The Pyrenees

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A few years ago, my friend and I went to France to go hiking in the mountains. We decided on going to the mountains near Lourdes because it didn’t seem to be as touristy there as compared to other more well-known areas in the Pyrenees.

We first had to fly to Toulouse, and then we took the train to Lourdes.

Once we got to Lourdes, we started making our way through the town toward the mountains.

Unfortunately, it started raining right then. We trudged through the rain along the roads until someone was kind enough and pulled over for us, offering us a ride.

It was nice to get out of the rain on the first day of our backpacking trip, and she got us much closer to the mountains. By that time, the rain had subsided enough that we could walk without getting soaked.

We managed to get to a lake that marked the entrance of the park, and we ended up pitching our tent behind some bushes where it was fairly hidden.

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Semester Abroad in Germany—Other Countries

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While I was in my semester abroad, I traveled to a lot of the areas around Pforzheim, where I was studying, on the weekends, but I also went to a few other countries while I was in Europe.

On one of the weekends I went to Zürich, Switzerland. I used a site to carpool from Stuttgart to Zürich which only took a few hours.

I was couchsurfing, which helped save some money, because otherwise Zürich is expensive! My hosts were fun, and we went out to a club one night. Another time while we were sitting on their balcony, one of them told me how he accidentally stole a table from the university. The university had set out a table with some books that were free to take home, and they had put a sign on the table saying free. As the pile of books disappeared, my host told me how he ran across the table with a sign on it stating free, and he thought he would take the free table home. It wasn’t until later when he talked to another roommate who asked him if he saw the books that were free did he realize that the table itself was not part of the deal. Oh well, he kept it, and that’s what we ate off of on the balcony. When I wasn’t talking with my hosts, I was off checking out the city.

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