Everyday Is A New Adventure...

...But some days are more adventurous than others.

Yesterday was one of those days. So just to explain this... Interlaken is known for its EXTREME outdoor sports. Paragliding. Skydiving. White Water Rafting. Zorbing (if you don't know what this is... its AWESOME... you roll down a mountain in a bubble!). I decided to go canyoning. I had heard about it through friends here, and they said it was awesome... so I just decided to go for it. Basically - you're jumping off waterfalls into rapids (that is me in the pic by the way).Pretty awesome right? But you know it wouldn't be a story about me unless I hurt myself somehow. So after all that extreme jumping off clifts and all that stuff you're probably wondering... so what did you do? Fall off a boulder into a pile of sharp rocks? Jump off the wrong waterfall into man eating sharks? Nope. I twisted my ankle tripping off a curb on my way back to the hostel. Very anti-climactic. (My story is that I sprained my ankle doing something extreme... like playing with bunnies. Renee has started calling me "The Walking Accident.")

So to continue with my crazy day, I made a new friend on the train the night before - Andrew the Aussie. We had agreed to meet to go biking or hiking or something like that, so I met up with him and (being the smart person that I am) decided hiking would be a GREAT idea! I mean... you can't go to Switzerland and not go hiking... hurt ankle or no hurt ankle. So there was some little town up in the mountains that he really wanted to go see - whatever, I'm game. So we walk about 20 minutes to the train station (get lost... the signs in Switzerland suck), catch the train to Lauterbrunnen, and then from there this girl in Interlaken had told us that we could either catch a bus or do like a 30 minute hike up to Murren. Sounds pretty easy so far. So being the cheap person that I am, we decide that we're going to do the 30 minute walk to Murren. There's a sign that says "Murren 30 mins/2 Std." Now I'm not really sure what "Std" means, but 30 mins is definately a lie. We were at 795 meters above sea level and trying to get to 1,634 meters above sea level, and my genius mind thinks that this is not very far. Again... WRONG!We start hiking... up the side of a mountain. I started out happy, but about an hour into it Andrew the Aussie just says, "I hate this mountain." Yup... I'm going to go ahead and blame him - it was his idea, I just went along with it. He's the one who wanted to go see the stupid town on the top of the mountain. In fact... we didn't even make it to the town he wanted to see. It took over 2 hours to make it to 1,400 meters and by that point in time I had tripped (naturally) and scraped up my knee, my legs burned, and we still weren't there. But we had some awesome views, drank REAL Swiss mountain water, and saw Swiss cows with little bells on the side of the mountain.You know how sometimes you can go to a place and still feel like you haven't really been there... I have DEFINATELY been to Switzerland.

After that... we ended up actually taking the train up to Murren (where we were trying to hike to). It was a pretty quaint little town and there was pretty much no one there. After that I crashed... unfortuantely, the people in my room didn't. Hostels are nuts. There may have only been 12 beds in the room - but there were at least 14 people in the room. I think the high point of the night was when this one guy gets up and starts doing jumping jacks to prove a point that everyone was being too loud. Out of control.The last thing I learned this weekend (besides dispelling all my stereotypes about Aussies and kangeroos) was that girls don't ever travel alone. I mean - we all know that girls have to go in packs even to the bathroom, but I thought maybe a few would be cool and travel by themselves in Europe. I think that's even more wrong - so the fact that I was in Interlaken by myself was kinda a novelty and makes me kinda hard core. And the fact that I can't help but hurt myself in some way makes me stupid.