Swiss Adventures
Day 1: Awake for 18+ hours
Six of us wake up at 4 am to meet in the lobby of our apartment building. We are catching a flight to Zürich, Switzerland for the weekend. All of us are dog tired but so excited to travel to one of the most beautiful places on earth.
We land in Zürich around 9 am but we can’t check into our Airbnb until around 2 pm. So we decide to explore the city, but with all our luggage. Now I understand why everyone “backpacks” Europe. I didn’t bring a backpack, even though I had one, I brought a bag with handles, so I was either carrying it in my hands, or slung over my shoulder with the long strap. All. Day. Long. And I am the person that over packs every situation. Quincy (a friend on the trip) joked that I must have packed bricks in my bag because it was so heavy! My heavy bag aside, we walk around the old part of Zürich and hop onto a ferry that takes us around Zürichsee Lake! We sit on the ferry for a relaxing hour and a half, my feet thanked me. I would guess we walked about 7 miles that day, so we sat any chance we could!
After taking trams all over Zürich, we finally arrive to our Airbnb to drop off our bags, rest and freshen ourselves up before dinner. I hop onto yelp to find a restaurant for the night. Yelp is a great resource for finding restaurants, until you don’t speak the native language in that country. Thankfully, I find a place that a ton of Americans reviewed as being the best Swiss restaurant in town.
We walk to Restaurant Johanniter and enjoy one of the best meals I’ve had in Europe so far. I ordered Kalbsbratwurst mit Rösti an Zwiebelsauce (Pork bratwurst with onion sauce) and a Feldschlösschen Dunkle Perle (dark swiss beer). Not a normal meal I would ever order at home, but it was amazing!
Day 2: Swiss Alps
The next morning we ride a 2 hour train to Interlaken, Switzerland to our next hostel to drop off our bags and start our journey up into the mountains. Hostels are as common of a phrase as “backpacking Europe” so we felt pretty safe checking into one of these. And full disclosure here, I don’t think I’ve adjusted to the time difference fully, plus doing so much everyday is for sure adding to my exhaustion and struggle to sleep/wake up. The day before when we traveled and explored Zürich, I was tired, we all were. So when we finally hit the hay, I crashed. And the next day, I overslept. I didn’t have time to get ready like I’d have wanted to, but we just hit the ground running. At least I didn’t feel like a zombie like I did the day before!
As we traveled up to Kleine Scheidegg point, I thought to myself “Oh I’ve seen the mountains before. This won’t be that different.” Boy was I wrong. First, I took a step off the train and took the cleanest deep breath of my entire life. The air on the mountain was like being taking a drink of ice cold Fiji water when you’re hot and thirsty. Second, where we were was just mountains for miles. My head was exploding with the massive natural landscape I was looking at.
Day 3: Traveling home is exhausting
I start the day out by oversleeping, again. This time it’s because I was up too late, so I take full blame. We met some people in the lobby bar who were students like us traveling from the U.S. and Canada and it was nice to connect with them. FOMO kicked in for me and I should have just gone to bed! Combine the late night with the fact we didn’t really discuss a plan for when to check out and what Day 3 had in store for us, I just wasn’t prepared, period. This really threw me off, second day in a row. If you know me you know a few things about me:
I’m prepared, always. You don’t get called the “mom” of every group you’re a part of by not being prepared.
I typically look nice, even when I don’t need to. Senior year high school yearbook quote on the page says “You know you’re a senior if you remember Tristen Metcalf dressing up EVERYDAY OF SCHOOL.”
I don’t oversleep. I’ve only overslept for one class in three years of college. ONE. And it’s when I had walking pneumonia, so I don’t beat myself up too much about it. I used to get up for dance team practice at 5am and get fully ready for my day and start practice at 6:15am.
I’m usually the planner of a group, whether I want to be or not. Luckily during this weekend a decent amount of things were planned by others, so I didn’t have to do a lot of the legwork figuring things out. I am INCREDIBLY thankful to my traveling friends for their hard work in figuring out where to go and how to do it. But, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t throw me a bit and lead to my demise in getting up and moving each day.
The irony of the overpacking and lugging that heavy bag all over Switzerland- I didn’t even use half the stuff I packed because I never had more than 10 minutes to get out the door. MAJOR FACE PALM MOMENTS. I hope to travel again over a weekend or two, so I definitely learned some lessons over this weekend about being and staying prepared!
We stayed in Interlaken most of the day before catching the train back to Zürich for our flight later that night. We just continued to enjoy the beauty that surrounded us, I don’t think you can get enough of that.
We head to the airport sad to leave Switzerland, but excited to be home in Barcelona! It was sort of odd how I no longer feel like I’m going to Barcelona as a tourist, but as a visitor who cares about the culture and knows how to be a resident there. Upon check in at the airport, we learn our airline had different plans for us. There were strikes in France at the airport so our flight was canceled without notice. I’m not sure why not one of us six got notified, because the strikes had been going on since the day before. We all panicked, because it’s end of the day, there are less flight options dwindling down as the day goes on and because our airline had rebooked us, without our knowledge, to the next evening. We have class the next morning. Thankfully, we resolved it by catching a flight with a different airline and made it home only an hour later than planned, though $250 poorer after having to purchase the last minute, one way ticket to Barcelona. Stay tuned for the outcome of a refund from Veuling, our original airline (& one I planned on using for other European flights! Yikes!).
Final words: Travel, because it it makes the world much so much smaller and teaches you a lot about yourself. I never thought of Switzerland as a place I’d like to go, but I am so glad I did. It’s a place I’ll never forget. And, yeah, I learned a lot about packing, planning, sleeping, etc…
As the Swiss would say, Auf Wiedersehen!
Tristen
