July 5, 2011 Strasbourg, France

6:20 p.m. --

July 5, 2011 -- 6:20 p.m. -- Strasbourg, France

As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, there were three of us in the dormitory at the youth hostel in Frankfurt. The Japanese guy was 63 years old, and we got along fine, but the teenager from Bulgaria was a real slob. He left his stuff spread over the floor, the two small writing tables, and the two chairs in our room. I picked everything up and threw it on his bed as a hint. However, he didn't come back until sometime in the night, took one look at all of his stuff in his bunk, and climbed into the spare bunk and went to sleep. He was still asleep when I left this morning.

I also ate supper with the Japanese guy yesterday. He wolfed down his food as if he hadn't eaten in a year, but yet he can only be described as skinny.

Today I took the train from Frankfurt to Kehl, Germany. One the first train, I sat with an American couple from Kansas and a teenaged German girl who had been a guest at their house as an exchange student. Now she was returning the favor by being their guide in Europe.

Kehl is just across the river from Strasbourg, France, and the Kehl train station is closer to the youth hostel where I am staying that the Strasbourg station is. I walked though Kehl lugging my backpack, and when I reached the Rhine River, I decided to sit down on a park bench in the shade and admire the view before crossing the footbridge into France. I had barely sat down when a cyclist happened by, saw the word "Arizona" on my T-shirt, and decided that he and I should have a chat. Why he assumed that some old man from Arizona could speak German, I don't know, but in this case he was correct.

The chat turned into one of these hour-long discussions in which we solved many of the world's problems., despite the fact that I had to pay close attention to understand his southern German accent. (I learned German in Hannover in the north, where only standard German is spoken, so I tend to have troubles with the regional accents of the south.)

According to him, there is a marker of one of the routes of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Campostela a few hundred meters upriver from where we were speaking. Now that I have gotten ride of my heavy backpack, I'm going to go back over and check it out and at the same time post this blog entry. I found an open WiFi connection on the German side of the footbridge.

I've only met one of my roommates here in Strasbourg. He is an exchange student from Brazil who is studying in Grenoble, the same place where I studied as an exchange student six years ago. His English is quite good. He tends to stumble over some of the vocabulary, but his accent could almost get him by as an American or Canadian.