Switzerland

Switzerland was the first stop on my Easter break Eurotrip. We went to Lausanne, Interlaken, and Zurich.


Day 1: Lausanne
I live the closest to the bus station, so Neil and Yoni had come over the night before so we could stay awake and make it to our 3am bus to Gatwick. We flew to Geneva and took a train to Lausanne after getting some lunch in the airport. We could see a little bit of Geneva from the train, including the fountain in the lake. We did not realize we were sitting in a first class car on the train, but the conductor let us stay there since it was only an hour-long trip that was halfway over.

Our hostel was only a short walk from the train station, and it was a pretty building on a hill.

We went to Lausanne at the recommendation of one of our classmates who said it was one of the most beautiful cities she has been to. It is also home to the Olympic Committee and has an Olympic Museum, which was closed for renovations. Our first stop in Lausanne was Montriond, a park with great views of the city and Lake Geneva. The park was full of beautiful and interesting trees with odd, curly branches.

We then walked down to the lake and walked around the area down there, Ouchy. It's easy to humor Americans in places with the name __ of Ouchy: d'Ouchy.

The lake was full of cool paddle boats with slides and lounge chairs on them, and you could see mountains and France on the other side of the lake. It is probably a fun place when the weather is warm.

The city is incredibly hilly, and we had a free bus travel pass ticket from our hostel, so we took the bus up to the cathedral area where we saw churches and had a great view of the city.

We had a very hard time finding dinner that night, since we didn't realize how expensive Switzerland was. We weren't sure if it was the area we were in or just Switzerland in general. Turns out it was the latter. We had an early night since we had barely slept since the night before we left Oxford.

Day 2: Lausanne-->Bern-->Interlaken
After sleeping for about 11 hours, we woke up in the morning to visit a park up a hill that had the Lausanne Palace of Justice.

We then went back to check out of the hostel and head to the train station, where I got a delicious breakfast of waffles and Swiss drinking chocolate. Our next destination was Interlaken, which required transferring trains in Bern and leaving French-speaking Switzerland for German areas. The trains in Switzerland are amazing. They run like clockwork and are incredibly quiet - so quiet that Yoni said he would rather live next to a Swiss train station than a highway.

Yoni unfolding all of our InterRail documentation

The ride to Bern took about 1.25 hours, and we saw lots of homes and little villages tucked into small mountains.

We took an earlier train to Bern than we were planning on, so we had about an hour to hang out outside of the station. We bought German-style pretzels from a place in the station that you could smell from far away, and they were better than any pretzel I had in Germany. We went onto the campus of University of Bern, as it was right outside of the train station. It was deserted for Easter break, but we hung out there for an hour anyways.

Our ride from Bern to Interlaken was ~45 minutes long and took us through some beautiful scenery. Yoni told us how his dad always use to say to him that if he ever went crazy, just stick him on a train going through the Alps. After this train trip, it is easy to understand why - huge mountains and sparkling blue water. Interlaken is the most beautiful place I have ever been to.

It was warm and sunny when we arrived in Interlaken, and Zander met us at the train station. He had arrived earlier in the day from France and had already been to the hostel/inn and brought us our free bus passes. After checking in, we went for lunch and ate outside in the mountainous surroundings.

We then walked to an old-school funicular to go up Heimwehfluh hill, since the bigger one, Harder Kulm, was not yet open for the season.  There was a small restaurant, playground, and a lookout tower at the top. We came down the mountain (though it was more like a hill in comparison to the other mountains) on a toboggan run.

Afterwards, we went to go sit in a park where paragliders landed. Of all the extreme sports, I would be most likely to go paragliding.

As evening set in, we went to a small grocery store (we always went to the Coop - it's all over Switzerland) to pick up food for dinner. Yoni led a small seder at a table outside of our hostel. We had makeshift haroset, a Kinder Surprise Egg (which are banned in the US by the FDA) instead of a hard-boiled egg, lettuce for the parsley, and a piece of paper with a sad face on it for the maror. Yoni brought matzah that he had gotten from Chabad in Oxford. Zander drank from Elijah's Cup when Yoni had gotten up from the table, but this did not go undetected.

Day 3: Interlaken
We received a surprisingly extensive free buffet breakfast in our hostel/inn. The building apparently was home to the first inn in Interlaken.

It was a rainy day, so we got a slow start that morning while we tried to figure out what to do when it rains in a town that revolves around outdoor activities. The day before, we had planned to rent electric scooters (the boys were too lazy to go biking). The lady who runs the hostel/inn told us about caves, so we decided on that. We picked up some lunch from a grocery store and took a bus over to the mountain with the caves. The ride involved roads that went alongside the mountains and overlooked the lake. Though the poor weather meant you could not see mountains in their entirety, the fog gave the mountains a cool smokey look.

We walked up the mountain to the entrance of the caves and were in there for about an hour.

Water was still streaming through parts of the caves, and we saw a bunch of stalactites and stalagmites. They also had this odd show for tourists in the middle of the caves with a talking dragon head coming out of the cave. It was weird and mostly in German.

Luckily, it had stopped raining when we came out of the caves, so we took a bus back to Interlaken and walked along the river (perfect aqua green water) in the eastern part of the town (Interlaken is a town between two lakes, Lake Brienz on the east and Lake Thun in the west). When compared to the western side, this area looked more like rugged wilderness with some smaller mountains and little wooden cabins.

We walked to a lookout point at the edge of the eastern lake and hung out there for awhile skipping stones and playing with fallen tree branches.

We then headed back into town on a path that seemed like it went through a mini farm.

We had dinner that night at a tiny Thai place that was in a place that also rented/sold motorbike stuff. It was a weird combo, but the food was good (and expensive, of course - like 19 francs for curry). There was a TV in our room, so at night we watched ridiculous shows on what I guess is the foreign version of BBC. I saw Dr. Who for the first time, and it was so strange. The doctor wasn't even in it, since the episode showed what life would be like if he was not around.

Day 4: Interlaken --> Zurich
It was snowing when we woke up. I guess since I had a sunny Christmas, I would get a white Easter. There was a small chocolate Easter bunny at every place setting at breakfast. We had a late morning train to Zurich, and when we arrived after lunchtime, it was cold and snowing (wet snow). The city seemed pretty deserted since it was Easter. After checking into our hostel, we took a walk to the old city.
The business district and expensive shops were on one side of the river. We went to a high point on this side of the city to see the view.

The other side had more shops, restaurants, and tiny cobblestone streets. Most places were not open. We wandered around and saw St. Peter's Church, which has the biggest clock face in Europe. The church was closed, so we couldn't go inside.

We spent a long time trying to find a place to eat that night that was not very pricey. We saw a lot of strip clubs on our hunt, and coming across a Bang and Olufson confirmed that this was not because we were in a sketchy area. Switzerland just seems to have a large number of strip clubs. They were all over the old city in Zurich on the cute little streets. It was weird at first to see all the naked pictures in the window, but there were so many that you become desensitized. But getting back to dinner - the cheapest places we typically saw were the halal shops where a falafel pita, for example, cost about 9 francs. For comparison, I got a shawarma pita for about 3.5 pounds in London. We eventually found a nice little Italian restaurant that had prices similar to what a nice Italian restaurant at home could have had.

Since we were in a big room, our hostel had quiet hours after ten, so we hung out on the first floor using the Internet and figuring out what we would do the next day. This hostel was the worst of the trip, yet probably the most expensive. We were in a ten person room on the 5th floor (no elevator), and the bathroom opened right up into the room, so it smelled a bit. The bunk beds were plastic, and instead of giving fresh top and bottom sheets, we were given one sheet that resembled a sleeping bag and was falling apart.

Day 5: Zurich
The hostel had a small free breakfast, and then we headed into the center of the city to take a 1.5 hour boat cruise on Lake Zurich at the recommendation of our classmate from Zurich.

Zurich is probably a nice place during the summer, but it seems pretty dull otherwise. Many things were still closed this day for Easter. We could have taken a tour of the Lindt Chocolate factory, but it was only open Wednesday - Friday. We went to a Chinese food place for lunch, and it was the worst "Chinese food" I've ever had, mainly because they didn't use Asian race. That made a huge difference in the taste. We ate a lot of Asian food in Switzerland because those were often the cheapest restaurants (meaning under 20 francs). We typically ate one meal a day out and one from the grocery store.
In the afternoon we hung around the hostel for awhile before leaving for the train station for our 8.5 hour ride to Berlin. The underground of the train station was like a mini shopping mall with a bunch of food places and shops.

Overall, though it was pretty, Zurich wasn't that great. What do people do for fun in Zurich? Bank and drive fancy cars. Even people from Zurich asked why we were going there, and a guy at the hostel said it was good we'd only be here for one night.

More photos: here