Switzerland - July 1 & 2

We arrived in Bern the evening after our Europa Park day, and had a bit of trouble finding our hostel in the dark, but we eventually got there! The hostel was nice, it was a Hostelling International hostel, which usually means more school groups and families, which can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad! Our room was 6 beds, with a table, but there were people sleeping when we got there so we had to be quiet and not turn on lights.... such is the curse of late arrivals. Luckily, the lockers were in the hall (major plus) so we didn't have to disturb anyone while we unpacked. At the reception desk they had told us that although our room was supposed to be all female, they had a guy who comes and stays for weeks at a time and doesn't like to be moved, and he was in our room. We didn't really care too much about it, but then later on, we discovered we should have pretended to care, because this man snored like no one I have ever heard! I had my earplugs in and it still sounded like he was 6 inches away!! Another exciting hostel experience... once I got to sleep is was no problem though.

Tuesday we caught a train to Interlaken with no real plans except to see the Alps and check out the town, which is a backpacker/extreme sports haven. Interlaken literally means 'between lakes', and we saw one on the extremely scenic ride in, so after we got there we set off to find one of these lakes, but it turns out we picked the one that was farther away... oh well. We had fun walking around and watching all the paragliders in the sky, and ate burgers from a stand for lunch... Switzerland is too expensive to get real food very often! We caught a train to Grindelwald, which is higher up in the mountains, because we wanted to take a cable car up the mountain to get to a luge that we could ride (thanks, guide book!). The train ride was really fun and we took a lot of great pictures... the weather was so nice (but hot!) and the Alps were beautiful.

pic from the train ride - just how I'd imagined Switzerland!

Once we got there we had to walk/hike up through the town to get to the cable car station, where we rode straight up a mountain and took even more great pictures - super! When we got to the top, the 'rodelbahn' was so fun, it was about $5 per ride, and the luge track went in big s-curves before it brought you back up to the top. We would even tilt totally sideways around the curves and everything! We took a lot of fun pictures of each other, and then hopped the cable car back down, and practically ran to the train station so that we could make it back to Interlaken before our next train!

at the end of the luge + Swiss flag :)

view from the cable car

From Interlaken, we had decided to take the 'Golden Pass' scenic railway to Lucern, and I think we got a little more than we bargained for! We first went past the lake we hadn't seen yet, which was nice since our earlier quest had failed, but then across the lake we could see it was raining, hard. We basically watched the storm come across the lake, and then in rained really hard and hailed, and we passed through the storm and watched it from the other side... there was a ferry boat trying to outrun the storm, I think he made it? The storm caught up to us again and followed us the rest of the way to Lucern, so we got to see the sights, but amidst crazy hail and lightning - I was so glad we were on a train and not stranded outside somewhere! We eventually made it to Lucern, and had time to walk around a bit before we could tell the storm was catching up to us again, and we headed straight back to the train station! It was only about an hour back to Bern, so all in all, it was a great day, and we got to see a lot of Switzerland!

Wednesday morning we stayed in Bern and a nice Canadian girl we had met in our room came with us to see the bear at the Bern bear park (Bern means bear in German) and then to the Einstein museum, which turned out to be more like a history of Judaism and Einstein and everything that happened during Einsteins life including WWII and every other important person from Bern. But mostly Einstein haha. It was actually fun, but it took a lot longer than we had expected!

view of the Swiss parliament building
(our hostel was right below it)

from the Einstein museum

After the museum, it was basically time to go, so we got our stuff and went to catch a train to Zurich. In Zurich we had just a few hours before our next train, so we went to the Lindt chocolate factory and discount store, which was the perfect 2-hr trip, complete with cheap chocolate!

The crowning touch of our Switzerland visit was that when we left for Salzburg, we went through Lietchenstein on the way to Austria - another country to check off! We had seriously considered going to Liechenstein that morning instead of staying in Bern, so we were excited to get both of those things accomplished haha. There was also no one else in our train compartment, so we were able to flatten all the seats our (the six seats can flatten into three beds) and basically have a gigantic bed for us and all our stuff on the 5.5 hr train to Salzburg!