Literally the entire weekend I felt like the character from Spongebob that freaks out about chocolate. See picture below.
No exaggeration.
Let's back up a bit though to travel day. On Thursday night we were supposed to leave for Switzerland from Florence at 6:30 pm, but the schedule got moved back to 8:15 because the bus was coming from Rome and for some reason they were late. No problem. However, we didn't actually get on the bus until almost 10 at night, and we still had to stop for dinner. I was also told that the bus got lost (not sure if this was true) so we arrived in Interlaken, Switzerland at 6am. But with a curse comes a blessing! The program that we went on is called "Florence for Fun". The people who were coming from Rome on the bus were on a different program called "Euro Adventures". Our program felt so bad about the delays that they offered to give us a 50% discount to a trip to the Venice Carnival. Hell. Yeah. So I will most definitely be taking advantage of that! Both program leaders were very nice, but the people who were attending Euro Adventures on our bus were probably the most obnoxious, rude people we've encountered in a while. I won't go into detail, but there is definitely a difference between the people who attend the Florence for Fun program and the Euro Adventure program. It's no wonder they have the reputation that they do.
Okay, just needed to get that boring stuff out of the way so we could move on to the good stuff!!
So after sleeping for two hours (we woke up at 8), we went downstairs so some of my friends could sign up for Canyon jumping! I didn't sign up as it wasn't on my list of things to do and not exactly in my price range. However, for those who did do it, it seemed absolutely worth it because Interlaken is one out of two places in the entire world where people can Canyon jump. Incredible!
Friday was a pretty relaxed day. We walked to Lake Brienz (again, pictures below), and the view was stunning. Even on the walk there, I could not stop thinking about how beautiful Switzerland is. It felt unreal. I had never seen water so blue and never felt air so fresh. Coming from Florence, known for its pollution, being able to breathe absolute pure freshness was well....a breath of fresh air. I don't think I've said the word "fresh" enough times.
Oh yeah, I promised you pictures...
Unreal, right?!
Later that night we went to what we had all came to Switzerland for...the Swiss chocolate tasting. Oh yessss.
It was all amazing of course. I also learned that the more chocolate snaps when it breaks, rather than bends or folds (I'm looking at you, Hershey), the better the chocolate is. At the end, we tried an alcoholic chocolate piece that you bite into and then down like a shot. It was very minimal, of course, but still fun to do! I have a video of me doing so, but the Internet is so poor here, I won't be able to share it until after I get back from "studying" abroad.
As I said, Friday was very relaxed as we were all very tired. We turned in early, after eating at this great Irish pub with our AWESOME waiter named Sheppy (or that's what his friends called him) from New Zealand.
Saturday morning, during breakfast (which consisted of jam and bread) I noticed a man with pink satin bell bottom pants. Later on we started to notice more people with the same outfit and painted faces. It was odd....but more on that later. So we headed off to the federal city of Switzerland (whatever that means, kinda like a capital), Bern. The view overlooking the town was absolutely gorgeous. I didn't take very good pictures but just Google image it. In Bern we passed this stand that was serving free melted Swiss cheese on warm bread. My mouth is watering just thinking about it! It was so yummy!! My tour guide also bought this warm wine with cinnamon, it sounded like the perfect winter drink! I didn't get a chance to try it, but I'd really like to some time (but actually, friends...let's try it sometime!). There wasn't as much to do in Bern as I thought there would be, but it was still cool walking around a city we had never been to before. However, Switzerland's pricing is high! There was a Starbucks in Bern and the price for a grande was 9 Swiss franc which is basically the same currency as the US dollar. I don't buy Starbucks often anyways, but there was no way in hell I was trying any this time! Oddly enough, I think my favorite part of Bern, aside from the cheese and bread, was watching this street performer play bagpipes. I'm not sure what it was, but I just really enjoyed hearing music that we don't get to listen to often in the United States.
After we got back to Interlaken, we were exhausted so a few of us decided to take a nap while the others decided to go out. We had the room key, so we just left the door cracked open for the others when they came back. Well, that idea backfired. The nap was unsuccessful to say the least. Remember those people with the weird pink outfits and face paint I was talking about earlier? Well, there were over a hundred of them staying in our hostel with absolutely ridiculous outfits, each with different themes. We saw tiger costumes, jesters, outer space theme, and even outfits with lights on them! It almost felt like we were the ones out of place. Apparently they go from place to place playing their drum line music, which is not at all quiet. During our nap we heard someone attempting to play the trumpet and then all of a sudden just a ton of drums outside out window. That didn't last too long so fortunately we started to drift off again. But just as I was drifting off, (half asleep, half awake) in my dream someone had screamed, which then caused me to scream....but instead of screaming in my dream, I actually screamed. Sooooo I woke up my roommates again! For our third round of drifting off we started to hear whistling. "Well, that's fine", we thought. It's just someone passing our door in the hallway! But the whistling was louder than we expected. We then remembered that we had left the door cracked open, so our reasoning was that it was just louder because the door was open. Nope. Two guys from the drum line crazy outfit party had decided to enter our room. They were being difficult and claimed that they had used their room key to get in our room but we knew that we had kept the door open, but long story short, after some yelling and shoving them out they eventually went away and our night continued nicely!
After all of that we went to dinner and then back to our Irish pub where we saw Sheppy again! It was nice to just sit at a table and drink, again, just keeping it relaxed. We had a stressful day!
On Sunday, a couple of my friends hadn't been to the lake that we went to on Friday, so we revisited that and took some gorgeous pictures and then we left back for Florence (but not before buying some chocolate first!)
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