Switzerland!

As I mentioned in my last post, the hostel we stayed at in Interlaken, Switzerland, rocked. In fact, pretty much every aspect of Switzerland rocked. Here are some reasons why:

1. They have the prettiest money ever.

2. Per capita, the Swiss consume 27.28 pounds of chocolate products each year. (I probably consumed half that during my 3 days there, but whatever.)

3. They make really bad a** pocketknives.

It's hard to see because it was behind glass.
Price tag: 1200 francs

4. . . .and watches.

5. They have 4 official languages! (German was the language where we were.)

6. Their unemployment rate is very low, and their standard of living is very high.

7. The Alps. Need I say more?

Josh and I arrived in Interlaken at night. The next morning (officially Day 1 of Switzerland), we spent several hours pocketknife shopping. In Interlaken, there are tons of pocketknife and watch stores. Being the thoughtful siblings that we are, we decided that instead of us each spending a lot of money on a pocketknife we didn't really need, we'd combine our money and buy a really cool one for Vince. We walked up and down the main street, browsing pocketknives and exploring the town. That morning, a watch caught my eye; a watch that I never knew I needed, until then. I decided to think about it.

EVERYTHING is expensive in Switzerland. Though the exchange rate is better than the Euro, it takes a lot of Swiss Francs to buy just about anything. We went to the grocery store and got picnic supplies for lunch, and then we decided we needed to do something besides stare at those little red knife contraptions for the rest of the afternoon. We took a train to the town of Thun. There, we wandered through town, to the castle.

Thun
Picture Taken from inside the Castle

We spent the afternoon exploring the castle and the little museum inside. After that, we found a photo-op we just couldn't pass up.

It's hard to see, but I'm the knight and Josh is the short dude.

Thun was an adorable town. Everywhere we went in the Berner Oberland (the region we were in the whole time we were in Switzerland) was clean and beautiful.

Oh, and the castle was cool, too.

Josh, Inside one of the Towers of the Castle

Side View of the Castle

Cat on a Wall near the Castle!

On the way back to Interlaken, we grabbed some spaghetti pasta, tomato sauce, and frozen broccoli for dinner. Cheapest thing we could think of, since together we had spent 76 francs that day just on transportation plus the castle admission.

When we got back to our hostel, we made dinner in the kitchen there. Then we tried to make a plan for the next two days in the country, and we used our cute little hostel "tokens" on some internet time.

Day 2 in Switzerland, we followed a plan. We took a train from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen. At Lauterbrunnen, we caught a bus to a station where we took a lift up to Gimmelwald. Gimmelwald is the cutest town. Ever. (Well. . . until I tell you about Rothenburg in the next post.)

Gimmelwald is a tiny mountainy village.

Gimmelwald

Building. Fence. Mountains.

I think about 130 people live there. I would have guessed fewer. They do have a schoolhouse. It has one room and a handful of students. One Sunday a month, a pastor comes to Gimmelwald and a church service is held in the schoolhouse.

There are some farm animals. And there's a tiny shop that sells cheese.

This isn't the cheese shop.
It's a place where they keep the cheese for aging.
It's on stilts so the mice don't get to it.

Josh, on a street in Gimmelwald
(See Alps behind him)

Side note: We were really impressed with how the Swiss stack their firewood so neatly. We took a bunch of pictures of it.

Pretty Wood Pile

Barn with Wood Stacked in It

Another Barn. More Wood.

We hung out in Gimmelwald until we saw everything, which didn't take long. Then we hiked over to the town of Murren. (Well, we walked there on a paved path. I guess that's technically not "hiking.") Murren was cool, but when we got there, I was a little hungry. Josh was starving. Have you ever been around Josh when he's starving? Not fun.

The problem was that we were stuck in a tiny town up in the Alps where the grocery store had just closed for the afternoon, and all the restaurants were pricey.

And this is when I had the freaking most expensive Chinese meal of my life. I had sweet and sour chicken. I forgot what Josh got. Mine was really good! But I think we spent over 50 US dollars on something that would have been 10 here. Oh well.

After stuffing ourselves, (at that price, we had to finish everything) we did some more legit hiking. We were going to take a funicular to a different town, but it was closed that week for maintenance. Instead, we were going to take a path up to another tiny town and then hike back down to Gimmelwald from there. These paths were not exactly paths, though. They were terribly marked. We didn't have a good map, and we got lost and never made it to that other town. (Josh is horrible with directions. You can quote me on that.)

View from Halfway up the Mountain

We ended up wandering through the woods, where I had to take a bathroom break right onto the ground. (Embarrassing. It was an emergency. No one saw me. . . Whew.) The woods we were in belonged to someone, I think. We had to go through a couple of gates, but we were going in the general direction of Gimmelwald, we thought. Eventually, we made it to a clearing which led down to that same paved path we had taken earlier.

We headed back to Gimmelwald. We bought some Alpine cheese and some summer sausage from a nice lady there. We wanted to hike over to a narrow swinging bridge that looked dangerous, but it was closed until summer. So we took the lift back down, took the bus back to Lauterbrunnen station, explored the town of Lauterbrunnen, bought more groceries at the store there, and took the train back to Interlaken. We made spaghetti and broccoli again for dinner. Then we spent the evening pocketknife shopping. And. . .

I bought the watch.

I was so excited about it! The rest of the trip, I timed everything we did. I kept spouting out what time it was, or how much time we had until our next train arrived or left, or how long we had been doing things, like pocketknife shopping.

Me and my Watch!

We went back to the hostel that night, and we called Vince to tell him about our adventures. (But not about his future knife)

Day 3, our last full day in Switzerland, we spent the morning wandering around the town. It's confusing, because there are two different train stations in Interlaken, about a 10 minute walk from each other. Which means there are two different bus stations. And we couldn't really figure out where we needed to be in order to get to a certain cave we wanted to go to.

Instead, we went to a campground near one of the lakes. We inquired about renting kayaks for half a day. We had our 60 francs out to pay the guy, when he remembered that it happened to be National Swiss Camping Day, and to celebrate, everything at the campground was free. We got free kayaks. Awesome!

Me

Josh

We kayaked for a couple of hours, I think. Maybe less. Then we stopped for lunch. (Alpine cheese, sausage from the cheese lady, and crackers.) We headed back and dropped off our kayaks. We were also invited back there that night for some food and a play.

As we left the campground, which is close to one of the train stations, we walked over some train tracks. We had the brilliant idea to smash a Swiss coin. This is how the conversation went:

Me: Hey, let's smash a Swiss coin on the tracks!
Josh: Okay! (Puts a 10 cent coin down. Then the red and white things that block the road from the tracks start going down, because a train's coming.)
Me: I hope it doesn't make the train crash.
Josh: Yeah. Coins have been known to cause derailments.
Me: Are you serious?! (Start to feel really bad)
Josh: I don't know. . . It might.
Me: Well. . . it's too late now. Let's get out of the way. (We walk really fast and un-suspicious-like across the bridge in case the train gets derailed.) I bet they have sensers on the train that can tell if there is debris on the tracks, though.
Josh: Yeah, it will probably just stop if there's something in the way.
Me: I don't want to go to a Swiss jail! I hope they don't fingerprint the coin! Oh wait, you touched it. Not me. (The train is coming, but it's squeaky. Josh thinks they're hitting the breaks.)
Josh: Oh my gosh. . .
Me: (holding my breath and feeling really guilty)
. . .
. . .
. . .
(The train goes right over the coin. No problem.)
Josh and Me: Sighs of relief

Once that was over, we felt like criminals escaping from the police. I'll never smash a coin again.

We picked up our shamefully-gotten coin (which didn't even smash that much), and we walked to the station where we would catch the bus to the cave. Along the way, I tried some Swiss ice cream. (Verdict? Good, not great. And at 5 francs a scoop, try to resist.)

The bus ride to the cave would have been fine, except for the mean driver.

The cave was cool, though. We had to walk up a really big hill with a waterfall going down it. The path was wind-y and pretty, and there were some big wooden gnomes, which I would normally hate, but they look like they belong in Switzerland.

Gnome. Me.

We had a cave tour which lasted about an hour or an hour and a half. The cave was huge! We bussed back to Interlaken, got some surprisingly good Swiss beer, and sat on the picnic tables at the campground. Pretty soon there was food, and then a play. The play was a 1-girl act. She was speaking in German the whole time, so we didn't know what was going on, but it looked funny!

Unfortunately, the food they had at the campground (chips and little kebabs of mozzarella and cherry tomatoes) didn't fill me up. Shamefully. . . I had McDonalds again. Mmm.

We went back to the hostel later. Being a student, I got a 10 percent discount on the Swiss pocketknives sold at the hostel. Josh and I bought Vince's pocketknife there.

Swiss Champ

Then we called Mom for a while. And we called Grandma and Grandpa. That was when our phone card got totally used up, and we went to bed.

The next morning, we said goodbye to beautiful, green, clean, Switzerland.

We said hello to the castles, night watchmen, and beer gardens of Germany.