Switzerland

Do you like mountains?
Do you like to hike in the great outside?
Does gorgeous scenery catch your attention?
Do you like chocolate, watches and/or cheese?

If you answered "yes" to any or all of these questions, then Switzerland is the place for you.

Seriously, Switzerland is amazing. It happened to be our first stop on the trip around Europe, and set the bar very high for the rest of the trip. Because of the cost (Switzerland is an expensive place), we chose not to spend too much time there, so I picked out a little gem in the mountains for us to start with some good cardio and exploring. Here's just a little taste test of what we saw:

The trip started with a super long travel day. We left our house in Surrey around 9am, took a 9-hour flight from Vancouver to Amsterdam, then hopped on a series of trains that led us to Gimmelwald, Switzerland. We traveled through Utrecht, Frankfurt, Interlaken, then Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. From Lauterbrunnen, we had the option of taking a bus or walking to the gondola. Since we had been sitting on trains for so long, my sister and I decided to walk the hour-long path to the gondola since it was still light out.

Most of the walk was through farmland, but at the end we went through a forest and it was getting dark. Catherine and I were both imagining our worst fears of wild animals attacking us. We were so spooked that when a cyclist whizzed past, we jumped.

We made it to the gondola and took it up to the town where we were spending the next couple nights - Gimmelwald. We stayed at the Mountain Hostel. It wasn't much to look at, it was a little like sleeping in a cabin, but it was sweet and I would definitely recommend it as a fun  place to stay. We were beat when we got there and had the intention of going straight to bed. We put our stuff away then grabbed our toothbrushes to get ready for bed. The bathrooms were downstairs, so we had to go through the lobby area to get there. In the lobby, a bunch of travellers were hanging out and playing Bob Marley on the piano they had. Naturally, Cath and I were drawn in and it turned out they had rewritten the lyrics to the song "Is This Love" so that it was about the mountain hostel. Then, we made a video of all of us singing the song. There was one guy on the piano, I had a shaker, and there was another guy with a stick that had bottle caps attached to it that jingled when he tapped it on the ground. It was a blast. We forgot how tire we really were and totally took in the hostel atmosphere. Because we were all such good sports, the guy who orchestrated the song bought us all a big chocolate fondu. Delicious!

The next morning, Catherine and I set out for our one day of hiking. We intended to do the main hike in the Jungfrau region that goes up to Schilthorn mountain. (One of the James Bond movies...one with something about the secret service was filmed up there). We hiked up to the next town, Murren, which had a live video of the view at the top of the mountain and it was super foggy. The main drawing point of that hike it the view you get at the top. We figured it wouldn't be so nice to hike 5 hours up a mountain to see nothing, so we asked if they could recommend anything else. We ended up hiking an alpine meadow instead which had some great views as well below the clouds, and stunning wildflowers.

For the rest, we wandered, I had an American from Chicago complement me on my ability to speak English (he know I was Canadian), and we played some intense Dutch Blitz with two Dutch brothers from Maryland.

We left Gimmelwald the next day, and on the way out, we stopped at Trundelbach Falls, which is a series of 10 waterfalls inside of a mountain. It was sweet. The last picture is from the city of Interlaken, where we had a 2 hour stopover between trains. This is a beautiful city. Next stop? Salzburg...

Change

I believe change is good. I had been craving for things to change in my life, to go to new places, to meet new people, and to experience more adventure. i had gotten sick of blogging because it underlined just how boring my life actually was a few months ago. I guess maybe boring is the wrong word for it, my life was becoming too much of a routine. I am not a fan of routine, so I needed a change.

For the past year I had been working an 8-4, Monday to Friday job at Paris Orthotics, which was a great, steady job where I met fantastic people and learned a lot. But I felt a little trapped. I was struggling to see where this was going in my life. I made a decision to follow something I saw as a dream, but I can see that God has been leading me towards this for a while, I've just been avoiding it. I applied for a masters program in worship at Calvin Seminary. Long story short, they welcomed me in with my science degree and I am now sitting in my apartment in Grand Rapids, MI procrastinating homework. Nothing too new there, but before I get ahead of myself, I need to backtrack and describe my summer.

I left this blog with a bit of a downer post. I was faced with a lot of hard things in the first few months of 2011, first by having my car totaled in an accident, then by my uncle's accident only 2 days later, then by the suicide of a friend. I felt attacked. One thing I did have to look forward to was the trip I was planning with my sister to Europe for the summer. First though, I dealt with my grief by donating my hair to cancer wigs in support of a friend of mine who lost her mom to cancer a few months earlier. She had shaved her head, but I was not brave enough or bold enough to do that, but I did manage to cut off 10-inches and get a pretty drastic cut. I couldn't even put it in a pony tail really at first, which is a big deal for me. That's my 'do! :)

In early July, I left for Europe with my sister. The following blogs I write will reflect my experiences on that journey. We had where we wanted to go all mapped out and booked hostels since it was high season, but we set out open to change and spontaneity, we just wanted a safety net so we wouldn't end up going way over budget on places to stay. We carried everything on our backs for 5 weeks, did crazy amounts of walking and hiking, and had an AMAZING time. There were ups and downs of course, but nothing we couldn't handle. Word of advice: if you want to take trains around Europe, go before you're 26 and get a global train pass - best decision I made.

Our journey began in Switzerland and went in a circle all the way out to Hungary and then back to the Netherlands. In total, I think we saw 14 different countries and stayed in 8. We arrived in Amsterdam and went right away to Gimmelwald, Switzerland, then Austria, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, France, and the Netherlands. We took trains through Germany, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Belgium and Monaco and we also went to Vatican City. That's 14 countries total in 5 weeks. It was fabulous. More to come on that in the foreseeable future as more procrastination comes my way.

As for now, I am in Grand Rapids, working on an MA in Worship with the hopes of being a music director in a church.

God is good.