interlaken, switzerland

After a 2 hour flight and a 3 hour train ride, we arrived from London in Interlaken, Switzerland. I was SO excited! Switzerland was one of the places I was looking forward to the most on this trip. Unfortunately it was dark when we got there so we weren't able to see the beautiful scenery of where we were staying. After finally finding our hostel, we settled in for the night. Interlaken is a huge outdoor activity and extreme sports town. We talked with one of our roomates, Samantha, and she was telling us about how she had gone skydiving and paragliding that day. We watched her skydiving video and it looked totally awesome! Mike had been considering skydiving before we arrived, and even though I never thought I would be the type of person to consider skydiving, there I was wanting to go too! The seed had been planted.. hehe. It just seemed like the normal thing to do there. All of our roomates had done crazy things like either skydiving or bungy jumping. That night we didn't get that much sleep because of a group of drunks that came bursting into the room with no regard for everyone that was sleeping. It was ridiculous. They were screaming and acting like fools. There was one girl who was freaking out at the idea of staying in the hostel and was crying and saying "I cant do this, I cant do this.. I can't sleep with all these freaky people around me" Waaahhhh.. Maybe she should have stayed in a private hotel room then if she didn't want and roomates.. geez!

When we woke up in the morning we were amazed at our setting.. just surrounded by mountains! Our plan was just to relax the first day and then go canyoning the second day, but it was so nice out, and our roomate Phil convinced us to just go canyoning with him that day instead. We quickly got ready and met our group downstairs. There was only 6 of us, which meant we could spend longer doing differnt things in the canyon. Our guides Damien and Bart were super cool, and were shamelessly flirted with by the other girls in our group.. lol it was quite funny. We got all of our gear together - wetsuit, jacket, socks, booties, helmet, harness, and lifejacket - and loaded it all into the van. Once we drove about 45 minute up, we started by rappelling 50 meters down into the canyon. We had our waterproof camera and got some great pictures of it all, but unfortunately that means I won't be able to post any of them here =( For the next couple hours we were jumping of platforms of up to 10 meters into the water below, sliding down rock faces, and zip-lining through the canyon. It was SO awesome! I was pretty scared to do some of the jumps, but didn't want to be the chicken so I forced myself. I'm so glad I did. When we got back to the van we had lunch and then headed back down to Interlaken. We took it easy for the rest of the day, and went to the grocery store to get some food. Our hostel didn't have a kitchen or fridge, but there was no way we could afford to eat out there. We had gone to McDonalds the night before, and it cost 11 Francs for a meal. The exchange rate is equal to the canadian dollar, so that's $11 for a meal.. unbelievable! Someone was telling us that the reason food and things are so expensive is that because they have to import it all. Switzerland is mostly mountains, which means they can't really farm or grow things here on their own.

It rained our last day there, so we didn't do much. We were glad that we hadn't waited to go canyoning, we had much better weather on the day we went. We mostly hung out at the hostel and watched another one of our roomates skydiving vidoes. We were pretty much convinced at that point that it was something we wanted to do, but wanted to do it on a nice day. We planned to head up to the town of Gimmelwald for a few days, and maybe stop by Interlaken again on the way out once the weather was nice.