Italia!

Since last thursday was a holiday here, we took friday off and decided to make a long weekend of it!
We caught the train wednesday night out of Zurich where Rachel and I met up with Nadia, Bruce and Luke.

First I would just like to mention that the ride down to Lugano(southern Switzerland) was one of the prettiest collections of scenery and little towns i've seen in a while. It was great until the sun went down then I opted for tunes instead.....

We changed trains in Lugano and then had another 45ish minute ride downto milan. The train station in Milan is really grand on the oustide. Inside is a little bit of a shithole in some places but i think it is currently undergoing renovations.....

We wandered around downtown milano trying to find our way to the hostel for about 45 minutes. tempers were wearing down but it all turned out good. The hostel had clean comfortable beds so really what else can you ask for?

We decided to get an early start the next morning and went searching for breakfast around 8. This tiny little cafe run by an asian family had delicious baked goods and we each tried our first italian cappucino....

Nadia was really excited to see the Duomo Di Milano which is this giant cathedral. It was beautiful. It looks white in most pictures but up close it's a mosaic of tan and grey stone. They even let us take pictures inside which we thought was really wierd since the was a no photos sign written in about a dozen different languages.

Ha also walking up the main drag to the cathedral ( which had some very interesting shopping potential!) we got accosted by this group of guys from nigeria I think. They each had an armful of freindship bracelets which they would tie on your arm before you even knew what was going on and then demand some "Coins for papa". i kinda like mine so i kept it. I didn't end up paying anything because they spotted other pray but rachel gave him half a frank because it was all the change she had... he wasn't particularly impressed :).

After we toured the cathedral Luke and I hung out at the bottom dirnking an energy drink that i got for free at work while Bruce, Rachel and Nadia Climbed up the cathedral where they got some really spectacular photos.

Let me just mention that although i had a good time in milan it was dirty and hot and busy and reminded me more of a south american city then what i had pictured italy to be......

That afternoon we took the train to Torino. Torino is awesome. Exactly how i pictured italy to be. narrow streets. Cute fashionable older couples strolling. Gelato everywhere and people making pasta in the windows of the shops we passed. Our hostel was on the fourth floor of a piazza(plazza) . This was the view from our room on the first morning....

We wandered all over Torino and it was amazing. First day we visited the Shroud of Turin which was really interesting. They think the only possibly explanation for the way the mans imaged imprinted onto the flax was some type of nuclear energy coming from within the shroud..... I kept an open mind!
Day two we went to the Egyptian Museum of Torino which is second in the world only to Cairo's Museum. It went forever. Giant statues, hyroglifs, papyrus, mummies tombs, jewlery and glassware galore. I highly recommend it...
Also we found what i think was my favorite gelato place and i've decided my signature flavour combo is strawberry and nutella.....
We also went out for pizza on the first night which was delicious. they didn't even put tomato sauce on mine, just a ton of cheese, tomatoes and then after it came out of the oven, arugula and grated parmesean.

On Friday night we decided to go hang out by the river with some wine and that turned into going to this sweet club and dancing until three. Let's just say we definitely slept in on saturday....

Note our model pic with the 1.5 liter bottles of wine we bought for 3 euros....

olivia

Canyoning in Interlacken

Was so much fun!

We caught a 6:48 train out of baden to interlacken. Interlacken is beautiful! All day we watch parachuters and paragliders fall out of the sky. There is sailing and canoing on the lake and canyoning and i think white water rafting in the area.

We all got these awesome suits consisting of a wet suit, wet suit jacket, wet suit booties, a harness complete with bright yellow plastic bum piece, a life jacket and a carabener. Last but not least everyone got a bright yellow helmet with a name written on it. Things like wonder woman, rat, or pax. I got "shaved". don't say anything.

Anyway they drove us up to this canyon and pretty much we just follow it downstream for 5 hours. There are some points where you can just float down the river, and lots of walking but the really cool stuff was going over waterfalls on a zip line and jumping into 25 foot crevasses!
The biggest jump we did was about enough for me I think, though some people wanted it to be more challenging.

They split us up into two seprate groups to head into the canyon and each of us had two or three guides to help us along. These guys were from ireland, south africa, aus, and new zealand with a few germans thrown in. So far it is the most accents i have heard together.

One of the guide type guys was our photographer and he would climb back and forth between the two groups in the canyon taking pictures.
A picture CD at the end costed 38CHF which is food for a week so i thought i'd pass even though i really wanted to be a able to show you guys what it was like down there.

Around four oclock when we were done climbing around we hiked up to where they'd left the buses and had bread , cheese and beer for a late lunch.

They took us back to the base to get changed and return our stuff but they have this really swwet tent city going with a bar, a slackline, ping pong , foosball, ect so we hung out for a bit.

We were planning on getting a ride back to the train station but we got dropped off at one of the hostels instead. Our group was over 20 people so we kept getting seperated. Bruce , Luke and I got left at the grocery store where people had been buying dinner so we wandered all over town until we found the train station and came home. Most of the rest of the group got home a half hour after us so we must have just missed them.....

This is Bianca, Rachel and I. When Riley moves out in s eptember, we'll be living together!

Zurich!

I maybe shouldn't be as excited as I am about our Zurich excursion since technically we will be working there for the next year but it was a great success!

We got up early this morning, packed a picnic lunch and headed down to the train station to meet up with Maureen. Maureen will be the one training us starting next Monday.... She offered to help us navigate the train in today which was very awesome of her!
She ended up getting off two stops before us (on a side note we saw our first Ikea in a smallish town that sounded like Diteikon). We arrive in this massive central station and it took us a while just to reach open air, the station is pretty huge. If I remember I'll take a picture of it to show you.

Neither of us did any kind of reconaissance before embarking on our adventure so we had no map and no idea where we were... Don't worry, it was awesome!

The buildings are gorgeous. Apparently no detail is too small when it comes to contruction here. All the windows and doors are in themselves artwork.

We started walking and then finally decided it might be safest to find a map so we went into the first hotel we found, a best western, and pilfered these buisness car sized maps of downtown Zurich. Then we were set!

First we headed for the lake which we followed along until we had a really great view of the Alps in the distance.

The first bridge across the river that joins the lake in the centerish of Zurich has this massive intersection on the far side of it. We had a little trouble navigating the crosswalks at first because we wern't sure if we had right of way or not. It turns out the are crosswalks across roads that involve cars but there are trains ( probably acctually closer to trams) going everywhere. Every other corner was a four way crazy train crossing and there were no crossswalks! Some roads had flashing train pictures, if it was flashing, don't walk. Mostly though we tried to tag along behind people who sortof looked like they had some idea what was going on.

The point I was trying to make about the above mentioned intersection was that there is a circus in town! WE checked it out because we were thinking if it was cheap, we might go but we think(everything was in german) that it only ran a 6pm so we passed on it today, but maybe another time. The cheapest tickets ( nosebleed seat equivalents) were 20CHF, which isn't to bad. We did manage to grab some pictures of the menagerie though!


The park that we ended up in had the most beautiful colors of flowering bushes of which i took many pictures. There was also a lot of massive modern art strewn amongst the gardens.

We walked back towards the old town center along a slightly different path and got rained on a little but we were to stoked to be bothered.

The old town area was a series of hundreds of tiny winding streets with adorable shops lining everything. Shutters on every window and cobblestones everywhere. I acctually feel kinda bad for some of the kids I see carrying skateboards around, them having to deal with insanely uneven roads.

We went into one clothing store( I love all clothing here! With all the amazing things in the stores I find it kind of strange that a huge majority of the young women here seem to all wear skinny jeans, leather bombers with big scarves, ankle boots and a leather slouch bag. not that that isn't sweet style but still...) Anyway, this one clothing store had some beautiful clothes but we were talking 300CHF for a tank top. a nice one i'm sure but i made me uncomfortable just thinking about breaking something in there. I found this one really cool mural nearby though....

Another obvious difference i found was the cars. There are Porsches everywhere, and in this photo we see a Lexus, a BMW, a Landrover, and Mercedes just chillin.

...And then we bought icecream! I don't know if icecream is one of switzerland's claims to fame but it was amazing! just thinking about it causes embarassing amouonts of salivation...

Last but not least we picked the right train home on the first try and we were home in 16 minutes! Man o man are we lucky! Oh did i mention we took a quick trip to germany last night to get groceries? No biggie...ha!

olivia,
just bummin around switzerland!

Some things are everywhere...

I just thought this was funny. Europe even manages to class up MD's.

Also, things here which we have at home include Starbucks, Intersport, H & M, Northface, and then boring ones like BurgerKing.

By special request, here is a picture of the outside of our building. I may look a bit ugly from this angle but we love it! Guess which balcony is mine.....

On Monday we did our rounds as far as getting bank accounts, registering at the stadthaus ( city hall), and got our train passes (only 2175 CHF for the year, man).

The woman at the bank was wonderful. her english was pretty good but not perfect but she was cracking jokes anyway! I was impressed. I think she liked us because she gave us not one but two swiss chocolates, our first ones here.... turns out they are as amazing as everyone says.

after registering at the stadthaus, they gave us a free pass to the thermal baths here ( a big tourist attraction for baden apparently) , some free bus passes, a free indoor swimming pool pass, some iodine pills and a free garbage bag. You may laugh at the last two, but let me explain them. The iodine pills are a precaution since we live near a nuclear power plant ( on a side note, about 95% of switzerlands power production is clean power) and in the case of a nuclear meltdown, they sound the alarm and we take these pills. I'm really hoping it won't come to that. Speaking of nuclear power plants, we saw one as we flew into germany and it was exactly like you see in the simpsons.

The free garbage bag is nice because here, they will only pick up garbage that is in a specific garbage bag. They sell these bags 10 for 15CHF and it acts as a perfectly fairly distributed garbage tax. I thought it was kinda a good idea....

Our roomate has also been teaching us some german( we totally lucked out and Riley is fairly fluent I think) so now we can say "I don't Speak German", "Please" , "Thank you", "Sorry", "Wonderful", and last but not least "What's your star sign?" in german!

Yesterday we were out walking near the river again and we saw a swan. I think he likes our swimming spot as much as we do! We also walked down to the dam. One of many i think, I'm pretty sure hydroelectric power is fairly common here.....

Also, I thought i'd post my mailing address in case anyone wants to mail me a care package (wink wink!) also my room is pretty barren so if anyone has sweet pictures their getting rid of....

 Martinsbergstrasse 34
5400 Baden
Switzerland

xo olivia

Yesterday we decided to pass up a bike trip and explore baden instead. It was amazing! We started by climbing up the central park area behind our house complete with castle ruins. Apparently during the time of waring city states zurich up and destroyed baden.

The view from up there was gorgeous. During our wanderings we walked accross a larger bridge which we though took us closer to the other interns' apartments but turned out to be a completely different town.

This other town did have a chinese restaurant( china restaurant in fact) but definitely no ginger beef. They had a menu up and apparently garlic prawns were 32 CHF. just for comparison the canadian dollar is worth slightly less than the swiss franc so those had better be helagood shrimp.... Acctually all the restaurants are pretty ridiculous expensive and the food is fairly steep to. I've so far stuck to onions, couscous and grapefruit though so it's not bad.

The old town area of Baden is adorable. tons of little shops, cobblestone streets and shuttered windows. It's hard to beleive people acctually live here! very surreal.

When you google pictures of baden you often come accross an old covered bridge which we found on our travels. I didn't take a picture of the inside but the woodwork was really very cool.

Last but not least we went down to the river again yesterday and ended up having a really great nap! ha but before we all fell asleep Riley took a picture of Rachel, Maureen and I sitting on some rocks in the river....

Day One

SO I am here.
The flight was long and since we were flying into the night we only saw about 3 hours of darkness. very cool. They even fed us dinner and breakfast. Lufthansa is definitely the way to go compared to our airlines. before the meals they
come around and hand out warm hand towels to wipe your hands and face.


When we arrived in Frankfurt, we had two hours until our next flight but we had to go to a completely different gate. I don't know why but we had to go through security a second time in order to get to were we needed to go. This surprised us so we both had water bottles that we'd gotten after the last bout of security. Between that and the security people not liking the sketch pab that Rachel brought to use with her computer, we held up the line for a little while....

But we made it to our next flight with lots of time to spare. It turns out it only takes about 30 mins to fly from Frankfurt to Zurich which was pleasant. Rachel and I guzzled a cup of coffee with the hopes that it would help us last through the day.

Riley our new roommate was waiting for us with a sign right at the airport. It was great of him to donate pretty much his entire saturday to show us the ropes.

Riley walked us through buying train tickets and then we had our first swiss train experience. it definitely lives up to expectations and is complete with dining cars and water closets.

Ok so now piece de resistance. Th apartment. We're in this really quiet neighbourhood right dowtown, close to groceries and train as well as the beer gardens. All thebuildings here are pretty much the size of small apartment complexes but with tiled and gabeled rooves.

Just for everyone who hadn't heard, our apartement is two bedrooms and a sitting room which is used as a bedroom(all three have there own doors), a ong skinny kitchen and a long skinny bathroom( with bathtub). Riley had closed the doors to our rooms and Rachel and i flipped a coin for them. Rachel got the bigger room with the gorgeous big shuttered window and the doubleish sized bed and i got the smaller room with the bunkbed and the balcony. The balcony looks onto a park behind our building the has a very rudimentary basketball court, a small soccer/handball type field and a very nice ping-pong table.

After we did a once over of our rooms and unpacked, we brought our empty luggage to our storage area up in the attic of the builing. it smells like a sauna up there because it's all made out of cedar....

Maureen, who is currently working at ETH Zurich and who will be training us came by to drop off a set of our keys. We all decided to go search for some lunch and then continued bathing suit clad downto the river. turns out it was cold but very beautiful. I'll take some pictures of that next time....

We did some grocery shopping, just the basics . then headed back to the apartement where Riley came up with ideas to keep us awake until 9 pm here so that we arn't to jetlagged tomorrow.
It is now 9:30 which means we've been up for almost 30 hours.... so i'm going to go to bed, but I will keep you posted!
olivia