What were we thinking

Wow German is a hard language... We arrived in Basel Switzerland last night at around 9 PM. After hauling all our luggage out to the curb it then took us a mere 10 minutes to find someone who spoke english AND had a trunk big enough for all our suitecases. Finally we found one...

now today was our relaxing day, we chose to sleep in and just aimlessly roam around Basel (a population of 170,00). (the whole country of switzerland is about the size of 1.5 San Diego Counties)....We had a number of interesting conversations most ending with the question "Where you from" and us answering "California" all people responded the same way... "What the hell are you doing here!!!!" Haha it was shortly after that we were wondering the same thing. Our adventure to the train station was interesting. We managed to find a nice woman who spoke english and she managed to get us a ticket to Freiburg (or at least we think). After looking for lunch and buying some essential groceries i started to worry and wonder. What made me want to go to GERMANY and study? They can't understand me and i surely can't understand them. But after shopping around, roaming around, speaking my minimal german (very limited to hi, how are you, thank you) i started to feel more at ease. What i learned was Switzerland has 4 official languages and even though English wasn't one of them they know it and are more than wiling to help as they can.

Fun facts about our trip in Switzerland so far.

• The airport we landed in is on the border of France, Switzerland and Germany. By simply walking to three differnt corners of the airport we were in each of those three countries. Jessica and i had fun hopping the boarders. The train station as well as an exit to the left for France and to the right for Switzerland. Which was rather cool we thought!
• Second is that the keyboard here as all the letters mixed up. The Y is where the Z is on our keyboards at home. I don't know thought that was interesting...
• Thirdly Jessica and I are soaking up the prices in Switzerland, while a little more expensive, they use the Swiss Franc which is the frist time our US currency has been stronger and therefore we are able to not cringe at prices!!
• Fourthly (i think i'm making words us now!) the weather here is a chilling 14 F (which is i don't know how cold in C but definetly like negative 4 or so... oh we're going to have fun
  Lastly...We leave Switzerland tomorrow and travel onward to Freiburg Germany where we will finally move in on Wednesday.

P.S. I thought i would share with you some of my very poor German i've learned from the streets of Switzerland.

1. Hello...Hallo
2. Good day....Guten Tag / Morgen
3. Good evening....Guten Abend
4. Good night....Gute Nacht
5. Hi....Hi / Tag ( i opt for Hi its much easier and sounds much nicer)
6. Good bye... Auf Wiedersehen (they also say bye which is nice)
7. See you soon.... Bis bald (dones't sounds anything like it looks)