Again, its been too long since my last post and its going to be tough to draw back to last weekend. It's hard to believe how much has happened in the last week. Each week here so much happens. It feels like an eternity since we were in Switzerland. However, the weeks seem to be going faster and faster as time goes by. We're at the end of the fourth week now, so next week is technically our 'dead week'. Then finals finish the following wednesday. Wow, that means as of this upcoming wednesday (its saturday right now) there is only one week left with the program!
Okay, so after the concentration camp last wed., Thursday was a regular school day. Thursday is the day I get to sleep in, however, I never do. I don't think I've slept past 8am on this trip so far. Not once. Anyway, I woke up at 7, talked to my beautiful girlfriend, and then went on a run with Brent, Jacob, and Dr. Kennedy. DK (Dr. Kennedy) took us up to this church on the top of a hill at the northwest part of Salzburg. The view was fantastic, however it would have been netter without as much fog. It was a good 50 minute run and felt pretty good. I've been proud of myself at how much I have been running. Although I am NOT at all hitting the milage I should be for summer so far, I am running more than I thought I would for this trip. Thank God Brent is here, he is always asking me to run, and I would not be going as much if it weren't for that. After the run I made my new favorite breakfast. Although I'm not sure what it is called, its where you cut a hole in the center of a piece of bread, butter the rest, drop it in a pan on the stove, and cook an end in the center of the hole. I saw it in the movie V For Vendetta and has always looked delicious, and when I expressed this to Nick he apparently ate them when he was just a little guy, and showed me how to make it. Since that I have made one almost every morning.
Classes went normally, with History for two hours, an hour break, then statistics for three hours, yikes. That class is tough to sit through for three hours. Our first exam was this last wed, and this was almost a week before the test, but I already knew I was in for it, as in I was not getting this stuff. Anyway, thursday night Nick, Erin, Rachel, Brendan, and I kind of finalized our plans for getting to Interlaken, Switzerland the next morning. It was a 7 hour train day. One the way there was transferred twice on three trains, the way back we hit four trains! Interlaken is out in the middle of nowhere in the Swiss alps between two large alpine lakes in a valley surrounded by 4,000 meter peaks, including the famous Eiger, which was our place of interest in going to the land of the Swiss. Little did we know what else we would do! A guy on our last train there from Canada talked to us for a while about our travels. HE had lived there for 13 years after dropping out of college because he didn't want to go back after a summer trip to the Swiss. He told us our hotel was a place where "you drank beer till you puked or till you got laid." Oh boy...
We arrived in the small town at 5:30pm on Friday the 4th and not 1 minute after walking off the train and pulling out a city map we had, a young woman on her bike rolled up and asked us if we needed help finding somewhere. She ended up walking us to our hostel about half a mile away. The people of this country followed that level of kindness and helpfulness the rest of the weekend. I had booked the hostel because it got great reviews and was the first hostel built in the city about 75 years ago. Balmer's Herbage ended up being no different from a coed fraternity house. It was insane. The place was filled with American, Australians, and Canadians looking to party and adventure. We stayed in a 36 bed dorm room. The bedding was as basic as you can get. A small pad with a thin comforter and very small pillow. Our little area was the 5 of us and two high school grads from Australia on 3 month backpacking trip around Europe. They smelled like they were 2 years in. Wow. Very nice guys though, they were a blast to talk to, as have most of the people we have met in the hostels on this trip.
That night we walked around town and enjoyed the cloudless evening. We ate dinner at this small pub about 200 meters from our hostel. But we didn't get there for about an hour because we were all taken back by how awesome Switzerland was. I can't quite put my finger on why we were all so Stoked. Maybe it was a combo of the view of the alps from their footsteps, the beauty of the town, the lively atmosphere that surrounded our hostel, and how everything had the swiss logo on it. We spent that hour going into shops and getting swiss chocolate, t-shirts, post cards, and other souvenirs. We made to dinner around 7 and ate some great 'traditional swiss food'. I put those in quotes because I'm not sure the country has a real food culture that is unique to itself. The food there was a variety of choices we'd seen in other countries, and american food. And we were told it was a place that served the best local food. But the Swiss also do not have an official language, so maybe the food follows. We noticed a good amount of italian influence in the food and language, as well as French, and German.
After dinner we hung out at our hostel for a while, which had turned into a huge frat party with its two beer gardens, indoor bar, basement club-bar, and loud music everywhere. Earlier that day we had discovered that Interlaken was a place where the adventure crowd swarms to do things like paraglide, bungy jump, skydive, and go canyoning. The last one, we saw being displayed on a tv inside an adventure co. shop. It looked like traversing through river canyons using ropes, jumping, floating, and swinging. So, at 9:30pm, we decided we were going to try and book that adventure for the next day, and then go on out original plan of hiking the Eiger trail. By 11pm we thought we had made a reservation for the next day, but after talking with the reception at out hostel, they said most people book in the morning for the following day. We booked at 10:30pm at night for the following morning at 8am. And it took a long time to get any confirmation. Needless to say, we were skeptical about whether or not we actually made a real reservation. Go figure, when we went to OutDoor Interlaken the next morning, we weren't in the system, but had just charged 500 dollars on Brendan's credit card…. and in some act of God the guy at the desk said he would just throw us a different time's slot for a four hour trip that day. We gladly took it, and came back when he said to meet at 9am. Another woman was there checking people in, and we weren't on the computer this time either…but we found the guy we talked to, and he didn't really know what was going on. But it sounded like he booked us when we actually hadn't paid anything! We still don't know if his card actually got charged. but we got to go no the trip anyway. So at 9:30am, the 5 of us suited up with extra padded wetsuits, special booties, and life jackets "more for padding than floatation". Then we drove 25 minute up into this canyon outside of the city, hiked another 15 minutes, and then dropped into this raging river to spend the next 2 hours traversing down. We had a South African, and Peruvian guide named Ren and Santiago. It was an absolute blast. We would repel down some waterfalls, jump off others, slide down natural canals, climb underneath waterfalls, and swing around corners off rocks 30 feet off the water. Brendan and I were the only two who would do flips off the rocks into the next pool. The process of jumping was difficult because you had to land a certain way to miss rock ledges, and clear the waterfall, and land lat enough to miss hitting the bottom. If you didn't jump just right, the guides would yank on your life jacket from behind to make sure you landed flat. However, that usually ended up with them yanking you back so that you land basically on your shoulders, and then everyone would laugh. Everyone made it down safe, although we were a bit worrisome before going when we heard someone had broken their arm and another with a broken leg the day before… but we made it! They said most of the inheres were not from jumping but from just walking around in the water because people wouldn't watch their footing.
When we got back we were all beat, but we pressed on! We had brought about 10 lbs of food from the center in a large bag and saved ourselves from paying for any meals besides dinner. We ate lunch at the hostel outside, and by this time is was about 80 degrees. Then we headed out for the Eiger. We took one train up to a small town called Lauterbrunnen. From here we boarded a cog train (a train that has gear-like tracks that prevent the train from sliding down the steep terrain) up to an alpine village called Wengen (Ven-gen). The view from this place wa incredible. The village sat on top of a mile-wide canyon with Lauterbrunnen below and the three peaks above. I felt like I was in a Jurassic jungle. Water falls littered the huge canyon. And the mountains rose from the horizon like colossal earthy skyscrapers. It was amazing. I was so excited. We then took a cable car up a vertical ridge about 3000 feet to the start a trail heading directly to the base of the Eiger. We all went crazy when we got to the top. I've never seen anything so huge and overwhelming. I felt so incredibly small and insignificant. On our way toward the mountain we climbed some smaller peaks and played int he snow covered ridge. We turned around after about 3 hours of hiking and climbing. We ate a small lunch at the base of the mountain and I enjoyed the moments I would be closest to this incredible mountain I would probably never visit again.
On the way back, we had to hike the ridge back to the cable car station, and then hike down the 3000 foot ridge because the car had stopped running. This was bittersweet because we had already had a long day, but the views would turn out to be amazing on the way down as the sun set, and we saved about 25 euro, however the decent took about 2 extra hours. We stopped numerous times to take pictures of the changing climate zones. We went from rocky and snowy to dry and rocky areas, to light trees, down through heavily wooded areas to the bottom. The trail was actually pretty confusing but we could see where we wanted to go from the hill so knew which directions to take. We passed a few hilled farms and cows, and ended in the middle of a rural area outside the town of Wengen after 2 hours. We took the cog train back to Lauterbrunnen, and than the 30 minute train back to Interlaken. We were starving at that point and found the first pizza place we could find and ordered the biggest one they had, American style. When we got the pizza, the guy who worked there noticed how fast we were ripping through it and told us to slow down, saying that American's don't enjoy their food as much as they should and just rush through dinner. We prompty kept ripping through the thing because what he didn't realize is that we had just spent the whole day expending more calories than we had eaten in the last three. We ended up just talking and laughing at the little place at our outside table for an hour and a half after we ate. It was nice to relax. We then tried to find our hostel in the darkness (it was about 10pm by this time) and got lost for about 45 min before we figured out where to go. When we got back, we all showered and climbed out sorry asses into the small, but very needed bed. I slept like a rock.
The next morning we got up for our 8am train, and made four transfers, which made the 7 hours go by quick actually. Sunday night was our weekly group meeting back at the center, where everyone shared their weekend experiences. Other groups went to Venice, and the mediterranean coast in Slovania.
The week was prey full of school because we all had the exam on wed in statistics. Our class trip wasn't until thursday, yesterday, when we went to Vienna. But wed night after the exam, I was on the group dinner committee. We made breakfast for dinner. I was in charge of making over 50 french toast! It was delicious. And this whole week starting around 10pm we all have been out on out balconies watching the lightning storms to the west of the city. Reminds me a lot of the storms we used to watch i Arizona.
Yesterday we all took a train to Vienna at 5:45 in the morning! A german teacher for the year program, an Austrian woman named Gundi was our private tour guide for the city. We visited the old castle of the Hapsburgs. This family ruled Austria from the 12th century through the first world war. They're strategy for preventing conflict with other empires was to have a ton of kids, and marry their kids off into the royal families of other nations, thus preventing most bad relationships. Good strategy actually, it worked for almost a thousand years anyway. After a tour of their castle, we walked around the "ring" which is the main street of the city. Vienna is split up into quadrants, and from about 1200-1700 the central quadrant was guarded by a star shaped wall that made a ring around the city. When it came down, the place where the wall stood became a main drag. We ate lunch outside St. Stephens cathedral after walking around inside the 13th century gothic structure. The main entrance to the church was built in about 1000 AD. Incredible. We shopped for bit, then met up again to go to the natural history museum. After that it was about 5pm and we made it back to the train station. The teachers left to go back to Salzburg while the rest of the group went to hostels to stay the night before we left for Prague this morning.
Now I am on the train, just went across the Czech Republic border. Actually, as I am typing this I looked out the window to a very broken down apartment building to see a large man sitting on his window sill completely naked. Nice. We are planning on getting some mopeds tomorrow and driving all around town! One thing I have noticed is that I have developed a much better skill of weekend packing. I am down to a lot less weight than the first weekend to Budapest. And the one thing I brought on this trip that has made a huge difference is a towel. God you def need one to survive. You don't when you'll be able to shower, and whether or not you can find a towel at the hostel. Next time I need to bring floppy floppies.
We have heard literally from every person were talked to the Prague was the best city to visit is Europe. Hopefully it hasn't been built up too much! I'll let you know.
Until next time.
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