And on the third day in France....

....I slept in again!  The mornings I spent in France could definitely have been put to better use, but hey....vacation. On Wednesday we all piled in the car again, this time driving to the Parc de Wesserling.  We drove through a town called Thann to get there, which made me think of my friend Matt.  He and I went to Thann on a grey November day (11.11.11, to be precise) and hiked up to some ruins way up on a hill. Miss you, Matt!

Anyway, the Parc de Wesserling is kind of awesome.  There's a textile museum there, which is located in an old textile factory.  We got to see how a type of fabric called "ïndienne" was made - essentially there was someone who would weave fabric, someone else who would conceive and draw a design, someone who would carve the design into wood blocks, and then someone who would stamp the designs on the fabric, using a different wood block for each color.  It was an insanely long process before it was modernized with machine production, and very cool to see all the steps of the old process.  

The grounds all around the museum form the actual park, where every year they have a new theme for the 5 gardens that make up the park.  This year it was Gulliver's Travels, so there were huge boots and big chairs for giants, and little tiny gardens and things for the Lilliputians.  We did the guided tour with one of the gardeners in order to hear a little bit more about the theme, the decorations, and the different gardens.  One of them was a veggie garden, one a garden in the French style, etc and so on. There was also a "sentier pieds nus", which basically means you take your shoes off and follow a path in your bare feet.  There were all kinds of different things to walk on/in - wood chips, pebbles, a clay pit...there was even a place where you could rinse your feet off.  It was a hot day, but we had a lot of fun just walking around.  Meanwhile, Isa's husband was off running for the 3 hours that we spent in the museum and the gardens.  Scenes from our afternoon:

When we got home from the park, Isa and I went to the grocery store where I stocked up on French candy for myself and others (pics to come when I get home), then we went back to her house for the big BBQ with all of my colleagues from last year.  It was so indescribably wonderful to be able to spend the evening talking with all of them!  There was one colleague missing - she was already on her way to Corsica when we called to see if she was free, so I'll have to get back to Strasbourg sometime to see her. :-)  All in all, it was a wonderful night.  The last partiers stayed until like 2:30 in the morning, and I was just about falling over by the time we finally said goodbye.  Here they are:

Le "Dream Team" du lycée Louis Armand

So, there you have it - only one more day to go before I've written all there is to write about my trip to France this year.  But it'll have to wait until tomorrow, because my feet are frozen so I'm going up to my hostel room to get warm, but the Wifi doesn't reach all the way up there!  See you back here soon!