La Fin de la Cours du Langue

Yesterday was the last day of my language course - bittersweet as most endings are; we're finally heading off to collège, but at the same time we're abandoning the liberty of gradeless four hour school days, and the camaraderie and solidarity of spending it with other students going through the same experiences. Hopefully, we four will remain friends through the course of the year. Of course, it was bittersweet in more ways than one: the latter half of our final day was spent at the 190 year old Cailler Chocolate Factory (which merged with Nestlé in the early 20th century). There were demonstrations of the machines, explanations of the development of chocolate manufacturing technology, vintage Caillers ads, and of course - my favorite - free samples. They had bite-sized pieces of every chocolate they produce, free for the taking. Naturally, I felt it necessary to take advantage of the opportunity to experience the legend of Swiss chocolate, and proceeded to sample every type of sweet avaliable. It was a delicious, but probably ill-concieved endeavor; Cailler produces several dozen varieties of chocolates, so after about twenty minutes of stuffing my face, I was thoroughly disgusted with myself. Our teacher, under the bidding of the language school, I suspect, bought us each a chocolate bar. There were many worthy varieties, but I discovered the absurdly dark "Noir Extrême" chocolate, with 80% cacao. It was delicious.

The day before, we had taken a similar outing, to explore the city of Fribourg. We walked (short one - Valeria was celebrating a holiday with the other Mexican students in Switzerland) through the old city, exploring the impulsive and idiosyncratic network of meandering back alleys, haphazard stairways, and unnecessarily intersections. With its mysterious semisubterranean doorways, misplaced windows, and arbitrary architectural easter eggs, there was a whimsically slapdash quality about the preposterously short-sighted medieval construction. Having no regular plan, Old Fribourg, holds all sorts of fountains, statues, and other mysterious and ancient treasures to be discovered.

 After our unsatisfyingly brief exploration of the old part of town, we walked over to the Cathédral de Saint-Nicolas, the undisputed emblem of Fribourg. Though I'd already been with my family, I was still awed by the dramatic gothic construction of the chapel, much to the amusment of the cathedral-jaded Germans in my class. We left the prof in the sanctuary, and climbed the 368 stairs to the top. We had a fantastic view of the entire city (though unfortunately, it was shrouded in a rather depressing fog), and spent the better part of an hour admiring the city, before we returned back to class.