In the land of Swiss Miss

10/8/2009

Today was a day full of train travel. Im talking 8 and a half hours. We took trains from Salzburg to Zurich, for Zurich to Bern, and then finally from Bern to Interlaken. We started traveling around 10 in the morning and got into Interlaken at 8 at night and totally over being on trains. The gamble you take of riding on trains is you can always have someone really smelly sit down next to you, and the thing about being on trains is that there is not very much ventilation. I guess you would call us lucky to only come across this situation once in our gigantic day of train travel yesterday. We always do enjoy breaking up the train rides by getting a beverage in the food car.

The train rides from Zurich to Bern and then Bern to Interlaken made us a bit nervous because we weren’t very sure we got on the right trains. The feeling was a bit reminiscent of our train ride back from Zugspitz when we weren’t sure if we were going to make our train to Heidelberg (and we know how that story ended so now we were a bit more nervous than we usually would have been). Luckily we did and we arrived in a drizzly, but not very cold Interlaken, in the dark. Thank goodness again for the good directions to the Hostel that our confirmation emails send us, because they were pretty on point. It was quite a walk to Balmers (We are staying in another one of the famous hostels), and so during this walk (because ti was so far) we also had the uneasy feeling of not really sure we are going the right way. Finally we made it and checked in and saw that it has got a great Swiss chalet vibe. We have free internet, breakfast, bus passes, it was five frank night at the bar, there is a great happy hour special of buy one get one free at on cool looking outside bar, everyone if extremely friendly and helpful, and we have a private, which is always nice to be able to sprawl your stuff out. The facilities are not the best we have seen, but by no means bad and will do just fine.

We had not really had not really had a substantial meal since breakfast at the hostel in Salzburg and were pretty hungry, so we headed right next door to Balmers to a recommended Thai place, which was recommended on food and price (the double win). Since Amsterdam and passing all of the Asian restaurants, I have been craving some sort of eastern food. Katherine normally does not care for Thai food, but she said she was down to check it out and she was sure that she could find something on the menu that she would eat. The place was very cute and quaint and we sat at the bar. It reminded me of a great Thai place in Breckenridge that I went to one time and totally gorged myself. The same thing happened here. I ordered chicken pad thai, Katherine ordered a spring roll, and then we split an appetizer order of chicken peanut skewers and chicken fried wontons. It was soooo delicious and I ate entirely too much that it made me uncomfortably full. In retrospect, it was worth it and I would do it again. Luckily t.hey too credit card because we had not exchanged any euro for Swiss franks and if they didn’t we would be in a pickle, maybe even washing dishes because it looked like that kind of place

It was pretty late at this point, so we checked our computers quickly and then went to check out the “night club” at the hostel that is also supposedly a locals favorite because they have really good deals. At this point I would like to also talk about how Switzerland, like the Czech Republic, is also not on the Euro so we have to mess with the whole money conversion again. Luckily for us to figure things out, the Swiss frank is about equivalent to the US dollar. The downside to that is that everything is so expensive in Switzerland (a good deal on a drink is 5 franks as opposed to 18, which we have been told is that average price). So now we realize how much we are spending on everything, which sometimes is a heart attack, but oh well we are living up this European experience. The “night club” turned out to be a really loud, moderately sketch scene with a whole lot of dude/brahs. I was still very uncomfortably full and didn’t feel like putting anything else into my belly, was not looking so hot in my sweats after a day of traveling and then stuffing my face, so we decided we would give it another go tomorrow night and just went to bed, being tired after a fully day of traveling. Hopefully tomorrow we can take advantage of the cooler looking outdoors bar happy hour. I was very content when I went to bed!