So, for those of you unaware, I am currently in Switzerland. Switzerland is not the most jumping place in the world, I mean, it's considered a relaxing holiday spot here in Europe. Their main industry is tourism and adventure sports. So today we went to this place called Interlaken, which is this neat little town squished between two gigantic lakes. From there we decided to splurge on a ticket to a different train into the alps.
The alps were incredible. After my friends took a picture with a carabineer-mug hooked on his ear (don't ask), we decided to get lunch in this cute, I mean uber cute, town called Grindelwald. The place was tiny, and the main event there must have been skiing, as most of the shops we walked by were ski supply shops. We then climbed up the mountain-- and I mean straight up, by the way-- on a cog-wheel train. B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L. We then got off at the top of the train route at Jungfrau. The draw for Jungfrau is that the Top of Europe is located on one of the five peaks nearby. You can see the Matterhorn from that place. I unfortunately couldn't stay long because my friends wanted to make it to the next town without waiting a half-hour. It was fine, I just have to find a post card or something with those mountains labeled. I can't spell the next town name, but it's the place with the cable car that goes up to the Schilthorn, or the James Bond mountain. My friend couldn't do that, though, because the car was not running today. We ended up catching the next available train back to Interlaken anyway because the Castle at Thun, which was my treat for the day, closed at five according to our information. It was almost four.
So we time it just right and hop the train to Thun. We get out and start seriously speed-walking (have you ever tried to run with a backpack on in a cobble-stoned area?) towards the castle spires. It was really inspiring. We probably shouldn't have crossed some of the streets in the manner we did, but hey, we're not in Switzerland every day. So we tried to go as straight as we could to the castle, but the streets were not laid out in a way as to make it easy. We ended up passing the castle, going all the way around it, up some stairs, down a few other stairs, up another flight of stairs, and under an archway just to get to the main courtyard, and the ticket desk was inside the wall to our right. Only then did we discover that they had already closed. Something about an event, which may have to do with this being their 750th anniversary. It was on our way down that we found the staircase that led to the street we had walked the length of to find the entrance. Whatever. Then we had one thing on our mind-- finding a place to sit down. We wandered in circles for a bit, and an old petite lady whacked me in the arm because I almost ran over her (she gave me a glare that could toast bread, so I didn't feel as bad as I should have). Soon after the grumpy old-lady thing, we decided to seriously look for some food.
Pizzerias are fairly common in Europe and, let's be honest, Switzerland is close to Italy. We found two pizzerias, and though I had had pizza for lunch, I was very willing to sit down to some good Italian food. Boy did we make the right choice-- it was an excellent location next to the crystal-clear river with a view of scenic town-scape and swans (though I thought the swans wanted to pickpocket my backpack. I had an excellent tomato soup that only cost, like, ten bucks. It was wonderful, and I don't usually like tomato soup.
We were very tired still and had seen most of what we wanted to see, so we decided why not go back to the hotel in Bern. As we were standing in the train station discussing schedules, a train pulled in that said Bern on it. It wasn't the type of train we took from Bern, but we felt that if it was going the same way, who cares? It was only after we were seated in the second level (trains seem to be double-decked a lot) that one of my friends got this weird, panicked look on his face. His eyes got a little wider and he fumbled into his backpack for our Eurail Pass. He muttered to me that it was the wrong train. He got up and found the rest of our group and gave them the heads up-- we were getting off at the next possible stop. He sat down next to me when we heard this tik-tik-tik noise down below. I was pretty sure he'd blow a gasket, especially when I informed him the noise came from downstairs. Hey, he asked. Ticket collectors go down the train to see who has a ticket, and they often carry hole punches, so you know where his mind went. Thankfully we got to the next stop, Uttigen, before he collapsed of fright.
Uttigen, you have to understand, is a tiny station with two tracks running through it and an unmanned station. There was no town that we could see, just a platform with one set of tracks on each side. It was not a place one expected the national railway system to stop. Several of those big trains did pass us, but they didn't slow down. This meant that every train that passed was deafening. My panicked friend soon discovered that he had reacted too quickly to the situation-- the sub-line that we had ridden on was owned by the national railway. It was just a smaller train run by a smaller sub-company. The next train was in 40 minutes, so we had fun waiting by telling jokes and discussing the reactions of the four personality types to this situation: a sanguine would laugh, a choleric would yell, a melancholy would cry, and a phlegmatic wouldn't really care. We got on the next train and rode with no problems to the train station in Bern, though we approached it from a different angle than normal and thus were uneasy about the drop-off location at first. We got back to the hotel and have pretty much crashed after our alpine adventures.
Do you blame us?
