Culture Shock: Mercedes and Ferrari and Bugatti..Oh my!

Today was an excellent day!
We woke up early and headed out. Our first stop was Colmar. Where we wandered around the Vieille Ville (Old City) for awhile and saw La Maison des Têtes...which actually took us quite some time to find.
We got lunch from one of the little shops, and my mom got a dessert...that we quite enjoyed. It was a chocolate layered cake with ganash on top...delicious. It came wrapped in paper, but then wrapped with a plastic cover to keep it from smearing everywhere. After she had finished devouring the cake (don't worry, my dad and I did get some bits) she then licked the wrapper. My dad came over, collecting our trash and asked if she was done. She pulled that wrapper so quickly away! How dare he try to take away her chocolatie wrapper! It was quite entertaining to watch her practically eat the plastic.
After our lunch we wandered a bit more, found La Maison des Têtes, which took us more to the center of Colmar, just outside of the Vieille Ville. So we looked around there for a bit, until it was time to move on to our next stop.

We drove to Mulhouse, to Le Musée National de l'Automobile. I thought this would be very boring. But it actually turned out to be kind of fun. The museum was actually a private collection of a guy named Schlumpf. Basically he just had this collection of cars (that he had to of been working on for years and years and years) and it became a museum. Now, I'm no good at math, but I know that their was a car worth atleast $1 million...and there were a couple other cars that my dad said went for upwards of $5 million at auction years ago...plus the other probably 300 cars in the place...and your looking at a LOT of money. And most of the cars weren't modern day ones. They were original Bugattis, from when cars first came about.
At first you walk through a dark area with screens playing different videos with old cars in them. Then you walk past an area that you walk through again on your way out. At last, you enter a very large room that has rows and rows set up of cars through the ages.
As you weave through these rows, there are rooms that you can go in and see more specialty cars, or a demonstration, or whatever. But at the end of the room, there's a special area set aside. As you walk over, you can see a car on a platform that is spinning. The whole area around it is dark, except for spotlights just on this car.
For someone who knows nothing about cars...I could tell this one was a big deal. It was painted a black that had a midnight blue undertone in the light, with royal blue accents. There was a video explaining a bit about the car...and wow! Some of the things I remember are...

The Bugatti Veyron

it goes from 0 to 100km in 2.5 seconds

it has 16 cylinders!

it has 1001 hp

it is the fastest "luxury" car in the world

and it's worth about $1 million

I don't know much about cars...but I do know that my little 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee, has 6 cylinders, and can't even do 0 to 20 in 2.5 seconds.

Now it was about 4:45 (16:45) and we needed to meet Justine and her parents for dinner at 7:30 (19:30) in Strasbourg. So we headed out, knowing that somewhere up the road was an extensive traffic jam. And extensive is understating it.
We meet Justine and her parents right on time though! Literally, at 7:31 (19:31). It was awesome.
We all went to a Lebanese restaurant for Justine's mom's (Viviane) birthday. Restaurant Beyrouth. I have never had Lebanese before, and didn't know what to expect.
We sat down and her parents ordered. I don't know what it was called, but it's basically a meal that you order and they bring you and assortment of dishes. You each take a bit of whatever dishes you like and eat with a very thin bread, rather than silverware. There were 22 different dishes. And I enjoyed most of the ones that I tried.
I don't know any of the names of the dishes, but there were some humus ones, some that were a bit like salsa (only not spicy), a "cucumber yogurt" they called it (but it was very tart), and lots of other different dishes.
After this, they invited us out for ice cream, in Germany! So we went back to the cars, Justine coming in ours in order to direct us where to go, and we went over to Germany! We went to a really cool ice cream shop that you go in and sit down at, or you can walk up to the ice cream counter and just get some boules (scoop) to go.
I had zitron -German- (lemon) and vanille -German-. It was funny, because now we were in Germany. So as Justine is helping me with the flavors of all the ice creams, she has to translate from German, to French, to English. And she doesn't remember much of German from high school, so she had to ask her mom for some help (who is the only one at the table that speaks German). The best part about the whole thing...we were an American family, in an Italian ice cream shop, in Germany, out with a French family. I don't think you can get more cultured than that!
Justine's mom was telling us that the owners of the shop, are actually Italian, and go back to Italy every year to make new flavors to bring back here to sell. It was really interesting.
So all in all, a very good day! And also very exhausting!