Sunday 11:00 p.m.

In my hotel room in Strasbourg. I had hoped to be in the little town of Mertwiller tonight, but the B&B was all booked up. It is the beginning of X-mas season over here and apparently Strasbourg is the focal point. Tonight was one of those moments where everything seems surreal. Attached is a really bad picture of one of the sight streets by my hotel. The only thing that I can think of is the end of the movie “Catch Me If You Can” when they catch Leonardo in a French village Mont Richard. It has the feel around here with all of the X-mas lights, vendors. It even started to snow (It should more probably be called sleet, but it’s writer’s privilege) as I was going around chewing my Bretzel and looking for X-mas presents. Just then, I realized that the song in the background was “I saw Mother kissing Santa”; oh well.
There is an amazing Cathedral here. More impressive on the outside than Notre Dame de Paris. (this one is Notre Dame de Strasbourg)

Went to a couple of museums today as well. One was the archeological museum. The had bones and such, but what I was really interested in was the Roman founding of the city. Strasbourg was originally a Roman fort on the Rhine. This museum and tons and tons of Roman stuff, like 5 foot tombstones of general of Augustus’ 2nd legion in 100 A.D. It made me think of Bob and I get excited about finding a railroad spike from a hundred years ago. Here, farmers dig up Roman ruins. Crazy.

My thoughts on France for the day: 1. I take back what I said about Europe not having any fat people. This is the land of Handsel and Gretal and there are some German speaking people who sure were chowing their food at lunch, and you could tell it wasn’t the first time.