Daaaaaaang.
Yeah, so. Kelly and I decided to do our own thing in Switzerland this weekend, but since I had to see a show for a class, we couldn't leave until Friday morning. This meant traveling from 8AM to 6PM, consequentially cutting out a lot of time in Interlaken. Thankfully, unless you're partaking in one of the many high-adrenaline, blood-pumping, why-in-God's-name-am-I-doing-this extreme sports, there's not a lot to do. So, Friday night, we found our hostel (the Funny Farm...classy naming, I know) where we were greeted by an ENORMOUS SAINT BERNARD. Yes, the hostels in Switzerland have dogs. Particularly large dogs. Yes, I spent a lot of time in the public lobby of a highly populated hostel baby-talking and practically rolling around with a big, hairy, smelly dog. I talked about that Saint Bernard a whole lot while we were there. After putting down our stuff and silently deciding that our Iowan roommates were, frankly, boring, we headed to the Thai restaurant right down the street (Saint Bernard? A Thai restaurant? Interlaken is practically Lynchburg, VA) for dinner. Mmmmmmm. After that, we attempted to play card games with the 36-carded deck the generous bartender at the hostel had given us, and then we went upstairs and studied for mid-terms until approximately 10:45.
Then, Saturday, we got up fairly early and walked around the shops. I looked for an antique bookstore everywhere, feeling that since I was in the Swiss Alps, maybe I could find a copy of Heidi for my mother; alas, there are not many bookstores in Interlaken, and the ones that do are mostly too small to carry any copies of the novel. We got a quick lunch at the Thai restaurant (YES it was that good) and then met up with our skydiving group.
Yeah, skydiving.
It was pretty phenomenal. We flew to 13,000 feet, I sat on the stairs of an open plane and my instructor barrel-rolled us into the sky over the Swiss Alps. Free-fall for approximately 53 seconds, where I made no sounds--just grinned like an idiot--and the parachute was pulled at 4,000 feet. After that was about 5-7 minutes of airtime, where my ruggedly handsome Australian instructor Mick did as many tricks (aka spinning around a LOT) as he could to try and frighten me. He couldn't. But he did tell me, in the midst of our 4,000 feet-high conversation, that before he skydove for a living, he used to work in an underground coal mine. How's that for poignancy?
