyone started singing!..not too different than us BCers!..they were singing all these songs in French that I blatantly didn't know the words to but it was still fabulous! Then one kid got up and lead a song to the Remember the Titans tune..I loved it..so here it is:
"Everywhere we gooooo....People always ask us....Who we are...Where we come from...So we tell them...We are from Strasbourg...Sexy Sexy Strasbourg...Merry Merry Strasbourg..." and i think there is more but I don't remember it all.
 Anyway the singing on the bus was really fun and the club was wicked cool too. DJ +dancing +discounted drinks =success in my book. One of my goals for the night was to get up on the DJ platform and do my thing...so naturally I made it happen...I'm pretty badass sometimes haha..they even let me wear the headphones!

They played a bunch of funky german and clearly international music but they also played american jams! Lady Gaga has infiltrated the entire world...thank god! gotta love her and a dance party just isn't a dance party with her! On our ride home from Germany the Irish girls had facepaint and branded most of us americans with the irish flag. Chelsea had it on her face, cammie and sarah had it on their coats, I was the only one who made it home unscathed haha. All in all a great Thursday night, and no class on Friday lent itself to a pretty good recovery.

A Few Random Thoughts...

1.Picked my classes...picked 8 classes...but don't have class on Mon or Fri...pretty sweet deal :)
2. It has been snowing for 7 days straight..nonstop..a light flurry that is just super cold and annoying. I'm gettin a little sick of it Mother Nature.
3. Hey Strasbourg...when it snows you're supposed to plow the sidewalks and the streets and basically all the routes of transportation in your city! Slush is unacceptable.
4. French dogs are everywhere! and soo well behaved!, they never have leashes on but they just walk casually down the streets..in restaurants, cafes..its cool. Although with dogs, comes poop, and apparently the pooper scooper doesn't exist in France. Gotta love slushy slippery mine covered sidewalks!
5. I LOVE French bread and croissants and cafe and everything...and it seems to be all i eat (no complaints here)...but it's going to make me fat if i keep eating like this and French people are NOT fat!
That's all for now

First Strasbourg Pics!

Here are my first pictures from Strasbourg! There are some of the cathedral we climbed up and some of the cute shops..just random pictures of the city!

by hneeven


Last night we went on a "pubathon" throughout Strasbourg. It was a mix of international students and french students. It was soo fun! We went to four different bars, with discounted drinks at each one. One had a "metre" of shots for ten euro..its ten shots for ten euro...obviously we split it with a bunch of ppl but it was sick because they were so cheap! Some of the french students did them alone, or just split it with one person..they're wayyy bigger champs than I thought over here! The last bar we went to was in the bottom of a boat on the river..it was soo cool! like a huge dance party in the bottom of a boat and the french students said that there are a bunch of bars and clubs like that on the river and they're some of the best places to go. I had soo much fun! the pubcrawl was awesome  too because we were so intermingled with all the french kids and other international ones..I met soo many awesome french friends. It was cool to speak french to them and they understood what I was saying ( and i could even understand them!)...some of them were pretty impressed with my french! I'm not as bad as I thought, its all coming back thank god! Going to Germany tomorrow for a "rep your country" themed party...I think I'll wear my red sox shirt to represent! haha I guess the clubs in germany are ever sweeter then here. I'll let you know! Gros Bisous de France!