SWITZERLAND

The first that comes to my mind with Switzerland is nature, green, mountains, cleanness… even the cities don’t look like cities.

This is the first country that we had to exchange money, or get local money from the bank machine; to avoid commissions it is better to get the entire amount to spend in the country. In this case it was 100 Swiss Francs (60 €) but in our second they, as we said, with the money of the train to Zermatt and the food for the trek, we had just 19 Swiss Francs (11 €) and fortunately we were able to cross this expensive country in 10 days with this money in our pocket.

After travel in Valais province, we went straight to the capital Bern, hitchhike it’s perfect, in two hours we covered the distance of 160km. We didn’t realize when we arrived to the center of the city, we expected the classic city full of buildings, but no; here it seems like we are out of the city in a residential area. The historical centre is almost surrounded by the big curve that the river Aare makes.
The cathedral or the Clock Tower, are nice places to visit; and the streets, most of them with underground entries to shops and restaurants.

We felt a lot of cultural and architectonic changes. Is said that the people here is cold, perhaps, but the people that we meet through HC and CS, are open people and with interest about to know about us and our travel.
We saw that the people care a lot of the body, they use to have biologic food, nothing is messy in the houses; there is no comparison between the students flat where we stay before, with the Swiss student flats…

We went to the center of the country to a nice city at the shore of a lake, surrounded of mountains; Luzern.
We were very comfortable at Tobias house with his flat mates; we stay there for three days. In the small historical centre there is not much to distinguish; there is a big wall with towers and in one of them there is an old clock, which is working with gears and pulleys; and the “Hurt Lion” which is carved on the rock wall of a small hill.
Really the most beautiful is the settlement of the city.

When we were trustful of the weather, and enjoying the “summer”, the cold catch us again, the temperature fell down to 9ºC, with rain and snow on the nearby picks. With this weather we arrived to Zürich, the largest city of Switzerland, where we were “living” in a community in the suburbs, in an industrial area. It was like a big old building where each of the 13 people living there, have made their own living space; a part from a common kitchen and recreation room. It was an interesting experience to meet this community.

Zürich is the business city in Switzerland, the city center is similar to what we saw before in other Swiss cities, and like Luzern is located near a lake.

We continue traveling by hitchhiking far to the last big city on the east, St. Gallen to leave definitely the country; it was very nice the Cathedral which is protected by UNESCO; but the best was the company of Corinne and Christina of CS; they brought us in the night to a hill with beautiful views of the city, and also with the company of some local beer…