Stephanie and I were quite excited to go to Interlaken - and thanks to my dad, I know that that means "between lakes." We had our night train and our little couchette beds, so I passed out. That's one thing that's changed about me on this trip, I can now sleep anywhere! I used to not be able to fall asleep on car rides, planes (as you learned from my first post about getting to Paris), or anything other than my bed. If I go somewhere (even just to spend the night) I'll usually bring sleeping pills just because I guess my brain gets angry when it's out of its element and it wont shut down for the evening. Anywho, back to the train ride - I passed out and didn't wake up once. I remembered Ilona telling me one time that when she took a night train it was really hot, and sure enough we woke up and were like drenched in sweat...not so pleasant. We had to make a stop in Geneva to get on another train to Interlaken at 5:45am. So we do all that jazz and finally arrive in Interlaken! We get off the train and start making our way to our hostel and are awed by how beautiful it is. We stopped and took a few pictures but had to get to our hostel because we were carrying our backpacks.
We start walking down this road, because we saw a sign pointing us to our hostel. We continue walking and realize we have been walking way too long and we were in a neighborhood....with houses and yards and everything. This couldn't be right. Tired and hot, we turn around and figure we must have passed it somehow. A 10 minute walk back in the other direction we come up on it. We had literally walked RIGHT passed it, we had even read some of the signs in the window but didn't realize it was our hostel. For the record, the sign was hard to see from where we were walking, so I blame that - not us.
Yay for getting to our hostel. We immediately sign up for hang gliding!! My mom's voice was in the back of my head and I could hear her freaking out, but I decided to ignore that and go for it. Sorry mom. We drove up the mountain and did a couple practice take offs, signed our lives away and then it was time! Surprisingly, neither of us were nervous at all. It was comforting to know that the guys we were flying with do it like 4 times a day. My favorite part was take off. You run down a hill until the wind catches you and then you're flying! They said it was a perfect day for flying and we got lucky because they didn't have any other appointments that day so we stayed in the air for 45 minutes!! I felt like Superman! And I can not emphasize how beautiful this place is, and to see it from that height - it was just stunning. He did a couple tricks which made me feel a little motion sickness, but we landed shortly after that, so it was all good. Unfortunately, the camera died mid flight so I didn't get a little video like Stephanie did, but we got some cool pictures before it died. They're on a CD, so I won't be able to upload those until I get back home.
After landing, they took us back to our hostel and Stephanie and I planned to go explore or go hiking or something. But our 4 hour nap changed our plans a bit. We woke up, said "whoops", but decided to satisfy our hungery rather than hiking, so we walked into the center of town to go to a pizza place that the hang gliding guys suggested. The walk there was just awesome. Interlaken is just so quaint and perfect. It was nice to be out of the big city, because we've been in them for about a week and a half at this point. (I'm not Interlaken right now, so writing this is making me remember how much I loved it). Our pizza was great and afterwards we stopped to get some good ol' Swiss Chocolate!! We split a pizza for dinner and so we ended up paying like 5 euro each, and then we spent about 10 euro each just on chocolate. It was so delicious!! We sat outside and just enjoyed the atmosphere and ate some chocolate - it was perfect. For the first time, I really felt like I was in a different place. The mountains, lakes, and rivers are just beautiful. I would go back in a heartbeat and definitely suggest it to everyone.
We headed back to our hostel and just sat outside and looked out onto the river (our hostel was right on the river). We just chatted and relaxed - it was (and I know I've said this three times by now, but it's true) perfect.
The next day was quite rainy and cold when we woke up. We had to check out of our hostel, but we sat in the kitchen for a couple hours trying to wait out the rain. Once it cleared up a bit we headed over to our other hostel (we had two because of our train mix up from Barcelona, when we went to try and change our reservation, our first reservation was booked the new night we needed, but we didn't want to completely cancel because we would have lost our deposit, so we figured we'd just stay two different places). It was like siesta time or something when we showed up, so we had to put our backpacks into lockers and we decided to go walk around for a bit and then go back to our hostel to check in at 3:30 because the lockers seemed a bit dodgy. We walked around longer than expected, so we didn't get to back to our hostel until like 4:30 and then it started raining. We were pretty bummed because we hadn't done anything all day, and it didn't look like we were going to get to go up to these waterfalls we had planned to go to.
We hung out in our hostel for a bit (we were sharing with two boys again - they were kind of weird). Then we decided to go hiking. What an amazing idea that was, for one it was free, and two, it's Switzerland - who wouldn't want to hike through it? Well, our hike wasn't really hiking, mostly just walking down a trail - but it was probably the prettiest trail I've ever set foot on. To your right is a river and you're like immersed in the wilderness, so it's quiet and just so pretty. We walked for about an hour and a half or so until we came up on the lake. It was so worth the cold and rainy weather, because the view was just amazing - my pictures don't do it justice. We sat on the lake for like 30 minutes just taking it all in. Behind the lake were the Swiss Alps, so it was just an awesome view - I miss it. We had to pry ourselves away because it was getting dark and cold (silly Stephanie wore shorts - I was smart and had on jeans and a jacket).
We were told that we could take the bus back into town, but when we came up on the bus stop, we couldn't read the schedule (because of the fact that we don't speak German) and we hadn't seen any buses, so we just decided to walk back. Mom, you'll be happy to know that we turned down a ride from a friendly looking stranger who was going into town - minimal eye contact was made. This walk was ridiculously long and we were already quite beat from walking to the lake. Then, it started raining. Luckily, we FINALLY made it back before the rain got too hard. We defrosted and chatted with some people in our hostel. They were all from Texas and went to A&M (we thought about Michael and Tracy). But, like I said before, I have this new ability to sleep under any condition, so I kept falling asleep on the couch while talking to them (Stephanie was doing most of the talking since I was dosing off), and then I went into our room and fell asleep with all my clothes still on, but it was a good sleep nonetheless. We had to be up early the next day to catch a train to Venice, and we didn't want a Madrid-Barcelona repeat, so sleep was justified.
3 comments:
*yay* I LOVE switzerland! Lets take a trip there together...we can eat chocolate until we throw up!
sounds perfect. where in when did you go?
Man, oh man, hangliding! It is safe to say, if your adventurous spirit has been asleep your whole life, go to Interlaken. Chelsea, I am so glad you both liked it. I would go back over and over. You have to be there to really understand the peace and adventure that awaits; two seemingly opposite things in perfect harmony; french fries and a shake. Oh yea!
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