Eine Reise nach Interlaken!

For those who don't know German, like myself, the title of this post translates to "A Trip to Interlaken"

This past weekend four friends and I ventured into the Swiss alps to the beautiful, quaint town of Interlaken - located, as the name suggests, between two big lakes. I will start by saying it was one of the most amazing vacations of my life. I had never heard of Interlaken before coming but after a week or so here I learned that it's one of the popular trips that many students studying in Florence make. Still, it wasn't in any of our travel itineraries until my friend Natalie won a trip for two at half price to Interlaken with one of the student travel companies here in Florence. As we learned more and more about what the trip included, three more of us decided to tag along for the weekend.

We left Florence around 7pm this past Thursday night with an eight-hour bus ride ahead of us. We stopped a couple times at rest stops and to have dinner and arrived at our hostel just before 4am. We were told that if we wanted to sign up for any activities like skydiving, paragliding, night sledding, skiing, snowboarding, etc, that it's best for us to sign up 8am the next morning. We groggily made our way up to our room and passed out until waking up to make our reservations. We decided on the bus ride there that we would go paragliding on Friday afternoon and then night sledding after visiting the Swiss capital Bern on Saturday. We made our reservations while still half asleep and went back to bed for the couple hours before our paragliding reservation at 2pm.

Paragliding was absolutely amazing! The five of us left in a van from a place close to our hostel with the five guys (all local) that were going to be taking us paragliding. It was a bit of a drive into the mountains where we then hiked up a bit more by foot to the place where we were going to take off. We all got suited up with windbreakers, helmets and lots of straps and carabiners around different places. My roommate/friend Melanie took off first and then it was my turn. Each of us was connected to our paragliding instructor behind us and to take off, the pair of you basically runs off this hill/cliff and the parachute catches in the wind and you're off! The views were absolutely amazing, albeit a little bit foggy but it still took our breath away. As the paragliding company liked to advertise, going paragliding is to "discover why birds sing" and as cheesy as it is, I get it. It was a little scary at first when I actually realized where I was and that I wasn't connected to anything but my paragliding instructor, Christian, but that feeling quickly passed and I just enjoyed the views and chatted with Christian for the 15 minutes until we had a running landing in a field across the street from where we caught the van up to the mountain. I took a bunch of photos while I was up there but Christian also had a digital camera attached at the end of a long pole so that he could take better framed photos of the two of us. Of course nothing is free these days but I bought the pictures at the end because they came out so well. We all agreed that it was an amazing experience and couldn't stop talking about it for the next couple hours.

Later on Friday night we went to a chocolate tasting at a little chocolate shop a short walk from the hostel. The man who owned the shop had been a banker but fell in love with chocolate and decided to leave the profession and become a chocolate connoisseur! We sampled several truffles, some white and dark chocolate and even some chocolates that had pear liquor/brandy inside of them! After the man's short presentation we were free to walk around the store and he had told us that we were welcome to sample other chocolates before buying them if we wanted to. Out of curiosity, I asked him what their darkest chocolate was and he said it was 85% cocoa so I decided to go with the next one down (70%). A couple minutes later he tapped me on the shoulder with a piece of the 85% just to try. He was absolutely adorable and we all bought some chocolate for ourselves and then for our three friends back home in Florence that didn't come with us to Interlaken. Friday night we went out to the popular bar/club in town and had a great time meeting some other Americans, a few locals and dancing until we couldn't stand up anymore.

Saturday was a relatively early start, as we decided we wanted to go on the free trip to Bern that was sponsored by the travel company that took us. We left in mid-morning and arrived just before lunchtime. The city was again, beautiful, I feel like I'm getting redundant saying this about everywhere but I hope you know what I mean. We were lucky enough to see a couple of the bears and bear cubs that Bern is famous for housing and then we went on to visit Einstein's house from when he lived there, climb yet another tower and experience more breathtaking views, and get ready for it, indulge in an overpriced but totally worth it coffee at the Bern Starbucks. It is almost impossible to find American coffee in Italy and even if you do, it is often just espresso and water but advertised as "American Coffee" so we were more than happy to spend about 3x the price on a latte as it would have been in the US. After a bit more walking around and sitting out in the sun, we took the bus back to Interlaken to prepare for the night sledding we had signed up for that evening.

Night sledding was unbelievable. Going into it we all thought that it would be a short ride down a run on one of the many many mountains but it was nothing like that at all. A group of about 50 of us who had signed up split into different vans where we took a 45 minute ride high up into the alps. We then unloaded out of the vans and everyone was given a sled and a glowstick to wear backwards around our necks so that we could see each other while sledding down the mountain. We got a quick lesson on how to steer the sled and then hopped on a very long ski-lift ride even higher up on the mountain. At the top of the mountain we left in two groups (25 each) to start the trek down the mountain. There was a clearly defined path that we all followed that curved around and through the trees, quite steep at some points and more flat at others. For a lot of the time all you had to do was look to your side and you could see the entire town of Interlaken and others all lit up and beautiful. It was pitch dark outside since it was about 8:30pm but the guys leading the group had bright flashlights on their helmets that helped us see where we were going. Altogether, the ride down was about a half hour and it was surprisingly tiring with all the steering and holding onto the front of the sled that we had to do, totally worth it though. The sledding ended with all of us going to a Swiss restaurant for a traditional cheese fondue dinner. The fondue was delicious and our table devoured our three baskets of bread that we had to dip in it :) We went out again that night and on Sunday had a relaxing day of window shopping and chatting in the hotel lobby (our hostel was part of a larger hotel) before leaving for the bus back to Florence after lunch.

Finally getting home around midnight meant not much motivation to do homework so the past couple days have been hectic catching up on all the work that I didn't do over the weekend but it's a small price to pay for everything that we did in the three days. I'm off to bed now, buona notte to all!