Interlacken: Friday Travels

Oh, goodness. What a weekend. I have divided these entries up into Friday, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday, so just keep reading down!

If you want to skip the bajillion word essay that is to follow, the summary of my time in Interlaken is: I want to move to Switzerland, adopt a Burmese Mountain dog, and live on Swiss chocolates.

I have never been more excited for a weekend. Phi Delt’s formal in Gatlinberg was close, but God knows Switzerland trumps the Tennessee card. We caught a 4:00 train from Luxembourg City to Basel. Now, I know I take class in a castle and already want to run around screaming “Expalliraumus” and waving my wand, being on the train just magnified it. We were on the Hogwarts Express in our little cars with a little trolley truck serenading us every hour. We had made reservations beforehand, which was clutch. If not, we would have been stuck sitting the aisles or standing as the train got so crowded.

One of the American studies classes offered in Luxembourg is the study of European tourism. According to the students in the class, the teacher goes into depth about the difference between traveling and touring. Our transfer to our second train in Basel was a fresh breath of traveling. We had about 15 minutes to gather all our large backpacks (those darn American tourists) sprint across the train station, and in that sprinting from France to Switzerland, and hop on another train to Interlaken. Scary, but so much fun, and a lesson in traveling! We safely made it to the train, thanks to kind instructions from a 15 year old in our train cart.

Accepting we were the obnoxious Americans on the train, we continued to have a great time getting more and more excited as our ears popped and the train climbed higher into the Alpine altitude. We made it to Interlaken by 10 pm, not too bad!

We had made reservations at Balmer’s in Interlaken, one of the highest-ranking hostels in Europe. Our consensus at the end of the weekend was that it deserved such applause. Imagine a wooden cabin, attached to taller wooden cabins, built by the Swiss Family Robinson (hah, didn’t even realize they were Swiss, how ironic) with hammock hang outs, bonfires, a distoteque downstairs, a mirror room for card playing, a beer garden, and staircases and hallways popping out of all directions in the most discombobulated manner. It was beautiful.

After dropping our large backpacks we headed down to the discoteque (no one saw that coming) and bought our first Swiss beer. However, to my shock and disappointment, I was carded at the bar. Upon asking the age to drinking in Switzerland and finding out it was 16, I was more than a little embarrassed to tell him that it had been half a decade since I’d been under the drinking age. His answer, “but you look so young!” Despite the small bump in the road, we jammed and boogied and got down that night to some American old school music.

Welcome to Switzerland!