Well I figured that I should probably finish off the tale of my trip to Switzerland, for the sake of completeness, even though it is now ages ago and nobody will probably read this.
New Years Eve was a great night, and we had an amazing Raclette dinner at the flat. After dinner we caught the train into Zürich to see the fireworks, but even before that there was some as the people in the flat next door were letting some small ones off.
Yesterday I went to Alpamare with some people staying at our flat for New Year (family of Nelly). It is basically like Wet-n-Wild except mostly indoor, which is good considering there was snow in the outdoor parts.
The slides were incredible fun, I enjoyed it much more than Wet-n-Wild. One slide called the Thriller was completely pitch-black for the whole way which was kind of scary the first time as the turns and drops came out of nowhere.
The other day I tried to make a snowman but the snow was glorious powder and didn’t want to stick together. Today it was (according to the Internet) 1°C and the snow was starting to melt a little bit. Now that it was a bit melted I used the last chance I had before it melts away completely to attempt to make one before I go home.
Making a snowman is HARD WORK.
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.
