Getting settled in Switzerland (February 20,21)

Monday, March 2, 2009

This past week was my winter break and it was really really amazing! I knew I wanted to go to Switzerland as soon as Mom and Hadley told me I wasn’t allowed to come home. L So Lauren and I planned about a week in Switzerland and I’m soooo glad that’s where we went.
We left Friday morning very very early to get to the train station. It’s about a 30 minute walk from where we live. Well Lauren is ALWAYS late for everything – so I told her to meet me outside extra early. Well, she was about a half hour late and we almost missed our train. I was stressing out soooo bad and I was so mad at her! I like to be early for everything so that drives me crazy!! But we made it just fine. We spent Friday night in Geneva, Switzerland. It’s right on a huge lake and it’s very pretty. You can see the Alps in the distance too. Everytime we could see a mountain peak we were flipping out…little did we know we’d be skiing down one in just a few days.
Geneva is the home of the headquarters of the United Nations and we thought that was pretty important to see. So after we checked into our hostel, which was close to the train station and was very very nice, we hopped on a tram and headed towards the UN. When we got there we were blown away by the number of people that were there. It was some sort of protest against something in Sri Lanka I think?? All of the people there were of the same nationality – they looked kind of Middle Eastern but not really? Lauren and I just figured Sri Lanka haha. It was very intense though. People were holding signs and screaming and making all kinds of chaos. We felt VERY uncomfortable…being the only white people there. So we took a few pictures and hopped right back on the bus to go down to the lake. We walked around old town a little while then the lake, then searched for somewhere to eat dinner. We ended up stopping at a small pizza place and the pizza was SOOOO good!! At home, I stick to my cheese pizza from the Pub. But while I’m here I try all different kinds. So I ordered 4 Saisons….it had artichokes, ham, mushrooms, cheese, and peppers (I think). It was amaaazing!! Anyhow, while we were eating dinner a group of Americans walked in…and one was wearing a Steelers shirt. I was so pumped! I was wearing a Clarion Football hoodie – and one of the girls turned around and asked if I was from Clarion Pennsylvania! I said “Yeah!!” They all were students from Kent State, but her boyfriend grew up in Franklin! There were two people from Pittsburgh too! It was really neat. She knew exactly where Clarion was. Oh yeah! I earlier that day, when we hadn’t even gone through French customs at the train station yet, these three guys started talking to me and Lauren because they heard us speaking English. They were all from Philly and a couple of them went to Pitt and knew Clarion too! I thought that was pretty cool. So anyways….we talked to the Americans at the pizza place a little bit then headed back to the hostel to call Hadley and our parents. I was really excited to go out and see what the nightlife was like in Geneva, but little Ms. Lauren who hadn’t slept for two nights passed out at 9 p.m. I was NOT happy. I couldn’t do anything to wake her up!! So I went to bed early too.
The next day, we went back up to the UN headquarters. It wasn’t anything too special. It would have been neat to take a tour, but we didn’t have time. So we went back down to the lake, took some pictures, played on a tire swing, then decided to head to the next town. We had to make it the Interlaken that night and there were two towns we wanted to stop in on the way.
One really neat thing that I am so happy we did was buy a “Swiss Pass.” It was about $170 but for four days we could take any train, bus, boat, or tram without buying a ticket. All we had to do was show our pass and we were set. It made it so nice not to have to worry about anything. We were always just hopping on a different train and going!

So then we stopped back at our hostel and grabbed our big bags and went to the train station. Our next stop was Lausanne. After that we wanted to go to Montreux to see a castle. At the train station in Lausanne, we bought a locker and dropped off all of our bags so we didn’t have to lug them around to another train station….and since we had that pass we decided to head to Montreux so as not to lose sunlight for the Chateaux. When we got to Montreux we were absolutely mesmerized. At that point in my life, that was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It’s right on a huge lake (the same lake as Geneva) and the Alps surround it everywhere. I can’t even put into words how gorgeous it was…not to mention we had the BEST weather ever. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. We walked to the Chateaux de Chillon and it was really beautiful too. It’s right on the water and has the prettiest back drop of mountains. I was in love!! I would definitely go back! We got to go into the castle and see just about everything inside it. Our Swiss Pass also got us into hundreds of museums and things of that sort for free. So we didn’t have to pay the 12 Swiss Francs to get in which was nice.
By this time we were starting to lose daylight so we decided to head back to Lausanne. By the time we got there it was kinda late, so we just grabbed our bags and got onto a train to Interlaken. I was bummed that we missed out on seeing Lausanne, but I wouldn’t give up seeing Montreux for anything.
We got to our hostel in Interlaken pretty late on Saturday night. It has a bar/restaurant in the first floor called Brasserie 17. The bartenders there are also like the receptionists – they were all soooo nice and they all spoke English which was nice since Interlaken is in the German speaking part of the country, and I don’t know any German at all. The bar had really good food…but the drink were expensive, and not strong at all. Which was fine with me (not the expensive part but the non-alcohol part). Our first night down at the bar we met this nice older gentleman who was from Interlaken. He was very interested in hearing about our trip and all that. He was sooooo helpful!! He told us where the good food, skiing, and night life was and he was really friendly too. I never ended up getting his name tho.