Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Switzerland

We are in the beautiful, expensive country of Switzerland! Yes, it is quite expensive. We are an an Internet cafe in the train station (the cheapest) and it is 8 swiss franc's per hour. That is about 7 dollars, I think. Anwyway, I told Mom the other day that we weren`t going to blog until we get to Paris because it is so expensive here, and we have spent all of our money on food. (that's only half a joke). She really wanted to hear from us, so she said she would pay us 7 dollars (there is no dollar sign on this entire keyboard!!!) to post. That gave us a great idea!!! We are hereby setting up a "Rose and Katie Internet Cafe" fund. Contributions can be made through Lynn Wallen and are not tax deductible. haha

Well, we arrived in rainy Lucerne yesterday at around noon. We did not have directions to our hotel, so we just started walking and found it withing 10 minutes! I know you are shocked to hear it, but we are getting pretty good at finding our way around Europe. We knew the hotel was 500 meters away from the train station, so we figured we'd come to it eventually...and we did.

Our hotel is pretty nice. It is right in the center of the old town, which is convenient. We started walking around after checking in, to see what there was to do in town. there ins't much, unless you have a lot of shopping money!!! We wondered and wondered, and then decided to try to find an Internet cafe. That was a disaster. There just aren't any here. there is this one at the train station, and we ended up finding another later that is 10 francs per hour. It is almost as bad as Venice! The only problem is that we will be here four nights, and we were only in Venice for one. Anyway, now that we have the katie and rose internet cafe fund, it's not a problem.

The one thing we really wanted to do in Switzerland was go white water rafting. When we arrived, the lady at the tourist office said that it had been raining too much and was too dangerous for at least two days. So, we just took a brochure and decided to call ourselves. After figuring out the phone cards here (that's another story we'll save for another day), we called the rafting company ourselves and scheduled a rafting trip for tomorrow (Wednesday)!!!!! We are very excited. The trip is about two hours away, so right after we booked the trip, we went to the ticket office at the train station to make reservations to get to Interlaken.

Now, we are traveling throughout Europe on a eurail pass, which allows us to travel without purchasing tickets. We purchased a pass that is good for 10 days of travel in any of five countries. We can make reservations, which guarantees us a seat on the train, or we can just show up and get on a train. We can take as many trips we want on the days that we travel.

When we were at the station making reservations to Interlaken, I was trying to decide if we should use one of our 10 days for this trip, or if we should use it to take a boat trip across the lake in Lucerne, since the boats are considered part of the rail system. We decided to use it for Interlaken, because the tickets would have been expensive. It was at that moment that Rose had a great idea, qualifying her for the grand prize for the "best idea of the day" award. She suggested that we get on the boat yesterday, since it was considered a travel day and our rail pass was valid the entire day! So, we rushed over to the docks, just in time to get on the 6:12 boat that goes all around lake Lucerne.

We had a beautiful 2 hour trip around the lake, with gorgeous views of the mountains that surround the lake and the villages that are located on the shores. We made a few quick stops, but mostly just sailed around the lake. It was a wonderfully relaxing way to end the day.

But, it gets better! After we returned to the dock at about 8:15, we decided to have fondue for dinner. Mmmmmm. That was really good. I think Rose is posting pictures. We had four courses, salad, cheese, meat, and of course, chocolate. The salad was really good. We were totally starving by then, so we ate the entire salad. Next was the cheese course. It was a gruyere cheese, with bread and potatos to dip. Mmmmm. We ate about all of that also. Then we had the meat. You cook the meet (beef and chicken) in a little bot of boiling broth. The broth was a beef broth, I think, with celery, carrots, and some kind of noodle in it. Mmmmm. That was good too. We didn't quite finish the soup, but we ate all of the chicken and almost all of the beef.

The best was last, of course...chocolate! We had milk chocolate with hazlenuts in it. To dip, we had apples, pears, bananas, strawberries, and more bread. The bread was a little weird, since it was regular bread, not sweet bread, but it was good. Of course, we (or I should say Rose) finished off the chocolage as well. All of that, and we still managed to drink an entire pitcher of ice tea!!! Mmmm. we are not officially broke and officially not any lighter than when we left Tennessee. ha

After that, we went to bed and slept very well. We slept in this morning, since we don't have much to do today. We are mainly resting and regrouping. We went bathing suit shopping this morning (let me tell you, that was lots of fun after fondue) since neither of us brought ours (dumb). We then bought some fruit and a sandwich for lunch, and came here to post. This afternoon, we are going to walk a lot, do some laundry, and not have dinner. :) We have sworn off ice cream for the rest of the trip!!!

That's all for now!!! We will probably not post tomorrow, since we are going to be rafting all day, but we'll post again on Thursday.

Have a great week! And be thankful every day for American keyboards. I'm going to have to relearn typing when we get home.

Katie

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