Winter 2009 - Switzerland: Interlaken, Part 1

7th-8th
Helloooo. Sorry for the late update; took some time to settle down at Cornell again.

Bern to Interlaken! It means "in between two lakes", 'cause that's exactly what it is. Btw, this post is going to be more pics, less words (easy for both you and me lol).
On the train to Interlaken. Couldn't really get a good shot cause it was wobbly and all, but we saw lots of endless, snow-covered planes. Really quite amazing. NOT a place I'd like to get lost in.
One of the two lakes. Interlaken's on the far side, this is still on the train I think.

So we checked in at the nice hostel (Backpackers Villa Sonnenhof) and went to have some dinner.
Complimentary appetizers with a superb mystery bread-spread. No idea what it was. Rich, fragrant and creamy, with perfect flavour. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water (maybe cause I'd just finished frisbee practice). Delicious.
My main course. Rosti again! Love this stuff. Plus it's the cheapest on the menu (still 20+usd T____T). With bacon, sausage and an egg. This is one dish I'm DEFINITELY going to learn how to cook. Cheap ingredients, fantastic results.

Now Interlaken's just plain boring. It's right next to some gigantic mountains (the biggest in Europe), so the skiing and snowboarding's top-notch. Other than that, nothing.

We didn't intend to ski, so we just grabbed a map and walked around the city.
Note big-ass mountain.
Biiiig mountain.

Passed by a "coop" on the way. Coop is like a mix of Giant and 7/11 lol. Smallish and not open 24/7, but still has a pretty good selection. Bought chocolates.
Knoppers! I used to eat tons of these when I was a kid; uncle would bring them back. Y'know how hazelnuts go well with chocolate? Same for wafers? And creme? Well someone really fkg brilliant put it all together. DELICIOUS I TELL YOU.
Anyway yeah back to Interlaken. A river! Yay.

JUST KIDDING OMG I LOVE THIS STUFF.
NOM NOM NOM.

Lol I bought some KitKat too. Again, used to eat tons of Swiss KitKat. There's actually a huge difference between the Swiss ones and KitKat from other countries, mainly due to the milk in the chocolate. Apparently the climate's great for cows, so dairy products turn out really well. You can really taste the difference @_@ Sweeter and smoother on the throat. NOM NOM NOM.

Anyway,
Looks like those pipes that stretch across our beautiful klang river? Nope, it's a bridge.
I kept getting an image of two goats trying to cross from opposite sides. Was that a "peribahasa" or something.
River/Lake/Wtvlah.
Qvack.

Once again we were faced with stupidly expensive food. Solution? Grocery-shopping at Coop lor.
Spaghetti and Bratwurst, with sauteed zucchini. Cheap.
One of the kitchen shelves. You take a sticker, write your name, room number, and check-out date on it, and stick it to your food. If you haven't finished your food by the time you leave, replace the first sticker with a new one that says "Free Food". Awesome right! Fridges and shelves with lotsa free food lol. If we were broke-r and more thick-faced, we wouldn't have bought anything at all. There's enough food there for a few meals XD Rice, flour, salt, garlic, risotto (wth), pasta... lots.

Anyway, we still had one FULL day before leaving, so we decided to..... be continued. Work + Sleep now :D

Expenditure:
Rosti, 23CHF
Chocolates, 8CHF
Groceries, ~6CHF

Total: 37CHF = RM119

A new semester!

Back to class! Spring 2010. I'm taking 20 credits this time; gonna aim for a perfect 4.3GPA! Asian much. Gotta study hard (for real this sem)!

Classes I'm taking:

Economics 2040, Networks

Economics 3580, Behavioral Economics

Mathematics 2220, Multivariable Calculus

Physics 2217, Honours Electricity & Magnetism

CS 1110, Introduction to Java

PE 1331, Snowboarding

The math course happens to be the prerequisite to the physics course, meaning I should have taken the math last semester. No wonder I don't understand 50% of what they're saying in class! Bought some supplemental stuff to read up on.

In my physics class, the prof wrote four equations on the board (Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism) and said that if we can ace the course if we master those. I don't understand a bit of it, fml.

Frisbee is Mondays through Thursday; 10pm - 12am on Monday and Wednesday, 7pm - 9pm on Tuesday and Thursday. Fridays are free for us to do any other physical activity. Snowboarding on Saturdays!

It's gonna be a tough semester! Off to frisbee now :D

Winter 2009 - Switzerland: Bern

4th - 7th Jan

We took a train from Basel to Bern, the capital of Switzerland. I'd always thought it was Zurich lol.
Train. Would use them plenty in the next few weeks.
View from the train, can't see crap ==" Great scenery all the way.

We checked in at our hostel, "Bern Backpackers Hotel Glocke", then went for dinner.
Pasta at "Spaghetti Factory". Somehow I keep thinking about Cheesecake Factory lol ==" but it was good.

The hostel had a pretty nice kitchen so we bought cooked our own dinner that night. Sausages, eggs, and yogurt. Too expensive to eat out liao; this had to suffice. Was pretty good though, cause Swiss/German sausages are wonderful.

Grabbed a map and walked around the city the next day (after some "cheap" Thai food for lunch).
Turns out there isn't much to do at Bern either, though it was scenic and really quite beautiful.
Street near our hostel.
Clock tower thing.
Everything was covered in snow.
Skating rink! Saw rinks all over the cities I visited. Everyone just brings their own skates lol, unlike our one measly rink in Pyramid.
Could see some large mountains in the distance, not too sure which ones they were.
Yeaahhh a pity my camera (and skills) don't do the place justice. Was really very nice.
A lot of places were affiliated with Lions and/or Rotary.
Random shop. I don't understand.
Pipe organ in a cathedral. Three keyboards, fifteen buttons, and more pedals than I know what to do with.
Safety net over a low ledge somewhere. Scary =="
Part of the "Old Old City". The main touristy things are in the Old City, which is built over the Old Old City.

We were by a balcony-thing with a fantastic view of buildings and trees all covered in snow. An old guy with a cane and a fancy hat walked up to us and said something in German, which we aren't exactly proficient in. Then he widened his a bit (Oh, tourists.) and said "Winter has finally come", nodded, and went on his way.
No, it's not some sorta artsy thing, it's a bear pit Lol.
It's a bear.
IT'S A BEAR.
IT'S A BEEAAARRRRR.

Then we walked up to the "Rose Garden", which overlooked the Old City.
Path on the way up. Steeper than it looks; took our time walking up cause we didn't want to break our collarbones or something.
View from halfway up. We'd crossed the bridge; our hostel's somewhere on the other side.
Nice view of the Old City of Bern.
Tadah, the rose garden! It's winter, what do you expect >_> I'd imagine it's really beautiful in the spring.
Googled it! Not my photo.

We found a nice, dangerous-looking path down and decided to take that instead of our original one. It was like a narrow, 0.7m-wide path on the side of a hill lol.
Idiot being an idiot.
Uhhuh.
Yeah it was way steeper IRL, I swear! D:
It's not so much the "falling down a snowy slope", but "falling down a snowy slope and getting run over by a car".
View from another bridge. We stood there kicking snow into the water for a few minutes.
the schmuck cafe, right next to Einstein's old house. Irony much.

From Wiki:
"Schmuck is most often used in American English as a pejorative or insult, meaning an obnoxious or contemptible person; one who is stupid, foolish, or detestable."
further down,
"In German language, the word refers to jewelery, a trinket or a brooch"

Anyway Einstein-Haus is closed till February ==" Celaka.
Fountain and clock tower. I don't know why, but the town is littered with fountains, each with a different figure on top. 15-20 of them altogether I think ==" So many numbers on the map are just.. fountains. Abit potong steam.

We had dinner at "Altes Tramdepot", the #1-rated restaurant in Bern (according to Tripadvisor.com). It's a microbrewery like Brewerkz in Singapore. Sadly, microbreweries aren't allowed in Malaysia. Beer here comes in 0.2L, 0.3L, 0.5L and 1L. I just wanted to try some so I ordered 0.3L, but they misheard me and I got the smallest one.
Quite pathetic and somewhat embarrassing. The beer was pretty good though.
Jian's dinner, some sorta chicken-mozzarella thing.
My dinner. DELICIOUS stuff. Bratwurst with Rosti. Bratwurst, "Brat" meaning boiled, and "Wurst" meaning sausage. Boiled sausage. Apparently the best way to cook them is to boil them in beer and onions, then fry them on a pan. Switzerland and Germany definitely have the *best* sausages in the world. 95% of the sausages we eat are those stupid pink cocktail ones. This meal was fantastic.
The coins in my wallet. By this time I had eight types of currency with me wtf, mostly useless. Ringgit, SGD, Yen, Thai Baht, USD, Pounds, Euros and Francs.

And that's pretty much it for Bern. Yup. HAVE FUN LAH NG YU BIN.

Jian and I still had one full day in Bern though, so we just walked around.
A museum of something-or-another. Was too pricey for us so we didn't go in; looked kinda boring anyway. Gotta love the signs, "Zurich, Basel, Interlaken".

And now I present the most retarded sign in Bern, or Switzerland for that matter.
What the fffuuuuuu? Somehow this looks really, really damn wrong ahahahaha.

Aaaanyway.
Scenery from.. somewhere. Somehow the snow-mist-fog stuff is very prominent in photos, dammit. Really quite an amazing scene.

Anyway we had fondue for lunch/dinner! Some guy at YMCA Basel told us that Swiss people never have fondue in restaurants cause it's so expensive. True that, it's 35CHF per person in Basel and over 20CHF per person in Bern. The Swiss people make their own from their own cheese; we just had to do with the semi-instant version.
Rented a fondue set (pot, stove, fondue forks) from our hostel! Was 17CHF for the both of us. A quarter the price lol ==" Even though I say instant, it still took ~40 mins to prepare.

Use a garlic clove and rub the pot a bit, dump the cheese in and heat till it boils, stirring all the while. After it boils, move it from your kitchen stove to the fondue stove and keep stirring. It curdles at the top really, really fast =="
Cut bread into cubes and start eating! Fondue.. is pretty nice. It's got a decent amount of alcohol in it, and it's slightly bitter. I tried some when I was a kid and HATED it. I've since learned to appreciate this stuff, though it's really filling and quite sickening after a while. We finished a whole loaf of bread @_@
And here's the rest of our meal that night. Ham, bread and cheese. Note the Luxembergerli :D

Saved lotsa money on food doing this @_@ ahaha. And that's it for the Bern trip!

Next: Interlaken, Switzerland

Temperature: Colder that I'd thought. Had to wear long-johns and thermals etc.

Expenditure:
Spaghetti, 19
Groceries for the few days, 11
Bun I had as a snack, 5 wtf
Thai food, 16
Altes Tramdepot, 36
Fondue, 8.5
Snacks, chocolate and beer (from grocery store), 11
Total: 106.5 CHF = RM347 for three days. Meh.