Hotel Europe Zermatt

Destination 405

km197'555

Not entirely shure, if I spend my last day in a foreign country, I head towards north. A stopover at Novi Ligure provides me finally the opportunity to send a notification to all family and friends about my remaining itinerary before return back home. The date has been fixed to the 29.
The ride up to Vercelly in the low lands was not that exciting like the sighting of the mountain of Mont Blanc in the far. Since my ...

... used my final day of my eurrail pass for this trip only to find that the trip from Visp station to the Zermatt was not valid despite being told by two train operators that it was. I also couldn't get through to the girl at the station that my eurrail pass allows me discounts for the train but she kept telling me, 'no, no, you can't use anymore days it's full'. Today wasn't the first time I have been stuffed around by the Swiss. It's hard to believe that Einstein was educated here.

... br>We had decided to travel via Aosta, so as to get as close to the roadbook outlined route as possible. About midday, we got our first views of Mont Blanc, or Monte Bianco, as the Italians know it. As we turned off the motorway, we could still see it, until the narrow winding roads took us across the other side of another mountain.

Now we realised this was our last chance to get the police photo, as soon we
wouldn't be in Italy any ...

... town of Zermatt and its Matterhorn views.

Zermatt is a very small town of only 5000 people with no petrol fueled vehicles at all. They have little electric taxis and horse drawn carriages to take people around. Very cute.

We made our way to our hotel which was unfortunately up a small hill. This would have been ok except for we took a couple of wrong turns and our backpacks were getting heavy!

The receptionist was a lovely guy and explained that the ...

We woke "late" (8am) and were the last to leave our bunk. Skipping breakfast, we began our 5 hour journey back to Zermatt. We chose a route that would give us a different view of the valley, but involved 1800m of decent. We paid for it for the next few days. We arrived at our apartment and ...

Basically a travel day, we left Paris at 1pm and arrived in Zermatt at 9pm. The kids did great and our apartment was ideal. Hiking here we come!
     

(For those of you who asked me to include more information about school, classes, etc. in my blogs, it's not going to happen for the rest of my time in Switzerland. My classes are too terrible to even mention, and it only makes me mad thinking about it ... so, enjoy the much more entertaining stories about my weekends ...) Well, I accomplished my mission of not dying and not breaking anything while skiing in the ...

... excursions were pretty outrageous and were more geared toward skiers than sightseers. A round trip ticket was at least $75 for each of us. I had also wanted to try and do some skiing but the costs were also prohibitive unless I had my own gear, which I obviously did not. With nothing left to do other than lose feeling in our faces from the cold we set off via train for Bern, the capital of Switzerland.

... the moment the summer trainees are here so every weekend the committees organize a trip somewhere. This is the story of my first IAESTE weekend. It was actually over a month ago but I still havent integrated into the Swiss culture completely yet so waiting is sometimes required (patience is the virtue Im trying to teach the Swiss as a swap). .. The story goes like ...

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Here is a video (sorry for the very bad quality)
http://www.youtube.com/watc h?v=R5_9hODsqgs