The Zoo

Sorry it's been awhile but once we started classes we all stopped traveling for a bit.

Classes are going pretty well. I have one class in English taught by a professor from Oregon, that's cool and I have three German classes. The German classes aren't what I expected but they aren't too bad. I'm taking writing class, a short story class and a culture class. They are all more similar to my high school German classes than my college ones but oh well.

Yesterday, I finally convinced my friends that we had to go out. We decided on the Basel Zoo. The zoo was awesome. It was stuck somewhere in between the old fashion zoo where all the animals are in cages and the modern zoo that's decorated to look like the animal's actual habitat. They had way more animals than we expected. You can check out some pictures here: Zoo Pictures

We had a minor incident on the way home. We had chosen Basel because we were under the impression that we could still get their on the weekends with our semester tickets. Apparently, this is not so. No one checked tickets on the way down but on the way back they came around and the guy looked at our tickets and started saying things we didn't understand. Then he informed us that we could only get so far with this ticket and not all the way to Basel. We had the map that came with our original tickets and showed him that Basel is on the map. He then explained that the tickets we had in March were tickets for high school students and college students while the tickets we have now are only for college students. We still have no idea why that makes a difference but apparently it does. He was nice enough to not make us pay the $40 fee for not having a ticket probably because he saw the mix of rage and confusion brewing on our faces but he did write us up and make us pay the price for a ticket from Basel to the first stop on our tickets. This was kind of annoying but it ended better than expected.

We've done a lot of exploration of Freiburg since our classes started. We found some great restaurants including a sausage place that serves American style hot dogs which were delicious. Here's a picture: Food
We also found a really good and really cheap Italian restaurant. We found something similar to an American mall with all sorts of stores that we didn't know we had, that was nice. We finally found IKEA and bought some stuff for our rooms. When we first got here we would ask people how to get to IKEA and they would shake their head and say "oh, no. you can't get there from here without a car" There's actually a bus that says "IKEA" on it that takes you right there, it's pretty simple. It was just like every other IKEA and had everything we needed.

Things are going pretty well.

Love you all