Saturday I got the train to Visp to begin the IAESTE Zermatt Weekend, which very unusally for a swiss train arrived about 5 mins late. From Visp we went on a cog train up to Zermatt, which was a lovely town at the foot of the Matterhorn.
We got a cable car up to the top of the Klein Matterhorn which must be an epic ski resort in winter because they had runs open in the middle of Summer and there was a fair few people up there skiing.
This weekend I went on an IAESTE trip to Lichtenstein. It was a hard decision this weekend whether or not to go to Lichtenstein or stay and go the the street parade in Zurich on Saturday night. In the end I’m glad I went away for the weekend, although the street parade would still have been a sight to see, but I had a great time in Lichtenstein. As we waited for the train to Sargans on Saturday morning, we even saw a few people that were in dressed in costumes for that night.
On Monday afternoon I did the 007 Bungee Jump off the Verzasca Dam.
We caught a train to Tenero then hiked up towards the Dam. When I first saw it way in the background I thought - that is huge. But once we got close the nerves dissapeared and I was just excited mostly.
We had to wait for a fair while before we could do our jump because there was a film crew filming for a German travel show.
We caught a train from Zurich to Airolo, which took a few hours. Along the way we played Chinese Whist (what we just called hearts at Ergon) whilst going though the Swiss Alps. Some of the views were pretty cool, but there was lots of tunnels, and tunnels are boring.
In Airolo we got rental bikes and started a 40km (something like that) bike ride to Biasca. It was mostly downhill through the Swiss Alps but was still tiring by the end.
So I had planned to do uni work this weekend, got next to nothing done.
Here’s some of the photos that were taken in the name of procrastination.
I went for a walk up the mountain on the opposite side of Turgi this time.
The photo of me standing over a sheer cliff below looks a bit lame when you can’t see the cliff…
Went out to some pubs in Zürich last night.
Had a very expensive rum cocktail which was nothing on just normal plain rum, some relatively cheap beers, and found some Famous Grouss, but was talked into buying a rum and orange juice thing which was okay. But I took a photo of the grous for Mr Hooper and Tommy P. The drinks were real expensive but, even for clubs.
The pub where we got the beers was really cool, had lightbulbs everywhere on the roof, played good music (Little Yellow Spider for example) and had a cool vibe.
Whitewater rafting was really fun, but I must say it would have to be better in Australia purely because the river we rafted down consisted of 4 degree glacial water.
After wet-suiting up, we caught a bus up into the mountains where we were told about all the safety rules and told what to do for each of the commands from our guide. Our guide “Dougie” was from NZ and quite a funny lad.
I was in Baden and noticed a cool castle-y looking thing on the top of the hill near the train station. I think it’s the ruins of an old castle, or maybe just a lookout tower or something.
One thing that is interesting (was to me anyway) that Trevor told me is that a lot of watches here are synchronized to a pulse transmitted over the radio. He bought one and was going to try and replicate it in Australia by generating a radio signal.
But the cool thing was that he claimed that the clocks at the train station have the second hand speed up for the last 5 seconds, then wait at the top of the minute until the pulse, before they move again.
When I was introduced to everyone around the office and told them I was from Australia, they all wanted to know if I knew Trevor, because he was from Australia too. He was the very first co-op from CQU to work at ABB in Turgi, and came back after graduating, having been here for the last 9 years. But he moves back to Australia next week to work for QR, so he had farewell drinks on Thursday night.
