This weekend was graciously slow and lazy. Strasbourg was closed because of the NATO summit and the riots and burnings in the streets, so Anne's parents took Anne and I to Colmar on Saturday, a beautiful city much like Strasbourg. It was the birthplace of French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, who's most famous and well-known work of art is the Statue of Liberty, donated to the United States in 1886.

We entered the town by way of a round-about, in whose center stood a miniaturized version of the Statue. We strolled through the shopping district for a few hours, and the architecture was amazing. There were buildings with beautiful turrets that hung over the squares, and others whose roof tiles looked more like mosaics. On the way out of Colmar, the center of the round-about hosted a group of protestors - thankfully a much more peaceful bunch than those in Strasbourg - who were holding signs that read, "Liberté pour le Tibet".

Today has been thankfully uneventful - Anne's mother cooked a delicious dinner, more Alsatian cuisine I've only been too happy to try. As picky of an eater that I am, I've yet to eat anything I didn't enjoy.

Waking up today felt different than previous mornings because the sun had already made it far enough over the mountains to shine in through the slits in the window covers. This was a good start to the day - waking up in the dark has been somewhat disorienting. Last night I went to the hospital, where Anne's dad works, to have my knee x-rayed because I slipped on some stairs at the castle. All's well in the ACL department but they're having me wear a brace for the next few days just to keep it stable.

The hospitals in France only bare subtle differences from our own - I didn't get to see much, as we were in and out pretty quick, but there was a very friendly ambiance in the halls and the rooms, and the doctor and nurses were very nice and sociable, even with the language barrier.

So with my dress and my matching blue brace on, we left for the cinema, where all the American and French students were meeting up with the teachers to go see President Obama's speech at the Rhenus sports arena. We were chauferred to an ice rink across the street and waited there for an hour or so, just mingling and eating lunch. Then we crossed the street and passed through some intense security and then took our seats to wait another two hours for the president to arrive.

When he did, his speech was short and to the point, but highly moving and an amazing thing to hear from only a few hundred feet away. It was humbling realizing everything he was talking about - countries uniting in these difficult times, helping those who need it, the importance of international relations - were issues our generation is going to be dealing with in the near future. I'm incredibly grateful to be in France, in this entirely new country and culture and surrounded by such beautiful people and places and languages. We're so small compared to everything else that's out there, and this trip and President Obama's words have made this even more evident.

Once we arrived at St. Etienne's this morning we immediately hauled tail out to the bus. I think the ride was only an hour and a half, thought I slept through most of it. What I did see when I was awake was breathtaking. It's funny how we can be in such a huge city like Strasbourg one moment and in the next all around us is vacant green country side. There were plots of geometrically arranged trees along the highway, but mostly the view was acres of combed dirt, old villages beyond that and the looming mountains even further.

The bus ascended this road that I'm sure would look like a giant's staircase to the clouds if the trees were cleared away. We reached château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg and trekked up to the entrance, where our wonderful tour guide gave us a brief history of the castle before leading us through. It was difficult to discern which parts of the castle were left from Medieval days and which were restorations made by Emporer Wilhelm II - except, perhaps, for the dining hall, where he'd knocked out the second floor in order to extend the ceiling. The walls in this room were colorful and elaborate and extremely detailed.

After the castle we visited a small village called Kayserberg, evidently one of the finest wine growing areas in Alsace, which was apparent as we traveled to and from it - there were fields as far as the eye could see, and even spare patches of land in between houses, that were covered with grape-vine contraptions. In 1944, Charles P. Murray - the namesake of our middle school - single-handedly fought back a well-armed German force in Kayserberg, and was offered a Medal of Honor for his actions. We spoke with the Mayor of Kayserberg's staff about this and later visited a small gravesite in the heart of the town where some American soldiers had been buried during the war.

Today was much more relaxing - we had the opportunity to spend the day with the French kids and teachers at St. Etienne's. We divided into groups for certain sports - most of the students and teachers played volleyball, but I went with the group to rock climb. We were only in a gym but it was still completely scary - I'd forgotten just how afraid of heights I was until I'm clinging with sweaty palms and fingers to protruding bits of plastic ten or so feet from the ground. Not exactly terrifying heights, but I was sufficiently terrified nonetheless.

After failing miserably to reach the top of two different rock walls, I gave up and slunk over to where a line of ropes hung from a horizontal rock wall above our heads. This proved much easier and much more pleasantly exhilerating - I hooked one part of the rope to my harness and stuck my foot a loop near the bottom, and pulled myself up to the top. It was pretty high, and there was one slightly frightening moment when I couldn't figure out how to counter all I'd just done and get myself safely to the ground again. The bit holding my harness, though, started sliding slowly downward so I made it.

After sports we went to the gym where the volleyball matches were being held, signed a letter our teachers composed to President Obama, and recieved a couple prizes for our participation. Then Anne, her friends Alex and Basile, Hélène and Hannah, Camille, Hanna and Madison and I all walked around Strasbourg for a couple of hours. We ate lunch with a group of French and American students in a restaurant called Flam's, which served a popular dish here, flambée, comprised of a pita-like pizza crust, a white sauce instead of marinara, and ham, cheese and onions. We were a pretty loud group, and it was amazing listening to the mixture of French and English conversation going on around me.

I went shopping with Hélène, Hannah, Hanna and Madison after lunch and picked up a scarf and a version of Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu (and the Goblet of Fire) for a friend, who unfortunately does not speak French, but enjoys the Harry Potter stories just as much as I do.

It's always different, learning things from text or instruction versus sight, sound, any of the senses. It's a detatched, indifferent education. In elementary and middle school, when we read in social studies books about World War II, about the Holocaust and the concentration camps, this knowledge doesn't affect us much. First, perhaps, because we're too young to fully appreciate the magnitude of the situation - too young to really comprehend the millions of deaths involved and the horrors and atrocities attributed to the time. In high school, we recognize the profound sadness that clings to any mention of the Holocaust, but we don't quite feel it.

On Tuesday we felt it. At least, I know I did. We visited a museum on the relocation of people in France during World War II, which focused especially on the constant nationality changes frol French to German, then traveled a ways more by bus to walk through the Struthof Concentration Camp. Later, Anne's dad told me that it wasn't the original camp because it had been burned a number of times, but the experience was still profoundly disturbing. The prisoner cell block corridors were narrow, the cells lifeless and small and thankfully lacking the odor they must have been teeming with decades ago. When I peered into the isolation cells, it wasn't hard to imagine what Miss Kidwell read to us - that in the few days before they're scheduled deaths, prisoners were forced to squat in the miniature cell, unable to sit or stand or eat or drink until they died. It was chilling standing in such close proximity to a place that hosted such acts of human cruelty.

We walked through the crematorium, too, whose center still held the stove with it's cyndrillical opening - some one placed flowers there, now, instead of bodies. The walls on the left bore plaques with names of resistance members who were shot in a room off the main entry. It looked just the same as all the other rooms, except in the center where the stone floor sloped into a single drain - an easier clean up, the sign outside the door read.

After that somber visit we went through the museum on the grounds there and because most of us were too restless to walk around and read through everything, we wrote a short reflection on our day. When we returned to the school we hung around the courtyard then met our French host students in the cafeteria for a Rotary club meeting, where our teachers presented them the flag we made.