Final Day
My flight was at 3:15pm, late enough that I could leave Oxford after a final breakfast. Quite a few people were there, because a US Airways flight that originally would've left really early that day was cancelled, so a bunch of people on that flight were stuck in Oxford another day. I caught a bus afterwards to Gatwick Airport, which took two and a half hours to get to. And then, after a check-in process that could've been horrid due to the luggage belt breaking but was actually really efficiently handled by British Airways, I got through to the gate. Actually, not to the gate. Gatwick doesn't announce the plane's gate until the plane is at the gate and it's time to board, rather like a train station does with platforms, but I've never seen that before with an airport. But board I did, and I ended up in Amsterdam. Curiously enough, it was in Amsterdam that I got the most intense questioning at immigration (not at London, where I had to get a student visa, or even coming back to New York through JFK Airport!). That really didn't give an accurate view of the city, though, where the people are so laid back that they sometimes don't do things right. Or at all. But no worries, there.
Amsterdam
There are a number of things you can do in Amsterdam...if you're not traveling with a family. When you are traveling with a family, it's risky to walk through the Red Light District for fear of scarring someone for life, and those coffee shops that really sell weed are off-limits--though there were enough of them that I wondered if it were possible to get a contact high just from walking past so many. That said, Amsterdam is a really beautiful city, but not a city for anyone who is in a big hurry. Being from New York, this is quite the odd concept. Fast food restaurants don't open until 9am there, and these are usually the first to open. There's no rush hour. The nightlife is rather contained. It's very...relaxed...for a city.
But beautiful, as I've said, with the wonderful tall canal houses and house boats lining the canals. What my family did do: We wandered through the Anne Frank house and learned a bit of history. We were also surprised that the house was so HUGE. It was definitely bigger on the inside, though I imagine all canal houses appear that way. We walked around to the center of Amsterdam, Dam Square (which doesn't have a dam in it) and ate some pizza that wasn't really pizza. There was some walking through the Red Light District and yes, we did see the schools nonchalantly displaying themselves in the windows. The thing that got to my younger sister, though, was probably the more explicit sex shops that displayed their...interesting products in the windows.
Finding food to eat was hard because food in Amsterdam is ridiculously expensive for some reason. But we ate pancakes (both savory and dessert ones) and liege waffles (awesome and not quite as awesome but still good) and even got candy from a candy store (they sold weed chocolate bars; we did not get those). Our last day we went to the Van Gogh museum, where many of Van Gogh's paintings and certain ones of artists that influenced him were displayed along with interesting text narrating Van Gogh's life and how it influenced his paintings from beginning to end. This was extremely interesting and definitely a highlight. I want to get Van Gogh's letters because many excerpts from them were included in the museum texts.
The next day we left and our plane was delayed. Consequently we arrived in Munich after our connecting flight had boarded but our plane de-boarded at the tarmac, not at a gate, so we had a bus take us directly to our other plane, also not at a gate, which left on time for Prague, where we did actually land at a gate.
Prague
Prague is like an Italian city. In fact, they have really good Italian food and gelato. And the buildings kind of look like the ones in Italy. And the streets also look like the streets of an Italian city, Florence maybe, and they even have squares like the ones in Italian cities. Being there reminded me a lot of the experience of traveling through several such cities in Italy during a school trip three years ago. The differences are that Prague is actually in the Czech Republic and therefore the people actually speak Czech (among other things) and unlike in Italy, they use crowns, which are actually worth less than the U.S. dollar. So this was the one place we went that was pretty cheap.
That said, Prague is beautiful. The narrow cobblestone streets, wide squares full of people and food venders and cafes, and the colorful buildings, many of which had designs and pictures painted on them, all made for a LOT of sightseeing without actually going to a major site. The first night we walked to the Astronomical Clock in Prague's main square. The clock is extremely ornate and tells not only the time but the day, month, seasons, and much more for anyone who can actually read it. We walked past there through more narrow streets lined with stores--a LOT of jewelry stores, stores selling marrionettes, and many restaurants and gelato stands. And one Belgian chocolate store from which I made a purchase. This all led to the Charles Bridge, a bridge lined with statues of religious imagery with a statue of Jesus on the cross in the middle, and on one side a stone that grants a wish to anyone who touches it. The bridge leads over the river to the Old Town of Prague, where Prague castle is located on a hilltop. From the bridge there are magnificent views of both sides of the city, especially the castle because it is up on high. What looks like a castle spire is actually part of a cathedral on castle grounds.
The next day we actually walked through Old Town, which was the same sort of colorful buildings and narrow streets, but uphill, all leading up to the castle. The castle itself doesn't look like an old castle, but rather is a huge building or two in a square, a few stories tall, and guarded by uniformed men with cool looking guns. Past the main square inside the castle is the cathedral, which, dark with tall spires and detailed stained glass windows, looked more like a castle than anything. It actually looked, from a distance, like Hogwarts. It was beautiful from the inside as well, with the stained glass showing off all its colors and the details of the artwork. We then walked across a bridge over the moat (yes, there is a moat) to the gardens, which were mostly made up of some flower beds put into designs and lots of nicely mowed grass. There was a good view of the cathedral from there. We then walked down the steep hill to the moat area, which had a path adjacent to a small stream serving as the castle's moat which ran all around the hill that the castle sat atop. We walked halfway around this moat until we decided we were too hungry to continue, and so we climbed back up to the castle, and then back down into the main area of Prague.
Prague had a LOT of good food. The best of the trip, I'd say. We had some excellent pizza and gelato, and I had a real Italian hot chocolate, which is basically chocolate melted down so you can drink it, but really it's more suitable to be eaten with a spoon as a dessert because of its thickness and richness.
Our last day in Prague was spent wandering through the main square again, and then through the Jewish Quarter, which contained some pretty synagogues and the most expensive stores of, well, anywhere. We'd see a lot more of this in Switzerland, where expensive was common with watch sellers, but here all the expensive designer stores were on one street. We saw a Cartier ring being sold for over 2 million dollars.
Later we returned to the airport for a later flight into Zurich.
Switzerland
Landing in Zurich, again not at a gate, we were taken to the airport's main terminal. The path to the baggage claim was...the most expensive I've seen. Lined with advertizements for watch stores and Lindt chocolate, ending with a duty free shop on either sides before opening up to the actual bag claim area. The message: Switzerland is expensive, they know what they're good at, and they're not messing around. Which was mostly true.
After staying overnight in an airport hotel we took the two and a half hour train ride from the airport to Interlaken in the Alps. It was an interesting train ride, mostly during the second half when the Alps started to emerge in the distance, and then the train was traveling into them alongside one of the lakes that give Interlaken its name. And the lakes and rivers in Switzerland are beautiful--all of them have this turquoise blue/green color that is incredibly striking to look at, and very clear when looking down into. We switched trains at Interlaken to go into Lauterbrunnen, the small town in the valley of the same name where we'd be staying for the next few days.
Lauterbrunnen is...incredible. The valley is beautiful everywhere you look; there's no avoiding it. The town is one main street from the train station, which also includes a gondola station that takes people up a cliff-face to higher-up towns, past several hotels and restaurants, ending at a waterfall that cascades down a cliff into the valley. The valley itself is extremely narrow, less than a mile across with sheer cliffs on either side, and thinning even more the further in one travels. Looking towards the back of the valley, the taller Alps, each over 10,000 feet tall, are visible, snowcapped and looming above the rest of the greener mountains and valley. A white-water river runs through all of this. It was this view: of the taller Alps and the waterfall, that we had from our hotel room window. The tallest mountain full of snow even in August is Jungfrau, at nearly 14,000 feet tall. This mountain and another mountain, Eiger, create between them a pass at 11,000 feet from which glaciers can be seen, as well as the two mountain peaks and the adjacent valley on the other side of the mountains. This pass, called Jungfraujoch, has a train station and a look-out point, among other facilities, for tourists. Known as the 'top of Europe' it is the tallest point one can access in Europe in the Alps without having to climb. It was this place that we planned on going.
The only problem: weather. We had a forecast for clouds and rain the entire time we were there, with only two windows of sunshine and good weather--the afternoon we got there and from 8am-12pm the next day. After talking to a hotel attendant, who further confirmed the variable nature of the weather at such heights, we decided to go for the small window the next morning.
That afternoon we instead took a gondola up to the clifftop. It's interesting that the Alps have such a good transportation system, made up of trains that are capable of going up steep terrain, gondolas, and lifts so that the towns higher up can all be accessed, in addition to the ski areas. This particular gondola connected to a train, but we walked 3 miles along one of the mountain sides at 5,000 feet to the town of Murren, towards the back of the valley area. The pathway we walked offered beautiful views of the mountains across the valley--the lower (and by lower, I mean 5,000-10,000 feet tall) mountains, all vibrant green and occasionally full of cliff-faces, as well as of the taller snowy peaks occasionally covered in clouds. Murren, bigger than Lauterbrunnen and sitting at the edge of the cliff, offered restaurants and more great views, and a gondola ride down to Grimmelwald, a lower cliff town, from which another gondola literally plunged (you could see the steepness of the cable, looking like it plunged straight down, and you could also feel the drop as the gondola dipped over the edge of the cliff) into the valley back to Lauterbrunnen.
The next day we woke up at 6am to catch the 8am train out of Lauterbrunnen up to Jungfraujoch. This train ride includes one transfer and takes two hours, so we needed that earlier leaving time to make it up to the mountain pass before the clouds came in. The train ride up was beautiful, and as we passed the final town at 9,000 feet and ascended in the tunnel up to the pass, the affects of thinner air could be felt. Or I felt them--my sister and dad didn't, but my mom also did--I was more light-headed and jittery, and a bit slow in moving. The train made two stops where passengers could get out and look at views of the valley below and glaciers, before finally stopping at the final station 11,333 feet high. We made our way through the network of tunnels up to the viewing station, which offered beautiful views of the valley (and some smaller clouds) below. It was weird, being higher than some clouds and as high as some airplanes. On the other side was a huge glacier that wound between both mountain peaks on either side, and off to one of the sides was a research station with an igloo and many red tents dotting the snow, as well as an area for helicopters to land (which one did a few minutes after we got there).
Afterwards we actually went onto the snow to explore a bit. It was actually a bit warm for 32 degrees, with the sun more directly on us than at lower elevations. My sister and I walked up the snowy path towards the other side of the pass for a good distance, but did not make it all the way to see what was on the other side, as neither of us were equipped with proper shoes. We instead admired the beautiful scenery around us; the two peaks on either side still towering more thousands of feet above us, the gathering clouds that were impossibly close, the glacier that looked like a river of ice, and the snow! As we were about to leave the snow from one of the cliffs surrounding the area slid down with a thunder-like noise in a mini-avalanche.
We caught the 11:30 train out, having successfully taken advantage of the window of good weather, which proved to be forecast accurately when, after half an hour in the tunnels, we emerged to find the peak AND valley covered in clouds and fog. Once the train reached Grindelwald, the main town on the other side of the mountains in the wider valley, it had started to rain. Luckily the rain stopped once we reached Interlaken, where we walked around and popped into stores and had truffle cake, which is as mind-blowingly good as it sounds. Especially with Swiss chocolate.
It rained again once we reached Lauterbrunnen. One thing about the Alps: beautiful as they are in the sunshine, there is something wonderfully beautiful about seeing them in the rain, the greens of the mountain sides are a bit greener, the low clouds forming near the waterfalls and the mountaintops, shifting so that each time you look the view is different and if you're lucky, you'll get a view of one of those white mountain peaks. And after the first day and a half of good weather, these were the views we got as the storms moved in and took hold, giving pouring rain to the valleys and heavy snow to the mountain tops.
The following day we took a two hour train to Luzern; the most beautiful train ride I've ever been on. I feel like the ride to Luzern was better than the actually city of Luzern; the train road past the turquoise Lake Brienz, surrounded by tall mountains, into one of the valleys and then carved a path into the mountains on one side of the valley so that the view for much of the time was of the valley below and mountains opposite, not as tall as the ones in Lauterbrunnen but still beautiful, especially against the turquoise lakes. As we neared Luzern, and again as we left, we were given a wonderful view of tall Mt. Pilatus that loomed over Luzern and a particularly beautiful lake that preceded it on the way in; not Lake Luzern, but one near it.
The actual city of Luzern included one of these lakes and a turquoise, wide river cutting through the city, and straddled by two beautiful flower-laden bridges build with wood and each with a tower and a few other bridges as well. The older part of Luzern resembles Prague in that the buildings are colorful and some have designs painted on them. We wandered around for a bit and came across a food market on either side of the river where venders sold flowers--in particular beautifully vibrant sunflowers, and food venders sold fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, cheeses, and breads. We got dried strawberries to snack on, which were delicious. Then we browsed the stores, some cheap, some expensive, some found back home. There were some chocolate stores that were very tempting. But we managed to get back on the train relatively early and get back to Lauterbrunnen by dinner time.
A note on the food: it's expensive and not all good in Switzerland, at least not in the region we were in (I hear it differs). But some of the better food were, of course, the desserts. I had a delicious apple struddel with vanilla sauce. There was that chocolate truffle cake. And gelato. And Swiss chocolate in general is good. We also had Rosti, a potato dish like hashbrowns but not as fried, with stuff in it--in our case, bacon and cheese.
Going Back
For me going back was a long time coming, after two months of not being home. And for all of us going home was a long time going. We got to Zurich airport after a two and a half hour train journey that had started at 6am only to find out we couldn't check into our flight at all until 11am, so we had an hour to spare. Our flight was delayed an hour, and we had to go through four passport checks (in addition to the actual security check) before getting on the plane. The plane ride was nine hours long with only two movies played--the middle portion of the flight was them showing the flight progress map on the screen (this plane didn't have personal screens) for two hours, which is just painful to look at, and when it arrived in Kennedy International Airport the gate wasn't ready so we sat on the tarmac for half an hour. Surprisingly, immigration literally took five minutes because of the huge immigration area in Terminal 4, in which, smartly, all of the booths were occupied by an immigration officer to speed up the process. And then, after a two hour ride we got home at 8pm, or 2am European time, 20 hours after we had left.
This trip was one of the best I've ever taken. I saw some amazing places and beautiful sites, learned some cultural differences, particularly about food and dining practices (some good, some not so good). However, being in other cities also made me miss London a bit more; I think London may remain my favorite city in Europe so far, not because it is more beautiful or has more sites, but because I formed such good memories of all the things I did there. It's the city I spend the most time in and got to know really well, and that makes it really special.
That said, my favorite place, possibly ever, was being in the Alps. Just the sheer beautiful of everywhere you look, the majesty of the mountains and the unchanged wonder of nature. Being on top of a mountain from which you can see other mountains and clouds and valleys made me feel on top of the world, like if I tried anything I could succeed. And looking up at the mountains, past the green grass and waterfalls up to the rocky cliffs and snow, made me feel absolute awe that such things could exist, and it made me feel inspired, and at peace. Something about the beautiful mountains and valleys just put my mind at more ease than it had been in awhile, and perhaps in another life I would live there. But that is very unlikely. And I can still be awed as a visitor. I'm not sure how I would handle seeing that beautiful every single day. It would be amazing. And yet I'm not sure if I'd know how to channel that excitement.
And now the traveling is over and I return to school. But hopefully there is more travel to come!
These pictures are out of order, but:
View of the glacier and adjacent peaks at the mountain pass Jungfraujoch, over 11,000 feet up.
The hotel we stayed at in Lauterbrunne, with cliffs in the background.
The cathedral at Prague Castle, looking a bit like a castle itself.
Boathouses lining one of the canals in Amsterdam.
Lauterbrunnen Valley in the rain and at sunrise, on the last day. View from our hotel room.
