Lafayette, we are here . . . now where's the parking?

My Austrian and I took her father's car to drive to France. This went very smoothly and we even saw some interesting cars.



We made to Strasbourg and found our new home without any problem.We live in the local catholic student center. My Austrian knew the nun who ran the equivalent one in London. Unfortunately we've only seen one nun briefly here in the one in Strasbourg. But we've seen many students since there's also a cafeteria in our hof which is apart of the greater university cafeteria system. It's basically a dorm but each room has its own shower and toilet built in a little cabin that's about 5'x3' and a sink outside of that. We also have a mini fridge and a hot plate, desk and a bed! What else could we need? Plus we're right down the street from the cathedral.




Satisfied with ourselves, we set out to find a place to park the car. The "nuns" (as we call the workers here, who are neither female nor members of a monastic order) told us to park at the university. But they were misinformed, and there was no free parking. We spent the next two hours looking for free parking, to no avail. We decided to park in a parking garage since we couldn't park on the street and the car is her father's new company car.

The business with the car caused much worrying, since parking it everyday in the garage would be exorbitant and parking it in the long term parking at the airport would be much cheaper but inconvenient. Finally when we got connected to the internet we discovered that you could buy a month pass for the parking garage (even though none of the workers at the garage mentioned it). We also discovered that we could buy a parking pass from the city for the street. But since it is Der Vater's car and the natives have a tendency to burn cars on the street, we decided to go with the parking garage.

Having a car is useful for doing things like going to Scandinavian flat-packed furniture stores. Be warned, though, that the restaurant there closes early so you might get stuck eating only dessert.



It also is useful for going to the larger supermarkets, which my Austrian prefers. However, finding them in Strasbourg has been a problem. For some reason, they hide themselves from us. Not to mention that there isn't a Carrefour (despite Strasbourg calling itself Europe's Carrefour). So the first week after we went on a little excursion we found the nearest Carrefour, which is about 50kms north. It was full of Germans buying water.



We came loaded with water from Austria, since Der Vater was sure that you can't get water cheaper anywhere else in Europe. His reasoning? In Austria you can drink the tap water (its brought from the mountains on Roman aqueducts). Makes sense to me. For some miraculous reason the carbonated mineral water doesn't taste like dirt to me this trip, so I appreciated his foresight. But the car is close by in case we run out.