we are finally in wintery interlaken. and it's amazing. i knew that i would love this city the most. but before i get into the details of it's awesomeness.... let me tell you about today!
we woke up at 6:10am to catch what we thought was our train at 7:23am. once we arrived at the train station, the train we were supposed to be on was no where to be found. so i spotted the train to zurich and made a snap decision to jump on it because it was leaving in about 3 minutes. so we ran to the train and got on. this made our attempt at reserving seats the day before pointless, but we really couldn't find the train we were supposed to be on.
we are sitting on the train, just glad to have seats when the man who checks the tickets comes by to stamp our eurail passes. thats when we found out that our train was also going through austria. we have select 4 eurail passes, which means we can only ride trains in 4 countries: benelux (belgium, the netherlands, and luxembourg), germany, switzerland, and italy. so we all had to cough up 5,20 euro, which is nothing compared to our friends' story of when they didn't validate their eurail pass and were caught and fined 50 euro. so we were not that upset. also, come to find out, we were sitting in first class? apparently first class train seats are equivalent to coach plane seats in america. so i obviously assumed that we were in second class. wrong. so we grabbed our ridiculous bags and headed back a couple cars. we actually got 4 seats together and the train was mostly empty all the way to zurich!
after we settled down in our seats, we started to train through a blizzard. i'm not kidding. the train was making crazy noises because the tracks were covered in snow, and i think we stopped about 40 times because of snow delays. i have never seen anything like it. you couldn't see farther than 20 feet from the train. but it was quite the experience.
crazy amounts of snow
i have decided that austria is amazing. everything we saw was unbelievably beautiful. i want to go visit so badly now. i think i want to go to lindau, which is directly on the water. so there was tons of snow, and then water.
riding on the train
right outside of lindau, austria. ahhhh
but i love switzerland. we sat next to a swiss couple who were telling us a lot of things to see. they said that bern is amazing. zurich looked really cool when we were pulling in to the city. i am fascinated by this country. the alps are incredible. i was blown away.
once we arrived in interlaken we walked to balmer's, which we quickly learned was a terrible mistake. but luckily when we arrived they gave us a free bus pass, so we will definitely be taking that back to the train station when we leave. we immediately signed up for snow sledding because we knew that we wanted to do that. we paid, and then went to the ski shop next door to rent ski pants, boots, and gloves.
snow sledding was probably one of the most fun things i have ever done. i didn't expect it to be so awesome, but we were laughing and having the best time ever. we jumped in a van with about 20 other kids, and headed up the mountain on a 30 minute car ride. ohh my gosh i was so car sick, but i didn't want to make the woman pull over, so i had to talk myself through it. i didn't feel normal until a little while after we started sledding. (can't wait to ride the van in italy... not. good thing i packed dramamine)
once we got to the restaurant at the bottom of the track, we grabbed our sleds, and headed up the gondola. it was a really old one that was very shaky and made me very nervous. but we made it! at the top we were all given red flashing lights to wear on our backs so that we can see each other in the dark. we were taught how to steer and stop, and then we were off! it was a little over an hour, and we were this narrow ski run that went all the way down the mountain. we stopped once to see a frozen waterfall which was really cool. after we watched heather hit the side of the mountain about 6 times and fall off of her sled, we made it to the bottom. i had a really difficult time seeing because the snow was getting in my eyes. i felt like my eyes were closed for most of the time. dangerous?
sledding is the best
we stopped to see the frozen waterfall
SO much snow
at the bottom we had a swiss dinner that was included in the price. we had salad, a beer, cheese fondue, and hash browns with a fried egg on top. it was all good. after that we headed back down the mountain to return our pants, gloves, and shoes. now we're all dead and looking forward to touring interlaken tomorrow!
fondue
fried egg and hash browns
oh and balmer's internet is a million times better than any other hostel we have been to. normally it would take me hours to upload pictures. it took about 2 min tonight.
i love switzerland.
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