Switzerland

So we’ve come a long way since our last posts, and Mitch tried to catch you guys up on what we’ve been doing, but there was just too much. So my job is to tell you all about how amazing Switzerland was to us. Starting with Bern. Sadly the computer I’m on is not letting me post any pictures, so maybe I’ll post some stock photos in the mean time.

So this is Bern:

Bern

Inside Bern

We stayed there for two days, and as of right now it currently sits atop my list of favorite cities visited on this trip, and could just be the most underrated capitol city in the world (they have a statue of an ogre eating children!!). We were able to rent bikes for free for four hours and get a great feel for the city, which pretty much all looks like the picture above. It definitely was not the most exciting city we have visited so far, but it was completely different from anywhere we had been, and was a perfect way (although sadly we did see Hancock here) to start a really great week in Switzerland.

Next we went to Interlaken, a touristy town in between two beautiful lakes and completely surrounded by mountains. We stayed there for three days, taking day trips each day to different surrounding areas.

The first day we took a train up to Schynige Platte and got a great view of Interlaken on one side, and the Junfrau mountains on the other. Here is Interlaken:

Interlaken from Schynige Platte

And here is the view of the Jungfrau from our train:

Jungfrau

Then we went into the Lauterbrunnen Valley to Gimmelwald and Murren, two small towns where there are no cars, barely any people (the population of Gimmelwald is 150) and you can only get to them by cable car. So we went up there and hiked down. This is a picture of the valley:

Lauterbrunnen Valley

The next day we went to Grindelwald, another amazing little town in the middle of a different valley. We split up in this town, I went for a hike up to Bachalpsee Lake and Grindelwald First, and the other boys walked around the city and played mini golf.

So I bought a one way ticket at about 4:00 in the afternoon and took a very long but beautiful gondola right up to the top of the mountain, with a plan to walk down and catch the 10:20 train. Here is my gondola:

My Gondola Ride Up To Grindelwald First

Once I reached to top of the mountain it was only an hour to Bachalpsee, a couple of lakes pretty much in the middle of the mountains. Here it is:

Lake Bachalpsee

This place was absolutely gorgeous, and I had a very hard time leaving. I ended up staying way too long and had to do a four hour hike down the mountain in a three hours in order to catch the train. It was a tough hike but definitely worth it.

After Interlaken, we tried to go to Lucern, but on the way Marc got a ticket for having his shoes on the seats of the train, and we were unable to find any place to stay once we reached the city. Also it was a lot bigger than we expected, so we decided if we were going to be in a big city we might as well be in Zurich. So we moved on to Zurich:

Zurich

We knew absolutely nothing about this town but it ended up being really great as well. We stayed there for two days and then split up with Marc; we went off to Munich, while he went off to Venice.

So now we have you guys almost caught up. I think I will put Mitch in charge of Germany (Munich and Berlin), and I will make a Slovenia (where we are right now) and Austria post tomorrow night.

Some more Spain, a little France, and Switzerland and Germany

So we haven´t posted for a long time… our last real post was when we were in Granada. Since then we´ve left Spain and traveled through three more countries. A quick recap of what we have done since then is Madrid, San Sebastian, Pamplona, Barcelona, Nice, Monaco, Bern, Interlaken, Zurich, Munich, and now Berlin. Rather than trying to write about everything we´ve done i’ll try and do a quick run down of things.

Madrid: We spent two nights in Madrid which turned out to be better than expected. We had heard from people that Madrid was a city you could miss but we’re definitely glad we stopped. Max and Marc met two locals one night and made it to some super secret bar.

San Sebastian and Pamplona: Our first night in San Sebastian was a sleepless one. We ended up arriving a night earlier and decided to sleep on the beach. The problem was it’s impossible to be a bum in San Sebastian because everytime we tried to sleep we were told that we couldn’t sleep there by one of the 50000 police officers roaming around.

The next night we went to Pamplona for San Fermin (running of the bulls). Once again it was a sleepless night because people stay up all night and party and then run from the bulls at 8am. We didnt run but we watched the people come running in from the stadium.

Barcelona: We stayed two nights in Barcelona. The highlight was Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia which was amazing and offered a great view of the city as well.

Nice: Nice was a nice change of pace. We stayed at the Sweidan´s apartment which had amazing views of the bay. We relaxed for a few days which was much needed. We also visited Monaco for a day which was really cool.

Ok, I´m running out of time. I know we´re still way behind but we´ll try and update more in the next couple days. I uploaded more photos to my web album so there should be some new ones in there.

-Mitch