Jul 2007

Rome was a blast! I got to see so much stuff. We got there around 10:30AM Saturday and dropped our bags off at the hostel. By the time we got to the hostel and got everything taken care of it was about 11:30. We headed off to Palatine hill which is where the old roman forum is and where Romulus and remus were said to have been raised and founded rome. There were lots of old ruins dating back several thousand years. It was very impressive and possibly one of my favorite places to visit. It was truly amazing what they could build without engines or electricity! After that we trucked off to the Coliseum! It was just down the street from palatine hill. Again it was truly amazing what they could build 2000 years ago! After that we grabbed some panninis from a street vendor and walked to the circus maximus where they used to have chariot races. Kind of weird because this was just a park now with people running and sunbathing, still a few ruins left though. After that we trucked off to one of the top 5 gelato places (we got to visit all 5 at least once over the 2.5 day trip). From there we took a tram to the Pantheon which was stupendous!! The dome in the top was incredible! After the Pantheon we got some more gelato and walked through the shopping district with all those fancy stores (I don’t know what ones were there I didn’t pay attention) and to the Spanish steps, why they are called the Spanish steps I don’t know really… I guess they were built in the Spanish style or something. After that we walked up to the Bourghese Art Gallery where we bought tickets to see it on Sunday (you have to buy tickets 24 hours in advance). After that we went back to the hostel to clean up a little bit. After cleaning up we went to a cool pizza place and got some tasty pizza. After pizza we went to the trevi fountain and hung around that area for awhile (there are tons of bars, and gelato places there) after awhile though we decided to walk to Saint Peters Basilica (about 2 miles away but you could see it from the fountain) We walked all the way there and saw some cool things along the way, like a neat street festival and the Roman TV awards… We were then told (incorrectly) that the Metro was closed by the Police so we ran to find a bus and got on the first one we saw, not really knowing where it went, it went to the train station and from there we caught the metro to our hostel… go figure.
The next morning was a little more relaxed than the other days had been. We went and saw the Capitoline museum (lots of really cool sculptures). After that we went to the Piazza Navano which is a famous square in Rome and where 2 of the top 5 gelato places are located. So we had some gelato and lunch and then headed off to the Bourghese museum and the park that it is in. We walked around the park for a long time and dipped our feet in a huge refreshing fountain. Then we went to the museum. It was incredible, there were so many paintings and sculptures in this little museum, it was very impressive!! After that it was dinner time and the guide book recommended an Indian restaurant only a few metro stops away so we did that, the food was amazing!! Some of the best I have had and cheap too!! (A huge plate of curry, rice, naan, beer and 2 samosas was 10 bucks!) Top notch! After that we went back to Trevi fountain and got more gelato and then headed back for the night.
Monday there was a little miscommunication in wake up times got a little confused (I was in charge of making sure everybody was awake at 7 but I thought it was 7:30…) Needless to say we got to the Vatican a little late… And paid the price. We waited nearly 2.5 hours in line!!! But the wait was worth it! The Vatican Museum was amazing!! Think of all the paintings that could be bought by one of the richest groups in the world (the catholic church) over a span of roughly 2000 years! It was amazing! At the end of the journey was the Sistine chapel. It was truly something else! We spent almost 1.5 hours in the room looking at the paintings. We had a great book that explained each one in detail. After the Sistine chapel it was off to Saint Peter’s! I had seen it on TV plenty of times but it is just soooo huge and soooo amazing!!! There aren’t even words to describe it. We went up into the dome and then on top of the dome and had the most amazing view of the city!! After that we went and grabbed our bags and headed to the train station. It was really cool, in our couchette were two teenage aussi girls and their dad and a guy from Wisconsin and then us so we all spoke English and had a blast on the way back!!

We left for Switzerland around 5 Thursday night. We got to Interlaken around 10 on Thursday night, we had this great hostel which is the oldest private hostel in Switzerland called Balmers. We had canyoning planned for Friday at 8AM so we just went to bed but the other people in our room had other plans for us and came back at 2 and kept us up FOREVER Needless to say we woke up tired and cranky Friday morning but SUUUUPER excited for canyoning. Canyoning was CRAZY fun. You take about an hour bus ride up to the start where it is a 20 minute hike to the canyon. They go over all the guidelines with you which pretty much scares the crap out of you, they pretty much say do exactly as I tell you on each jump, and one little mistake could kill you. The first jump was the biggest, you take a 65 foot drop off a waterfall!! After that the fun started because after you jumped the largest jump of the day everything else seemed easy enough. One of the hardest of the day was a 5 foot jump to a slide where you slid down. Another was a slide called the corkscrew which literally flips you over and if you don’t put your arms just right it breaks your nose (I avoided the broken nose and took a nasty bruise on my arm). After awhile you started to have fun with it doing some twists and turns on the way down (being 6’3” prevented me from doing some of the flips like the other people) about ½ way down we got to do a 183 foot rappel (rope assisted descent) over a waterfall. This was truly amazing because you were in freefall for about 100 feet until they started to brake you from the top. We spent a little over 4 hours going down the canyon and it was truly amazing. At the end they gave us some beer, bread and cheese, just what the doctor ordered! After the drive back we walked back to the hostel with a guy from UNC and U of M (GO BLUE!) changed and went down to the main square in the town (after eating a couple of tasty kebabs of course). The weekend we were there, there was the Nissan Outdoor games which consisted of every awesome sport that I dream of doing! When we got to the main square they had a bouldering (rock climbing short technical courses without ropes) contest and warm up runs for the mountain bike jumping competition. This was really impressive because these guys weren’t just doing a little bar-spin, they were doing backflips, 360’s on full blown mountain bikes (not that little trick bike you had when you were 10). I pretty much stood in amazement until my friends pried me away so we could see the airshow. On the schedule it showed there was an airshow but we had no idea what to expect. Well it starts out with two base jumpers jumping out of a helicopter and starting LITTLE ROCKETS ON THEIR FEET!!! They shot across the sky like little bullets doing little tricks!! This was incredible! There were also paragliders doing flips and spins as well. It was crazy. After that we went back to the hostel to watch a rugby game… or so we thought, it ended up being Saturday night not Friday… but it took us an hour to figure that out. So we went into the lounge of our hostel. Now this be noted, apparently our hostel was the place in town, not just for tourists either, locals even came there to party, there was a bar down in the basement and a lounge on the ground floor. We all grabbed a few beers down at the bar then came up to the lounge where somebody was rockin out on the piano and we all sang along until they kicked us out at 11 and we went off to bed because canyoning kind of killed us. The next morning we “slept in” until about 8 and literally went off to the races. We decided to watch the whitewater kayaking in the morning and this was a great decision. We got right up next to the kayakers as they paddled between the rocks and over a nice “little” waterfall(in comparison to canyoning it was small). After we had seen enough around noon we decided to catch our shuttle bus back into town, which was a 6 mile drive away. Well little did we know that the last bus left at 11:30 and no more were coming until 1:30 and at this point we were starving and wanted some tasty food. So somebody told us there was a train station just a little ways (it ended up being about 2.5 km) down the road. So we hiked to the train station and caught the next train back. All in all we got back about 30 minutes faster than if we would have taken the bus… Lunch was tasty again (more kebabs) and we went and sat next to the lake and took a little nap. After our naps we went to go watch some more mountain bike jumping before the rugby game. We hung out and watched mountain biking for awhile and then headed back to the hostel bar to check out the rugby game. They created a new happy hour for the rugby game so of course we had to indulge, for about 1 US you could have a pint! Tasty! The game was great because it was the Aussies vs the kiwis (Australians vs new Zealanders) and the bar was 50/50 split between the two and it was just one big party. After dinner we were in the mood for some kebabs so off we went and then after kebabs we went back to the main square for the video competition of the outdoor games, they were amazing! After that there was a little party with lots of drunk outdoor people so I had a blast! Since there is a countrywide noise curfew we had to shut down at 12 and we asked one of the trashed locals (note at this point I was truly 100% sober) where the party was going to? His response “ BALMERS, the party is at BALMERS MATE” So we went back to Balmers and we stayed in the bar for a bit, then piano for a bit then off to bed by 1. We got up the next morning at a glorious 7:30 am to catch a train up into the swiss alps to do some hiking. It took one transfer to get all the way to where we were going but the view was spectacular!! We really enjoyed the hiking and atmosphere in our little swiss town. After a few hours of climbing up the mountain we headed back down to Interlaken for our departure from that amazing city. The city must have been just as sad to see us go as we were to see it go because it started to pour just after our departure from the station. The train back was uneventful and we got our last kebab of the trip in Strasbourg.
It is necessary to add a few foodie points about Interlaken: 1. Yes I had lots of Kebabs but this is because they were the best kebabs I have had in all of Europe. 2. The water in interlaken was to die for! They had ‘water fountains’ that were what we could just a fountain and they were all over and this was straight from the mountain springs and 100% safe to drink!