Amsterdam

Meh.

Interlaken

Interlaken is an amazing place. If you like the outdoors and enjoy regions like the Sierra Nevadas or the Colorado Rockies, add this to your list. There is incredible hiking and lots of other conventional mountain activities, but the area is also the extreme sports capital of Europe. At any given moment during daylight, you can look up and spot at least three parachutes falling above you. At one point while I was walking through Lauterbrunnen Valley, I heard a chute open, and someone had base jumped from a point right above me (probably the "Nose"). Interlaken is home base for the local rafting, canyoning, paragliding, hang-gliding, and skydiving companies, and they do a great job of offering some alternative ways to take on their Swiss Alps.

After I arrived from Zurich, I took a local train to Lauterbrunnen and then did a 4-5 mile hike up the valley rim to Murren, a town on the cliffs far above the valley floor. This was two hours of continuous climbing, and returning took just as long because of the trail's steepness, but it offered some beautiful views of the region's snowcaps and glaciers.

On day two, I finally decided (an hour before the group departed) to go canyoning. Canyoning is an activity in which guides direct you down a canyon featuring a white-water river of snow melt and glacier melt. Through jumping, hiking, rappelling, and riding natural waterslides, you make your way down the canyon. Long story short, it's a blast. Now water has a specific heat capacity of 4.187kJ/kg-K, meaning it takes a lot of energy to heat water, so between melting up in the high-elevation fields of snow and ice and meeting us in the canyon, the water maintains about the same temperature--it's just above freezing. ("That'll wake you up in the morning, boys!") They give you wetsuits, but the first time your head goes under, there is a good chance you'll get an ice cream headache. That means when you jump into a pool from a rock 30 feet above, you get quite a shocking splash, but it's a really exhilarating experience. If you go to Interlaken and you're in the 18-35 demographic, do not miss out on canyoning!

On my last day in Interlaken, I wanted to take it easy and rest up a bit to beat a cold I'd been fighting, so I just went back to Lauterbrunnen and walked the valley floor a bit. Down there, I went to see the Trümelbach falls, an amazing set of waterfalls that are fed by glacier melt and snow melt and fall through the inside of the mountain. The pictures don't really do this place justice, but it was really cool to see ice cold water roaring through caves at 20,000L/second (nerds--I'd guess turbulent flow but don't have the Reynolds number).

After leaving Interlaken (photos here), we went to Basel, Switzerland to catch our overnight train to Amsterdam, Nathan's last stop before heading home.

- R

Zurich

From Munich, we took a Sunday morning train to Zurich (Zürich) and dropped our bags and Dan and Leslie's apartment (Dan is working in Google's Zurich office for a few months before Leslie starts her job). I did a couple loads of laundry and then spent a couple hours walking around the city.

Zurich struck me as much smaller than its fame would indicate. That was nice, however, as it allowed me to see a great deal of the city in a short amount of time. It was a perfect Sunday afternoon, and the locals were taking full advantage and relaxing along the shore of Lake Zürich.

I liked Zurich--it has a very nice, clean, classy vibe going on. And the Swiss are a bit quirky relative to other Europeans--for example, they will not break the law, even if following it is entirely impractical. If you have a red "Walk" sign with no cars in sight in any other country in Europe, that is generally an effective sign to cross the street, even if a cop is standing right there (I have observed this directly). In Zurich, however, they will wait for the green signal, and if you cross without it, locals will look at you funny. They also value time above pretty much everything. Punctuality is key, trains must not be late, you get to meetings early, etc. Dan remarked that he always wears his watch because when he wasn't wearing it at work, people would look at him during conversations like he was giving them the finger. In NYC, when people are stopped at a crosswalk, they look at their iPhones. When the Swiss have a pause like that, they all swing their elbows and look at their watches. But hey, no wonder they make such great watches.

I should note, however, that Zurich is probably the most expensive city I have ever been to. The city was founded by the Romans as a point of tax collection on a major trade route, and it's still bearing the torch of extracting money from passers-by today. I ordered a simple dinner entree that probably would have been $12-18 in the US, and it was about $32 USD in Zurich. A simple coffee is at Starbucks in Zurich will run you about $5-7 USD, and Nathan's lunch of chicken nuggets and a milkshake was over $13 USD. So if you decide to go for an extended stay in Zurich, bring wads o' cash.

Overall, we had a nice, relaxing day walking through the town and hanging out at Dan and Leslie's place. We had a nice dinner with some of Dan's coworkers from Google, one of whom was Swedish and created an atmosphere that could only be compared to sitting with Wikipedia . . . in every language. Intricate points of Russian history, German films, Swedish trivia, etc.--this guy was a sponge. I bet he even codes pretty well, too.

The next morning, I left for Interlaken on a 9 am train so that I could take advantage of a full day there. You can view my Zurich photos here. Thanks for reading!

- R