BOB DYLAN Concert in Oberhausen

This weekend I trecked it to Oberhausen, Germany to see Bob Dylan live in concert! I was amazingly excited for this trip, but I couldn’t convince anyone to come with me, so it was a solo journey. The concert was on Saturday, Oct 29, which happened to be the same day that my apartment was hosting a Halloween party, but I was more than willing to make the sacrifice and miss the party for Bob. One reason that I wasn’t able to recruit anyone to accompany me, was that Bob Dylan will be playing in Zurich in November, but I already have a plane ticket to Berlin for that weekend.

So I took the train early Saturday morning, after some crazy good times at Cheers the night before. I had to change trains a few times, including once in Cologne, where I briefly checked out the cathedral next to the train station. Cologne seems like a cool city, and I’ve heard good things about, so maybe I’ll go back there sometime. But this trip I was focused on a more important goal: getting to Oberhausen to see Bob Dylan. I was so excited for this concert because for me, Bob Dylan is one of those guys that I would say, if I could see anyone in concert, it would be him. And I only recently realized that he still performs. For some reason I was under the impression that he was completely burnt out and somewhat retired, but obviously that is not the case.

So I made it to Oberhausen, grabbed some dinner, and checked into my hostel. There were 3 other oldish German guys in my room who were also going to the concert. The concert was held very close to my hostel in the König-Pilsner Arena, which is also close to a big shopping center. So I made my way over to the Arena, somewhat following some other young people (I wasn’t the only young one there).

I was not impressed because the security people wouldn’t let me bring my camera into the concert, so I had to check it at the door. It would have been cool to get some pictures in there, but oh well. Before the concert, I walked around and checked out the band merchandise. I ended up buying a cool shirt. I probably would have bought at least one more, but all the nice T-shirts were only in men’s sizes… it was probably for the best, since they were quite expensive.

So, I was sitting in the second story, directly in front of the stage. I seemed to be in a fairly old-people section, but they were totally into the music, so it was sweet. I gotta say, the music was just amazing. It was so wicked to see him perform live! He looked really good, and played so well… (harmonica too!). Here’s the set list from the show:

1. Maggie's Farm
2. Tell Me That It Isn't True
3. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
4. Lay, Lady, Lay
5. High Water (For Charley Patton)
6. To Ramona
7. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
8. The Times They Are A-Changin'
9. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
10. Ballad Of Hollis Brown
11. Highway 61 Revisited
12. Tangled Up In Blue
13. Mr. Tambourine Man
14. Summer Days
(encore)
15. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
16. All Along The Watchtower

I was glad that he played a fare amount of old songs, since those ones are my favourite…I don’t really know that much is his new stuff, but it was all so good. The best part was Highway 61 Revisited, followed by Tangled Up In Blue, as well as All Along the Watchtower. I was glad that he played Mr. Tambourine Man, but it was so different from the original, and I didn’t really like it as much. It was almost unrecognizable… that’s how different it was. But all in all, I’d say it was an awesome show. It was funny though, how little he interacted with the crowd. He introduced the band right at the end, and that was the only thing he said to the crowd the whole show.

Afterwards, I walked along the Promenade, which is just a little street along the river. There are a bunch of restaurants and pubs along there, which looked pretty cool. After chillaxing by the river for a while, I eventually made it back to my hostel.

The next day I had a few hours to kill before my train home, so I went out for breakfast at a little restaurant along the Promenade, and then I checked out the mall. Apparently it is the biggest mall in Germany (or maybe Europe), which I can believe, since malls don’t seem to be that common in Europe. It was somewhat Chinookesque, and it had some good stores. I bought a pair of jeans, so I was happy.

On the way back home, I had to change trains a few times again. And I noticed that all trains in countries other than Switzerland are most likely not going to be on time (yes, even in Germany). So my first train was late enough to cause me to miss my second train, which set me back about an hour. I eventually made it home though, and found a nicely Halloween decorated apartment and an interesting background on my computer (courtesy of Kevin). About 3 months later, I found another present that Kevin left on my computer that weekend... haha.. it was nice.

This was definitely a wicked trip, and well worth the long train rides. Since I was by myself, I was able to get a lot of reading done, and I finally finished the book I was reading when I left Calgary.

PARIS

This weekend, a group of us went to Paris, France. The group was: Me, Jacqui, Shane, Vance, Olivier, George, Evan, Bernard, Henry, Tyler, Kevin, Mike, Rebecca, Fen Ling, and Fen Ling’s friend. We took the night train there, which was around 6 hours. We arrived Saturday Oct 15 and arrived back in Baden on Tuesday Oct 18.

So I should start on the Friday before we left. Jonas (a swiss guy who works at ABB) was leaving to go back to school in Lausanne, so he decided to make a nice swiss fondue farewell supper at Antonio’s apartment. I think the group was Me, Jonas, George, Antonio, Javier, Phil, Anthony, and Devon & Jenny came for a bit later on. (Jenny is a cool swiss girl who moved into the upstairs in our building, and has recently started dating Devon).

So, we hung out at Antonio’s for a bit, and ate the best cheese fondue I’ve ever had. At the time, I had only eaten fondue once before, but I’m writing this now several months and 2 or 3 fondue meals later, and I still say that Jonas’s fondue was the best I’ve ever had.

From there, we moved down to Mojo and met up with Vance, Adrienn, Jacqui, Shane, and Evan before catching the night train to Paris. Jacqui, George, and I were in the same 6-person compartment. This was the first time I’d slept in a couchette on a night train (my only other night train experience was to Vienna, where we just slept in the seats… not so comfortable). The beds were a bit more comfortable, but it was a really short ride, and George and I were so full of cheese, that it wasn’t the greatest sleep.

We arrived early on Saturday morning, and after some metro highjinks, we eventually checked in to our hotel. We grabbed a quick breakfast nearby, and then headed for the train to Versailles, which is about 30min out of town.

Versailles consists of a huge palace, through which we got 3 audio-guided tours. One cool thing, was the hall of mirrors, but unfortunately half of it was closed for restoration. The palace was really cool, but the best part was the amazingly huge gardens. We just walked around for so long. People were renting golf carts to drive around because there was so much ground to cover.

After the first audio tour, the group had split up quite a lot. Vance and I managed to run into Jacqui, Tyler, Kevin, and Mike. So it was the six of us wandering around the gardens. We checked out the Grand Trianon and the Petite Trianon, which were houses where the King and Queen could go to relax. Then we made our way over to the Queen’s Hamlet, which was a series of little houses around a big pond. It looked like a little fairytale village. The pond was filled with tons of ugly fish, and one huge fish that we were watching and “oooing” and “awing” at for quite a while.

It was such a nice day, and the Hamlet was really cool, so we just chillaxed on the grass for a while. There were quite a few trees bearing this strange fruit, which Tyler and Mike eventually tried. Apparently it didn’t taste very good, but they survived.

We then walked back towards the palace along this big canal. We went through the 2 other audio-tours and somehow our whole group miraculously met up in front of the palace.

We were all pretty tired by then, and we took the train back into Paris. There was this French guy on the train who was all dressed in hip hop wear, and bopping out to his music. He kept yelling out and banging on the windows and did a few head spins. At one point he pulled a couple hundred euro out of his wallet and threw it on the ground, only to return it to his wallet shortly after. It was quite entertaining.

When we got back into Paris, we got off the train near the Notre Dame and bought some dinner supplies at a grocery store. We hung out along the river across from the Cathedral while we ate our bread and cheese and other good stuff.

We walked back to our hotel, which was really nice since it was an actual hotel… none of this crappy hostel business… and it was cheaper than any hostel we could find (and by we, I mean Olivier, since he did all the leg work for this trip). Equipped with our many bottles of wine, we had a nice little pre-party in our hotel room. I was staying with Vance, Jacqui, Shane, and Olivier. We had an extra person in our room, so 3 of us had to share a double bed, which wasn’t too bad.

After we consumed a sufficient amount of wine, we took the Metro over to the Eiffel Tower to see it all lit up and sparkly at night. The Eiffel Tower is one of those things that is just so much bigger when you see it in person. And it looks really beautiful when it’s lit up at night. We hung out there for a while, and laid on the grass, just staring up at the tower. A few smart people decided to take the last metro home, but the rest of us decided to make a poor decision and stay out later. We some how thought that it wouldn’t be that far to walk, however, it turns out that it was damn far. Somewhere along the walk home while I was talking to George, my infamous 9-10 scale came into existence.

We had a good time walking around Paris. I think it was Vance, Me, Jacqui, Shane, George, Evan, Rebecca, Olivier, and maybe some others. At one point we stopped to buy more wine (yet another poor decision on my part). We walked past the Arch de Triomph, which was quite cool at night. Another one of those things that is just so much bigger than you imagine. Around this time, Shane got the hiccups, and he and Jacqui fell behind. I didn’t notice it at the time, it just seemed like they disappeared. They wound up sleeping on the grass somewhere, and got back to the hotel much later than the rest of us.

Anyways, we continued our journey home. At one point Evan and I walked into some random fancy hotel to use the bathroom. I thought I was going to get kicked out, but if you just walk in there like you belong, then nobody says anything.

We eventually made it back to our hotel, and since Jacqui and Shane weren’t home yet, I took the double bed all to myself. I woke up the next morning to discover that they had joined me in bed at some point that night.

The next day (Sunday) we planned to visit some of the museums around Paris. After some morning highjinks, I eventually made it to the Louvre where I separately ran into Shane, Henry, and Bernard. It is amazing how much stuff there is in the Louvre… I knew there was no way that I would be able to see everything (or even close to everything), so I made sure I saw the 2 things I was interested in, and then just wandered around checking out as much cool stuff as I could see. The first thing I went to see was the Mona Lisa. It was actually quite small, but it was beautiful and cool to see the original in person. The other thing I went to see was the Venus de Milo. Another really cool sculpture that I saw was the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The placement of that piece was great… right at the top of a big staircase.

I should mention, most of this day was solo for me, which was actually quite nice. So after I left the Louvre, I made the longer-than-it-seems walk down Champs Elisse. It doesn’t seem very long because when you look down the street you can see the Arch de Triomph, and it doesn’t look very far away. It’s deceiving though, because you don’t realize how big the Arch actually is. The point is, I walked down the street and it was quite cool. There were some really wicked shops along there (eg Sephora, and a huge Luis Vuitton store). I eventually made it to the Arch, where I ran into Fen Ling and her friend. We hung out for a little while and took some pictures. We eventually found the underground route that took us across the ring-road, over to the Arch. There was something going on there, but I wasn’t exactly sure what. There were guards and official looking people (maybe some army vets) laying down flowers and what looked to be a memorial of some sort under the Arch. There was a flame into which one of the guys put his sword. It was quite interesting, and I watched for a while until it started to become dusk.

At that point, I took the Metro back to the hotel to meet up with the others (well really to meet up with Jacqui, since the others had changed the meeting time until later, without informing Jacqui). Since we had a bit of time to kill, we both took a nice nap.

When most people got back to the hotel after their day of museums and various exploits, we all went down to Moulin Rouge. It would have been really sweet to actually see a show, but it was much too expensive for our taste. Instead we just took pictures outside the building. Moulin Rouge was the red light district of Paris, so we walked through there for a few blocks and were surrounded by sex shops and erotic shows and lights of all sorts. It was pretty cool.

From there we walked to Sacre Coeur and by another Paris miracle, ran into the rest of the group (Shane, Evan, and George). Sacre Coeur is a church up on a hill, which looked cool all lit up, and gave a beautiful view of the city. We chillaxed on the steps for quite a long time. There were a few guys playing the guitar and singing, which set the mood quite nicely. And George was impressing me with his photography skills. That guy has skills even he doesn’t know about. We made a good decision that night, and left early enough to take the Metro home and get a good sleep.

The next morning, Vance and I went to the modern art museum (Centre Pompidou). There was some cool stuff in there, and some pretty crazy stuff too. There were 2 Dali paintings, which I really enjoyed.

After that, Vance and I split up and I went over to the Notre Dame. It’s quite beautiful and has a really cool design. I’m a fan of the many Gargoyles perched on the edges. After that, I just wandered around and checked out the city until about 4pm when I went to the Eiffel Tower to meet the rest of the group.

So we all paid to walk up to the 2nd platform of the Eiffel Tower. They have stairs in the legs I guess. They also have fun facts for you to read all along the way, and around each platform. It’s really cool to see the city from up there. And you can really see how big the arc de triumph looks compared to everything around it. We met on the second platform, and then almost everyone decided to take the elevator all the way to the top (you can’t walk up there). The view doesn’t really change that much from the second platform to the top, but it’s just awesome to be up there. It was for surely worth it.

When we were all standing back on solid ground, we split off again for our last evening in Paris. I went with Jacqui, Shane, Evan, George, Olivier, and Rebecca back to the Louvre to make the Champs Elisse walk at night followed by climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomph. This is where Jacqui and I had our most embarrassing moment of the trip. All weekend we tried to get into museums, etc for the price of children (under 18 at most places). We were sometimes successful… Jacqui was actually quite successful on her own. So everyone else had gone through the ticket line (Evan, Shane, and George had day passes, so they went through quite quickly). Jacqui and I then tried to pass for under 18, but little did we know that if you are under 18 you’re not allowed to go to the top of the Arc unless you have an adult with you. So we tried to explain that Evan, Shane, and George were our ‘guardians’, but the ticket people wanted us to go and get them. They had already gone up the stairs, so there was no way we could reach them. We were about to give up, but I really wanted to go up to the top, so we decided to go back and tell the ticket people that we had lied and that we were actually over 18. When we produced ID they let us go, but made fun of us for lying… we were so embarrassed. But, we did get to go up the Arc!

The view from the top was so wicked! Especially at night! There are 12 streets going off from the arc in all directions. Champs Elisse being one of them, which was all lit up and beautiful. You can also see the Eiffel Tower from up there, and Jacqui and I got up there just in time to see it sparkling (it sparkles every hour for a few minutes).

So we were hanging out at the top, checking out the view, when one of the guards started yelling “Oh la la”, and we looked over to see Shane on top of the middle of the Arc. Good thing he wasn’t our guardian, because he got asked to leave after that.

That was all the time we had left in Paris, so we stopped by the hotel to get our bags and took the night train back home before work. Paris was definitely a beautiful city and an awesome time. It has been one of my favourite trips so far. The city and the sites were incredible, and we had such a good group dynamic (and even with such a large group).

OKTOBERFEST!! – München

This weekend, 16 of us went on a road trip to Munich (München) Germany to check out Oktoberfest, which is a 2 week long (3 weekends) beer festival. It takes place during the end of September and ends in October, which according to Jacqui’s blog, is because the weather is nicer in September. We were there for the second weekend of the festival. We rented 4 cars and drove up Friday night and back Sunday. The groups were: Me, Tommy, Vance, and Kiran in our car… Vance driving and Tommy as chief navigator. Jacqui, Adrienn, Shane, and Evan in another car. George, Devon, Travis, Warren in one car. Bernard, Richard, Henry, and Olivier in the last car. Keegan and Victor were also there, but they took the train and didn’t stay with us. I think they managed to run into Henry and Bernard at some point though.

So the plan was for us to pick up our cars in Zurich after work and then get to Munich before 10pm to get a campsite. We were all going to meet in Zurich and drive together, which of course did not happen. Devon’s crew was picking up their car a bit later, so they weren’t going to meet us, and just headed straight to the campground. After some highjinks at our rental place, we went to meet Jacqui’s crew while Bernard’s crew headed straight to Munich. So it was just the 2 of us cars driving together. We lost each other within about 1 minute.

After a few hours of driving, getting stuck behind an accident, and an hour long detour which took us around Munich, we finally arrived at the campsite. Surprisingly, all of the groups made it there, though none of us were there in time to get a campsite, so we slept in our cars. Adrienn, Shane, Evan, and Jacqui drove down the road and set up their tents in some random field.

Anyways, the next morning we checked into the campsite and took the bus over to Oktoberfest. It was difficult to keep everyone focused and together, especially with all the distractions of food and Oktoberfest hats, but we managed to get to the tent grounds. Oktoberfest is kind of like the Calgary Stampede (complete with rides and such) but with less bull riding and more of a focus on beer drinking and liederhosen (Warren was all in with the liederhosen). We tried to get into one of the tents, which proved to be a difficult task. After about an hour and a half, we gave up and sat at the beer gardens outside the tent and the drinking began. They only serve beer in 1Litre mugs… and you have to be seated to order beer. Those mugs are pretty big, and it kind of hurts if you get hit in the face with one. Devon, Shane, and Evan continued their attempt to get into the tent. I think Devon and Shane succeeded.

After some beer and some chicken and a game of “Never Ever”, we walked over to the ride area where some people went on the Drop of Doom and a Roller Coaster. We lost Adrienn and Shane at that point. (It was amazing how well we stayed together for having such a big group). The rest of us checked out another beer gardens and were able to get a couple of seats and thus some more beer. A guy puked on the table behind us. To remedy this, the beer lady lifted one end of the table up and poured a few mugs of water and beer on it to rinse it off. It was pretty disgusting.

Jacqui and I made another feeble attempt to get into one of the tents, but we got shot down pretty hard. At about 11 I think, those of us who were still at the beer gardens headed back to the campsite. We found George sleeping in the trunk of his car, and these French guys kept calling him Jackie Chan and were apparently reminded of some French movie called “Taxi”.

We all went to sleep and eventually Shane and Adrienn came back. Adrienn had lost her purse after the roller coaster, and Shane lost his camera somewhere along the way, so they had been looking for their stuff. The next morning they went back to the Oktoberfest grounds and Adrienn was able to get her purse back from the lost and found… with the money in it too! Unfortunately Shane’s camera never turned up. Devon’s crew headed back home, and Bernard’s crew along with Kiran did a bit of site seeing around Munich. We went in search of a grocery store with Evan and Jacqui and wound up taking the same detour we took on Friday on the way in… damn traffic circle construction. Eventually we got back to the campsite and then Vance, Tommy, and I headed back towards home.

IBIZIA – Espania!!

This weekend, a group of us went to Ibiza, which is an island off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean sea. Ibiza is known to be a huge party/clubbing place and is mostly populated by British tourists. They have the biggest club in the world there (Privilege) and they get some of the most famous DJ’s to play.

So, Thursday night Devon, Travis, Tommy, Warren, Kevin, and Nate all flew to Ibiza. Jacqui and I joined them on Friday night. Devon, Tommy, and Travis went to see Paul Van Dyke at Amnesia on Thurs, which sounded pretty wicked.

So Friday after work, Jacqui and I caught the plane in Zurich. We had a stop over in Barcelona, then on to Ibiza. We checked in and met the boys (who were taking a pre-party nap) at around 11pm. We stayed in apartment type rooms, but we had one extra person, so Jacqui and I shared a bed.

After waking up the guys, we all had some drinks in our rooms, then headed down the street to the club (Es Paradis). It was a pretty cool club.. and a good time. The drinks were crazy expensive (same with all the clubs)!! A vodka-redbull was 11 euro. And a little bottle of water was 8 euro!

The clubs hire people to dance on these platforms all night. At one point, Devon climbed up onto the platform and wound up getting kicked out. On the way back from the club, Jacqui and I some how ended up swimming in the sea. Good times. Though after that, our apartment was filled with sand for the rest of the weekend. I hate sand… it’s coarse and it gets everywhere.

The next day, we woke up and took the bus over to a beach. The weather wasn’t very good, so it was pretty cold. It was a really nice beach though, and it was cool to just relax by the sea.

That night we went out for dinner and had some sea food paella, which was sooo good!! After a nap and some pre-drinking, we all went out to Eden for a “shower party”. But there were probably 10 other people in the club.. and no shower party. We stayed there for a bit, waiting for it to get busier, which didn’t happen, so we headed over to this other street that had a bunch of different clubs. It was raining pretty hard, and kind of cold out, so walking from club to club wasn’t overly enjoyable.

Jacqui, Tommy, Nate, and Travis went into a hip-hop type club (Soul City or something like that)… the rest of us were lagging behind, and when we tried to get into the same club they wanted us to pay… so shot that down and checked out some other clubs… all of which were completely dead. There was one place that had zero people on the dance floor… it was ridiculous!

I wound up getting separated from Kevin, Devon, and Warren, and so I went back to Soul City and asked them if I could go in and look for my friends… so they let me in without paying… haha… suckers.

We just went back to the hostel afterwards, and eventually the others showed up. Devon and Kevin had both ended up in some fountain (which they later noticed had high-voltage signs all around it!!) The bad thing was that they both had their cameras with them… but they worked the next day, so it was all good… Devon’s camera has been able to survive a lot of shenanigans.

Okay so Sunday we were going to go to another beach, but it the weather wasn’t very good. We went over by the Café de Mer for a bit, but it started raining, so we left. We went back there later though when it cleared up a bit and we watched the sunset. It was quite beautiful. There were a lot of people out there watching it… and when the sun went down, everyone started clapping and cheering, like it was amazing and not something that happens every day, although I’m sure the sun was able to set the next day.. and maybe even the day after too… haha… it was kind of funny.

That night we went out to Privilege, which is the biggest club in the world. It was really cool. Some of the guys went out to Amnesia for a foam party, which their cameras were able to survive.

We flew back home on Monday to find Vance, Richard, and Kiran (friend from Canada who came to visit for 2 weeks) drinking gin at our place. Tommy was on a slightly later flight home than the rest of us and his bag got searched at the airport where the asshole airport guys stole 100euro, his discman, and his camera from his bag.

It would have been nice if the weather was better, but other than Tommy’s stuff getting stolen, Ibiza was a good trip.

De La Soul

This sunday I went to my first Hip-Hop concert. Jacqui, Phil, George, Devon, Travis, Dan (english praktikant), and I went to see De La Soul in Baden here. It was a really good time! Jacqui and I even wound up on stage at one point! so that was cool.

After the concert a DJ kept playing music, so we stayed around for a bit. I don't usually pay much attention to DJ's, and I don't really notice if they're good or bad. But this guy was ridiculous! I actually noticed how bad he was... he kept destroying the songs... it was not impressive.

Also, there were these 2 girls up on the balcony area who reminded me of an 80's aerobics video with their dancing... haha.. it was great.

I'm leaving for Ibiza this weekend!... so super excited about that!!

Bellinzona

This saturday, I went to Bellinzona with Jacqui, Richard, Olivier, and Feungling. Bellinzona is in the canton of Ticino, which is the Italian part of switzerland and was having a wine festival this weekend. It's about a 3-3.5 hour train ride from Baden.

We went out to a BBQ at KSB on friday night, where the Zeigelhau boys introduced us to "Turbo-cups". This is a team-oriented drinking game, which I only mildly participated in. You have two teams with an equal number of players. And it's a race in which you have to drink your cup of beer, then put the cup on the table and flip it over until it lands upside down without falling over. It was good times.

So anyways.. back to talking about Bellinzona. We took the train on saturday morning. When we got there, we ate some lunch and walked up a hill to check out one of the castles (Castlegrande). They have 3 castles there. One on this hill and 2 on a neighbouring hill. This is probably the coolest castle i've been to. It's actually castle-like (the other castles i've seen are just walls with very little castle resemblence). This actually looked like a battle time castle. It was cool. And you could walk all through it. And we went up one of the towers, which gave a nice view. You could see the other two castles from there too. There was also this big wall that you could walk along, which was quite nice. On the way back, we walked through the wall in a tunnel-type thing.

Jacqui, Richard, and I then decided to take a nap on the grass before heading over to the other castle. The other one was quite cool too, and we walked around there for a bit. One of the castles had a drawbridge!... i think it was this one. We didn't go up to the 3rd one because apparently it wasn't worth the extra effort.

When we came back into the main street, the wine festival had started. There were booths set up along the street with different types of wine from around the area. You could buy a glass for 6CHF and then have all the wine you wanted!.. it was pretty sweet. Some of the wines were really quite good. I think most of the grapes that grow around there must be Merlot grapes (though i'm not exactly sure how wine works... is it the grape that makes it Merlot vs something else like Pinot, etc). Anyways, a lot of the booths had Merlot.. and white Merlot too... which was quite good.

After some wine tasting, Jacqui went home and the rest of us went out for pizza and more wine tasting. I also tried some of the grapes that they had there!... they were so good!... not like normal grapes. They were black ones (kind of dark bluish) and they tasted like grape juice. They had a weird rubbery texture on the inside.. they were awesome! So we took some grapes and one last glass of wine to go, and caught the train back home. I think we all slepted the whole way home.

Lausanne, Sion, St. Gingolph, Montreux

So this weekend a few of us went over to the french part of switzerland to check out the situation. Jacqui was in Lausanne for a work conference, so we capitalized on this opportunity and met up with her for the weekend. So, the initial plan was for Tommy and I to head down to Lausanne on friday night and spend the weekend. However, there weren't any hostels available in Lausanne, so the hostel website redirected us to Sion, so we ended up getting a hostel there instead. Now, since Sion is in an excellent hiking region, we thought it would be nice to do a few hikes over the weekend (an easier one on saturday, and a long hard core one on sunday).

So, Tommy and I took the train to Sion on friday night (approx. 3 hours). It was pretty late, so we just chilled at the hostel and went to bed quite early. The next morning (noon) Richard and Bernard took the train and met us there.

We started our "hike" by walking up this hill to check out the castle. It was pretty cool and had a nice church and a nice view of the city/surrounding cities. After that, we attempted to do a short hike that was in our guide book. We eventually found the end of the hike, but I don't think we were actually on the hike until it was almost over. We were close though. We walked through a ton of vineyards and stopped for lunch under a grape/vineyard covered area. It was really nice. We also saw some fig trees and wound up by some orchards... there was definitely an abundance of assorted fruit over there.

That night we took the train to Lausanne (1 hour) and walked around. We found a really cool crepe place and ate dinner. We had to use our mad french skills to interpret the menu, though we still required some assistance from the waitress. It took us a while to realize that we were even looking at crepes on the menu. We had some regional wine and some excellent crepes! We all got dessert crepes too (Tommy's dinner consisted of only dessert crepes). Bernard and I shared some banana-pineapple flambe. It was cool cause the waitress lit it on fire! (and because of the clear AD reference!!)

After dinner we walked around the town for a bit and managed to get lost. With the help of some french ladies and our mad french interpretation skills (and double map reading skills) we eventually made it back to the train station in time to catch the last one back to Sion.

When we were going to bed, we noticed a gianormous mother of a spider on the side of the bed! It was nice that Tommy stepped up like a man and killed it. It was gross and huge.

The next day, we got up relatively early and attempted to start a hike that was supposed to take 7 hours. We definitely didn't think things through though, because we had to carry our bags with us. But, that didn't kill our plan completely. We were still going to do the hike. After some trains and waiting around, we realized that we hadn't checked the bus schedule and so we wouldn't be able to get to the beginning of the hike, do the hike with our bags, and get the train home at a reasonable hour.... so that killed the plan. Instead, we took the train to the end of the hike and hung out by the lake. This was in St Gingolph, which is on the border of france and switzerland.

We went into france for lunch (more crepes!). To get across the border, we had to cross an unguarded foot bridge. It was nice that it was so unguarded, since none of us had passports with us.

After lunch we went swimming in lake Geneva (aka Lac Leman) and took a fairy across the lake to Montreux. We walked around Montreux for a bit, which is a nice lake side town. We saw guys playing those swiss Alpine horns! which was wicked!! I think that's the first time I've seen anyone play those.

On the train ride home we had to transfer in Lausanne, where we ran into George and Olivier and some other praktikants who were in Geneva for the weekend.

It was a nice, relaxing and liver-friendly trip.