Interlaken

I've been home from Switzerland for two days and I'm only just now starting to recover from the grief of leaving. If you are ever given the opportunity to travel, put Switzerland on your list.

I traveled with just my roommate, which was a nice change of pace and made for an incredibly easy going weekend. We arrived in Thun, about 30 minutes outside Interlaken, to get to the apartment we were staying in for the weekend. After a somewhat frightening adventure getting the key and getting inside, we decided to just crash and get up early the next morning.

At 8am on Saturday, we packed our backpacks and grabbed a train towards a random mountain we had selected. We knew we wanted to hike, and it turns out, there's a decent amount of mountains to choose from. So we just picked one. We got off the bus and looked around and saw a path that appeared to be leading upwards, so we started climbing. It wasn't lost on us that it could have been a path to someone's house, a path that would end un 500 feet, a path that lead to a scary and dangerous place we shouldn't be, but we just climbed it anyway because it was right there.

Luckily it wasn't any of those things. About ten minutes in, it dawned on us how terribly out of shape we both were. We were pulling to the side, leaning on trees and exploiting the gorgeous view as a reason to stop and catch our breath. Eventually we found our rhythm (it took five tries to spell that) and climbed on without stopping. I could feel my heart slamming in my chest as the air got a little bit harder to breathe and the ground turned from sticky mud, to icy leaves, to a foot of clean, undisturbed snow. It was like walking through every season in a few hours. A few hours later we reached "the top". We stood in awe at the few of sparkling lakes and snow capped mountains every direction your turned.

We sat down and opened our lunch of swiss cheese and crackers and basked in one of those moments where you just stop and think "I'm here, I'm doing this right now." We slipped and slid all the way back down the mountain after lunch which proved to be almost more difficult than climbing up.

That night, we got picked up to go to night sledding. We climb into this van with about 10 of the loudest most obnoxious, alcohol fueled fellow Americans and cringed the entire way until they finally let us out. There we met other, significantly more tolerable college kids, from all over America and other people from all over the world.

In case you are wondering what night sledding consists of, because I was, it's basically a few experienced employees of Interlaken Outdoor taking you up to the top of a pitch black mountain in a cable car and dropping you off. There you pace and panic and stare at the hugeness of this mountain you're expected to sled down and if you can get past the pacing and the panicking, hopefully take a minute to look at the sky and see the most stars you've ever seen in one sky.

It took about an hour to sled all the way down this mountain and it was so incredibly exhilarating. Afterwards, we had a fondue dinner and sat around talking with other students about the differences in our study abroad experiences.

The next morning, we took a 45 minute walk from the train station to see the lakes only to turn around and realize had we gone the other way, it would have taken 5. But it was hard to be bitter staring into this water that was so blue I wasn't convinced they hadn't dyed it. We had to reach down and touch the rocks only to see they were underwater. We sat on the dock and absorbed as much of the view as we could before getting back on the train and heading back to Luxembourg.

Interlaken was by far the most beautiful place we've been and it broke my heart when the train pulled away from the mountains. Hopefully Belgium this upcoming weekend will make me feel better.