Last Night of the Trip: Discovering Zurich's Night Life

So here we are. The last night of the trip. Packing up everything, getting ready for the 11-hour plane ride back to LA tomorrow afternoon. Coolest thing about this flight? We're going BACK IN TIIIME! Our plane leaves at 3PM from Zurich, then we fly for 11 hours and arrive at 4PM in LA. Whooooaaaa!!! Sweet. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep on this flight, so the jetlag isn't too gnarly...some Ambien might be in order to facilitate the process.

For our final day in Europe, my family spent a good amount of time hanging out in Lucerne, extending our time there as long as we could before the train to Zurich. I FINALLY found another place selling Doner Kebaps (a large sandwich made by stuffing a fresh roll full of gyros meat, onion, lettuce, and yogurt sauce...I've been jonesing for one of these ever since I had one at the Vienna farmer's market, exactly a week ago), and there was rejoicing in the streets as I stumbled through my order in a bizarre mix of English and German and came out righteously stuffed with delicious food.

My entire family was on the lookout for new watches while in Switzerland, because hey, Switzerland, so we spent an exorbitant amount of time over the past two days in the 4-story Disneyland of Extraordinarily Expensive Watches, Bucherer. Both of my sisters were able to come out of the experience with some pretty classy watches, and will now tell you exactly what time it is should you even have a stray temporally-themed thought.

This has become their new permanent sitting position.

My mom found a nice bracelet-ey one, to go with the other Bucherer watch that she'd gotten on our last trip to Lucerne, 5 years ago (she was the one pushing for the shopping trip). My dad, in typical fashion, claimed that the Swiss Military watch that he'd gotten from Costco in California was perfectly fine, and looked on in horrified silence as the girls perused the high-priced selection. I found only one that I liked, seeing as I am ridiculously picky about both the style and cost of watches, but had my selection further limited to only the black-crodocile-ish leather strap since they don't make a metal link strap that will fit around my giant hands but still fit snugly to my awkwardly small wrists. It was still pretty nice, but I was unable to convince myself that I needed it and decided to go with a good old fashioned Swiss Army Knife as my major souvenir from the trip.

Our train to Zurich went much more smoothly than our previous trainrides, and with no one maimed or subject to foreign-court litigation, we managed to get all of our luggage into our hotel. Another train ride took us to the downtown area of Zurich, where we found a ridiculously good but unbelievably expensive vegetarian buffet.

So here's the deal with this place. It's called Hiltl, which I have next to no idea how to pronounce. The buffet is a glorious, varied, massive affair filled with an absurd variety of vegetarian dishes, mostly with a distinct Indian flare.

The setting is classy but casual, and the service is all incredibly friendly, plus there's free tap water! (If you've traveled in Europe for any amount of time, you realize that this makes this place like an oasis in the Sahara). Everything looks, tastes, and smells amazing.

The catch? You have to pay by weight.

GASP!

Well, let me qualify that. If you don't want to pay the ridiculously high price of 57.00 CHF (Swiss Franks) -- something like $70.00 -- to have the all-you-can-eat buffet, you have to fill up your plate, then weigh it. The scale then prints you a receipt with your price, which is calculated at 5.50 CHF per 100g, translating in 'Mrrcan as about $7 per quarter pound. As you can imagine, with a buffet this adds up VERY quickly. Here are the receipts for myself, Becky, and Jess. Can you guess whose is whose?

If you can't make that out, prices from left to right:
CHF 19.15, 44.10, 30.45

WELL GUESS WHAT, YOU'RE WRONG!

Ha! Got you there! Mine is actually the 19.00 CHF one...the big 44.00 in the middle was rung up by none other than Ms. Becky Hummel, who made the biggest rookie mistake of weighed buffets: never get the rice. I attribute my low cost to the number of times I've eaten at the Whole Foods hot bar, where you pay $8 a pound for similar foods, so I'm used to gauging the weight. Yes I'm proud of myself. So I celebrated by eating a bunch of Becky's. It was only right.

After this, we took to the streets, wandering around to try to find a good place for a drink or a coffee. The rest of the night can be summed up as follows:

-There was a giant sculpture of a spider by the water.

The car got in the way, but Jess is stepping on it.

-We had drinks at what I'm pretty sure was an outdoor Swiss gay bar.

-We tried to find a coffee shop, and ended up wandering deep into the "West Hollywood" section of Zurich.

-The whole family, walking as a group, passed through a group of obvious prostitutes standing on a street corner. Thank god my dad didn't try to ask them for directions.

-We spent about 1.5-2 hours wandering the less-seedy side of Zurich looking for a place with dessert, eventually walking in a giant loop around the train station and ending up in the same place we'd been an hour before. So we had dessert there. Seemed like a sign.

-We ran into about 6 separate bachelorette parties. I guess it's definitely wedding season.

-Apparently the park outside the history museum is the "cool hang out place" for all of Zurich's Goth subculture. Seems a tad odd.

-Final thought of the night: it's really hard to find a coffee shop in Zurich after 9PM. Who'd'a'thought?

As you can see, it was quite an eventful night. Now we're back at our hotel, packing up for the plane ride home tomorrow. I was quick, so I could post this. Hope you enjoyed that, I'll try to get one more out before we leave, but no guarantees...it'll probably be pretty gnarly in the morning!

Til next time, auf wedersehen!

The Hummels Plank Switzerland

Thanks to a recent picture sent to Jess by one of her friends from college, my family has recently discovered the internet trend known as "planking".  Today, we spent pretty much the entire day wandering around Lucerne, and felt that this was a prime opportunity to get some good solid planking in.  Here are the results:

Dad wins the "Not Particularly Unique, but in a Sufficiently Socially
Awkward Situation to Warrant Appreciation" Award for his plank
right in front of some random Swiss woman (left edge of the picture).

Mom wins the "I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!" Award.

Jess, with Becky and I attempting to recreate the Abbey Road
Beatles' picture in the back.  Becky decided to do her own pose.

Becky planked this awkward statue.  Quite good form, I must say.

I planked a staircase.

My planking masterpiece: had to use my other hand to stabilize so
that my legs could stay flat without another support, but the effect was worth the sore abs.

Hooray for family involvement in internet memes!

I'm Pretty Sure Switzerland Is Messing With Me

Sorry about the lack of posting for the past few days: wasn't a whole lot to post about, just a really relaxing day in Salzburg and an epic tour of the Augustiner Brewhouse.  Maybe I'll write about it later.  For now, Switzerland!

We spent about 7 or so hours today on trains, moving from Salzburg to Munich, Munich to Zurich, then finally from Zurich to Lucerne.  Train seats are better than airplane seats, but not by a whole lot:

The situation also dictated that I watch Eurotrip while on the train.
"Mi scuzi, mi scuzi!"

As you could probably guess, this long trip was not without its difficulties.  We had to hop trains in Munich, with only 10 minutes to run across the entire train station to our next train.  With 7 pieces of carry-on luggage, and 7 rolling bags all pushing the 50-pound checked bag limit, plus a scattering of souvenir bags and coats, this move was quite a project.  My dad and I laid out a game plan, establishing lines of attack and points of exit and luggage transfer, all of which quickly went to hell as soon as the train stopped and we had to contend with the fact that, oh wait, there are about a thousand other people trying to get off the train at the  same time. So it was fun.  But we made it, just barely, and got everyone to their destinations, with my grandparents stopping in Zurich to stay for their flight home tomorrow, and my family moving on to Lucerne.

Ground-kissing would have happened if the floor of the
train station wasn't so nasty.

So, Switzerland.  Swissy-Swiss-Swiss-Switzerland.  This place is a bit of a conundrum.  Lucerne is honestly one of the most spectacularly beautiful cities I've ever been to, and even all the amazing sights from this new trip have not been enough to change that opinion.

This was the sight that greeted us as we got of the train.
I mean really, come on now.

However, despite all this glorious beauty, there is one big problem with this city.  You pay for that damn view.  And you pay hard.  The prices for everything, and I mean everything in this city are absolutely insane.  It makes Disneyland look like a damn Wal-Mart!  Walked into a Starbucks...latte? 7 Swiss Francs.  In 'merrcan?  Somewhere around $8.50.  For a freakin' grande latte.  Just the plain latte.  Who are they kidding here?

Also, our room at the hotel.  And really the hotel itself.  It really just feels like they're playing a practical joke on us.  Look at this thing:

That's the "quintuple" room.  I'm currently sitting on the bed you can see in the far right corner while I type this...and we're paying in the range of $350 a night for this room!  This is in a tiny, tiiiiiny hotel that is supposedly notable for it's outdoor pool.  And by "outdoor pool" they mean the glorified jacuzzi that's set in the alley behind the building.  It's not much to look at.  The hotel itself is rather ludicrous as well, with only 6 rooms per floor, an elevator so small it has a capacity of 4 people, and actual keys for the room...not card keys, but put-them-in-the-lock-and-turn keys, of which we get only 2, and if we lose one, it's an charge of 250 francs to our room.  But then again, it's a damn beautiful city.

Also, the place we ate at was an Irish pub with this happy guy printed all over everything:

So you know it's legit.

Lots and lots of swans, too.

And a good picture with the sisters:

And creepy lights on the mountain, that you just know are alien spy cameras:

And a cool night-view shot of the town:

And a GODDAMN HUGE SPIDER on the bridge thing!!!!

Now it's time for sleep.  Sorry for the abrupt ending, I'm tired.

Wheeeee-zzzzzzzzzzzz

Fly Like An Eagle

(Note:  Back at the hotel in Munich which won´t let me upload pictures, so they´ll have to wait until we get to Zurich in 2 days.  Sorry!)

Today was the point in this vacation which I've probably been looking forward to most: our trip up to the Eagle's Nest, the mountaintop hideout built for Hitler during the Nazi control of Germany.  First of all, let me be clear that when I say "mountaintop", I'm not talking about a small hill, or up in the higher areas of a nice skiing town.  I mean on top of a goddamn mountain:

This is the view from our tour bus as we drove over from Salzburg.  In order to get up to this ridiculously high spot, we first needed to disembark from our tour bus at the sort of "base camp" about halfway up the mountain.  From here, we hopped into these red buses which looked a bit large for sneaking up a tiny mountain road.

Various reactions to the beginning of the ride.  I don't trust other people to
drive me up ridiculously windy, narrow roads.

But sneak up the road we did, coming to quite a few areas where there was about 4 feet between the window of the bus and a sheer cliff face, protected only by a small, clearly-not-strong-enough-to-stop-a-moving-bus railings.

Pictured: not enough space for this bus to safely fit through.

This bus brought us to the base of the facility, which was essentially a brick-lined tunnel blasted into the side of the mountain.  We wandered into this tunnel, shivering at the icy cold breath of the Grim Reaper (or just really strong air conditioning), and walked about 200 feet into the mountain before reaching a brass-lined elevator, in which pictures were verboten due to the highly reflective walls.  By this point, we were all pretty unsure if we were at a historical site, or just the most elaborate Disney ride ever, a feeling not at all helped by the fact that our tour guide was dressed like a stocky German innkeeper from the 17th century.

Into the tunnel...of DOOM!

The elevator brought us and the 40 other somewhat scared, less-than-rosy-smelling members of our group up to the actual facility of the Eagle's Nest.  Quick history lesson:  the Eagle's Nest was a facility built by the Austrians for Hitler in the time leading up to World War II (possibly during it, can't remember for sure), and was meant to be used as a meeting place for foreign diplomats, not as a living quarter.  Therefore it's pretty small, and has little more than a few rock-walled rooms, though there is apparently a very extensive bunker network built into the mountain under it.  The facility, having been bombed and looted extensively by allied forces at the end of the War, is now home to, oddly enough, a nice German restaurant.

I bet their Wienerschnitzel is excellent.

I'll stop talking now, and just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Apparently the restaurant is sponsored by Hofbrau House?

View from above the facility...from a real estate perspective,
the building's not much, but you're really paying for the setting.

Guy's pic in front of a steep cliff.  Manly.

There's a surprising amount of shrubbery up there, all tastefully arranged.

THE MISSSTTTT!!

Down the mountain...that's a town in the middle-right-hand side.
Like a whole town.

"Hmmyes, Sir Hummel, that does look remarkably like a new,
unexplored territory, just ripe for a flag-planting!"

Somewhat more impressive  retake of an earlier picture from Pismo Beach.
I would post the older picture for reference, but facebook sucks
and I can't get download any pictures, even of myself.  Wtf.

Little stair path down the side, found a cool little arch and random
bench at the bottom of it!

Epic scenery photo.

So yeah, as you can see, it was a pretty cool place.

Salzburg - A Cool Place With Lousy Hotel Internet

So we got to Salzburg today, and while the city itself is awesome and super fun to wander around in, the damn hotel doesn´t have free WiFi in the rooms.  I got spoiled by these past few, but now it looks like we´re close enough to Germany for the dang pay-for-internet thing to kick in.  Therefore, I´m forced to write this from a little kiosk in the main lobby, and can´t upload any pictures until tomorrow at the earliest, when we get back to the other stingy internet hotel in Munich.

Most notable thing from today?  I learned that Europeans aren´t as immune to traffic as they´d like us all to believe.  After making a detour to a small German town called Gmunden (that´s not a typo, that´s how it´s spelled, pronounced "gu-moon-den") where we stopped to take a ton of pictures of a beautiful, absurdly picturesque lake in the Austrian Alps, we attempted to squeeze our far-too-large-for-small-German-towns tour bus out of the city, only to find ourselves stuck in a single lane of PARKED traffic.  Like, not even slightly moving, people-getting-out-of-their-cars-to-see-what´s-going-on traffic.  Apparently, there was some major accident in the tunnel that was the main way out, and no one was getting through for a while.  So our bus driver, Claudio, the Italian Stallion, decided to take an alternate route out; unfortunately, we weren´t the first to think of this.  We soon found ourselves in another line of dead-stopped traffic, this time on a street so narrow that even the small sedans in front of us couldn´t turn around to escape, leaving no hope for our giant tour bus to backtrack.

Eventually, we made our way through, discovering that the source of the traffic was little more than too manz people trying to drive on one single-lane road.  Honestly, though, it wasn´t that bad.  If I could post pictures, I could show you that we were stuck on a road in one of the most gorgeous pieces of forest/lake scenery you´ll ever see, and I was able to comfortable nap for the rest of the ride to Salzburg.  All in all, not too bad, but I still felt a slight sense of smug satisfaction knowing that it isn´t just us Southern Californians who have to deal with gnarly traffic.

That´s about it for today, hopefully I´ll be able to get some pictures up tomorrow night, especially since myself, Becky, and my Dad and Grandpa are all heading up to the infamous Eagle´s Nest tomorrow, hiiiiigh up in the Austrian Alps.  Might need some of those famous German schnapps to get me past inevitable vertigo, but it´ll be worth it!  (Look up the Eagle´s Nest if you don´t know what it is, it´s good trivia knowledge if anything.)

Auf wedersehen, ya´ll.

Vienna - It's A Classy Place

It's the end of our second and final day in Vienna, Austria, and I must say I'm pretty impressed!  It's definitely a different kind of impressive than Budapest or Prague, though Vienna is still loaded with the obligatory giant cathedrals.

Not bad.  Not bad at all.

Apparently this is the guy who designed the cathedral...
I guess this is the architectural equivalent of a photobomb?

Probably the most significant difference between Vienna and the other cities that we have visited is just sheer population.  While Munich, Prague, and Budapest were all very densely populated cities, Vienna is just straight up packed full of people.  Germans, Austrians, Americans, other Europeans, they're all just crammed in there like Japanese commuters on a subway.  And the worst part?  It's freakin' impossible to tell who is who. Everyone looks and dresses exactly like you would expect to see in New York or San Diego, so you have no way of knowing if the person you're about to ask for directions is a visiting American, friendly Austrian, or angry tourist-hating native person who will stare at you like you just stepped on her dog when you just wanted to ask what kind of beer they serve at the little restaurant in the farmer's market that you went to with your family...stupid mean waitress...

This farmer's market.  That story was about me.  If you couldn't tell.

Anyways, this is confusing, though it also leads to some extraordinarily random situations.  We came across a major example of this yesterday, while checking out one of the main shopping areas.  As can be expected, this street was filled with people, animals, and street performers

Also, for some reason, the "human statue" people in Europe
all use a squeaky-dog-toy sound, instead of the American
boardwalk-staple robot whirring noise

And lined with really expensive shops and cafes:

Even window shopping here is expensive.

Desperate to find some place where we could sit and drink things loaded with either caffeine or alcohol, we got ourselves a seat at one of the street-seating cafes that are ridiculously common in Vienna.  We passed the time talking and people watching, taking particular interest in the large number of dogs that walked past with their owners.  When confronted with a giant fluffy dog being walked next to a tiny little runt of a pup, my grandma decided to ask the owners what kind of dog it was.  Turns out, it was an Akita, and the little one was a mutt, but that's not the important part of the story: the important thing was that not only were the owners Americans, but they actually turned out to be from Solana Beach, about 10 minutes from where I live! The guy with the Akita apparently works at the US embassy in Vienna, and the other couple they were with were visiting from San Diego...probably the second most ridiculous "small world" moment I've ever experienced, only topped by the time that I ran into a high school friend while walking through St. Peter's Basilica in Rome on our last Europe trip, 5 years ago.

So yeah, that was pretty crazy.  As for the rest of our time, we got to stay at a suuuper nice hotel, with a stocked, FREE minibar and a whole room and fold-out couch to myself!

Found these weirdos wandering the street outside.

This morning was spent touring the huge Shonbraun (sp?) castle, historic home to the Hapsburg family...yes, that Hapsburg family, for all of you who took AP Euro.  The castle was really cool, despite a rather awkward moment on the walk in when I got this unfortunate angle on one of the big fountains out front:

Yeah...and my dad was the one who pointed this out.

The castle was great and all, but really the highlight of the whole thing was this cheeky-ass duck:

He just rolled up to us and was siting right at our feet, staring us right in the eyes and daring us to try to go swimming in his fountain.  I knew when to back down, so we survived the day.

I guess the gardens were cool too.

After a return  to the hotel, and a trip up and down the stairs to try to work off our excessive breakfast buffet, we were ready to head out again.

These stairs.  This is actually how the stairs in our hotel look.

We found our way over to this giant flea market/farmer's market thing for some lunch...this was pretty cool, since it was quickly made clear to us that this was a spot frequented by real Austrian people, not just tourists.  Unfortunately, this also meant that a lot of them didn't speak much English, or were kind of annoyed when they had to.  Therefore, the story mentioned above with the waitress.  I did, however, manage to work in one short German-language conversation with a vendor at the flea market, which pretty much consisted of me asking how much a kitchen knife was, then nodding appreciatively while he rattled off a bunch of long German words, then walking away.  Good enough for me!

Also, I just need to note how ridiculous this flea market was.  The people there were clearly, in many  cases, just selling random crap that they had found or stolen: for example, there was one guy selling two obviously-not-legitimately-obtained car radios among an assortment of glassware and cups.  Another vendor had a box on his table filled with, I kid you not, metal nameplates peeled off the backs of cars ("ACCORD", "CIVIC", "CAMRY", those things).  And there were about a thousand similar vendors, all peddling their own brand of random shizer.

Apparently you would have loved this place, Noah.

After losing my Grandpa for about an hour, then finding him wandering through another part of the market, we decided it was time to get somewhere less crowded, and walked to a nearby park.  There was another giant church here, though the admission fee kept us from wandering in.  There were some pretty epic angel statues out front, though:

Also, definitely found the broken finger from this statue sitting
on the stairs next to it.  Left it on the ledge, figured someone
would fix it later, and I didn't want to risk getting cursed or
something if I had taken it.

A sudden, annoyingly unanticipated rainfall forced us to seek shelter outside a nearby cafe:

Where we waited until we could get back to the hotel.

Ok, I know, this story is going way too long.  So here, I'll just wrap it up with some pictures:

Becky, at a Starbucks that's slightly different from the one she works at.  Only slightly.

As Jess and Becky said, somehow this is a bit different from watching
street performers at Venice Beach.

We at here for dinner on Friday night.  Pretty sweet.

Welp, that's about it then!  Hope  you enjoyed these tales from Vienna, I'll try to keep the stories a bit shorter next time.

Auf wedersehen!