What a week! After a relatively calm January and February, I can already feel my travel schedule starting to pick back up. Writing this week’s post was surreal because for the first time ever I got to ski the Swiss alps and for the first time in awhile I got to write about adventures with one of my very best friends. It was so nice having her back in my close vicinity and I can’t wait for our next trip! Until then, I’ll keep scrolling through all of these insane videos and pictures we captured shredding in Switzerland!
Lazy dazy with Lola
Elinor landed in Berlin on Tuesday and we went to Interlaken on Wednesday, so Monday was my only relaxed day this week. To relish in the downtime, I hug out with Lola and ordered all of my food as take out. There’s a fine line between self-care and self-destruction, but boy do I walk that line well.
BEST FRIEND IN BERLIN
Elinor made it to Berlin! It was so lovely being able to show one of my favorite people around one of my favorite neighborhoods in Berlin. When she arrived I greeted her on the street with a home made sign and a big hug. After a brief apartment tour, Elinor and I got lunch at Umami and caught up on the past 5 months. It’s crazy that we were once neighbors and now we are 3,965 miles apart! Luckily, we both love traveling and we both have the same end goal…brownstone apartments across the street from each other in NYC. So for now, I can be okay with meeting up in random cities around the world for skiing, concerts and exploring.
OVERNIGHT TRAIN
To maximize our time together, Elinor and I decided to take an overnight train ride from Berlin to Zurich. We bought dinner from Zula, snacks from Edeka, donuts from Brammibals and booze from Duty Free for the train ride. We even timed it all perfectly and got to the station with seconds to spare. Seconds that I used to run to the top floor of Hauptbahnhof and buy vegan Curry36. Our plan was to party alone in our cabin, but when we walked into the train there were two other people also in the room. After a few minutes we found out that they were both students escaping Ukraine! They told us stories about crossing the border and showed us videos of bombs going off outside their buildings. It was truly scary to see, but they both were keeping in positive spirits, as much as they could. Only one of them had a backpack, and the other had lost everything in the evacuation. I can barely wrap my head around there being a war in Europe and now I’m listening to war stories in my overnight train car. To help add a little sparkle to their week of train rides, we split our donuts, snacks and drinks with them. Then we stayed up for awhile playing coin games and killing time. We parted ways with them on the border of Switzerland, but kept in contact and I know they made it to their next destination and were reunited with family. I hope the war ends soon and they’re able to return to all of their belongings and their life in Kiev.
Interlaken
Holy cow, Switzerland is gorgeous. I can’t even grasp how beautiful everything is and it seems to be so casual for everyone that lives there. On our first day we just relaxed, rented our gear, bought groceries, and went on a small hike in the evening, but the entire time all I could do was look out over how stunning the surroundings were. If this was the backdrop of my everyday life I don’t think I would ever mind running errands.
Gear rental
We rented our gear from Eiger Sports in Interlaken and the experience was amazing. The process was quick and the team that helped us get our gear was super knowledgeable and nice. I would and will rent from Eiger Sports again in the future because they made the process so effortless. After skiing for 3 days I can also say that the gear is great too. My snowboard boots were comfortable the entire time and Elinor’s ski’s worked great on the combo ice and slush conditions.
SKIING THE SWISS ALPS!
For my full post on skiing the Swiss alps, click here.
Spring skiing in Switzerland, what a dream! At the beginning of March I went to Switzerland with a few friends and we used Interlaken as our home base to explore the Jungfrau Ski Region. In the Jungfrau region there are three main sections of the mountain: Grindelwald-First, Grindelwald-Wengen and Murren-Schilthorn. We started day one on the Grindelwald-Wengen side because it was the easiest to reach and it had a majority of the runs on the mountain. We spent two whole days of non stop skiing on the Grindelwald – Wengen side of the resort and I still don’t think we saw it all. We would take the first lift up in the morning and then spend two hours traversing routes down the mountain until we made it back to where we started. It was amazing! For the second half of our skiing adventures we ventured out to the other side of the resort by taking the train from Kleine Scheidegg to Winteregg and then taking a tram up to Murren and even further up to the peak. We spent a few hours exploring the runs on Schilthorn and watching paragliders fly off the side of the mountain before catching the train back to Männlichen and skiing home. The whole experience was actually insane, but it’s hard to grasp how crazy it all was because everything about skiing in Switzerland was insane. The giant mountains, the hour long runs, the paragliders and paraskiiers… all of it, insane.
APRES SKI
Obviously, when in Switzerland… you come for the skiing, but stay for the apres! The apres skiing was so much fun and we were able to squeeze in different styles of apres each day. Our apres varied from Grindelwald bars with overpriced pizza and live band karaoke (Wagon Wheel, duh) to DJ’d parties at the base of the mountain. We were also able to ski down the mountain and stop at several off piste bars, which made sure we were always ready to apres by the time we hit Grindelwald terminal.
HIKE
Interlaken is known for it’s hiking, so on my final day in the city I took some time to check out the easy hikes around the city. The best and easiest to reach was The Rugen trail. The Rugen trail is a simple loop around kleiner Rugen and to the top of the mini mountain. I walked around the trail and in the woods for 2 hours and only passed 2 people on horseback. I loved the peaceful forest even more when it was completely empty. I spent awhile sitting on the several red benches scattered throughout the trail and looking out over the beautiful mountains I just spent the week skiing!
FAMILY FACETIME
To round out the week I spent my final evening in Interlaken facetiming my family and showing them the views from my hostel. I love Facetime, it’s such an amazing invention.
