Dear bloggy,
Kristen, Qien (pronounced as Qi En) and I are now on a two-hour train ride from Feldkirch to Innsbruck. We woke up at 4.30am this morning to start our journey to Austria. ARGH~
I have decided not to upload any photographs on you because the blogger dashboard isn’t a user friendly interface. The pictures can be found on my facebook photo albums.
22 August 2010
I left home for Changi Airport on 22 August 2010 (Happy Birthday Jerome Yeo) at about 11pm. My parents and Ming Hoe were there to send me off. I was pleasantly surprised when the counter staff at Row 2 directed me to the business class lane for checking in because the economy class lanes were too packed. I was half hoping that I might be bumped up to a business class seat on board too, but alas, the checking in lane was the nearest I got to the business class league.
Since school starts only on 10 September 2010, Kristen, Qien and I took the opportunity and planned for a short tour around Europe before heading to our schools. Kristen and I are enrolled in Utrecht University in Netherlands, while Qien will be studying in Helsinki, Finland.
Kristen and I took two Boeing 777s to Zurich. We transited at Colombo and at Dubai before arriving at Zurich. The bath and internet access at Dubai refreshed me. Thankfully, we got front row seats on our flight from Dubai to Zurich. The leg room was to die for. The comfort afforded to us caused me to fall asleep quickly, and Kristen discovered an interesting fact about me.
I’m a very deep sleeper.
My parents have long faced this problem, and whined many years about it. I was sleeping when the air stewardess came with her trays of breakfast and she tried to wake me up. Tugging on my shoulders, the air stewardess and Kristen tried to rouse me from my slumber for a good long time. They only succeeded on their fourth attempt. For a moment, Kristen even suspected that I was dead.
23 August 2010
Upon arrival at Zurich, Kristen and I activated our Eurail passes and met up with Qien, who came from a transit at London. We took a train to the city centre, deposited our bags at the lockers and started touring Zurich. Our stay in this city was to be short, so we could only check out the prominent landmarks like St Peter’s Cathedral. After a day of roaming around, we left for Lucerne in the evening, and checked into Lion Lodge Hostel for the evening. The 6-bed dorms cost us about SGD30 per night, and it was pretty decent. The beds and showers were clean, but no meals were provided.
24 August 2010
On the next day, the trio bought our breakfast at coop before touring around Lucerne. They bought some postcards and swiss army knives for a souvenir store too. We visited the Lion Monument, and Chapel Bridge in the city centre before taking a bus to Kriens for Mount Pilatus. We purchased tickets for the cable car, cogwheel and train rides for 55 euros and left for Pilatus Klum, the summit station.
The sights we saw on our way up to Pilatus Klum were breathtaking. The mountain was majestically huge, and the trees which grew on it were lush. I last visited the Alps in December, and they were all covered in snow. Seeing green was a pretty sight.
The temperature at Pilatus Klum was very comfortable at 10 degrees Celsius, but the howling winds led us to pull out our jackets and scarves. Our ascent to the peak at Pilatus Klum was tiring. The thinned air caused us to pant even harder. But our hard work paid off when we reached the top. The bird’s eye view of Switzerland was beautiful. We could see Lucerne and the lake from above. The camera could not catch up with our eyes. There were sights which we couldn’t capture on the camera, and we didn’t know where to crop the mountain because it was too vast even for a wide angle lens. We took the cogwheel train down Pilatus and transferred to another train back to Lucerne at about 4.30pm. Arriving in Lucerne at about 6pm, we bought our dinner quickly because the shops were closing. Qien and Kristen had pasta, while I opted for a quarter slice of margarita pizza. The cheese was yum.
We took away our dinner and ate them at the lounge in Lion Lodge Hostel. After bathing and uploading some photographs, I retired for the evening while the two of them stayed up to write their postcards. And that brings us to where we are now, on our train from Lucerne to Innsbruck.
So dear bloggy and friends, I’ll update you guys again when I have more free time. Till then, catch me on facebook or drop me an email.
Signing off,
Dennis
25/08/10
9.47am (+1 GMT and +1 DST, Utrecht time)
3.47pm (+8 GMT, Singapore time)
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