Switzerland

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! They dont have Thanksgiving here in Italia, but dont you worry - we are cooking ourselves a fantastic Thanksgiving feast (but not until tomorrow night...). I hope everyone has a blessed day and remembers everything they are thankful for.

Right now, Im thankful for free internet so I can tell you about my favorite location of the semester - Switzerland!

We had our "four day break" in Switzerland, which really meant two travel days and then two days of no class or museums. It was such a wonderful break, in one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. We stayed in a town called Interlaken, which means between the lakes, and it literally is in between two huge, blue, mountain lakes. The Swiss Alps surround the whole city, and we got snow one day we were there!! The Alps themselves are not all that different from the Rockies (at least in the spot we were) except for the fact that they dont seem to have any foothills. Our hotel was on completely flat ground and less than a half mile away was a huge snow-capped peak. I dont think my words could ever do justice to the incredible beauty of that place, so Im going to stop trying, but I can tell you about all the fun stuff we did there :)

Our first night we came in in the dark and rain, and so we had no idea what to expect for the rest of the weekend. The next morning, however, a few other girls and I and one girls (Vanassas) parents, who were visiting, got up really early and took the train to "the top of Europe". Its the highest train station in all of Europe, and it takes a couple of hours to get up there. The views on the way up were incredible, though, because we were going right through the middle of the Alps. You have to change trains a couple of times, and at the first town we got out, it started snowing and I was SO excited to be seeing snow! One girl with us had never been in snow before, so she was running around playing with it like an excited little kid (or like my dog last Christmas break...) When we got to the top we went out onto the highest point in a full on blizzard - snow blowing EVERYWHERE! It was so fun :). Inside the train station they have this thing called an ice palace - its a part of the mountain carved out so everything is ice - walls, floor, ceiling, furniture, and they have a bunch of ice sculptures. We played in there for a while and then eventually rode the train back down through more incredible scenery and then had famous Swiss fondue for lunch. Probably one of my favorite days of the trip.

The next day, my friend Morgan and I hiked over to one of the lakes and then just wandered around the town enjoying the beauty of the place. Morgan is orginally from Bozeman, Montana and now lives in New Zealand, so she is all about mountains and snow and she loves them as much as I do, so it was fun to share that with her.

Overall, probably my favorite location of the whole semester, and somewhere I can not wait to go back to!

Free internet is about to run out, so I must be off, but happy Thanksgiving and all my love to all of you :)