I figured I wouldn't bore you with all the details of every minute of my travels so I decided to combine a few countries into one post. This may still be a little long but it will prevent me from becoming long winded and from uploading every single picture! I spent two days in each country, just to give you a sort of timeline for my travels!
May I start with saying that I am so lucky that I speak English! The rest of the world has such a high number of English speakers and even with that, we had trouble sometimes with language barriers. I can't imagine what it would have been like to travel to all these places and have nobody speak English.
So, we start with Prague. I flew to Prague from England with my roommate, Megan and we met up with our friend, Cameron who has family friends in Prague and invited us to stay with them. These people were so kind! We were treated like royalty here. They drove us around, cooked for us, told us all about Czech history, washed our clothes and even gave us parting gifts when we left. We were complete strangers to them and they treated us like family. I will never forget Jana, Petr and Martin!
Prague was such a nice city. There was a good mix of things to see and we pretty much saw it all! We saw the Prague Castle, Charles bridge, John Lennon wall, the Astronomical clock and the main square, the Jewish Quarter, the Petrin Tower and many others. I will name a few of my favorite parts of Prague:
Easter markets were being set up in preparation for Easter. These were food stands serving traditional Czech foods and sweets and fried foods and more! They were set up in the main square near the astronomical clock so it was a fun place to hang out. We took advantage of these food stands a few times and got the Czech trdlo. Not sure how to pronounce it but it was a doughy circular shaped goodie that was crispy on the outside and covered in sugar. SO GOOD.
Exploring the area called Kampa, which was a park like area that went along the river. The John Lennon wall was over there as well as many placed to sit and watch the swans or just people watch. It was a nice place to relax.
St. Charles bridge at night was also a highlight for me. We had only seen the city during the day so we waited around for it to get dark so we could see the bridge and the castle lit up for the night. It was nice to just kinda sit and wait for the sun to go down and watch all the colors that changed as it got darker.
Trdlo. SO GOOD.
View of the city
John Lennon wall
Astronomical clock
River view from Charles bridge
Charles Bridge at night
Megan, Cameron and I took a night bus to Munich to save money and time on travel. It was a good idea in theory but it meant no sleep before another day of sightseeing! We were zombies when we got to Munich. We met up with our friends Tierney, Bridget and Bridgets boyfriend in Munich at our hostel to make ourselves look like humans before starting the day. There are a few main things that I will remember about Munich:
Visiting Dachau concentration camp. I wouldn't say that this was fun, but I'm sure glad we did it. Walking onto the grounds was very moving and imagining the horror of what went on there brought tears to my eyes. It is so sad how dark humans can be. We spent a good amount of time there walking the grounds and going through the museum. I learned a lot more about concentration camps and world war II in a short few hours.
Eating at the Hofbrahous. This is a famous brewery in Munich and we treated ourselves to their famous brew and some traditional German food. Giant pretzels, pork, sauerkraut and beer. Yum.
Exploring the area around the Glockenspiel and spending time in the famous English Garden. We climbed up a tower across from the Glockenspiel which was cool because we could see the whole square and take really nice pictures of the Glockenspiel. Eventually we wandered through another market for lunch and over to the English Garden. It was nice to have some time to relax in the grass outside of the city and play with the daisies and dandelions :)
Me at the Hofbrahaus
Me, Tierney, and Megan in front of the Glockenspiel
Streets of Munich
Glockenspiel from the tower
Chilling in the English Garden
We stopped in Zurich for a few hours to explore the city and take some pictures. (All of which disappeared along with my phone in Rome. More about that in the next post). It was a beautiful city but we were ready to get to the mountains and settle into our chalet! It was about an hour and a half to our chalet in Grindewald which is about 15 ish minutes past Interlaken. The chalet was beautiful. It was nestled right in the middle of the mountains and had a kitchen, beautiful bathrooms and bedrooms and a place to have campfires. We loved it.
Interlaken had some really amazing things to offer us. Again I will highlight some of the favorite things in the very short two and a half days we had there:
Hiking up Harder Kulm. It is named HARDER for a reason. I think we took the difficult path up. Once we got over our tired legs and reached the top I forgot about how much my legs hurt a minute ago and took in the incredible beauty that was surrounding me. It was so exhilarating to finally reach the top after all that hard work and then just know that its ok because I was looking at the most beautiful view of my whole life. Definitely a highlight of my whole month of travel. Or actually more like a highlight of my whole life!
Exploring Interlaken and finding the beautiful lakes full of bright blue aqua ish water. The water though, it was so blue. And the sunshine! Ahhh take me back. I could have spent weeks looking at that water and the mountains surrounding the town were just amazing. I really can't even describe how beautiful it all was!
The last but definitely not least highlight was going to a chocolate show. We all know Switzerland is famous for chocolate and there is a good reason why people. It was fun to watch the chocolatier make little chocolates out of molds and then we got to eat them right there. We got so many free samples.. Maybe thats why I like it because he literally said you can have as many as you want. WHAT. It was sooooo good. Seriously, thinking about the chocolates with homemade caramel in the middle is making my mouth water. I may have had a few of those…
Our beautiful chalet
View from the top of Harder Kulm
On top of the world yo
Picturesque Switz (Photo by Tierney Chlan)
Chocolate show (Photo by Tierney Chlan)
Sadly we had to leave Switzerland. The land of blue water, mountains and chocolate. Or in other words: Heaven on earth. I hope to go back there someday and spend more than two days because that was not even close to enough time! And to take my own pictures and actually have them when I return from my trip...
Next country: Italy! The best of the best and the worst of the worst. Stay tuned..
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