On Top of the World

If you get anything from this post it will probably be this: The Swiss Alps are beautiful and Switzerland was one of the highlights of our trip! Spencer asked me about 17 times if we could move to Switzerland while we were there. He has also declared it the most beautiful place on Earth (but no big deal).  The real bummer about our visit to Switzerland was that we only had 2 days there.  It was the hardest part of our trip to plan (how do you narrow down a whole country to one place?), so it ended up getting the least amount of our time because we sort of gave up on planning it (lame, I know).  Our biggest regret is that we didn’t extend our time there and cut out a few days in Italy (Naples, maybe??). 

Riding trains is pretty fun!

Thursday we caught a train from Germany to Grindelwald. The journey took about 7 hours, so it ate up most of our day. It was fun to watch out the windows as we rose higher into the Alps, and to see all the little villages with their cottages and churches.  The worst part of the day was dragging our luggage up the icy hill, in the dark, to the hotel we couldn’t find.  Plus there were little rocks that kept getting caught in the wheels so the luggage wouldn’t roll.  I was a really happy camper for those 35 minutes ;).  That night we were supposed to be sleeping in a 16-man hostel room with bunk beds, but we got upgraded to a 2-man.  Still with bunk beds but certainly better.

 (Top left: A picture from inside the gondola, Top right: Giving you an idea of the poor visibility)

Friday morning we got up bright and early, walked into town, rented our ski and snowboard gear, and headed up to the ski resort.  We spent the whole day on the mountain, and survived ski day with no broken bones or concussions, but some really sore muscles.  We were hoping we'd get an awesome view of the Alps from the top of the ski lifts, but the clouds covered everything up. In fact, we spent most the day skiing through the clouds causing very low visibility, lots of snowflakes in our eyes, and difficulty perceiving what was snow ahead of us and what was sky.  We spent the day doing the "easy" runs because we didn't feel safe going too fast with our severely limited visibility. Doing the easy paths was fine with me though. The plus side of the bad weather was nobody else seemed as crazy or determined as us, so we had almost the entire mountain to ourselves with all the fresh, fluffy powder that fell throughout the day. 

Rosti for dinner - A traditional Swiss dish.  And yes, we did eat lots of Swiss chocolate here too ;)

That night we caught a train to one of the other mountain towns near Interlaken called Lauterbrunnen.  We had loaded the walking instructions to our hotel from Google Maps when we had Wi-Fi, and found the hotel was about a 30 minute walk from the train station.  This time we decided to catch a bus to our hotel rather than walk, but we had about an hour to kill until the next bus came.  So, we took our time getting dinner, then just sat at the bus stop.  While we were doing this, Spencer was fiddling with the GPS we’d brought.  He got it working just as we finally got on the bus.  As the bus was driving up the road, the GPS told us we were passing out hotel!  We looked out the window, and sure enough there was the Hotel Staubbach.  We pushed the button to get off, and hopped off at the next stop.  Turns out our hotel was actually about a 5 minute walk from town, so we sat in the cold for nothing.  Stupid Google Maps.  At this hotel, we got a budget room and were literally sleeping in the attic.  The funny thing is it was one of the nicest places we stayed!

Lauterbrunnen valley

Saturday, our hotel receptionist suggested we go hiking for the day. So, we rented hiking boots and took a ski lift up to the hiking trail.  Lauterbrunnen sits in a U-shaped valley between two sets of steep mountain cliffs.  The name Lauterbrunnen means “many springs” because of all the waterfalls that fall from the tops of the mountains into the valley.  To give you an idea of the place, JRR Tolkien created Rivendell based on Lauterbrunnen, so yeah it was pretty beautiful ;).  Sorry for the picture overload!

A little mountain train

Spencer drinking some crisp mountain water

One of the cabins in Gimmelwald

The Hotel Staubbach in Lauterbrunnen

The hike was only supposed to take a couple hours if you walked at a good pace, but we took our time taking pictures, soaking up the sun, and sitting on benches in awe of the mountains around us.  The final portion of our hike took us through a little Swiss village called Gimmelwald where the locals raise goats, the cows have bells around the necks, everyone makes their own cheese, and no cars are allowed in the village, even for the villagers! That day may be my favorite day we spent in Europe.  

 Top left: The Lauterbrunnen church was right outside our hotel, Top right: Staubbach falls

 I loved these Christmas lights in the church yard

Spencer took this picture in Interlaken while we were waiting for our train to Venice

Leaving on a Jet Plane

We visited the Warner Brothers Studios on a Monday.  On Tuesday, we finished packing up and cleaning our flat, travelled to the Stansted Airport, and caught a plane to Stuttgart, Germany. Overall, our journey to Germany was flawless.  We got to the airport with plenty of time, made it safely on the plane, and found our hotel without any trouble.  It took us 5 months, but we are finally professional travellers ;). 

 (A beautiful cathedral near our hotel)

The whole purpose of our going to Germany was to visit the German Christmas markets, which had been recommended to us many times.  So on Wednesday, we spent almost the entire day visiting two Christmas markets. The first one was a smaller market outside of Stuttgart in a town called Ludwigsburg. While we were there we had a bratwurst (we were in Germany after all) and a steamed bun with vanilla cream and cinnamon over it. The bun looked delicious but tasted mediocre. After the first market we went back to our hotel to put on some more layers, it was a lot colder there than London was. We both ended up with about 5-7 layers plus hats and gloves, but at least we were warmer!

The Stuttgart market was much cooler than the first one. It had a lot more stands with more variety. We spent several hours walking around looking at the 100s of booths. One of the coolest parts was the elaborate Christmas decorations on top of their booths and all the smells of Christmas almonds roasting. The one downer was that these markets were very similar to the two Christmas markets in London (which were based on these German markets), so it wasn't AS cool as it would have been if we'd never seen those before. Overall, we still had a good time and now we can say we've been to Germany.

A model city with train tracks around it

Hand carved and painted toys were a specialty item

We had to get our German pretzel at the end of the night! One of our favorite parts of visiting Europe at Christmas time was seeing all the nativities.  

Harry's Wonderful World

Well, we have officially been back in Utah for 2 weeks now!  We definitely miss London, but we're also happy to be back. I guess that's probably how missionaries feel.  You love the place you lived and the culture there, but it also feels good to be home. I tell people it feels like London was just a long vacation and coming home is back to normal.  Spencer has started work, I've started job searching and started my last semester of school, we're living with Spencer's parents until I find a job, we bought a new car, and got new cell phones.  Life has already started to get back to normal.  

But since real life isn't quite as fun to blog about, I thought I'd take the next couple weeks to share some of our experiences from our 3 week trip around Europe.  I've found that we saw and did so much, I haven't been able to share much of it with people, because there's just too much to tell! So, here's my best attempt...

In our minds, our trip officially began on Monday, December 16th which was before we even left London... As we had been prepping to leave, there was one thing left on my London bucket list - Warner Brother Studios: The Making of Harry Potter. So, on our very last day when we should have been packing and cleaning, we went to the Harry Potter studio.

 For those that don't know, the WB studios is a total tourist attraction with a display of many of the sets built during the filming of the Harry Potter films. The tour is set on the actual lot where the majority of filming occurred. Some of the highlights included the Great Hall, Gryffindor Common Room, Hagrids Hut, The Burrow, Number 4 Privet Drive, Diagon Alley, a huge model of Hogwarts, and my first glass of Butterbeer (the same stuff they serve in Florida). 

I think my favorite part was seeing the insane amount of detail that goes into EVERYthing. The Gryffindor common room has a notice board with changing notices never seen in the films. Many of the portraits on the walls were handpainted with real people. The potion bottles were filled with real bits from butcher shops.  The list goes on and on.  Even Spencer who isn't much of a Harry Potter fan could appreciate the intricate details that went into filming the movie.  

These pictures are probably worth a thousand words, so we'll just leave it at that.  Next time, I'll write about when our trip technically began with our flight to Stuttgart, Germany!

The Great Hall at Christmastime

Butterbeer!!!

The Potter's Destroyed Home

Diagon Alley!

I loved seeing the dormitory and common room set up for Christmas

Number 4 Privet Drive! Plus the giant chess set and the Ministry of Magic

Kierstin Hougaard, I took this picture with Severus Snape for you! We found out the entrance to Dumbledore's office and the Chamber of Secrets were mechanically made to work, they weren't computer animated!

"Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.” -JK Rowling