En Suisse!

This weekend, I made my first venture out of the EU and into Switzerland! I didn't get my passport stamped (which I thought was weird) but I have enough Swiss chocolate to prove I actually went there (but no promises on making it last). Anthony (who came to visit the Abbey last week too!) and I got a 7:30am train (ouch) and spent the day traveling the French/Swiss countryside until we arrived in Lucerne, Switzerland.

In all honesty, Lucerne is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, and definitely one of the most random. I was first surprised by how much German was spoken there -- luckily, Anthony managed to get us around without too much trouble. The accent of Swiss German is different than "real" German though, and they also throw French words into their vocabulary: they say "merci" for thank you and "pardon" for excuse me, which is really odd.

The first day we were there, we just wandered the city -- we went up to the "old town" section of Lucerne across its famed "Covered Bridge" and to an old wall that was used as protection for the city against invaders. Behind the wall was a huge park that had bison (yes, like buffalo) for no apparent reason. We kept walking into a residential neighborhood and found llamas (yes, really) in what looked like someone's backyard. It was bizarre but I loved it.

Bison!

Yep, those are llamas.

A view of the wall from down below.

For dinner, we realized just how expensive food was in Switzerland, so we went to a little Thai takeout place with the hopes of saving some money. While we were there, a girl came in to pick up an order, walked over to us, and asked if we liked chocolate. Naturally, we said yes, and she pulled out a Lindt chocolate bar and gave us this chocolate and said "I just wanted to make someone happy today." She most definitely did :)

The next day, we tried to find a little bakery to get breakfast at and wound up in the middle of an open air market, where we ended up getting some kind of traditional Swiss pastries -- I'm not entirely sure what they were, but they were delicious.

After that, we headed to the dying lion monument, which was carved into the side of a mountain to commemorate the 500 Swiss soldiers that died during the French Revolution and it was amazing.

Right next to the carving is a glacier garden museum which was basically a mix of everything you could possibly imagine in a museum: it had glacial formations and a museum with about 3 million scale models of Lucerne over time. On top of the museum was an old Swiss house that we toured, and after that we went through a hall of mirrors with a middle eastern theme (three times), and then we climbed a watchtower to see over the whole city of Lucerne, which was an amazing view.

The hall of mirrors!

These creepy little gnomes were all over. Why? I have no idea.

After that, we kept wandering to the city churches which are very different from French churches: French churches have a lot of ornate carvings and decorations, while Swiss churches are relatively bare but have amazing altar pieces.

We also went to the history museum, which is called Depot and is literally a storage locker-type place of historical artifacts. It had nothing written on the "exhibits" but we got barcode scanners when we walked in, and we scanned barcodes to have the information about certain objects pop up on our devices.

Finally, for dinner that night we tried to find a cheap fondue place and completely failed -- literally nothing in Switzerland (aside from museums) is cheap. However, we had some delicious tomato fondue for our last night in Switzerland.

After a 10 hour train ride the next day (which was just the tiniest bit hectic since this region of France is just getting back from their ski vacations), I was finally back in Pontlevoy -- just in time to write this blog get ready for finals.

I can't wait for Paris Week -- it's coming up fast!