Weihnachtspyramide

This is our new Christmas pyramid that we bought when we were in Bern. The candles in it, when lit, make the windmill at the top (and therefore the rest of it) spin around. A Christmas pyramid is traditional in Germany/Switzerland/Austria and it's all hand carved out of wood. They come with limitless different designs like deer/nature landscapes, religious scenes, and Christmas-y scenes with snowmen and trees. They were all gorgeous and we took a really long time to decide which one to get but when we saw this one we just knew:



It has little skiers on it!



And is complete with a little woodpile:



I personally love the tree in the middle - it's so neat how the wood is all shaved into little curves and manages to look like a pine tree.

For those of you who can only think of cousin Eddie in National Lampoon's Christmas vacation when looking at the Christmas pyramid ... that's all I can think about too. Thankfully I have no cousin Eddie who can drop in unexpectedly and break mine! These things are not cheap - as is evidenced by the tiny size of ours. If you're so inclined, you can spend up to $1500 on one of these. Some day when we're rich maybe we'll buy a bigger one to compliment this one.

Bern Wanderings 2

A little scenic Bern shot. It's a really cute town.



And here is the Bern bear park:



The park is along the bank of the Aare river, which borders Bern on three sides. There are also "bear pits" but those were closed in 2009 when they opened the park you see here. There are currently 4 bears in residence here. Bears have been kept here in Bern since 1441 as a symbol of the city. They are not only what Bern is named after, but they are also on the Bern flag and coat of arms.

Ever since I went on safari in Africa and then watched the movie "The Cove", I have vowed to never support or set foot in a zoo or sea world-type park again. But the bear park in Bern is hard to avoid since you can see it from far away and you have to walk by it when you wander around Bern. It's completely free so at least I didn't give any money to support the captivity of the bears. I will get off my pedestal now but I dare any of you to watch "The Cove" and not walk away with the same feeling. It did make me sad but the bears were cute and so Martin took some pics of them:







I think they look pretty bored and like they'd rather be wandering free in the mountains instead of stuck in a cage in Bern. But, that's just my opinion.

Some fall colors along the Aare:



Looking back at the old town of Bern from the bear park:



Next we climbed to the top of the church you see in the left of the above picture. Here are some shots of the details of the outside of the church, before we went inside:



350 stairs later, the view:



Looking over the old town of Bern:



And then we found some sunshine on our way back to the train station to go back to Zurich:



And that was our day in Bern.

Bern Wanderings 1

As I'm sure you all know, Bern is the capitol of Switzerland, though it's population is only 130,000. So it has a nice small town feeling. The old town area is very nice - long streets filled with stores with statues in random places in the middle of the street or on the buildings.

We had a cold and rainy day but still took plenty of pictures. Here are some pictures of the statues in the middle of the streets:



This one is a bear:



And some statues sticking out from the sides of buildings:





There are also some big clocks in Bern:





We visited Albert Einstein's apartment (look there he is in the window!):



Einstein's street:



He lived in Bern when he developed his theory of special relativity. Neat.

Even though it was cloudy out, you could see the mountains in the distance:





To be continued in part 2.

Chocolate Hedgehogs

We saw these at a pastry shop in Bern today. An 'Igel' is a hedgehog. Very cute. I believe they were filled with a hazelnut filling of some sort. We did not buy one because we figured it was slightly too large to be called a mid-morning snack. We bought some really delicious little donut-hole type pastries for our snack instead.

Just another day in Zürich ...

Can you even tell these two pictures were taken on different days? I can't. One is Saturday morning, and one is this morning (Monday). Awesome, isn't it? I would have taken one on Sunday morning too but I was too depressed to get out of bed and do it.





And this is Onyx's spot, on the futon in the living room on the ratty old blanket we would have thrown out but we saved for him:



So, it's just another dark-as-night cold and cloudy morning in Zürich! And, side note, it doesn't start getting light out until 7:30am here already ... I think it will be dark until 9am in the middle of winter! My early morning runs will be forced to become mid-morning runs.

The Trift Glacier

Since I titled this blog "The Travels of Garmisch", I figured I'd better take Garmisch on at least one of our travels this year! We usually don't have room for him in our backpacks (and we have to be able to carry everything on our backs on our hikes) but this time he fit! Well, I made him fit. And he had a great time, in my opinion.

Here he is hanging out at the bottom of the Trift Glacier hike. We were waiting for the cable car to bring us to the start of the hike.



Martin was also waiting for the cable car. We had to wait an hour before we could get onto the cable car, which only takes 8 people up at a time. I hate to think what the crowds are like during the peak summer months! You must have to wait about 3 hours before you can get up ... and that's only to the start of the hike.



The hike itself was nothing too serious, from the cable car station to the glacier it only took us a little over an hour. We chose to walk all the way back down to the parking lot afterwards to avoid waiting for the cable car again. So the way down took us about 3 hours but it was worth it. The bottom part was gorgeous - we walked through forests and fields and all the trees were changing and there were lots of neat clouds in the sky.

Anyway, here's the glacier:



It looks impressive in that picture but it used to fill this entire basin (the lake used to be all glacier as well) back before it started melting:





Sorry the pictures of the glacier look black and white. The sun was directly behind the glacier and we don't know how to handle that with our camera so our pictures are all washed out. But you get the idea.

You can view the glacier really well from the Trift Bridge, which is Europe's longest suspension bridge at 170 meters. We walked across it. It swayed a lot in the wind and was pretty shaky but we survived.







And some views from our hike back down to the bottom.

We saw some more glaciers:



And some mountains with neat clouds around them. And fall colors, though most of the trees that high up are pine trees:



And a lot of pretty scenery. I think this hike was the prettiest hike we've done all year:

Meiringen

Meiringen is a bustling little town about 2 hours away from Zürich by train. It is nestled in the Alps and surrounded by mountain peaks. It is the town where the character of Sherlock Holmes died in a waterfall (Reichenbach Falls) and then was brought back to life 3 years later by his author due to popular demand. This fact alone lures a lot of tourists to Meiringen, where you can see the falls and tour a Sherlock Holmes museum. There is even a statue of him in the center of town.

Meiringen is surrounded by hiking trails and ski trails and it is where we stayed in order to hike to the Trift Glacier, which I'll write about in my next post. You can also tour gorges formed in the limestone by the Rosenlaui and Aare rivers. They are apparently quite impressive. Martin and I have to get back to Meiringen to see Reichenbach Falls and the limestone gorges, and of course to do some more hiking or possibly some skiing over the winter.

And it's a cute little town too:



I only took these two pictures but you get the idea. I wanted to take more but did not have my camera when we wandered around town, of course.



In the evenings this huge bank of fog rolls in through a break in the mountains on one side of Meiringen. You can literally look up there while walking down the street and see this river of fog flowing into the valley. It was really neat and it flows pretty quickly. But sorry, I didn't get a picture of it so you'll have to go see it for yourself. The train ride in/out of Meiringen goes through this river of fog and that's actually where our train got stuck on our way out of town. It was pretty spooky. I can't imagine living someplace that gets socked in by fog every evening in the fall and winter.

Heisse Marroni

Around October 1st all of the ice cream carts disappear and carts with hot chestnuts (heisse marroni) appear. They cook the chestnuts in the big pots you see in the picture below and the smell of the roasting chestnuts fills the surrounding area. Apparently these carts hang around all winter long. I've never even thought about eating a chestnut before, since they're not so prevalent in the U.S. but I might have to try them here since it's such a big deal.



I would like to note that there is a Pretzel King about 10 feet to the left of this photo. I pass by here when I go to class and I always end up with a fresh hot pretzel in my hands. The Pretzel King also just appeared a few weeks ago ... so I'm not sure he'll be there for long.

Grosser Mythen

This is Grosser Mythen. It is 1900 meters tall. We started our hike up it at 600 meters and it took us 3.5 hours to walk straight up to the top. No flat areas on this hike!



Myself, Christian, and Nikko about a half hour into the hike. We had gorgeous views throughout this entire hike. It was worth all the pain.



Christian and Nikko are both PhD students in Martin's lab at the ETH. Christian is just about done and is going to move to Boston (where his girlfriend lives) hopefully by January. So we'll have more friends in Boston! Nikko likes to do crazy hikes. But there don't seem to be many hikes in Switzerland that aren't crazy.

On our way up we found a kitten having a morning nap on some paper bags. We actually saw a lot of cats on this hike, just hanging out in the fields around the farms. I'm sure there are lots of mice for them.



I post this picture not just because it's funny that Christian is so neatly rolling up his sleeves, but because the view behind him is nice.



Taking a break. The last 500 meters of elevation gain of the hike were straight up. It was like walking an hour straight up stairs (after walking 2+ hours up steep hills beforehand). I took a lot of breaks.



We finally made it to the top! Just in time too because I couldn't have made it much further.



There was a swell restaurant at the top where we got ourselves some beer and food.





From the top of Grosser Mythen you have 360-degree views of the surrounding countryside and mountains. You could see Zürich from there too! It was a little hazy though so the picture of Zurich didn't come out so well. It was close though because we were only an hour away by car. But here are some mountains:





You might be wondering where the huge crowds come from on such a difficult hike. Well, first off, we were the only people who started at the bottom and walked all the way up! Nikko said we had to do that in order to avoid crowds like the one you see in some of the pictures above. Most people parked in the parking lot half way up and then took the cable car some more of the way up. But, secondly, everybody had to hike the last 500 meters of straight-up rock to get to the restaurant. These people are Swiss. And they're serious hikers. Even a 90-year-old arthritic Swiss man could beat me up any mountain in Switzerland.

And then the boys had to have some coffee schnapps. Nikko said if you weren't able to see the spoon in your coffee schnapps then it had to be sent back because there wasn't enough schnapps in it. You could see straight through Nikko's but Martin kept his a little more opaque:



The boys, enjoying their coffee schnapps and the views:



Nikko:



A sign at the start of the steep top of the hike, telling of all the dangers on the hike. There were tons of little kids on this hike and every one of them was on a leash. I could've used one of those so Martin could have just pulled me up behind him.



One last view from our descent: