Today I went to see the Abbey library of St. Gallen. You aren’t allowed to take photos so you will have to follow that link to see what it looks like, I didn’t take any of my own. The photo shown is essentially the whole library, it is tiny and is much smaller than it looks in the photo.
Despite being much smaller than I was expecting, it looked incredible. They have different books open at any one time on the display tables depending on the theme, which was music this year.
Christmas in Switzerland did not feel like Christmas at all to me. That is not to say it wasn’t a great day - just that I didn’t do anything particularly Christmas-y. Or more specifically without having a meal with the rellies it doesn’t feel like a real Christmas.
But I did have an interesting day. I went with Roderick to Mt. Rigi, near Luzern, to try Schlitteln (sledding) for the first time.
So a while back while talking to mum I said that meat was really expensive. She asked me how much it was per kilo for mince and I gave her a number off the top of my head - which she decided wasn’t expensive at all. But since I have a horrible memory and probably was way off with the number, I have gathered here some prices of random stuff in Switzerland for comparative purposes.
So this weekend was the much-anticipated IAESTE Ski Weekend.
After finishing work on Friday, I went to Karla’s Goodbye Apero for a little while and then had to get a train to Les Diablerets. The journey takes 3 hours and 40 minutes, and after each subsequent train change there were more and more IAESTE peeps. At about 10 we finally got to our destination, and upon arriving to the chalet we got some Glühwein, or rather Vin Chaud because we were in the French-speaking part.
So last night I went to Asako’s Fondue party at her house in Neuhausen. We ate lots of cheese and drank lots of beer.
Bram had his Cantus books from a Belgium Party he threw during the week, so we sang some songs and watched some youtube videos for a bit, but then we moved on to Beer Pong.
I’ve seen Beer Pong several times in American movies, but never actually played it.
It started snowing again this afternoon, so I was able to take a few photos while the snow was still fresh & unmelted, and before it got too dark. It gets dark so quickly now - it’s like I’m living in a completely different town.
On Sunday my housemates and I went on a roadtrip to Jakobshorn in Davos. When we got to Davos we went to the rental store and I got a brand spanking new Snowboard for the day. After we had our gear we headed up a cable car, up another cable car, and then finally we were at the top of Jakobshorn (2590m).
Switzerland is a bit different to Aus/NZ - they have a different colour scheme.
This Saturday I went to Technorama in Winterthur on an IAESTE event. It was sort of like the Swiss version of Questacon. Check out the video below for some of the random things that I filmed.
The Lightning display was a fairly big let-down for the most part (it went for about 30mins but the only cool bits were in that video). But the Tesla coils were definitely worth the wait.
So my cousin Kate was in town, so I went in to Zürich to say hello on Wednesday.
In the train station now they have a giant Swarovski Christmas tree and some markets were open. Besides this, Zürich was as dull as usual, but it was good to have a chat to Kate. When I came back into Turgi I saw they now have Christmas lights up in the main street, which was pretty cool.
