MrFrancyPants: Weekend 1: In die Schweiz

To kick off the summer we took our first weekend trip to Switzerland. To avoid paying for an extra night in a hostel, we decided to leave early Saturday morning instead of Friday night. Our train was scheduled for 6:36am, so we thought it would be best to arrive at the train station at about 6. We looked up the bus schedule on line and decided to take the bus at 5:34. Again, to be safe, we decided to get to the bus stop at 5:15. That's when the fun began.

Waiting for the bus:

We looked at the schedule at the bus stop, and it looked like a bus wouldn't come until 6:02, which would be bad because it takes about 30 minutes to get to the train station. 5:34 came and went with no bus. Eventually a bus came at 6:19. By this point we were prepared to just catch the next train and get to Switzerland a few hours later than anticipated. The trains here are very punctual, so we knew we had little chance of making it. In the morning, however, the bus is able to get to the train station much quicker, I guess due to low traffic and fewer stops. We pulled up to the station (really across the street and a large pedestrian zone) at 6:34. We sprinted into the station, figured out which platform our train was on, and hurried to it. When we reached the platform, I ran up and grabbed the door to the train as it was closing. An employee started yelling at me in French, but I couldn't move until I knew all five of us would be on the train. From there it was pretty much smooth sailing all the way to Switzerland. It took about 6 hours to get there because we swapped trains a few times.

The first the we did when we got to Interlaken was drop our stuff off at the Hostel. It was pretty nice, but I think we all agreed it would have been nicer to stay in a hostel in the mountains rather than in Interlaken.

Our co-ed bedroom was in the guys bathroom. Great building design, Balmer's.

With our stuff dropped off we needed to get some food. So we walked back to the main area of town, taking some pictures along the way. Here's a few of them:

My pointing is homage to Uncle Lanier.

group photo:

After picture time, guess where the girls decided we should eat...

At least it wasn't McDonald's...

After eating, we went back to the Hostel to hang out and kill some time until dinner later (at a nicer restaurant). Ethan and I played chess.

For dinner I had all-you-can-eat fondue. It was awesome.

At the end of the first day, I was a little bit frustrated. After being in France for I week, I was surprised to learn that speaking English was pretty rare. Because of this, I was exited because I'd be able to use the small amount of German that I know to communicate in Switzerland. Turns out, everyone speaks English (at least in Interlaken, probably because it's a touristy town). The next day, though, I got to use it to order food and get directions from mountain people.

We got up early Sunday morning to hike. We had to catch a bus and a train, so we didn't end up getting to the valley until about 9am. It was cold and raining, but we were prepared.

We walked for about an hour until we saw a sign for something about waterfalls (there are about a hundred waterfalls in these mountains, and we heard they were really cool, especially in the rain). We kind of got sucked into a really touristy place where we paid ten franks to take some bad pictures of some waterfalls. I'm not sure if everyone agrees, but I don't think it was worth the money. By this point we were all ready to start hiking up a mountain. We walked for about another hour and reached a restaurant at the base of a mountain trail at about noon, so we stopped to eat.

I'll be the first to admit that I was extremely overconfident about how far up this mountain we would get. There's no way I could have done the route I traced on the map before we left. I was basically the weak link of the group. Ethan and I usually brought up the rear to "protect the group". After about two hours, we reached a small mountain town, Gimmelwald. Here's a panoramic view from Gimmelwald:

It was about 3 o'clock, and our options were either hike back down the way we came, and walk about an hour and a half back to the train station, or hike across the mountain until we can hike down right over the train station. We chose the latter, thinking it would be about two hours. We were wrong. It took us four hours to get back. Along the way we saw a Georgia Tech student and her family (And she is not in GTL, they were just on vacation). Small world.

Even though I was exhausted for most of the hike, it was a lot of fun. For an idea of how high we went, I took a picture of the sign in Gimmelwald:

We were almost 1400 meters above sea level, but we started at about 700, so we hiked up 700 meters. And we probably went a hundred or so higher as we hiked across the mountain.

You would think we'd be tired and ready for bed when we got back, but Heath, Ethan, and I went to the casino in Interlaken that night for some blackjack. We each won back a large chunk of the money we had spent in Switzerland, so fun times were had by all.

Monday morning we bought souvenirs and got on the train back to Metz. It took way longer than it should have because one of our trains got canceled. The last train in our route was a TGV, which we actually aren't supposed to get on without a reservation, but we wanted to get back, so we risked it. No one came to check for our passes so we made it back without any problems.

Here's some more pictures from the weekend: