May 24th
Where do I even begin? As you may have noticed, we are running a little behind on our blog posts, but none the less, we still have to keep writing them because we're printing these off to keep for ourselves...anyways..Today we left the wonderful Hirsch home and left for Interlaken! Our trains all arrived on time and we enjoyed a beautiful train ride through the mountains and lakes of Switzerland! Seeing that Interlaken must mean "inter-lakes" in German, that's exactly what it is! It's a little backpackers' town situated right in between two beautiful bright blue lakes! This area has the tallest, steepest mountains I have ever seen and where we were in the valley of all these mountains in Interlaken was quite warm, but it was crazy to think that at the tops of the mountains, it very well could be snowing! There are lakes for water skiing, rivers for river rafting, and mountains for hiking, biking, and skiing in the winter!! Pretty much it is New Hampshire and Park City combined so of course I LOVED it!!!! I think it is my favorite place in the world!
Anyways! We got to Interlaken and made our way to "the Happy Inn"! We dropped off our bags there and went to go talk to the Bungee jumping place... Oh yes...we are indeed going bungee jumping!!! We went to the place and talked to a very friendly guy named Henna who seemed to know anything and everything about Interlaken! It turns out that the "big bungee" that we were signed up and paid for to do might not be possible because of the ice that's still on the lake that we're jumping over! We were planning on going tomorrow (Friday), but he said that we have a 50/50 chance that we won't be able to tomorrow! So we just prayed and prayed out guts out that it would work out that we could do the bi bungee over a beautiful lake rather than a little bungee in a grey canyon that we may or may not even want to do! Pretty much, at this point in time, everything is a little up in the air!! So we're hoping for the best! One good thing that did come out of the visit was that he told us about this town we wanted to go to called Gimmelwald. Apparently, it is so beautiful and cars can't drive up there cause you can only get there by hiking or by gondola! So he led us in the right direction and told us about his lady friend Petra who owns the place. He described the town as "Hiedi-land" and said that the hostel was very "kyut" ("cute" with an accent) haha. So we decided to give it a whirl! But first, we needed to head out on our seemingly never ending quest for wifi. We discovered a hotspot in Georgie's grill and we were starving so we decided it was the best option. Georgie was in there alone, bored out of his mind...poor guy! He's British and you can just tell that he spent all his life savings to come to Interlaken to open up a hip happening teen-attracting restaurant and defied all advice he got to not do it...but it was heartbreaking because the place is sort of a flop..the food is gross and it was completely empty and far too expensive despite the deals he was creating to advertise his place a little more! We felt awful! But we needed the wifi so we could book Petra's hostel in Gimmelwald and book something for the next night too! After we finished at Georgie's, we grabbed our bags from the happy in and said adios to that place, and on our way we went to Gimmelwald!
A lot of this day was spent on busses, but it's actually a really awesome way to see a ton of Switzerland! We took a train to a little town about 20 minutes away called Lauterbrunnen or something like that (we are really wishing that Cami was here to help us with pronunciation and communicating! Haha) and then got on a bus that took us another 8 minutes away that took us deeper in between the mountains and then got on a gondola that took us to the side of a mountain which is a town called Gimmelwald. Literally the tiny town is on the steeply sloping mountain sides of this mountain! And I dont even know if you can call it a town...it was more of like 18 houses at the whole place and grazing areas for goats and cows and 1 hostel slash restaurant which was Petra's! It is pretty awesome to think that this isn't set up to be this way for tourists...people actually live here! We were 4 of probably 25 people in the whole area!
So we checked into the Mountain Hostel and threw our stuff down so we could go on a little mountain hike slash walk through the mountains! One thing that I love about this place is that there are such steep mountains, but instead of it being covered by pine and aspen trees, there are big square patches with little wooden houses on it and little white and purple flowers and dandelions covering the ground! It's amazing!! We hiked and just enjoyed one another's company and breathed in the unpolluted fresh Swiss air! It was absolutely amazing! We could find a word to describe it! It was so majestic and fairytale-like!
After our nice walk and heart to hearts and even a rain scare (only considered a scare because of the expensive cameras we had with us), we went back to the mountain hostel and were forced to get food there because it is the only place that we could go haha. We ate Petra's homemade broccoli and cheese soup which was actually quite good! We ate it overlooking a deep valley and looking straight at the tallest mountains ever where the bottoms were completely green and the tops were snow covered and in the clouds! It was quite a sight! and then had some chocolate fondue for dessert (which apparently is an American invention and only cheese fondue is actually Swiss haha). Afterwards, we were so dog tired from the day that we all went to sleep at 8 at night!
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