Back in the Confœderatio Helvetica

Alright! We didn't have any internet in Geneva (unless we sat in the right place on the window sill) and the upload speed was very slow in Heidelberg - but now we've come to Strasbourg where Anne has kindly let us use her internet and now I've uploaded photos a-plenty! "Best friends ever".

So I returned to Switzerland and Germany and both were great reunions. We headed to Geneva, where we excitedly went to do a free tour of CERN. They took us to see some of the ATLAS facilities - unfortunately we didn't get to go underground to see any of the experimental equipment but we did get to look through a window at physicists in their natural environment. Everyone looked very busy, either because they were putting on a good show for the visitors or because CERN scientists really are just very awesome and dedicated to their work. CERN was very space-age, as evidenced by their use of 3D TVs for educational videos, 60s pod-chairs and tabletop touchscreen computers like in Bond movies. I was definitely suitably impressed!

After our grand plan to head to the Palais de Nations was thwarted due to heading there on a Sunday, we went on a day trip to Lausanne which was brilliant! I think I liked it more than Geneva, really cool views of the lake and the mountains.
In Lausanne I had my new contender for favourite icecream on my trip - maple and walnut icecream. It was just like having icecream with maple syrup on it, one of my favourite treats from home.
I've now concluded that my top five icecreams are as follows:
1. Mövenpick Maple and Walnut icecream
2. Rice icecream
3. Batman/Catwoman icecream
4. Ben and Jerry's peanut butter cookie dough icecream
5. Ginger and cinnamon icecream

Sometimes I have really good icecream and then I make lists like this. But now the weather's taken a turn for the cold so it's looking like it's no longer icecream weather. Ah well, it's been good while it's lasted! Some other good things I've eaten over the past few days include:
- great Chinese from a restaurant called "Hungky" which also did 'phoenix feet' and had an entire section of it's menu dedicated to 'marmite dishes'.
- fondue, which I was waiting til after meeting up with Jenny to eat in Switzerland. Between us we consumed a lot of tasty cheese.
- $15 pho, which is cheap by Switzerland prices. Crazy Switzerland!
- German ravioli (which really did have sausage in it this time)
- more currywurst (eaten whilst watching a great countdown of 'best 90s videos')
- cornflake chocolate

And tonight we enjoyed a welcome return to baguettes, cheese and wine and homemade quiche. Cheers to Anne for tasty French food!

I am jumping backwards here but in Germany we went to Heidelberg for two nights, a university town (with the oldest university in Germay) with a cool castle. We were staying, pretty literally, in a pub/restaurant and drank some really good beer there. Hooray for Germany!

So here are all the photos of what I've been doing for the past few weeks:
France: here
Switzerland and Germany: here

I'm looking forward to checking out Strasbourg and then we have a whole week in Paris before flying out to Dublin on the 27th. Time's going fast but it's going good!

All aboard.... the night train!

Here are some stories about culinary greatness:

The other night I became a master of the supermarket cooking art when I made vegemite, gruyere and fried egg toasted sandwiches, served with salad with a white balsamic vinegar and maple syrup dressing (being the two ingredients I found in the “free food” box).
My kitchen madness is also my kitchen genius.
Turns out vegemite and gruyere is really good, and why don't I eat maple syrup on salad all the time?

I also drank something called “Jungle” containing “Yumberry & Granatapfel”. Whilst I'm sure these are just Swiss/German names for normal fruits, they sound like something somebody has completely made up, from the Wonka fruit family.

My decision to make these sandwiches came after hiking around the Bernese Alps all day, where I went on a quest for the Alpenvogelpark but no matter how much I walked never seemed to actually get there. Until I did and I saw some cool owls. The walk was good, just very tiring, and I didn't end up getting to Zurich til 7pm where I crashed until my body said “give me vegemite and fried eggs stat!”

After that I spent a day walking around Zurich and then the next day walking around Vaduz in Liechtenstein, after which I caught a night train to Ljubljana where I realised that I was incapable of doing any more walking for the time being and forced myself to spend a whole day at my hostel. I only left once to get groceries for another supermarket cook-up. Today my plan is to finally see some Slovenia but joke's on me: it's raining! I'm going to have to find some way to see as many interesting things in Ljubljana as possible without getting stranded too far from my hostel.

In the meantime I uploaded a somewhat ridiculous amount of Switzerland photos which can be found: here!

Far up! Far out! Far more!

Today I got up at 5:30, caught 2 trains, a bus and four cable cars spending about $100 on transport and it was completely worth it:



(this picture isn't doing it justice but it's the only angle I could get from the cable car)
I was under this impression that Piz Gloria would look just as it does in the movie on the outside but that inside they would have completely revamped it after the movie, or possibly some scenes were filmed on sets rather than in the complex itself. I was wrong!


They've changed a few things but have kept a whole stack of the original furnishings. There were even some Christmas decorations up! Also the layout of the building is practically the same, with the lifts and the stairs. There were heaps of doors marked "privat". This must be where all the bedrooms with cone fireplaces are.



Comte de Bleuville coat of arms



Helicopter pad
(through the window: not a great photo but you get the idea!)



I am excited to be here!
I was pretty enthusiastic about paying extra to eat "Diana Rigg icecream" before my James Bond breakfast buffet (with champagne!) but several courses later, which included such classic breakfast fare as 'cheese platter', realised this was no longer going to happen. Still amped that they had it though!


I got a few pictures of the view but this was about all I managed before my camera battery died. I'd been so focussed on getting all my stuff ready for my 5:30 start I'd completely forgotten to charge it.
I think this occasion calls for an uncharacteristic display of emoticon: :( :( :(

As a result, I've just had to try and commit as much of my day to memory as I can. Somehow I ended up spending 3 and a half hours at Piz Gloria, with non-breakfast activities also including going to a theatre room and watching movie clips, and climbing down onto mountain just below the complex where there was a patch of snow I could play with and wrote my name in (with my boot).

I considered climbing down the cable ropes by hand to save on the cable car fare but decided against it because I need pockets in my pants to keep stuff in. But I scoped out the place and climbing out onto the cable car roof would have been completely possible. Getting away with it, maybe not so.

On my way back down I got off at some of the stops and found the Alps to be pretty much real-life stereotypical Switzerland but in the best kind of way: green mountains with snowy peaks in the background, chalets, goats with big bells on, cheese shops everywhere. In Lauterbrunnen I also found the place where Bond jumped out of Tracey's car to use a phone booth during the Piz Gloria escape. You'll just have to take my word for all of these things because I couldn't take photos, or maybe not (except for the last one), because I'm now planning on going back to the Alps tomorrow because I thought the Bernese Oberland was so great! This time I'm going to Grindelwald where I intend to find an ice rink, or at least, a place that would be an ice rink if it was colder.

New life plan:
1) get rich
2) learn how to ski
3) get really good at skiing
4) go back to Piz Gloria in winter
5) ski down the slope

I've only put up a few of my photos because I still need to sort through or clean up the rest of them. You might have noticed I've taken a fair few photos of fountains. Turns out Bern is pretty much the city of fountains (and bears) and there are fountains all over the city. Once I realised this, I went on a quest to find as many of them as possible. Be prepared for even more photos of MANY FOUNTAINS.

The Life I Live

Hello from Switzerland! I've just arrived in Bern after an 8-hour train trip, a few good days in Amsterdam and a few tiring days in Luxembourg and Bruges.

Here are my stories about the above!

As mentioned, before heading to Amsterdam I got two unexpected stops - one night in Luxembourg, one night in Bruges! These passed very similarly: trains in the morning/afternoon, dinner and some internet, sleeping, walking around town, leaving for the next place. I also got to talk about Slovakian politics with a cool guy I met in Luxembourg, and went out for beers in Bruges with some Australians.

Luxembourg was pretty impressive to look at though not so cool to navigate with my backpack (the train station was high up and my hostel was low down). But it was good to return to a French-speaking land and drink some Orangina!
Bruges was also cool, I enjoyed how on my city walk I went from mostly-empty streets to dense tourist-town as I walked further towards the city centre. Nice houses but bad Stella! Give me BBC any day (though my cumulative time in the BBC is probably longer than the amount of time I spent in real Belgium, possibly making me a biased judge).

Conclusion: 1 day is plenty of time to see a small town, but isn't really a great amount of time to spend in a place. Lots of train travel in 3 days = very tiring!



Luxembourg and Bruges photos: here!

After my quiet first night in Amsterdam I was ready to see some of the town! I went on a free walking tour on my first day which was really good, our guide was real energetic and took us all for lunch afterwards. I found a fellow Australian on the tour (we had the same backpack), Nick from Brisbane, and we went out for beers later that night along with two Ukrainian guys he'd met at his hostel.
The Ukrainian guys I am now calling Han Solo and Chewbacca. Han Solo could speak some English, and would make a comment every now and then - but Chewbacca couldn't speak much English at all, so instead talked constantly in Ukrainian with Han Solo occasionally translating. Much like with Chewbacca, he was always part of the conversation and often interjecting emphatically, but you know you have no hope of ever really understanding. This illusion wasn't helped by the fact that I swear I heard Han Solo call him "Chewie" several times, though I probably just misheard a Ukrainian word.

The next day I saw the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum and that night set off to do something I hadn't done in almost 2 months: go to the movies. Far out, I had no idea how much I missed movie cinemas until I was sitting in one! I went to see The American, which was a bit of a mixed bag but was definitely the kind of movie I felt like sitting down and watching (lots of running around Europe).

On my last day I had a most excellent Dutch day! I rented a bike to do some cycling around the countryside and when it turned out the bike hire place had run out of maps the girl suggested a route to me, wrote some place names down on a post-it and said to just follow the signs! Turned out the first place I was headed to wasn't signposted until after heading to another place first, something I found out after an awesomely helpful local gave me directions. But after that it turned out the girl's suggestions were great, I saw a lot of black and white cows, green fields and, succesfully, one windmill. It rained once for about 15 minutes but after that the skies were pretty much blue!



After I'd ridden around for most of the afternoon, and was completely beat after riding against the wind for a while, I headed to my last stop in desperate need of some food but with no sign of a cafe/restaurant anywhere. I asked another helpful local and was directed to a Pancake House, where I bumped into some fellow cyclists who I'd seen on the track - a family from South Africa and their Dutch friend Famke (!!), who invited me to join them for lunch! In the cafe I had tea with rum, greatest post-cycling drink ever, and a massive Dutch pancake with bacon, apples and sugar-syrup. So good! (Lola, I think you would like Dutch pancakes)

With the combination of cycling, windmill, traditional Dutch farmer pancake (which apparently my bacon-apple choice was) and meeting someone called Famke, I feel like I've appropriately lived the Netherlands dream.

Netherlands photos: here!

Frustratingly, some dust has gotten into my camera and has been showing up every now and then as dark blurs on my photos, particularly when I zoom in on things. Not cool! The only way I can think of getting rid of it is taking my camera into a repair shop, which would probably be pretty costly. Maybe I can photoshop some of the blurs out when I get back home? Does anyone know more about cameras than me and have any tips (I've tried looking through forums to no avail)?

I'm liking the look of Switzerland so far. Swiss 5 franc coins are so massive you feel like you're trading with doubloons and I've only been here four hours but I've already eaten a copious amount of cheese.
Also, the receptionist at my hostel here said my hat was cool, and then said I had a cool voice and should take up singing. Hooray! (this is so much better than "you have a weird accent", which I'm still getting everywhere)

In just a few days I will be in Piz Gloria, spending exorbitant amounts on the cable car and being rewarded with champagne and a chance to practice my genealogy. Note to self: remember to wear kilt.