Global Gauthier's: More German Friends!

Our arrival in Germany was, as usual, late.

Thankfully our gracious hosts Lori and Alex were ok with our tardiness and picked us up at the train station a while before midnight. Blaire Roberts was also at their home and so we were able to spend a long time visiting all three of them- it was such a blessing to be with them!

The next morning we had breakfast together with Lori, Alex and Luca before heading to one of Lori's favourite cafes for lunch. Afterwards they took us over to their church where they have a charity clothing 'shop' and we replaced some of our lost

Milessa, justin, alex, lori, and
I'm sure luca is there too

clothing and got some dress clothes for our upcoming cruise. They even said we could simply have them and wouldn't take our money!

They then quickly rushed us over to the bus station and we jumped on Meinfernbus to Cologne!

Somehow, though we didn't remember telling Mathias and Andrea our arrival time, they both showed up at the bus station to meet us! Mathias and Andrea are a young couple we had met in

Andrea, mathias, milessa, justin,
and a complete lack of babies

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in the train station. We ended up taking the same train, chatted for 20 minutes before exchanging contact information. Then we found out they lived in Cologne where we wanted to go anyways and were able to meet up! We hung out that night with them over supper until late even though Andrea had to work early the next morning.

The next day Mathias gave us a walking tour of

Cologne, taking us to one of the largest gothic-style cathedrals in Europe and for a great walk along the river.

We also splurged and bought a cute little lock to lock onto the bridge across the river for the whole 'love lock' fad going on everywhere. We've seen many of them so far on our travels so since this is one of the more well known ones it seemed, we thought we'd lock our love here! We borrowed

Can you find ours in the bottom pic?

Mathias' house key and carved our names into it. Not as pretty as some of the other ones but it did the trick!

Afterwards we shared lunch with Mathias and a friend of his of Currywurst french fries- incredible!

Mathias organized a rideshare for us online for our trip to Brussels saving us over 50% of a train ticket! Our driver was a Brazilian guy living in Brussels, his girlfriend from Bulgaria and a newly graduated Physicist from Bavaria in the south of Germany. She was a hilarious girl to visit with and we were glad to share the car on our way to visit Blaire in Brussels!