Zermatt II

This morning, I got up relatively early and was on the slopes by 9:30 AM. This time I went to the Sunnegga (Sun corner) instead of Gornergrat. I think I liked the Gornergrat better, but both were still pretty good. At Sunnegga, you can take the lift higher up to Blauherd and Rothorn. If you go to the Zermatt site you can see a map of the area.

It turns out I did a black run by accident up in the Rothorn Paradise - I must have taken a wrong turn, because I meant to take the blue route, but ended up on a run that was really steep and took me forever to get down, since I just kept going from side to side.

Here are some pictures! In some of the pictures, you can see the JamesBond-esque building in the distance on top of the Gornergrat, the mountain I was on yesterday. Since Dad specifically mentioned Visp, I got some pictures from the train heading up from Zermatt to Visp, and from the Visp train station. I was going to take a couple more of the surrounding mountains, but the train heads into a tunnel pretty quick.





















I've got a few more pictures, but my Picasa is running low on space, so I won't upload them all.

Zermatt

The company that I work for doing translations, Picard Angst, decided to invite all of the employees to Zermatt for a ski weekend. Since I've never been, am horrible at skiing, and want to see as much of Switzerland as I can, I of course signed up right away. The guy from the ski rental made sure to correct me: I'm not "bad" at skiing, I'm just a beginner and am inexperienced.

Starting in St. Gallen, it was about a 5 hour trip. Here's the approximate route.

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An interesting thing about Zermatt is that no cars are allowed. The road stops in a city called Täsch, and from there you have to proceed by train, helicopter, or electric car. As a result, there are a lot of little electric cars / buses / taxis / horses etc zipping around Zermatt. It's pretty neat.

We arrived on Friday evening, so conditions were suboptimal for picture taking. As part of the program, all of us went to a place called CERVO, and had some Swiss specialities. Here are some pictures from the train and from my hotel room's balcony:











On Saturday, I went skiing. I didn't go to the Matterhorn itself, but went to a nearby mountain called Gornergrat. Since it's fairly high up, you have to take a train to get to the top, and up top there's a James Bond -esque fortress / mall. From there, you have a perfect view of the Matterhorn, the Dufourspitze, and many other mountains, as well as the valley.

At first, I was pretty nervous, since I haven't been skiing since last January when I went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany with Brian Holmes and when I went to Lech am Arlberg in Austria with Alicja / Alison Link. Links to old blog posts here and here. After I made it down the first curve or two, I had gained a lot of confidence in my ability to stop, steer, and control my velocity. I stuck to the blue runs for the most part, and took a few pictures.


















After working up my confidence on the blue runs for a bit, I gave a red run a try. Of course, the first one I tried had an immensely steep drop-off, and I went too fast and seem to have sprained my hand. That put me out of action for the rest of the day, but I still got to hang out up on top of the mountain and enjoy the view. If you're a good enough skier (i.e., can do red runs :) ), you can ski across the border into Italy and back. I think I'll save that for next time...

Now, I'm planning on getting to bed early so that I can get up early and try out the Sunnegga area (instead of the Gornergrat). Here's a map, if you want to get a vague idea of how things are situated. You can also compare that to the Google map below:


View Larger Map

So! I'll make sure to take more pictures tomorrow, and some pictures from the train on my way back to good old St. Gallen.

Thanksgiving in Berlin!

It's been about a month, so I'd say it's time for my next update. This time from Berlin! Over the past few weeks, we've gotten some snow in St. Gallen, so winter seems to have begun. Unfortunately, I'm pretty bad at remembering to take pictures, so you'll just have to use your imagination in some parts.

I've been super busy in the past few weeks - went to Longbridge in Basel to teach English to Swiss kids twice, and now I'm up north in Berlin. Here are some assorted pictures of everything!

These pictures are from Langenbruck, which is where we have the Longbridge English camp.








Blake, a friend from high school, and his cousin Angie were on vacation in Germany, so we met up in Zürich for a day. It happened to be the first day of Fastnacht, which was quite a surprise and a neat coincidence.










Berlin is super cool. They even have an NPR station, and we're listening to Garrison Keillor. On Friday, there was a get-together of some random assorted Waldsee people, which was a lot of fun. We went out to some tiny village in Brandenburg, and had some really good food. Lots of fun.




I've been saying with Antonia (real name: Christina), a friend of mine from Waldsee, who also sheerly randomly happened to be in Hamburg and London the same summers that I was there. She's got a neat group of friends, with a lot of people who grew up bilingual and/or are half-American. We went to see some of them (some of whom I had even met before!) and had my second Thanksgiving of the weekend, and third this year.

I also visited Ronny, another counselor from way back, and saw his kids. Thorsten (Chris), a Waldsee counselor from Rochester, is the godfather for Julius, the older one. It was fun to run around with a 2 year old for a bit.





As I saw most of the "must-see" attractions when I first came to Berlin 5 years ago, it's not too frantic and I've been able to enjoy myself without worrying about what I might have missed. We're going to head out now to see an exhibit about the Berlin Wall - should be exciting!