Life in Switzerland

Now that I've finished most of my exams (everything except my German presentation), I've been working on getting out to explore more things in the area. All of the pictures are on top of the respective captions; I don't really feel like going through and styling them so that they look "correct" at the moment.

On Saturday, I took a long walk / hike around St. Gallen. I found a nature preserve that has a lot of hiking trails, and will probably check that out again.


View of St. Gallen. Well, part of it at least.


These are the stairs I walked up at the very end of this "ascent", before hiking a bit further to get to the nature preserve, and then hiking down into the valley again, and walking in the direction of Lake Constance.


This is a view of the nature preserve after walking through it. There was a little farm with a restaurant and a barn where you could buy eggs or milk. I didn't buy any this time, but I'll remember that it's up there


This was a view from the farm, looking away from the nature preserve.


That night, I made some cheeseburgers. Not all that exciting, but I took pictures anyway.


Charring up.


This is what Swiss ground beef looks like. Weird, huh?



End result.


On Sunday, I pretty much just stayed around the apartment. Did laundry, watched the Obama-GOP deal, cleaned my room, etc. A friend of mine from Waldsee had been skiing in Austria, in the part right next to Switzerland, over the weekend, and asked if I wanted to come hit the slopes on Monday.

So, today I woke up early, and caught a train to Austria, and we ended up in a little town called Lech. You can see here that the area was quite mountainous. I hadn't been skiing since high school, so I had my fair share of wipeouts, etc. At the end of the day, my muscle were all sore, and I was definitely ready for a rest. I might go skiing again next weekend as well, when I go to visit Brian in Munich.


This is what Austria (and lots of Switzerland too) looks like. We didn't ski on this mountain, but I thought that it looked pretty good in the morning sun and with the river there. The river looked sort of surreal because there was steam billowing off of it.



After going up two ski lifts, this is what we saw. It's on the back side of the particular mountain, and I stuck to the less-advaned trails that (relatively) slowly descended the mountain.


This is more mountains, as seen from the top of the slope. We certainly didn't think about going to ski over there, but other people had definitely made their way over there to enjoy the fresh powder snow.


This was a little cabin that was in the middle of the slope. There were actually a few of these on different routes. Inside, there was a little bar / sitting area, and a restaurant area. We ended up getting a cup of hot chocolate here to warm up.



Looking out over the valley at the mountains on the other side. A lot of the area looked like this, it was pretty spectacular.


This was at the bottom of the first run that we did, and one that I kept on doing throughout the day. Keep in mind that this is still at least halfway up the mountain, as we had to take a chairlift to get this high in the first place.




Self portrait.


We ate lunch ate one of the places on the slope, and I probably had the largest Wienerschnitzel that I've ever seen in my life. It was pretty delicious, and definitely hit the spot after using up so much energy. After lunch, some clouds rolled in and visibility dropped (while my wipe outs increased... interesting relationship there), but it was still fun.


Over the next week or so, I'm going to be taking care of a lot of little things, and preparing my German presentation. It's a 15 minute presentation on pretty much any company or product that I want, and it counts as the verbal section of my German exam, so that I get credit as having German as my Level 2 foreign language. This upcoming weekend, I'm planning on heading over to Munich to visit Brian and then potentially go skiing again on Sunday. We'll see how I've recovered, and what their skill level is, but that's the plan for now. Next week, I have my "test first day" at a part time job that I landed doing some web programming for a consulting company here in St. Gallen. It pays well, the hourly wage is probably double what I would earn in the US doing this part time. We'll see how that turns out. In other news, I'm going to the post office to pick up my graphics tablet today (they tried to deliver it while I was gone, and no one was home), so I have some time to get used to it before the semester starts.

So! It's late, and I'm exhausted from skiing all day, and probably made a bunch of typos. Goodnight!