And on the 16th day they rested

Wanting to take full advamtage of Nicole and Olivier's knowledge and excellent hospitality we packed as much as we couild into our 4 days in Fribourg. Today? We did nothing. Blessed noting. Emerging from my room barechested, yawning, stretching at 2:30 in the afternoon I even felt compelled to explain myself to a Seattle family that I passed in the hall. Of yesterday there isn't much to tell except for trains and rains, which been the unofficial theme of Switzerland so far. The two notable items were the mildly interesting revelation that we had in fact been here before; 5 years ago with our whole family. Though I recognized some of the sights (particularly Luzerns famous covered wooden bridge) it was all very delayed and very vague, as if from a dream or from pictures of someone elses trip. Not surprising, really, considering how dead tired we were on the "EF 1000MPH European Sampler Whirlwind." A perfect reason to start with a guided tour to find out what you like, then come back and fire for effect.

Lastly, after being in Europe for more than two weeks, our impulse to "eat local" entered a waning phase, replaced by an urgent need for...Thai! Now some of you are probably asking yourselves "Where the heck are you going to find a Thai restaurant in Luzern, Switzerland?" And after nearly an hour chasing geese around old town Luzern, we were asking ourselves the same question. Eventually we stumbled onto (into) a Korean restaurant (Korean Town, naturally) that was warm, dry, smelled delectable and appeared to be patronized astoundingly (and encouragingly!) primarily by Koreans. The menu was mercifully subtitled in English so we helped courselves to hot green team, dumplings, a beef and glassnoodles house special, and a spicy chicken dish. We declined the waitresses offer of forks or even wooden chopsticks, instead opting to try the traditional Korean chopsticks: flat and metal. Despite some hand cramps we had an excellent meal and were mostly dry by the time we headed back out into the storm.

Tonight we cooked here at "home" (the Luzern Backpackers Hotel) and plan to turn in early, post-prandial cappucinos notwithstanding. Depending on whether we hear from Veit and Hilly (two of the Austrian scout leaders) we'll either head for Vienna or Munich on the morrow.

[Editor's note: What do tech savvy budet travelers to do to get around extortionate net fees and still make lengthy blog posts? Why, they type the whole blog post into the URL bar of the kiosks browser windows, 400 characters at a time, in 5 separate windows, then pay the money and past the whole thing together in 20 seconds. (Then they spend another 2 minutes being smug about it...)