Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Week 4 (September 19 to 25)

All the pictures should now be up. I don't know what was happening before.

This week wasn't that exciting -- everybody was away so we spent most of our time watching Scrubs (we have seasons 2, 3, and 4!!) and reading. We received a lot of mail this week (I didn't know anybody knew we were here!). All from the different Swiss offices wanting money for health insurance, fire insurance, just because they want money, and so on. So many forms and so much stuff to take care of. We got our living permits which you need to get almost anything (phone, tv, etc). I guess its like getting the equivalent of an SSN back home. Aaaanyway....

Friday night we went to Jan's wedding reception in the cutest little spot in Switzerland. I had no idea the cutest spot was so close to Lausanne. It was in Grandvaux in an old winery overlooking the lake and a vineyard. We don't have pictures though.

Then on Saturday we went to Zermatt to do a little hiking. We were supposed to go from Lausanne to Visp and then Visp to Zermatt but we weren't paying attention so we ended up taking the train past Visp to the end of the line. Just as we were musing about how nice it was that we were the only ones in the train car, some maintenance guy came on board and was like "Um... this is Brig..." and we told him "oh, its fine, we're going to Zermatt." Idiots that we are, we had to change trains and had like 5 minutes to make it. We would have just stayed there and wondered when we were going to get to Zermatt if he hadn't said anything. Here's the map of the area: you can see how we screwed up:


Anyway, we caught the train which was a cutesy wootsy Disney-style train (red on the outside). Here are some pictures from the ride:



Once there we took a "metro" to the middle of one of the mountains and hiked from there. Here's a picture of the "metro stop"


The hike was really pretty. We had a clear view of the Matterhorn and the day was beautiful. Perfect hiking weather. Here's Dave looking for the Matterhorn (shh! its behind him!):


And the Matterhorn from the far side of a little lake.


And I'm a birdie:

And Dave's a goon:


A nice view on our way back:

Then on Sunday we took it easy (we jogged and went for a couple of walks -- hah, easy). On our walk we stumbled into a community garden (you can rent plots for the summer or something). Here are a few snaps:

What are these giant gourds?? They are not less than four FEET long. They're mutants.


And we ate some raspberries...shhh.


And the scarecrow giving us a wave:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home