Clouston sisters united at last: Strasbourg, Interlaken, and a little bit of Bern

After Mollie’s horrible nightmare of a trip, we were finally united at the Citadines hotel in Strasbourg at 5:30 pm on May 18^th.  Now, when I say “horrible nightmare,” what I really mean is enduring an 8 hour flight that was 45 minutes late, losing 6 hours of her life with the time change, and then missing her connecting bus to Strasbourg because of a “computer glitch” with her baggage.  So, instead of arriving for a French lunch at 11:30am, she spent all day in the Frankfurt airport.

Alas, she finally arrived and at long last my trip became our trip.

Strasbourg

We immediately went to meet the rest of the group for a boat tour of Strasbourg that covered the basics of the city.  

We then went to the best restaurant we have ever eaten at, Le Stras´.  Navigating the language barrier was certainly a challenge, but our waiter (who may have also been the owner?) was fantastic, and our food looked like art and tasted like heaven. 

The brownie looking deserts are actually chocolate marshmallows. 

Pistachio crème brȗlèe with a side of fudge.
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The next morning we moved into our own room, which felt like a move for me from the school part of my European excursion to the fun part. We started our morning in search of wine tasting in the basement of the old hospital. When we heard this, our first reaction was “excuse me, did you say wine tasting in a hospital?” Well, the answer was “yes,” and it was amazing. The hospital has been there since the 1300’s and the basement is now full of giant beautiful wooden wine barrels (excuse our absent mindedness in regards to the real name of these).  We didn’t actually get to taste wine since the tasting season begins in June, but we did bring home a delicious bottle of Riesling just to keep them honest. For lunch we visited the inside of the cathedral and then shared a traditional Alsatian tarte flambe´ and 2 Kronenbergs. 

The infamous tarte flambe´

After second wonderful French dinner in two days, we fell asleep and were off for Interlaken.

This meal was called "Pork knuckle" and I ate it :)

Mollie's Strawberry Melba in an edible basket. 

Interlaken

We have had a love-hate relationship with Switzerland these last few days.  It was all lovey-dovey at the beginning, starting with the train ride. We hauled our million pounds of luggage onto the Swiss train in Basel heading for Interlaken and we were panicking because we had forgotten to activate our Eurail pass beforehand.  When the attendant finally came to take our ticket, she not only helped us figure out how to use the pass, but informed us that we were in the wrong section of the train. We were riding in 2^nd class, but our passes were for 1^st class. FIRST CLASS. We grabbed our crap and ran up the stairs to sit with our fellow classy peeps.   Then we approached the Alps entering Interlaken and the views were the most breathtaking we’ve seen. Things between us and Switzerland were really great at this point.

View from the train entering Interlaken

Then we got to the hostel. It is very aesthetically charming outside, but upon entering the reception area to hearing a group of obviously American fratboy voices saying things like “hey dude, I’m gonna do like 10 Johnny Reds tonight” we realized, we were in fact, in a hostel.  Our room was really clean and we would recommend it to any frat boys out there or others looking to party hard and only go to the hostel to sleep.  We don’t regret staying there, it was certainly an experience one should have, but that will probably remain our one and only hostel experience.  

Balmer's Hostel, Interlaken

Two parts of being in Interlaken were awesome.  The views (mountains on all sides, all the time), and canyoning. I wish we could have purchased the video of us climbing, repelling, jumping through waterfalls, and sliding on our behinds down the rapids.  Unfortunately, a girl in our gang got hurt and the video got cut short (and the video still would have cost 40 bucks). We absolutely recommend canyoning to anyone who considers doing it.

Views in Interlaken

So the “hate” part of our relationship with Switzerland is largely due to how freaking expensive it is to eat here. We were starving after our canyoning adventures this morning and considering how expensive it had been to eat the previous day, wanted to get something cheap.  We knew we could always count on McDonald’s in the cheap department and decided the golden arches would have to cut it for lunch before heading to Bern.  We were almost in tears when we put in our orders for some good ole’ cheeseburger meals with water and coffee and our bill was 35 dollars. Switzerland, we tried so hard to love you, why’d you have to do us like that?????

We got on the train to Bern slightly less hungry but SO over Switzerland.

Us at the Interlaken train station getting ready to head to Bern. 

We got to Bern around 4, ate some more Swiss gourmet food (by “gourmet” we mean a pile of melty cheese for 20 dollars that they sell here as pizza), and did some beautiful site seeing. We are now in the train station waiting for our Swiss friend Simon to come collect us. We are hopeful that he will show us a good enough time so that when we leave for Marseille in the morning we are back to the “love” part of this thing we got going with Switzerland.

Beautiful Bern, Switzerland

An old tram car in front of the tram museum in Bern.