Interlaken

Interlaken was a much smaller town than Amsterdam (or Paris), it's a tourist destination that seems to serve mainly as a base to go up into the Alps for skiing/general sight seeing. The town of Interlaken itself was rather disappointing. Everything was targeted at tourists, and therefore notably overpriced. Meals started at about 17 franks (1 frank = 0.96 USD) depending on where you went, including the tap water you had to pay for in many places. However, tap water was served cold. Actually cold, with some ice in it, and in glasses big enough to make it an actual drink, which was extremely refreshing after Paris and Amsterdam's lukewarm water in scotch glasses.

A river runs through the middle of town which is an amazingly light, clear shade of blue. Almost turquoise, you could see much farther down into this water than nearly any other river I've seen. It was odd also because farther up the mountain the rivers weren't particularly clear. Perhaps the waterfalls act to purify them somehow.

The hotel was very nice, it seems to be targeted at American tourists. There were outlets everywhere, a decent sized TV, a fridge (!!), the bathroom was huge, there were three windows + one in the bathroom. They had a free breakfast that I missed the first day, and was alright the second. Like Paris, you were supposed to leave your key there when you left - there was a large board on which to hang them. Wes and I decided that this would make stealing everything in the room stupidly easy, and just carried the key with us until we checked out.

The first night Wes and I got several different kinds of beer to try, and realized that at the reduced air pressure, you have reduced alcohol tolerance. The night ended with West convincing a bar (in the hostel in which part of our group was staying) full of Europeans that he was from Spain, that he had only been talking to Chrissie earlier to try to pick her up (which made her look rather stupid as she'd been drinking after him), and that he barely spoke English. He got 3/4s of a pint for less than the price of 1/2 after the bartenders knew he was "European." I was sitting in the back silent so as not to screw it up. He was extremely lucky that none of them spoke Spanish, as he was not speaking it at all in the way a Spaniard would, both in lack of fluency and in that he did not have the distinctive lispy Spanish accent. When returning to our hotel - which has a restaurant/bar in the front of it, we were refused entry as Wes still had the end of his beer, so we had to go around to the side door.

There were no museums or landmarks to see in Interlaken, the only real notable experience was the time up in the Alps. We went up Kleine Scheidegg, which has an elevation of 2061 meters = 6762 feet. There was a ~1.5 hour train ride up and a ~2.5 hour ride down (we took a different route, which was more scenic). The trips up and down were in many ways more impressive than actually being up top as it provided wonderful views of the countryside/mountains. Words can't do the region justice (nor really pictures), so I'm not going to try. Suffice to say, it was huge and beautiful.

At the top of the mountian we had a picnic, then wandered around a bit trying to find a good area to sled. Wes decided jumping down a few feet and sliding down the side of a cliff would work well. It did for him, nobody else tried it. Catherine tried to sled down a small barely slanting strip of snow, which entailed her running a few feet then sitting down and not really moving.

The train that took you most of the way up the mountain was interesting in that the tracks had a set of cogs in the middle that connected with a large gear in the middle of the train, this is supposedly to ensure that the train can stay on the track during some very steep parts, which makes sense considering we're taking a train up the side of a giant mountain. The windows on that train opened almost entirely down to allow for clear pictures.

It was somewhat disappointing to see many of the other students who went up with us (many did not as they were busy doing extreme sports, mostly skydiving and cannoning) fall asleep on the way back. In fairness we were in much lower air pressure than we were used to, but the views they missed were more than worth fighting through staying up for a bit.

After getting back to the hotel I called home (they had been trying to call me and for some reason my phone would only ring once then go to missed call, so I called them and had them call right back and just hit answer as soon as it started ringing), then went and bought some souvenirs for people back home, and then went out to an extremely mediocre Italian restaurant with some people. The only thing that was nice is the water they brought out was in huge glasses and actually cold enough that water was condensing on the sides, something I've missed hugely since getting to Europe. I got to sleep earlyish that night and got on a train for another beautiful ride through the Alps and heading to Italy. There is a train strike going on in Italy, as we found out via a sign in one of the train stations going up the mountain (the Interlaken Ost station), but they posted times and which trains would be affected, and we shouldn't be slowed down by it at all.