Interlaken Day 2

Hey everyone! Today we woke up around 7:45am to get breakfast and be downstairs ready to go canyoning. We signed up to go on the “athletic and confident” trip to Chili Schliere (video of what it’s like can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9xE_ajrUc). I was pretty excited about today, but a little nervous as to the difficulty level. I knew I was athletic enough for anything I could face, but confidence is another story. It turned out to be a great day, and I didn’t really struggle with any of the obstacles. We left Outdoor Interlaken around 9am and drove to where our particular trip was. It was about an hour away in the next valley over. The drive over there was beautiful, as we got to see view of the entire area from up in the mountains. We saw some beautiful waterfalls on the way up. Once we got suited up into our gear which we had been fitted for before leaving, we walked 15 minutes to the beginning of the canyon. The initial shock the water temperature was just as I expected, overwhelming. It was really cold like I remembered it was rafting in West Virginia. The guide said he thought it was around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The overall trip was a blast and I had a lot of fun. I was thankful I didn’t really encounter a jump/slide I was too worried about. I purposely didn’t really think about it and just did what they told me. Most of the time, they would give you a brief explanation to the group, a few pointers individually before you went, and then counted you down from 3-2-1, Go! Every time, they said three, I went and I came out ok! Throughout the 8 hour trip, about 3.5 hours was in the water and the rest of travel, preparation, quick lunch, and clean-up. We did about 8 jumps and 6-7 slides throughout the day. The slides in this canyon where a lot steeper than I expected and you really had no control over what the water did to you. It would bump you into the sides of the walls and you would have no idea where you were because water was everywhere. Looking back at some of the slides, they looked more like gradual cliffs than a possible slide. The jumps were my favorite part. My favorite jump was a “jump and slide” where you jumped into the side of a cliff, turned in mid-air, and slide down the smooth face. It was a blast! All of our jumps were in the range of 20-30 feet and were pretty fun. Some of the jumps, we had to aim for a specific part of the pool because we could hit boulders at the bottom, but I didn’t have any trouble. It was really cold when you were in the water, and my hands were numb/frozen a good part of the afternoon. My feet were really sore at the end of the trip from all the water sloshing around and I came away with a big blister on my left big toe (it’s sore but not all that bad). I was happy to come away with no injuries. One of the guys on the trip, dislocated his shoulder (has happened several times before) on the first jump and had to take it slow the rest of the day. I couldn’t afford to get hurt because of my golfing trip in two weeks which I would die if I missed. 

The rest of the afternoon was just relaxing and view a bit of the town. A group of us walked around town looking at all the souvenir stores. I’ve learned that every store pretty much sold either Swiss watches or Swiss Army Knives. Tonight we ate dinner at the BierGarden at Balmers. I had a burger and fries for 10 Francs which was the best prices I’ve seen since being here. Tonight we have just hung around the hostel playing cards, ping pong and hanging out. I think tomorrow a group of us are heading up into the Alps to hike a little bit and then catching a 6pm train back to Strasbourg. Not looking forward to Finals on Wednesday, but I come home Friday! Looking forward to free refills, golf, friends, family, good food, my bed, and many others! See everyone soon!

Jonathan

Interlaken Day 1

Hey everyone! We got an early start this morning catching a 7:21am train to Interlaken. It a little less than a four hour train ride with only one change in Basel, Germany. We got into town and walked about 15 minutes to our hostel, Balmers. We’ve heard great things about Balmers and I’ve got to say it might be the best hostel we’ve stayed at in Europe. It’s pretty large in size with a game room, and several lounging rooms. I also think the beds are pretty comfortable, which have been hit or miss at the hostels we’ve stayed at. After storing our luggage till our room was ready, about ten of us headed out into the main part of town for lunch. Interlaken is a fairly small city (has one main road connecting train stations) situated between two gorgeous lakes. We quickly found out that Switzerland is very, very expensive. The cheapest food we found on the street was about 17 Francs (about $19). Today, each of us had different activities that we signed up for. Some people went bungee jumping, some went whitewater rafting, and some of us went bike riding. I went bike riding since I had already been whitewater rafting in West Virginia (which is known for world-class rafting). A group of about 8 of us rented bikes and rode through the scenic town. It was a really pretty day, although slightly overcast with the clouds low hiding the peaks of the mountains around us. It was cool to get to see both of the lakes which have amazing blue water. It’s a kind of turquoise blue and looks really, really cool. But we spent about 3 hours on the bikes and came back to get dinner at a local Irish Pub. I did a little better at dinner only spending 17 Francs (I spent 26 at lunch). Tonight, we just hung out at Balmers. I played some ping-pong with Michael which was really fun; we are both about the same skill level and our games got pretty competitive. This weekend is a little different in that it’s more of an outdoorsy town with no sites to see, but plenty of activities to do. They have canyoning (which I’m doing tomorrow), bungee jumping, sky diving, canyon swinging, etc. I’m only doing canyoning because the activities are expensive, but it should be a great rest of the week. Switzerland might have the most beautiful scenery of the countries I’ve visited. Looking around at the Swiss Alps has been amazing. I’ll update everyone tomorrow about our canyoning adventures. We are doing the hardest/most technical canyon recommended for the “athletic and confident” so that should be interesting. Looking forward to it!

Jonathan

London Day 2&3

Hey everyone! I’m a little behind on my blog as you can see. Days two and three of London were pretty similar so I’m going to combine them into one blog. I woke up Friday and left my hostile around 10:30 to head to the Museum of Natural History. I’m pretty sure this is the place they filmed the movie “Night at the Museum” and it sounded like a cool place to visit, so I figured I’d start the day off with a little history. I walked around the museum for around an hour and half or two hours. It was a neat museum with some pretty interesting exhibits. I liked the interactive ones in particular where you could see how decisions you made affected the outcomes. I left the museum and walked a ways down to Buckingham Palace. I didn’t get to see the changing of the guard (which was at 11:30) which is pretty famous, but it wasn’t that big of a deal to me. I wasn’t really sure what to do for the rest of the day, so I headed back over to Westminster for awhile. It was raining off and on all afternoon, so I thought about watching a movie, since I hadn’t seen any of the new releases, and I was in fact in an English speaking country. I headed back over to the Fullham/Chelsea area where I was staying looking for a movie theater. I ended up walking 20 minutes in the rain to find that the theater I had thought was showing the premier of “Green Lantern” was actually only showing old films. But they pointed me to a theater, 5 minutes back towards where I came from and I found a movie showing in about 30 minutes. I thought the movie was really pretty good. I had no prior knowledge of the Green Lantern superhero, besides hearing the name; I thought the overall concept was pretty cool.

Day three in London was a pretty relaxed day. I had decided the night before I really didn’t want to deal with the hassle of taking a two hour bus outside the city to view either Windsor Castle or Stonehenge. Even though they are really historic sites, I didn’t really want to spend 4 hours total on a bus to spend two or three hours outside the city. So I started the morning by going to the Museum of Science next to the Museum of Natural History. I walked around the museum for a few hours and then just walked around the downtown area for awhile. I ended up catching another afternoon movie (I saw Thor) and then ended up walking around Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus for awhile. I went into M&M world there, which is a giant store, all things M&M on four stories (pretty much anything M&M you could ever want). I ended the evening by walking back over to Westminster and getting some pictures of the London Eye and Parliament lit up at night; took a few pictures and called it a weekend.

Jonathan

London Day 1

Hey everyone! I started my trip bright and early this morning taking a 6:15am trip to Paris. I caught my Eurostar connection under the English Channel at 10:15 arriving around 11:30am local time. I left the train station and saw that I was close to King’s Crossing station so I decided to head over and see if I could see platform 9 ¾ which everyone knows is the platform to the Hogwarts Express. Unfortunately, I think I needed a train to ticket to get onto the platforms so I didn’t get to see that. But I went underground and took the tube about 15 minutes to the Fulham/Chelsea part of London where I am staying. Once off the tube, it took me about 15 minutes to find my hostel, which isn’t all that far from the station (about a 10 minute walk). Because I booked my hostel late, I’m kind of staying a little bit farther out of the main part of London, but I am just fine with that. After dropping my stuff off at the hostel, I immediately headed over visit Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea F.C. (my favorite EPL team) plays. It was really cool to visit the stadium and I really enjoyed the tour. I spoke with the two tour guides quite a bit about transfer rumors and it was cool to hear some of what they’ve been hearing. (They think Kaka is coming for sure, but who knows.) They also said that there was buzz going around because Abramovich was at the stadium while I was there, with possible developments on the new coach or transfer business. I think I might have seen his car too, an Aston Martin parked out front which was cool.  At the end of the tour, they dropped us off at the Megastore which I spent forever in. I walked all over the store making sure I got exactly what I wanted. I ended up getting two jackets, a jersey (Essien of course), a beanie, a scarf, and a poster. Let’s just say that this will be my only souvenir shopping for myself. 

After Stamford Bridge, I headed out to Westminster where I saw Big Ben, the Parliament Building, Westminster Abbey and the London Eye. They are all really close together off the Thames River. I spent several hours over in this area just looking around and admiring the views. I didn’t go into any of the places because they were all so expensive and I was just content seeing them from the outside. Each of them cost around 18-20 pounds which is around $30 so it doesn’t bother me not seeing them and saving money. I also walked 15-20 minutes down the river and saw the London Bridge which was a cool site.

Most of the day I had my headphones in and just listened to music while walking around the city. I also downloaded several Breakaway and Ignite podcasts which I got to listen to. I think I actually listened to about 7 hours of podcasts from my train ride and walking throughout the day. It’s been real nice to do whatever I wanted (like in Paris) without following a large group around. Tomorrow I think I’m going to see Buckingham Palace and the Museum of Natural History, so I’ll update everyone again tomorrow!

Jonathan  

Paris Day 2

Hey everyone! We started bright and early this morning meeting Dr. Gaspar downstairs at 7:45am to head to the Palace of Versailles. We had a 9am reservation and it took us about 45 minutes to reach the Palace. The place was really extravagant and we saw a lot of really cool rooms. Dr. Gaspar had given us 3 hours to see the place, but most of us finished viewing the rooms in just over an hour. A couple of us decided to spend the remaining two hours viewing the gardens which was an extra 6 Euro to visit, but it was definitely worth it. The palace gardens were beautiful and probably the prettiest gardens I’ve ever seen. They had really extravagant designs and fountains all over the property. They had choreographed the fountains to music which was really cool to see.

We left the Palace of Versailles, to tour the Louvre. I think the Louvre is the largest art gallery in the world with over 80,000 pieces to view, but I could be wrong. I knew from yesterday, the place was ridiculously big. But you could seriously get lost in this without the thousands of signs in there. None of us were really big art fans, so we decided to hit the major paintings and sculptures. We spent about 2.5 hours looking around and saw pieces like the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. We also saw some of Napoleon’s furniture he had in his apartments. The Mona Lisa the most famous piece of all painted by Leonardo de Vinci isn’t actually all that large. I knew about what to expect, so I wasn’t disappointed but I think some people might have been. The Mona Lisa had a room to itself and was behind what looked like about 5-6 inches of glass. We were allowed to take pictures which shocked me because in the Italian museums we weren’t allowed to take pictures of David or the Sistine Chapel.

After leaving the Louvre, we walked around the city, most of which I had seen the previous day. But we did go up on this large hill on the outside of town, which had a really neat view of the city. We saw the sunset and this really cool street soccer performer. He was standing up on the pillar (about 2 feet by 2 feet) and did all sorts of juggling tricks. I had seen quite a few of these before but he did a few things I’d never seen and was really impressed by. At the end of his act, he climbed a 15 ft pole while the ball was perfectly balance on his forehead and then proceeded to do acrobatics while holding the ball to his foot. It was a really neat thing to see and he made quite a bit of money from what I could see. I heard that he apparently makes close to 2000 Euros a night which is a nice chunk of change. I wish I would have gotten a video, but my camera was dying. Around 10:30, we headed over to the Eiffel Tower and hung around till about midnight. Tomorrow we head back to Strasbourg around 2pm and get in about 7:30pm. It’s been a great weekend and I really like Paris. We have our first two midterms this coming Wednesday which should be so much fun (Sarcasm) and then I’m off to London for the weekend which should be a blast. I will probably update everyone next weekend, because I’ll be studying and prepping this week. Hope everyone in Texas is doing great. I’m starting to miss home. Europe is fun, but Texas is where I belong. Missing those I’m close to; see ya’ll in just under 3 weeks!

Jonathan