March 12, 2023
I've now been in Zurich for just over a month, and I've been traveling around Switzerland on the weekends. This blog post is also a photo dump, with even less context than last time. All photos have been scaled down to make the page load faster. Delete "resized/" from the image link to view the full image.
On the final day of German class, we went to the Lindt chocolate factory.
Then we went on a boat tour around Lake Zurich.
That weekend I hiked the Uetliberg mountain near Zurich with some friends and flatmates and various other ESN attendees.
There is a program in Switzerland called snow25 where people under 25 years old can pay as low as 25CHF for train travel to and from select ski resorts, as well as an afternoon lift pass at the resort. So the next Saturday I took advantage of this program and went skiing in Stoos. Visibility was not great, so I couldn't take any pictures. In any case, that Sunday there was a lot of snow outside my apartment.
The next Saturday (last Saturday) I took a day trip to Bern with some more flatmates and friends. We hiked the Gurten mountain which gave us a great view of the lush countryside and the city. In the afternoon, we walked around Bern before visiting the Einstein Museum at the Bern Historical Museum.
This weekend, I went on a weekend trip with some friends and flatmates to Grindelwald and Interlaken, two popular villages in the Bernese Oberland. I purchased a snow25 pass for Saturday and skied in Grindelwald in the afternoon. Visibility wasn't great so the views weren't as remarkable as Sunday (keep scrolling), but I had goggles this time around so the skiing was a comfortably challenging adventure.
Switzerland also has a similarly-themed program for hostels called sleep25, which allows one to rent a bed in a hostel for as low as 25CHF. There were six of us, so we were able to rent a single room with six beds for $200 total.
This hostel had won multiple awards among Swiss hostels and is apparently one of the best in Switzerland. It had an attached restaurant (with affordable dinner options and free breakfast), which I was told is unusual. Even if the other hostels around Switzerland aren't as fantastic, the sleep25 program still seems like a solid way to link together multiple day trips and explore all of Switzerland.
Today, half of the group continued skiing and the other half (including me) hiked around Interlaken. We walked along Lake Thun and visited some nearby ruins. The water here was incredibly clear, and the views were all remarkable.