France and Germany!

I was informed that the red writing on the blue background is hard to read, so I changed it; let me know if this is still difficult to read! J

We left Kortepohja (my apartment complex) around 5:30pm on Friday March 13th. Greg had bought our train tickets and was waiting at the train station. Some how we missed the train but seconds, we were reaching to push the button that opens the door when the train took off…talk about frustrating. So we had to change our tickets and wait for the 7:22pm train. So in the meantime we had dinner at Hesburger (Finnish McDonalds).
Our train ride to Tampere was about an hour and a half then we took a bus to the airport. I was warned to “not get scared” when walking into the Tampere airport and I understood as soon as I stepped inside, it looked like a garage! We flew out of Tampere at 10:55pm and landed in London about 3 hours later. We were lucky enough to have to sleep in the airport since our flight from London to Marseille wasn’t until 8:55am. Surprisingly, there were so many people sleeping in the airport, we had a hard time finding a place to crash. The three of us ended up cuddling on the tile floor because it was so cold! We woke up 2 hours later to a lady who works at the airport kicking us to get up.
We landed in Marseille around 10:30am and took a bus into town. Marseille from a distance looks really nice, but once you are inside the city, it doesn’t look so nice and there is a ton of graffiti. We got lunch of a small café then got on a boat that took us out onto the Mediterranean Sea and to a small island about 30 minutes off the coast of Marseille. The island was really cute. We walked around a bit and Jackie and I got some ice cream. We took the boat back into Marseille about an hour later to take the train up to Avignon. We got lost trying to find the train station for about an hour but stumbled across a really cool monument we were hoping to see. No one spoke English so it was really hard to get directions from anyone and I am useless with a map. We managed to find our way to the train station about 10 minutes before the last train was leaving to Avignon! The ride was about an hour and 45 minutes. We were meeting up with Greg’s mom in Avignon, she is a high school teacher and was chaperoning a school trip through France and Spain, so she let us stay at their hotel. After we got off the train, no one could tell us how to get to the hotel, so we found a taxi driver who said he knew where it was. After getting lost, for a while, the taxi driver found the hotel and only charged us 10euros when the fare was about 30euros but it was his fault. The hotel looked like something straight out of the Caribbean. The rooms were two floors with bedrooms, a living area and a kitchen. We stayed in a room with five high school girls who had a lot of gossip all the time. We went to sleep just shortly after getting to the hotel.
The next day we wandered around the city for a while. We went to a church and a garden where you could see out above the entire city. From there we went to another church and to le Palis des Papes, the Popes house. And then we had lunch; we went to a fancy outdoor restaurant. I got beef tartar, Jackie got duck and Greg got lamb. We also got desert, I got a scoop of chocolate ice cream and a chocolate fountain cake and Jackie got a scoop of raspberry sherbet and a raspberry and whipped cream kind of thing. One of the options for desert was goat cheese, and for some reason Greg did order it for desert. After lunch we went to Pont D’Avignon, a bridge that was built years and years ago. The story is, a man was told by God that he needed to build a bridge across the river to connect two cities that were not getting along at the time. He told some people in the city and they build it. However, today only about half of the bridge is still there. We walked out on it and it was so windy! Avignon is known as the city of violent winds. Then, we went to a small coffee shop and I got a coffee au lait, coffee with milk. We tried to find a shop that was still selling crepes since I have never had one, but everyone was out. So for dinner we got hotdogs from a small shop. These hot dogs were 2 dogs on a grilled baguette with ketchup, spicy sauce and French fries on it. However, it was probably one of the spiciest things I have ever eaten. We walked back to the hotel and talked with Greg’s mom and her friend, Sue, for a while and went to bed.
On Monday morning we left early to go to the train station to take the train to Nimes. The school trip left shortly after us and actually drove by us as we were walking and picked us up and drove us to the train station. We had to wait an hour or so for the train, so we got some bread, nutella and fruit and ate breakfast in the park. Greg’s watch was wrong so we had to run to the train station and barely made it; I was stepping onto the train as the door was closing! When we got to Nimes, we went straight to the coliseum. We listened to the video recording and walked all the way to the top. We stayed there for nearly 2 hours. Then we went to the Maison Carrée and watch a 3D movie about the history of Nimes inside. Then we went to a tower that looks out over the city. It was a hike to the top of the hill and once we were inside, we had to climb some rickity spiral staircase. Now, I’m not a fan of heights and everything we had done on the trip involved being wayy up high. It took me forever to get down and by the time I reached the bottom, I was shaking and not breathing well. On the bright side, the view was really nice! I finally got a crepe on the way back to the train station. I got one with nutella on it! We took the train into Montpellier and got there around 6. We had dinner and walked around the city. We found some parks and cool buildings. We stayed there until all of the creepers started coming out and then took a taxi to the airport. We had to stay the night in the airport once again because of our early flight to Frankfurt. This time we were able to sleep on some nice metal benches and had a cold breeze from somewhere blowing on us all night, but we did sleep for about 7 hours.
We flew into Frankfurt, Germany in the morning and then had a 2 hour bus ride to Mannheim where Greg’s friend lives. His friend, Milos, picked us up from the bus station and we went to his apartment and showered then went to get some weiner schnitzel. That night we went to a national German play-off hockey game between Mannheim and Strassburg. We hung out with some of Milos and Greg’s friends that night.
The next morning I had to be back at the bus station at 5:30am for my 10am flight back to Jyvaskyla. Greg and Jackie are still in Germany but I had to come back for an exam that was today.