Switzerland!

Friday, September 24 at 7pm, four friends and I left the Kartause on our way to the train station for our first free weekend using our Eurail! The walk to the train station takes about 45 minutes but if you stick your thumb out there you might be able to hitch a ride ;) None of us really felt like hitch hiking though since we were going to be sitting on a train for a while. The train left for the station in St. Polten about an hour away at 8pm and we saw lots of other Franciscan students in St. Polten who were headed to all different places in Europe. We had kind of a long layover before catching our night train to Zurich, Switzerland and in the meantime tried to print our reservations we'd made for the night train, but the dumb machine wouldn't print them - a lot of other people were having trouble too. Here's how night trains work: they suggest you get reservations by calling the train station ahead of time because they're often crowded. Then upon arriving at the station you can print your tickets which tell you your seat number. Well, after many failed attempts on the broken machine, we gave up and hoped for the best. Without reservations on a night train one of three things are most common to happen 1) sleep in the luggage compartment, 2) buy coffee at the little restaurant and stay up most of the night, or 3) sit in a couchette that someone reserved until you're kicked out. All of these situations have happened to students before and we were told to be prepared for anything! So we were kind of annoyed because we had scrambled to make these reservations about 4 hours before and we were so proud that we got them even with it being so tight with time, but we still ended up getting on our night train having no idea where we were going to be sitting/sleeping for the next 8 hours or so. We walked the length of the train maybe three times with little hope. Many of the couchettes had one or two seats but that meant we would get separated. Well thanks be to God, we found a couchette with four open seats and the man sitting in the fifth seat was getting off at the next station. And the sixth man assured us that the people who had reservations for that couchette had missed their train (I have no idea how he knew that) - all that to say though, we had a couchette for the night without any worry of getting kicked out! The two men sitting with us were so nice too! One guy was in his early 20's and headed to Vienna for work and the other was from India traveling. Here's how we slept for the night and we were all quite satisfied and comfortable :)

We arrived in Zurich sometime between 8 and 8:45am. Some of us got better sleep then others but it wasn't bad for being on a train all night long! It was pouring down rain in Zurich which was a bummer but we found a Starbucks not far from the station where we got some coffee, relaxed, freshened up and ate some of our snacks we had bought at the Spar in Gaming before we left. We just explored Zurich for the early part of the day and left for Interlaken at about 1pm and arrived about 4pm or so, eating yummy snacks all the way there!

We found our hostel - Balmer's which was the place to be in Interlaken!

Unfortunantely, it was still raining and the forecast wasn't going to be changing much. If anything this was the most disappointing part of the weekend and in that regard probably not the best weekend to be going to Switzerland but bad weather happens so we made the best of it and still had a great time! We went to a chocolate show and listened to a presentation and watched how chocolate's made - we also ate way too much chocolate since it was conveniently sitting in front of us during the whole presentation. After chocolate, we walked back to the hostel, desperate for a full dinner since we'd basically just been snacking the whole day. We ate at the hostel's grill and met a guy from South Africa named Justin. He sat with us for dinner and taught us a much cooler way of playing Spoons then we are used to!

We woke up in the morning and checked out before going to Mass at 10am. I made the hostel reservations and I tried to get a second night at Balmer's but they were completely booked so I had to make a reservation at another hostel for our second night. After mass, it was still raining but with sun breaks so we walked back to Balmer's where we left our stuff even though we had checked out. We played some ping pong before deciding what to do for the day. Thankfully the rain had stopped, so we ate lunch and decided to do the high ropes course. We did that for the afternoon and all of us had a blast!

After swinging through the trees and walking on ropes for three and half hours, we caught a bus from the train station to our hostel which was a fifteen minute bus ride away in Iseltwald, which was completely unintended but it worked out fine. It was on a gorgeous lake and the town was so quiet. Our hostel was nice too and there was hardly anyone there. We made spaghetti for dinner in the kitchen and just chatted. We met a friendly cat outside, he reminded me so much of my cat except that he was tiny compared to Al! We played with him for a little while :) We were all so tired so we decided to go to bed early. We were all in bed by about 9. It was good for us because we had to get up super early to catch our train back to Gaming. 5:15 we were up. Laura's alarm clock didn't go off though so we were scrambling to take showers because we needed to be at the bus station by 6am. We kind of messed up the timing though and the bus was actually leaving the train station at 6 and getting to Iseltwald at 6:30... so we picked up loose ends that we dropped while rushing out of the hostel (I did my make-up in the phone booth with Allie's little mirror) and we ate snacks for breakfast since breakfast at the hostel didn't start till 8am :( We caught our train at 7am and ran into some friends who had also spent their weekend in Switzerland and they saved us from getting fined for accidently sitting in first class haha. It was a full day of traveling and we were walking back to the Kartause from the train station at 7:45. We walked for a little while with our thumbs out hoping someone would pick us up. We were lucky and hitch hiked the rest of the way back :)

Switzerland. Check :)