So here's what went down

Josyane, the ever helpful Acedemic Director over at GTL took us car shopping last friday. Being a Renault woman herself, she took us to a large Renault dealership only to find that all of the salesmen were in a meeting for an undisclosed amount of time, so we picked up and moved on to the Renault garage just down the road from GTL which happened to have this nice little twingo.

After the requisite questioning and test drive we decided that although the twingo is a little nicer and newer than we had expected to end up with, it will be much safer to travel around europe in. Unfortunately, there were still 2 bits of scheduled maintainence that needed to be done to it, so we weren't able to buy the car that day...which is where the Peugeot comes in.

After picking out our car, we walked up to the Saturn store, not looking for more cars but for a GPS (Saturn has electronics stores over here) and like every time we walk through the Metzanine shopping center, we had to stop in the kitchen store. We had been looking for a wet salt grinder over here, since you can buy wet salt for euro pennies over here. As luck would have it, we found this Peugeot to match our salt and pepper set at home for 1/2 price, which explains how we managed to pick out a Renault but buy a Peugeot.



 So after a long weekend of waiting, and scrounging with acquiring proof of insurance back in the stated (thanks moms and dads!), we finally walked over the the garage yesterday to buy and drive away with our new car. Our first "trip" was back to the Saturn store to buy a GPS (a necessity with all the roundabouts in France) and a cassette tape adapter so that we can plug our iPods into the radio. Then later last night we went for a nice 1.5 hour drive though the tiny villages that surround Metz. We couldn't see much but the brilliantly lit churches that frost the skyline of each little town, but it was so enjoyable to be out on the road again.  I hadn't realized just how much I missed driving down the road, singing at the top of my lungs without a thought on just how much my next-door-neighbors can hear.