The Real End

Bon soir,

This will probably be my final blog for a while. I'm not sure how often it will be updated during the school year, but I may try to keep you posted on my studies this year and my research assistantship, in which I will be doing some experimental work: breaking bones with hammerstones so we can study the marks on the bone that are left and the fracture angles of the breaks, which we may be able to compare to the bone fragments that are found at Dmanisi.

It has been a long two months, and I am pretty excited to go back to the US. I have had a lot of fun and met a lot of great people, but I am pretty exhausted from all of the traveling and moving around. It has been nice though that we have been in Paris in the same hotel for the last few days. A nice end to a great summer.

I had a few problems meeting Katie in Dijon. Our flight was a half hour late and I missed the first train so I had to catch the later one. I guess that was really the only problem. At the train station, the person I bought the ticket from didn't speak English but he spoke Spanish, luckily, so I got to use that in Europe. And when I was in Switzerland, these two Spanish ladies came up to me and asked me a question in Spanish. It was very odd that they guessed that I actually would understand them. I had a brief conversation with them too. Very interesting.

Our road trip was very beautiful. After meeting Katie in Dijon, we drove to Montbenoit, FR, which is near the Swiss border and stayed there for the night. It was a very small town but it was very beautiful and had a nice, old church. The next morning, we drove to Interlaken, Switzerland, and on to Brienz, where we camped for two nights. We explored the town for a couple hours, but we spent most of the time driving up into the mountains. We drove up to Hasliberg and Axalp, which are two small towns up on the mountainside. They had wonderful views and the roads were pretty skinny and fun to drive on. After Brienz, we drove north to Germany and into the Black Forest. It was pretty landscape but it was pouring rain so we only decided to stay there for one night in a town called St Georgen. We stayed at a little bed and breakfast right in town, and the food was really good. Our dessert was quite interesting though. We ordered what we thought was a variation of Black Forest cake with pineapple, since only one word was different. The one word was 'Wasser' instead of 'Torte,' which is water instead of cake. We got our deserts and they were two slices of pineapple doused in cherry 'Wasser,' which was basically cherry vodka. Katie couldn't finish her's because it was too strong. I choked it down, almost literally, because I coughed pretty much everytime I ate a piece. Got a good buzz out of it anyways. Ha. After that, we went to Strasbourg, France, which is right on the German-French border. We went to the archaeology museum there and looked around the town at the Notre Dame and some other old buildings. We drove to a little town after this, which we think was called Bergheim. It had a medieval wall surrounding it and was famous for hanging 30 or so women for being witches. Morbid yes, but the town was very cute and had a huge chateau in the hill behind it. They also had a tree still standing and growing from the 13th century. We stayed at a nearby town called St Pie or something like that. The trip was kind of a blur at this point. We then went to Nancy the next day and explored the city. We stayed with a couple right in the city, Francois and Anne Lise. They were extremely nice and interesting people. We chatted with them until about 3 in the morning, accompanied by 3+ bottles of wine. They were very intelligent and our conversations touched several different topics.

After Nancy, we made our way to Paris. The drive was pretty boring, as Katie slept most the way because she may or may not have had too much wine. And by may have, I mean she did. Ha. Anyways, We navigated through the city and found our hotel and then took the car back to the airport. She was pretty freaked out about the traffic, but I didn't think it was too bad. A lot of cars and really slow, but nothing I've never seen before, except for the scores of motorcycles and scooters weaving in between cars. I usually enjoy driving in traffic anyways, so that's why I wasn't so phased by it. We hit a good chunk of the famous sites: Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Luxembourg gardens, and the Louvre, even though we didn't go into the latter. We went to Versailles for the day yesterday, which was ridiculous. Way too big, even for royalty. Marie Antionette's hamlet was really cool though. She had cottages built on the property that resembled the farm houses of the commoners because she wanted to pretend she was one of them. THere were farm animals and plenty of veggies growing. It was really cool. The palace was crazy with tourists, so we kind of rushed through to the gardens, which were beautiful, although extensive. We spent 6 or so hours walking around and only saw half of everything, if that. We went to the Pantheon today and saw the crypt, which houses Voltaire, Rousseau, Marie Curie, Alexander Dumas, and many other French people of historical significance.

Tomorrow is our last day so we will go to the catacombs and see all of the relocated skeletons. Very exciting and creepy. We will also meet up with one of Katie's friends who will be arriving tomorrow.

It has been a great summer, and a great way to close out the trip: A beautiful countryside with a beautiful girl. :)

That's all for now. I hope you all enjoyed my musings and writings. No leopards this year but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for next year.

Au revoir and dzilinebesa (Goodbye in French and Goodnight in Georgian)

Reed