Next stop on the journey was Switzerland, land of the most beautiful scenery you’ve ever seen and some of the most mediocre food at the highest prices that are guaranteed to really piss you off. I really had a hard time with this. I would have been fine with it being expensive if it was good food, I mean everything in Switzerland is expensive, but paying $30 for a crappy cheeseburger infuriated me to no end. I started dreading eating there, because I just knew it was going to put me in a bad mood. Switzerland is an interesting place, with the highest average income per citizen on earth. Everything there is very nice, you don’t see any homeless people, and their wealth has allowed them to maintain a unique neutrality and preserve their historical buildings despite all of the wars that have ravaged the rest of Europe. The number of fine jewelry and watch shops you see everywhere also just doesn’t make any sense. Everyone in Switzerland must own at least 100 watches in order to keep all these places in business.
After 5 days in Berlin, we took a series of long train rides en route to Switzerland. That travel day really sucked. I think we spent 9 hours on the train that day. In full disclosure I was enjoying the giant .75 liter beers at the basketball games the night before and was paying for it a bit the next day. It also didn’t help that our train ran out of bottled water and basically all food as well. Jared, hung over, stuck on a train for 8 hours with nothing but a veggie sandwich to eat is not a very fun person to travel with. Sorry Mark 😂.
When we finally arrived in Zurich, we were starving and got pizza at a restaurant near the train station. Easily the worst $30 pizza I’ve ever had. Don’t get me wrong, Switzerland is probably one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, the mountain scenery is absolutely incredible. With that being said, I had a lot of beef with the food situation there. We didn’t really do much in Zurich, it was more of a layover for our next train ride the next morning to Lucerne.
Lucerne is a beautiful city that dates back to medieval times and is most famous for the Chapel bridge, a 14th century covered wooden bridge that runs across the Ruess river in the middle of the city. The bridge contains many paintings from the 17th century depicting the historical events in the city as well as religious events. Unfortunately, many of these paintings were destroyed in a fire in 1993, but about 30 were spared and are still in place. We spent our day walking throughout the city, checked out the bridge, climbed the old city walls and also went to see a memorial to a group of Swiss mercenaries killed in the French Revolution. The memorial is a dying lion carved into stone that was pretty impressive. Lucerne was a pretty little city, but I think we did it right just spending one night there, we pretty much covered all the major things to do there in one day.
The next day, we caught a train to Interlaken for a couple days of incredible hiking and scenery. Our first day we hiked out to Brienz Lake and had big ambitions to try to play golf at Interlaken golf club which is apparently a great little course surrounded by the Alps as a backdrop. However upon arriving there, we learned that they required anyone playing to be a member of one of their accredited golf clubs and also required proper golf attire and shoes, of which we met zero of their requirements. Whoops, so much for that idea. Instead we hiked back into the city and took a gondola up to Harder Kulm, which provided an incredible view of Interlaken down below and the surrounding mountains, including the highest point in Europe. It was raining a bit when we were up there and we saw an amazing double rainbow over the city down below.
The next day, we took the train to nearby Grindelwald and hiked up to an alpine lake. The scenery on the hike was absolutely gorgeous, as we were surrounded by the Alps. There was also a really cool cliff walk across some metal grids attached to a cliff face several hundred feet in the air. Mark is not a big heights guy so he took one step out there and decided to go wait for me to finish in the restaurant. Afterwards, we went to take the gondola back down the mountain and the line was absolutely insane so we decided to start walking down the mountain instead and try to grab the gondola at one of the other stops along the way. This hike was steeper than anticipated and we really paid for it the next couple days as our legs were very sore from hiking steeply downhill for multiple miles. When we reached the 2nd to last stop, we decided to jump on the gondola as there was no line. It turned out there was no line because the gondola was actually closed. However, it was still running so we just hopped on, without tickets (for the record we did try to buy them, but the ticket shop was closed). It didn’t matter, as when we got to the bottom nobody was looking for a ticket. One thing we noticed in Switzerland is that nobody ever checked our tickets for the train, unlike every other country that almost always checks. Apparently Switzerland has enough money so they don’t really care or their citizens always follow the rules.
