Lakes, Alps & the Matterhorn

The group in Annecy

Vin chaud avec orange

The bridge of love

Once again I'm behind on my travel updates, so here it goes...

Last weekend Heidi, Sam, Chris & I decided to take a day trip to Annecy, France. I had been to Annecy once before on my first trip to France in high school and loved it, so I was really excited to go back. Annecy is a smaller town located just an

hour and a half bus ride outside of Geneva at the base of the French Alps. Most of the town is really modern, but a section of it is all cobble stone streets, canals and winding streets, needless to say we stayed on that side. After leaving fairly early in the morning and enjoying the hour and a half scenic bus ride, we were greeted with a street market and were able to walk around and look at all the produce and local goods. After walking through the city for a couple of hours we found a crêperie and proceeded to have an amazing lunch followed by killer dessert crêpes, mine was a carmel (with a homemade carmel sauce) and lemon crêpe, pretty perfect. After lunch we walked up to the huge château that over looked all of Annecy and is now an art museum. We toured through the museum for a bit and took pictures of all of the city. Once we were done looking around it had started raining and we were getting cold so we found a restaurant, bought some hot wine and discussed how perfect the little town really was. Once we were all warmed up again we ventured back out into the rain and cold to walk along the lake and take in the sights. When I was in Annecy in high school I remember there being a really creepy prison museum, and luckily we ran into it in our walks throughout the city. While most of the exhibits were in French, and for the most part lost on us, the creepiness of the prison and opportunities for creepy photos were not. Once we were done touring the prison we found a cute restaurant for dinner, which ended up being the best part of the day. Because we had to catch a bus back at 7pm, we had to eat dinner early (for the French) and luckily found a cute restaurant and were the only ones in it. The owner of the restaurant was so excited to show tourists the traditional food of the French Alps region and throughly explained each dish, but she didn't speak English, and being the most well versed French speaker in our group (which isn't really saying much) she explained to me all the local dishes and what was in everything, while I did my best to explain to the others about the meals. It was good practice for my language skills (or lack there of). After ordering all the traditional dishes, the owner of the restaurant was so excited about it that she offered us free apéritifs, which are always welcome. The delicious dinner was a perfect end to the wonderful day trip that we had.

Train ride there

The Matterhorn

Please come out of the clouds Matterhorn!

For reals.

After a wonderful trip to Annecy, this past week I was able to take Thursday off of work to go on my first trip into Switzerland to a small town in the Alps called Zermatt so I could see the Matterhorn. My friend Jack & I went, and left early in the morning to catch an early train to the town of Visp. The ride there was absolutely beautiful, filled with small towns, chalets and the alps. Once in Visp we had some time to walk around and window shop before catching the matterhorn express train to Zermatt. The second train was much shorter and took us up into the mountains, passing little groups of chalets and fields filled with goats. Once in Zermatt we walked around the town and took a plethora of Matterhorn pictures before finding a cute little pub to get lunch in. On our way back to the station to catch the train back to Geneva we experienced our first snow of the season, I thought it was pretty dreamy that my first snow this fall was in the Alps in Switzerland. It was also fun to be in the German part of Switzerland, I haven't been able to experience the Swiss-German culture (minus the few times I've been in the Zurich airport) and was happy to have that experience.

This past weekend I went to Prague with Jack and had an amazing time, that deserves its own blog post, so you'll have to wait for that. I can't believe we only have two weeks left on the trip. The time has literally flown and I think everyone is realizing that we only have a handful of days left together, and its getting kind of sad. I'm glad Heidi will be back in East Lansing with me, but it just doesn't seem fair to us that all the Ohio State kids will be able to see each other, but we won't be able to get together as easily. I guess we'll be making some trips down to Columbus this spring. The next two weeks will be spent enjoying Geneva, exploring parts of the city I have some how seemed to neglect, trying to speak as much French as possible and spending time with all the amazing people I've met here.