Even though I left Philadelphia on the 20th of January, I still have only had 3 days in Granada so far because I’ve just been traveling for a week in Switzerland! My classes at the CLM don’t start until the 6th of February and my friend Kristen’s classes don’t start until the 8th. We met last semester when she was studying in Granada with API as well. This semester she decided to move on over to Mallorca, a beautiful island off the coast of eastern Spain. I’m bummed she’s not in Granada but I can’t wait to visit her in Mallorca this spring!
Our Switzerland journey began on Tuesday, January 24th when I hopped on a bus to go up to Madrid to meet Kristen there because she had just flown in there from JFK. We flew into Geneva where we stayed for 2 nights. Geneva is in the bottom portion of Switzerland on the bottom part of Lake Geneva and basically surrounded by France. Funny enough, Geneva therefore speaks French which neither Kristen nor I knew about. Even funnier enough, neither of us speak the French language. This so began the biggest language barrier trip ever, though absolutely 100% worth it. The first night we were both so tired that we crashed in the hostel until the next morning when we decided to go explore the Olde Town part of Geneva. In the bay of the Lake stands the highest fountain in the world, the Jet d'Eau. It seemed pretty random but it was really cool. Another thing Geneva is known for is their flower clock. It’s a clock right by the Jet d'Eau that is a clock on a little hill of grass, decorated with various designs of flowers at various points in the year. We then walked into Olde Town where St. Peter’s Cathedral is. This was one of my favorite types of cathedrals because it is very simple. The outside is cool but nothing too extravagant, though this is how a lot of the outer shells of cathedrals are designed. What I loved was that the inside was not decorated with gold and jewels on the walls out the wazoo. The inside had cool arches down the center aisle. Everything from afar looked just like gray stone but when you got close to the front most part, you could see that they had painted some of the stone. Some of the arches in the front had remnants of deep red and blue stripes and other designs. Very cool and interesting to think about many things that we know without color were once decorated and painted.
After the Cathedral we continued to wander around Geneva and stumbled upon some parks. One of the parks had an ice rink and life sized chess and checker boards (Yes, I did feel like I was channeling Harry Potter). We played a game of life sized checkers and were on our way to continue exploring. We bought our first of many Swiss chocolate bars… Mmmmmmm. So so so good. We grabbed some lunch and headed back to the hostel for a quick siesta—it was our obligation to bring at least some of the Spanish lifestyle to Geneva. That night was the Bar
ça v. Madrid game so we headed over to an Irish pub to watch the game. (They tied but because of the previous game, Bar
ça won!!)
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| Life sized chess & checkers |
The next day, we packed up our stuff, checked out of the hostel, and decided to take a tour of the UN. Geneva, Switzerland was first home to the League of Nations. The League of Nations then dissolved (officially in 1946) and the United Nations, as of October of 1945, stands in its’ place. New York now holds the headquarters of the UN, which I was lucky enough to tour when I was a freshman in college but Geneva and the Palais des Nations is still the main European office and very historically relevant with its’ history with the League of Nations. The tour was very cool. There was a lot of awesome artwork throughout, much of it given by countries when they joined as a type of tradition. The UN is also situated across the street from the American Red Cross museum which you can also tour.
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| Broken Chair monument at the UN used to warn against the danger of land mines |
We were then onto our next city in Suiza—Lausanne! Lausanne was just about 45 minutes from Geneva. It’s another city on Lake Geneva but further north. Lausanne is the Olympic Capital and the second largest city in Switzerland. Our first of two nights was spent going up to the cathedral which was pretty impressive. There was a room off to the side in the back where they had painted the walls and it was still intact. The stained glass in this cathedral, like the Cathedral we saw in Geneva, was incredible. Both Kristen and I agreed by the end of our trip that the Swiss really know how to do stained glass. It was just breathtaking and awesome to admire that kind of craft.
One minor slash actually huge thing about Switzerland is that it is quite the expensive country. Somehow, though, the country has managed to be affordable for the people that are employed and paid in the Swiss Franc but for everyone else, it’s a bit ridiculous (we found out that someone working at McDonald’s has a minimum wage of 18 franc an hour! That’s almost 20 dollars!) Because of this, Kristen and I ate many things from the good ol’ supermarket. Many nights we would buy a loaf of bread, some tomatoes, and cheese and feast on them. That is what we had done this night but decided to grab a beer at a place called Les Brassiliers. It’s a brewery that was recommended by some websites I had checked out and it delivered with some very good beer.
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| Our first dinner in Switzerland: Bread, tomatoes, chocolate, spinach that wasn't quite spinach, cheese that said 'Classic' on the package but smelled like unwashed feet, proscuitto that was almost as horrible as the foot cheese, red wine, and truffles that we later discovered had a label on the package that said 'mit alkohol'... well that's neither french, nor spanish, nor english.. 2 minutes and a Google Translate search later, we discovered that we had picked out the only chocolate in the store that had alcohol in it... needless to say, they were put into the category of the foot cheese and bad meat as the Fail part of this meal. |
Because of Lausanne being the Olympic Capital, it has an Olympic museum that is very impressive. It has a timeline from the start of the games to present day. They have all the torches from all of the Olympic Games as well as memorabilia from many of the athletes. The entry for us ended up being free because on the 29th of January they closed down the museum for about 2-3 years to do renovations. Since they were closing, they were letting people in for free for the last week of them being open. I’m so happy that we went because it was SO cool. I’ve always been interested in the Games and to see all this information about it was awesome. I’m not quite sure why they’re doing renovations or what they’re doing renovations on because it all seemed pretty modern and was quite spectacular. There was one section that had 6 of some of the opening costumes from various Olympic Games. There was a big video presentation on it with footage from the original Ceremony. Talk about innovative designs. Those opening ceremonies are spec. tac. u. lar.
Our second night in Lausanne, we decided to cook our dinner at the kitchen in our hostel. We went over to the grocery store and picked up rice, Tikka Masala sauce, chicken, and veggies for an Indian feast. We met some people from Australia that just moved to Lausanne for a year as well as a group of girls from the US who are studying in Geneva for the semester. Now prepare yourself for an example of how small this world really is. In the group of girls who are studying in Geneva, one of them said she was from Philly (which, if you haven’t already discovered, almost always means you are not actually from Philadelphia but if you were to say your town name, people would just look at your weirdly, smile and nod while pretending they know where the heck that is). Anyways, I asked her from where since I am Philly as well and she said Upper Darby which is right next to my town of Media. That’s not even the small world part of it though; I asked her where she went to high school, etc. and she said that she would go to Media sometimes because that’s where her church is. The next obvious question is where said church is. She starts to explain it and the name of it sounded very familiar: Unitarian Universalist Church. As we continue talking, I realize that I know if because it is across the street from my church! So let’s recap, I’m sitting in a kitchen in a hostel in Lausanne, Switzerland talking to a girl who went to the church across the street from mine in my town of Media, Pennsylvania, USA. If you can imagine it, it gets even crazier when I ask her if she knows anyone from Media. Turns out I know all 3 people she had mentioned: Neil Cambell sat in front of me in geometry class sophomore year, Cat Ramirez sat at my lunch table all throughout high school and I had been over her house many a times, and Nick George who I have known since kindergarten and she went to church with him. My mind was blown by this point because it was so crazy to think that this girl knew these people from my life at home in Media. Small world, I know!
This now brings us to Saturday morning when we departed to head to our 3rd city, Interlaken. Interlaken is more north and further east than Lausanne. Interlaken, as Kristen so accurately described it, is the hub/home base of the skiers, snowboarders, sledgers, everyone. It’s at the bottom of the mountains so what most people do is stay in Interlaken and then head up to the mountains for the day. It also looks just like a postcard: mountains in the distance, typical Swiss houses/cottages in the forefront. The first night we hung out at the hostel we stayed and hung out with Petra, our roommate. The hostel was so cute and was full with students, mostly English speaking. For Sunday, we decided to go sledging in the Alps. I’m not sure why they call is sledging but it’s basically sledding on a toboggan. We rented our gear and headed to Grindelwald to take the bus up to the top of the mountain. There were a few different paths down that you could take and there was no time limit so our first trip down, we took our good ol’ time. It was very cloudy/foggy so we couldn’t see clearly to the other mountains which was unfortunate but the few that we had was still pure beauty.
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| My sledge and me somewhere in the Swiss Alps |
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| Taking in the gorgeous view of what looked like those fake little Christmas trees dusted with fake snow but was in fact the completely real beauty of the snowy Alps |
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| Kristen and me with our toboggans! |
We still had one more day in Interlaken after our sledging. We didn’t have any set time that we needed to be back in Geneva by so we decided to do something cool our last day in Interlaken. What might be cool you ask? Well, despite my being petrified about this, we decided to go Canyon Jumping! Yes, I said Canyon Jumping, not bungee jumping because, like its’ name explains, you simple jump off a canyon… 90 meters aka 300 feet above the ground… ground as in snowy rocks. But as you can see (or read rather), I am still alive! It was so much fun and probably one of the scariest things I’ve ever done in my life. You jump off of a platform and you free fall for 4 whole seconds. Let me tell you, 4 seconds seems like nothing until you are falling through the air and forget that eventually a rope and your harness will catch you. The process of the fall went something like this: Stage1— you jump, you think “this is kind of fun and cool”. Stage 2—you are still falling but it’s still cool/fun. Starting to get a bit scarier. Stage 3—You completely forget that you are harnessed in and you think nothing is going to catch you. Otherwise known as ‘The Complete Freak Out’ Stage. Then comes Stage 4—after you scream bloody murder because you realize you are indeed, still falling, the rope and harness catch you! Well, what d’ya know. Finally Stage 5 – RELIEF! YOU’RE ALIVE!! . Yup, that pretty much sums it up. After jumping off of a canyon, we headed back to Interlaken to pack up our stuff and go over to Geneva for one last night before our flight to Madrid the next day.
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| The contract that we had to sign before jumping (and indeed, my mother did not know I was there... sorry, Mom!) |
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| This is the bungee jumping platform taken from the cliff jumping platform (though not on the day we went because there was no trace of blue sky while we were in Switzerland) |
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| Pre-jump! Practicing a 30cm for a 300ft. |
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| Yours truly all harnessed up, ready to go! |
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| All of us getting ready for the jump! |
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| First one to go and nerves are a-flying |
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| And we're about a half of a second into my terror jump |
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| This is around Stage 3 (hence the eyes BULGING and screaming/terror filled face continuing) |
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| Stage 5! I'm alive!!! Estoy viva!! Gracias a Dios |
Though we had our cities for this trip planned, we didn’t have many plans beyond that. With that being said, this trip turned out to be so amazing/fantastic/every adjective along these lines. There were so many happy surprises along the way and if you had asked me before I left if I was going to come back having gone sledding in the Swiss Alps and having gone canyon jumping, I probably would have just chuckled at you and said ‘Yeah, okay.’
Happy February everyone!
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