The awesome adventures of Jack Chi: Adventures in Colmar

So continuing on the social gathering idea, I organized another gathering with the language assistants in Colmar yesterday. We invited lots of people and actually had about 12 people show up! Anyways I decided to bike over since it was such a perfect day outside.

I turned on my google maps and was flying down the path. It was literally almost 90% downhill on the way there. But around the 1 hour mark I realized the roads started to become less paved and more gravel. My road bike really wasn't designed to handle the rough road and even though I tried my best to avoid roads like this, there was no helping some of the routes. At one point I tried to avoid the bad road by going on the highway with cars whizzing past me at 100km an hour. But c'est la vie. My bike was holding up pretty well but I can start to feel the strain that this journey was taking on my baby. The nail in the coffin came finally while I was riding on a semi highway after coming out of a really rough patch. My back wheel had been bent and was hitting the frame of my bike. I quickly dismounted and tried to fix it myself with my bare hands. But of course lacking tools none of the remedies worked well.

Finally after about 30 minutes of this, I decided to lock up my bicycle and hitchhike into town, since by this time I was about 6km outside of Colmar. The original journey was about 30km. So I started to walk past the high way with my thumb and luckily after about 20 minutes I got picked up by a really nice lady named Rose. Rose is from Senegal and lives in Ensenheim but she told me people in smaller towns such as this doesn't usually pick up hitchikers. Anyways even though she wasn't going to Colmar she dropped me off and asked me to take her number just in case! What a nice person! I am definitely going to have to find some way to thank her someday.

So finally I arrived in Colmar around 4pm, even though I messaged everyone to meet at 2pm. Anyways I met up with everyone and some people had to leave and so we were 9 going to a resturant in Colmar.

The Colmar region is so touristy compared to Mulhouse! The old town area is really beautiful, I would go as far to say that it is even prettier than Strasbourg and might be even bigger. The old German architechture plus the canals really seems like they are taken straight out of a story book. And that's not just my own opinion, the amount of foot traffic from all nationalities confirm my views. There is even an area called "Le petit Venice!"

We ended up the night pretty early and Loic and I drove back and he picked up my bike off the high way and saved me the trouble of going back again at a later date. All in all a really great day trip and I definitely want to make another trip to Colmar in the coming months.