My first trip in a very long time was to Thun. I went out one day, got on the first train out of Neuchatel, which happened to be to Bern and decided from Bern where to go to next. I have no idea why I chose Thun, but it was great. Well….

I read in the guidebook this paragraph:

“[Thun] has an odd secret, however. After World War II, the authorities decided that in the event of a future invasion, the whole of Switzerland south of Thun was to be abandoned, and the entire population was to assemble here for dispersal into mountain retreats. Switzerland’s largest hospital was hollowed out of Niesen, but despite constant upkeep, has never been used; it remains pristine and fully equipped, and there are probably dozens of other major military and civil emergency installations hidden in the mountains nearby.”

and immediately got it into my head that the world was going to end, right there in Thun, right then at that very moment. The second part of that was because of the massive black clouds that were coming over the mountain.
First, there was the bridge:
I was terrified of it, but at the same time I had to cross it.

I walked along the river, out to the lake, spotting fun things on my way.

Some sort of bike-train:
An interesting boat mooring:
Some graffiti:

This one helped my imagination along a bit.

A boat:
By the time I got to the lake, the sky was black:
It began to rain a tiny bit and I was sure I could see thunder and lightning. I didn’t like the idea of being effectively in the middle of nowhere, either in a storm, or at the end of the world, so I went back to the main town. I’m not sure what came over me at this point. Any sensible person would have gone straight back to the station. I went out into the town. It began to really rain and the English girl walked through the storm in nothing but a t-shirt. I was drenched. I was soaked. I was wearing a t-shirt! And it was wonderful. But it was also too wet for me to bothered to take many photos, so there is just one of the rain in Thun:

Now I had to go back to the station. I walked along the road, watching the buses go past, but not having any money to get on one. But never mind. I got back. I found out when my train was, but noticed that the second one to go, which was already sitting at the platform and had been for some time, was a double decker. What could I do? I got that one back to Bern:
And here is me, dripping wet, taking photos of myself in the glass panels:

We started earlyish in the morning. Not as early as we have done, but early enough. I took my hat and gloves more because of habit than because I thought it was going to be cold. The woman we met on the bus yesterday said there’s completely different weather in Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchatel and I took that as “It’s warmer in Geneva”. It wasn’t. It was freezing – really really icy cold.
We started by jumping on a number 15 tram which turned out to be going the wrong way, so we walked back to the station to start again. Geneva doesn’t seem to believe in maps, or if it does, it doesn’t believe in making them readable. We decided we wanted a 13, so we went to wait for it and Jemma noticed how many scooters there were…

We got our tram, but Geneva still doesn’t want us to be able to get around. Signs at tram stops have completely random things written on them. The first one I managed to spot had FRANCE in big letters, despite being blatantly in Switzerland. How we got to the Nations stop is anyone’s guess, but we managed. This is what we achieved in Geneva in the first two hours:

This is our next failure. We got a 15 tram back (spotting a pattern?) and went beyond the station, supposedly towards the old town. We had nowhere specific in mind, so we just got off when we felt like it, which was when I spotted a lot of sails and thought the lakeside harbour mentioned in the book would be a good place to see.

As soon as we were off the tram, I discovered my sailing boats were actually a skatepark….
Back to the station again. We got a bus this time and went to the park with the giant chess sets, which was opposite the Grand Theatre. According to my map, the Red Cross HQ, Palais de Justice, Russian Church and various other things were within walking distance, so we walked.
Eventually, we found the Palais:

Not as impressive as we were expecting. We had hot chocolate in a cafe opposite it and then walked down the hill to a market with a grand total of two stalls. Jemma bought a Hat, then discovered a bath:

We found ourselves on what looked like the main shopping street, complete with toy shop (no goats though) and when we got to the end of it, we found we were in Place de Bel Air – completely the opposite direction from where we wanted to go. We started to go back, but it was so cold and we planned to come back when the fountain was actually switched on, so we thought all that could wait a while.
While we were at Bel Air, I noticed these:

Lots of them, all along the road and I’d seen them in other parts of the city. What are they and why are they there?
Jemma decided we should go to the Jardin Botanique, so we went back to the station (again) and got a bus out there.
I took 120 photos today, 91 of them there…

This is Tibet/Himalayas. Part of the garden was divided up into gardens of mountain plants from various places in the world. We saw Himalayas, South America, Swiss Alps, Oceania and Middle East, then because it was cold, we went into the big greenhouse.
It was like a jungle:

and so hot and damp that my glasses and camera lens both went misty.
At the back of the first part, there were four or five tanks full of fish and underwater stuff. Here are some wriggly purple-tipped anemones:

and here is Dory, Marlin and Nemo:

Then there were smaller greenhouses off the side. One was full of rocks with the occasional plant among it, but the second was Mexican and full of all kinds of flowers:

We particularly liked this one because it looks like someone spray-painted it:

Outside, we found a bed full of cacti with the wonderful warning:

which means Botany. Having thick, fleshy, water-storing leaves or stems. You learn something new every day….
Then we went in the toilets and had fun posing under the UV light in there…
Next we went in the other greenhouse, a big domed thing. There were more succulents:

and a set of steps so you could walk around the top and look down on the jungle:

I liked looking up:

When we’d finished there, we went back to the station and because it was cold and baffling in Geneva, we decided to come home.

Once again, I’ve managed to blow my electricity. I didn’t feel like another day of sitting on my own in the dark, so I decided to go out for the day, the entire day, and not come back until about ten, so I decided to go to Interlaken. No real reason, it just seemed to be pretty far away and was on my list of places to go.
It took fifty minutes to get to Bern, then I changed trains for Interlaken. It was a double-decker train, and obviously, I went upstairs. It felt very different from a normal train. Darker, smaller, more closed in and the weirdest thing was not being able to hear the wheels properly.
I had a ticket for Interlaken Ost but I got off at Interlaken West. There was a nice mountain view from the station, and a very odd-coloured river behind it:

I had read in my guidebook that there’s not a lot more to Interlaken than a main street with a station at each end. As soon as I came out of the station, I saw a big building, very Alpine-style, which claimed to be Migros. I hadn’t had any breakfast (I meant to get bread at the stations, but I always had to run for my next train), so I went in. It was one of those massive shopping centres, but upstairs it had the biggest Migros I’d ever seen and the entrance was right in the middle, so it was very difficult to know where to start shopping. Eventually I managed to get bread, butter, Pom bears, chocolate and a bottle of apple juice. The apple juice turned out to be fizzy, but it did at least taste of apples which is more than most fizzy apple juice seems to.
I start wandering up the road, deliberately took a side-street and walked up the road. There was a sort of park with benches, so I sat down there to eat my bread:

Nice mountain view and because the field was half-dead and all brown, it looked almost like New Zealand looking across it:

Behind me, there was a coach and it started reversing. I assumed it was going to try and turn around right there in the road and get in the way of all the cars, but it didn’t, it reversed down a tiny side-street. Ok, it was going to use that to turn around. But it didn’t! It just kept reversing down there. There was nothing there, the road would come to a dead end in about 200 yards, but the coach driver knew what he was doing. I think. I finished my bread, forgot about the coach and went on.

As I was walking down the road, I saw something that didn’t quite look right. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but when I thought about it, I realised what it was…

An English phonebox. I didn’t notice the dumpy coke machine with the chinese roof next to it until I was coming back down.
The next interesting thing I came across was a church apparently growing out of a Chinese garden (a half-frozen Chinese garden). I was in the middle of taking a photo of it when a man walked past wearing a Christmas tree hat. Obviously, I had to get a photo of that, but as my victim didn’t know, he walked away as I was taking it. Here’s my attempt – that hat is tree shaped!

And here’s what he distracted me from:

Anyway, I got to the end of the road and came to the East station. Without intending to, I had managed to walk all the way up the high street. I stood down by the river and looked at it for a long time. It was an incredible colour and I took about ten photos, just to try and capture the colour. They say the sky is blue because it reflects the sky, but it’s not true. The sky was completely grey. There was no reason that I could see for it being such an incredible colour. This one gets the colour well:

This one gets the view up the river, complete with mountains in the background:

I wandered around the station, noticed there was a Coop next to it. It seemed a very sweet little arrangement: Migros next to one station and Coop next to the other:

I walked back down.
I stopped at a shop to get some postcards for my wall and when I went inside, discovered it was a toy shop. I checked it for goats but there weren’t any. Then I spotted a rainbow koosh and couldn’t resist it. I also wanted to get a picture of something I saw on the way up, but I had been on the wrong side of the road at the time. Now I was on the other, so I could get a photo of it properly….

Half a cow sticking out of a wall!!! I followed this back road. There was nothing down there. Literally, once you’re off the main street, there’s nothing there, except a couple of pretty buildings and a big wall of mountain:

I was back at the station about fifteen minutes before my train was due and took lots of photos of the German high-speed train that came in. This is only one of about six:

The view was better now, although it might not look it in the photos:

The train that I got back to Bern was only a normal one. Disappointing. I sat opposite a man with a baby (actually, they sat opposite me, I was there first!) and honestly, although it was quite cute, the baby looked like a baby orc. It had that sort of face and ears. It could have been a horrendous hour, trapped in a train with a baby, but every time it cried, the man took it away.
I had planned to stay in Bern a while, maybe have a drink, delay coming back to Neuchatel, but it was cold and I was tired, so I decided to just come back.
Back in my dark room, I threw myself on Jemma’s mercy. Peedee’s here as well, so we’re all just sitting in Jemma’s room, playing computers.

Peedee has been looking forward to this for months, since about May, she says.
We got up very early on Saturday morning because the train left at 7.34. Peedee was convinced she was dying and was set on flying back to American first thing Monday morning and never coming back because she hates the germs in Switzerland. We got our train to Lausanne, changed trains to Montreux, which was fine although for some reason, the entire station looked completely different. The trouble with the second train was that it was packed full of skiers and snowboarders and although we hiked the entire length of the train, there was nowhere to sit, so in the end, we stood in between the carriages, where apparently my bag kept setting off the sensors which opened the door. The soldier standing behind me got very annoyed and eventually disappeared, or so I’m told. I think I’m completely innocent of this one. When we got to Montreux, we changed trains again. I’d looked at a map of the station early in the morning, so I knew platform 3 which we arrived on and platform 5 which we were leaving from were in fact opposite sides of the same piece of concrete. It didn’t look far on the map but it would take over an hour. We found that this was because it goes very steeply uphill through the local villages and stops everywhere.
We arrived at Chateau D’Oex (pronounced day)

just before ten and bought our tickets for the day (8CHF) and were each given a yellow tag to wear, which made us feel like we were being evacuated. We walked down through the town and into the showground. It was still early and there were only a handful of balloons blown up, which gave us a chance to watch how they’re blown up. First a big fan is used to get it full of cold air, while people run around pulling it in various directions on ropes. Then they fire the hot air into it and eventually, it starts floating upwards. The basket starts off on its side on the ground, but at this point, it begins to move, so people on one side pull it and people on the other push it and eventually it’s upright. There we were, surrounded by people from all over the world, real jetsetters, photographers, reporters etc and then Peedee spotted Miss Suisse in a balloon:

I don’t know what her name is, but there were lots of people taking photos of her. This is the fire:

You can really feel it when it goes off that close to you! By now there were about twenty balloons ready to go and some of them went. They fire lots and lots of hot air into the balloon, the short blue flames, not the big pretty yellow ones like that ^ and then the balloon begins to hover and then lots of people have to push it around to make sure it doesn’t start floating off in a random direction. Once the first one was up, the others quickly followed
As far as balloons went, the most exciting bit was over. We watched them until they were out of sight and then stood up on the field watching as one or two more balloons at a time were blown up and sent away.

Then there were a handful of odd-shaped balloons:

(here a clown, a mobile phone and half an orange)
We went into the big hall which I think used to be a barn, and had lunch. Jemma and Peedee had bread and vegetables and made sandwiches and I’d bought a baguette at the station before we left. Then suddenly Peedee said “Look, there’s a flying castle.”
I’d finished eating so I ran outside to take a photo and saw when I described at the time as “a tartan penguin lying on the ground.” Five minutes later, when I went back out again, it was in the air:

Not a penguin. I ran back inside, said “You have got to see what’s in the sky out there!” and ran back out again. It was surreal standing outside, among a crowd of people with this in front of me:

listening to “Amazing Grace” played on bagpipes over the loudspeaker. Really weird.
We’d intended to go up on one of the free balloon flights but there were no balloons, so we decided instead to go for a ride in a helicopter. It was 60CHF and between, we managed to make enough money. We bought the tickets, then went and stood in the snow in the queue. Peedee took a picture of me “with the ticket in my hand!”. I never figured out why it was so incredible or funny that I was holding the ticket. Jemma was doing exactly the same thing. I was scared – I’ve never been in a helicopter before. We got in and were still trying to figure out which seatbelts went where when suddenly we were wobbling into the air.

I didn’t take any photos while we were up there, although Peedee has photos and video. It was amazing, flying around over the mountains, seeing a frozen reservoir, going over into the next valley, trying to work out where I was from up high. Was I above Chateau D’Oex or was I somewhere completely different? The pilot was a master. All too soon we were landing, coming in far too fast, then going around in a circle before hovering slowly downwards into a perfect landing. It was noisy, but not deafening like I’d expected. We turned around to take photos of it as soon as we were out but it was already taking off to refuel and spraying us with pieces of snow and ice which were falling off it as it moved.
We were going to go and have a look around the village, since everything else seemed to have finished but as we were crossing the field, I heard something about parachutists, so we waited for that:

before going into the village. Everything was closed but up by the church we got a great view of the snow:

This is the showfield:

glistening with snow in the late afternoon sun. We went down the hill and had hot chocolate and vin chaud. This is what was opposite us:

The shutters kept randomly opening and shutting and they were very pretty when they were shut. A horse and sled went past:

and eventually we went back to the station and got the train back. We were going to stop in Montreux for a proper look but it was very cold, so we had a hot chocolate each in a bar (where there was the most gorgeous golden labrador puppy!). On the platform an American man asked Jemma why there were so many people with skis and snowboards, was there somewhere nearby to ski? Jemma didn’t know but apparently I know everything so he asked me and I explained about the mountains and villages behind the town, where the trains go. Then we were approached by an American girl and an English one who wanted to know which platform they needed to be on to go to “Egg”. I was baffled, then I realised they were saying Aigle which I guessed was the other side. The English one was very English. When I said it wasn’t this one because the train was going completely the opposite direction, she said “Oh, how awful!” in a very Eton-esque accent before they ran off to the other side like I guessed.
We got the next train out of Lausanne. Peedee bought a cup of some kind of herbal tea at the station while we were waiting and we were back in Neuchatel by 7.30. That’s a record.

This gorge is the most obscure trip we’ve done. I spotted it in a leaflet Jemma had in her room, and after a bit of work, found it where it was – the leaflet claimed it was in Neuchatel town centre which seemed weird. It’s actually only a couple of stops outside it actually. I was going to just go and do a finding-out trip while Jemma and Peedee did other stuff but in the end, Peedee wanted to come too. We met at about ten down in town, got something to eat, then got on our bus. The moment it was empty enough for us to find seats, we were at our stop. We had to follow a path past buildings, through car parks etc under the road, then I spotted the hotel. What I’d ben able to find out about the gorge was based around the hotel, such as the directions because they’re next door to each other. The first most obvious thing was a bit outside climbing wall. I have no idea what the rules are for using it because there’s no supervision, no one in charge or anything like that. Do we just turn up with ropes and harnesses? There was also a stone construction, for lack of a better word, which I climbed up inside and through various small tunnels and holes, not very high but high enough to be scared of coming down again. Then we went down to the gorge.
The first bit is a very icy platform with holes in it which you can see through, down to the water below, or in this case, ice. Then Peedee discovered some steps, so we went underneath and into what turned out to be the ruins of an old mill. The ceiling was decorated in little calcite straws, there were icicles on the wall and the ladder to get back out was very narrow and wobbly. We went up the steps onto the top of the gorge and walked above it, then down to a kind of beach. The shore was all frozen, in fact, half the river was frozen and it looked incredible.
This is just downstream from the beach:

From there, we could see the mill but the only way to get a good photo of it was to use the stepping stones above the frozen river:
and this is what I achieved:

We went back onto the planks, across the river and down the other side. From here, we could see a frozen waterfall:

going into a very green and very deep splashpool. Chunks of ice had broken off in little circle shapes and they were floating round and round in the water. Then the river narrowed down and went through a tunnel. We couldn’t get down there (well, we could if we went through the wire netting over the locked gate) but I looked closely at it and then I noticed something:

An absolutely massive icicle curtain, with a longer icicle at each end, like an enormous fang a little way inside the tunnel! We tried to get so many pictures of that but it was just too far in to get any clear ones. We followed the steps up and out of the gorge, hoping to find the other end of the tunnel. We went through more industrial places, through car parks, past where metal fences live when they’re not being put up to make pens for crowds, across some random train tracks, and eventually realised our path went right over the motorway and up the hilly bit of town on the other side. That didn’t look right at all, so we decided we would have to turn round and go back.
We went back to the hotel and then I discovered some icy stone stairs, which turned out to lead to another bit of gorge, in the other direction. This was probably my favourite bit.
There was a half-frozen waterfall, going into a windy pool, where one side was completely lined with icicles. Top to bottom:
Peedee made a few videos of it, we discovered that we couldn’t go any higher, and anyway, the gorge stopped there and turned into a calm if slightly icy river, so we went and had a look at the climbing wall instead before we made our way back to the main road. We went in Coop so I could get some chocolate to make some bus fare out of my 5 franc piece which the machine won’t accept, then we had to run because the bus appeared. My camera fell out of my pocket, but we did manage to get on in time. Three, maybe four, stops later we were at the top of the hilly shopping street in Neuchatel, so we jumped off there and went to a random bar for coffee and hot chocolate.

I think I’ve finally figured out which is French and which is German – Biel is German and Bienne is French. But they’re the same place and that’s where we went.
Jemma MSNd me at about 12, 12.30 to ask if I’d been shopping. No, I hadn’t, but yes, we could go today. We wanted to go to a Christmas market and considered Yverdon-les-Bains (too small), Montreux (wasn’t sure about the date) and finally settled on Biel/Bienne because Maite had told Jemma it was good for shopping, so we thought we could go there even if there wasn’t a market.
We got the big white shiny train as usual. Having been through Biel/Bienne on the way to Zurich, I decided it might be a bit under 45 minutes, so I was a bit surprised to be there after 15. The first thing we saw was a group of people in a circle outside the station, the second thing was a purple rope with all their bags. Then I saw what was round their necks and realised they were Scouts. We crossed the road and went shopping.
We decided to be ruthless – none of this “Oooh, I don’t know, I might come back later.” If we liked something, we would buy it. If we wondered what was in a shop, we would go and see. This led us to walking into a DIY shop, not believing the sign outside that said DIY in huge letters. The first proper shop we went in was the sort of shop that sells everything. Hats, toe socks, arm warmers, Christmas decorations, bedding, keyrings, hot water bottles, watches – you name it. We bought some bits and pieces and went off up to the road. Now I’m realising that it never occurred to me to look up. There were huge red pillars with snow piled around the bottom of them, but I have no idea what they were holding up.

Across the road was the start of the market. I thought it was a bit small, just a handful of stalls in a square. We had a look around, then we crossed the road on the other side to go shopping – and ran into more market.

It went on for miles. There was jewellery, wine, bizarre metal sculptures, New Age things and food everywhere. On every corner, there was another barbecue or wood fire or chestnut seller, or hotdog stall. The best one was a big square, covered in wood chippings, marquees and two big wooden poles, where they were handing out soup and tea and people were sitting on logs eating and drinking. The thing that interested me most though, were the poles. They were nearly the height of the buildings and one of them had a scruffy rope attached to it. On the ground next to the pole was a girl of about ten, having weird things strapped to her legs by two men. Then they put her in a full body harness which looked far too big for her, then they clipped the rope onto the back of the harness and she began to climb the poles. The things on her legs had three inch spikes attached and she used them and a loop of rope around the pole to climb, while one of the men held onto the other end of the rope on the ground. She got all the way to the top – which was when I noticed that the rope was only looped over the wires holding the poles up – and then she had to let go, hold her feet out and be lowered back to the ground.

We shopped forever. I found a Mammut jumper and was very tempted by it. This was the one time when I said “Oooh, I don’t know, I might come back later.” But I didn’t!
We outshopped the city. By the time we’d run out of shops, they were all closing. We ran back through the market to buy the vin chaud that Jemma had been “Oooh, I don’t know, I might come back later.”ing about and then got the train back. It took a bit longer this time, because it wasn’t the express train that only stops at the cities. It stopped about 20 times and it took about 35 minutes to get back.
Then in the evening, we went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We saw it Thursday night but we accidentally saw it at Studios in French. This time we got it right and saw it at Apollo in English and it was much better. Definitely go and see the original of things like this – that goes for Narnia too in a week or so. (We don’t get the big films until a week or two later here in Suisse Romande – German/Italian Switzerland do, it’s just French Switzerland)

Last Thursday we went to Peedee’s at about 7, and when we came out to take Carole to the bus at about 11.30ish, it had been snowing and it waas so cold! By morning, we had about ten inches of snow and it hasn’t gone away properly. Then this morning, I woke up to find it had been snowing all over again. We went to lessons and it was snowing. We came out of lessons and it was snowing. I took some washing downstairs, put it in the machine and went back to my room. Half an hour later, I brought it back upstairs. There was a blizzard. I went to town shopping. I got back and I could see the other side of the lake for the first time in days. Now it’s dark but it seems to have stopped snowing for now. Ok, no it hasn’t.

We had been planning to meet Peedee downstairs at 7 in the morning, so I set my alarm for 6, got up, got ready and went and sat downstairs. The train was leaving at 7.34. I waited and waited, looked at my watch and at 7.25, decided there was no way we would get there in time, so I went back to my room. Jemma was on MSN and told me that Peedee had texted her to ask if we could meet at 9 instead so she could sleep. Well, actually the text was written to me but it had gone to Jemma’s phone. The trouble was, if we met at 9, we’d have to get the 9.34 train which wouldn’t get to Zermatt until 1.30 and the last train left at 7.30, which would only leave us 6 hours there. I texted this to Peedee and she immediately got on a tram to meet us and we made the 8.34 train.
We got into Lausanne on platform 8 and ran to platform 3 for the train to Visp, via Montreux and Aigle. We had about 30 minutes in Visp, the first 10 of which we needed to find the train to Zermatt, then we went looking for toilets and food and missed our train because we were waiting for McDonalds. Visp is another nice little town and it felt a lot like a ski resort.

For some reason, most of the shops were closed – CH seems to have a three day weekend. Somewhere between McDonalds, the station and back to McDonalds, I managed to lose my gloves. I remembered eating my chips with bare hands, but I didn’t have a clue where I’d put the gloves. Jemma thought she remembered me putting them down on a wall and maybe I hadn’t picked them up again. I went back to the station, but there was no wall and no gloves. Eventually they turned up by the door at McDonalds.
We got the train to Zermatt -the Matterhorn Gotthardbahn, which went up the valley, sometimes above frightening gorges. Pieces of rock seemed to have fallen off the mountains along the way, massive chunks the size of a house sometimes.
I knew Zermatt had no cars in it, but I hadn’t realised how difficult it is to get to, considering its so famous. There were lots and lots of little electric golf-buggies which kept whizzing past us. It was all snowy but the sky was blue and the sun was blinding. We walked through the town towards the Matterhorn. This was our first view:

We spotted the gondolas going up the mountain and decided to go towards that, so we gave up following the footpath towards the mountain and crossed the bridge over the half-frozen river. The trouble was that the rest of the town seemed to be up on a bank above us and the only way to get up there was by a set of steps which ended up at a locked gate only for the use of hotel guests. We went back down the stairs and followed the path into the forest, around the end of the bank and hopefully up the other side.

That didn’t work either.
We went back to the other side of the river and walked down to the next bridge. On the other side of that was a big metal lift into the ski centre. We went up there and I was a bit surprised that we weren’t still inside a building when we got upstairs but by the side of the road in the main village, opposite the gondolas. We went in the little shop – I spotted ropes and couldn’t resist having a look – and I invested in some hot pads for hands and feet and a pair of polarising sunglasses. We looked at the mountain map. At the top there is an ice palace carved into the glacier but it was -21′ up there and anyway, the gondola up there had already stopped, so we settled for the Schwarzee, halfway up which was only -9′. We stopped briefly at the middle station to take photos of the town, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to the other side of the station, so we got back on and went up to the top.It was freezing – I was so glad I had the warmers. But it was spectacular. There were skiers everywhere. The sun was just about to set behind the mountain which made it a bit hard to take photos – I couldn’t see what I was getting. We could only stay about 10 minutes – it was so cold! We went back down to Zermatt – it had obviously got colder as it was now -9′ at the bottom.We went back down and across the river to the other part of town and had fondue. We were confused by the waitress who said we couldn’t sit until 5 o’clock (it was 4 at the time) and what did we want to eat? I think what she meant was that the table was reserved and if we were the ones who’d reserved it we were early or maybe that it wouldn’t be free until 5. Anway, we sat down at a different table and ordered fondue for Jemma and Peedee and a plate and fork for me, and “something with vodka” for Peedee, brandy for Jemma and hot chocolate for me and we had fondue. It came in an orange iron saucepan over a gas burner.
It was ok, but I don’t like foreign cheese so I only had two pieces. We had to leave our table by 5.30 because it was reserved for then, so with an hour until our train, we went outside into the cold and dark.We went into the station cafe and had another drink – a grand pression for Peedee, vin rouge for Jemma and more chocolate chaud for me, as usual, then we went into Co-op for beer and lip-gloss before getting the train. There was no view whatsoever on the way back because it was dark but we did talk to a couple of Texans who were over here skiing…
I thought we had about 20 minutes to wait in Visp, but it turned out to only be about ten minutes. We went back to Lausanne and as it was pretty early, we stopped there for basketball, air hockey and shooting.
Jemma and Peedee had their usual basketball competition – they seem to take it in turns to win, then five minutes before the 10.45 train left, they decided it was time to leave to get away from the men who wanted their phone numbers. We obviously missed that train, so we went to get a drink instead, but being paranoid about missing the last train, we got food and beer at the station shop and sat and waited on the platform before getting the last train back to Neuchatel. And as I was wearing my long coat, I had to pose Matrix-style with my sunglasses.

I had read about a cave. It isn’t put on maps, the idea being that people don’t know about it. But I found it and since we were thinking about what to do at the weekend, I thought we should go there.
Peedee was meant to meet me at about 6 but the first tram wouldn’t get her here until about 7, so we met then instead, walked up to the station, got the tickets and the bread and got on the train. It was another big shiny white one. I was a bit alarmed to see frost on the ground at the western end of Lake Neuchatel – if it’s snowy down here, hiking up in the mountains will be fun!
We had about two minutes to change trains at Lausanne and then when we got to Montreux, we had to find the platform for the cog railway. This was not easy. They don’t seem to like you using any platform other than platform one, so it took us about twenty minutes to get to the other side.
This train had weird seats. The ones facing forwards were normal, but the ones facing backwards tipped right back, so you don’t fall out of them when it starts going uphill. It felt really strange to sit on.
We chugged all the way up, zig-zagging up above Lac Leman on our right, the mountains on the other side were snow-capped, then we went through a tunnel and when we came out, the lake was on our left. I still haven’t figured out exactly how that happened!
We only had tickets to Glion, so we had to get out there to get the tickets for the next stage – except that there is no next stage in the winter except on Sundays. Annoying!! Still, at least we knew now and we had a beautiful view. It was still only 9 in the morning, after we’d spent so long on the train and the sun was only just appearing over the edge of the mountains.

We stayed up there taking photos of the view and of each other (Peedee’s digital camera arrived yesterday) for half an hour, until the train came back and we went back down to Montreux.

Peedee spotted Chateau de Chillon on a map and immediately wanted to go there, so we went looking for a bus stop, although we got distracted by some tiny wooden huts which I had to take photos of Peedee inside. We got the bus and arrived at Chillon. It’s where Lord Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon – this is the very dungeon where the prisoner was chained.

It’s a beautiful castle, I’m not entirely sure we saw all of it. There are rooms full of plates and weapons and armour – it almost feels like people are still living in it, not like Neuchatel Castle, which has been more or less converted into a conference centre.
We went back to Montreux and took the train back to Lausanne. I like this station – it has massive lockers that you can store everything in. I was carrying a lot of stuff, ready to go caving and it was good to leave it all. This time, we had an address for Media Markt and the woman at the station told us exactly how to get there. We took a bus to the end of the line, waited about forty-five minutes for another one to take us one stop to where we had to get the third bus, waited there ten minutes and finally ended up in a pretty little town. We walked down the back of it and straight onto the main roads. We had to cross them and walk down them, and then cross them a few more times, but we were finally there. They do not make it easy to get to. Anyway, we were finally here. I found a microphone – they don’t sell them anywhere else apparently, unless you’re willing to pay £70-100 for a stereo one. I also got a nice big card for my camera and some spare batteries for when one set just won’t last long enough. Peedee found a stereo with built-in DVD player, a card and bag for her camera and some other things which I’ve forgotten now, but when we went to pay, we found they don’t take any cards, except Post Cards (not the sort you write on, the yellow sort which come with Post Office accounts) and the cash machine was broken down. Peedee lent me the extra ten francs I needed,we left her stuff and went hunting for a machine.
Media Markt is on a big industrial estate and there are no machines. The man at MacDonalds said he thought there might be one at the station – not Lausanne main station, another one – but we had no idea where that was. Our last hope was a giant Coop – a shopping centre in fact. And they had one!
We got out Peedee’s money, bought her stuff and began the epic journey back to Lausanne. We walked back to the village and got our bus, changed at the next village and from there, we only needed to get one bus. We got dropped off at the top of the hill, so as we were walking down towards the station, I stopped in the little shop I saw last week and bought my knife. Then we left the shopping at the station and went out again, in hunt of house stuff. We looked in a few shops and she bought towels, pots, and stainless steel saucepans. We stopped at the same restaurant again to eat before coming back to the station. It had been a long day, our feet ached and we had a lot to carry. I’d had a lot to start with and now Peedee looked like she was moving house. We dragged the stuff onto the station and waited for our train.

This time we took Jemma with us. We started pretty early, got another shiny white train and off we went to Lausanne. The first problem we had was working out how to get out of the station – we went the wrong way at first. The station is right in the middle of the city – the shops were the other side of the road, up a hill. A steep hill. I went in a knife shop. There were knives all over the walls, all kinds of Swiss Army Knives, hunting knives, swords, clocks, cow-patterned cups etc. I looked at the knives and tried to decide which one I wanted. Then we went on up the hill. We stopped in all the funny little shops and Peedee bought incense sticks and looked at Buddhas and dragons. We spent a while just shopping, then we spotted a restaurant at the top of the hill, a sort of all-you-can eat place where you just pile your tray with whatever you feel like. Jemma and Peedee both got too much and couldn’t eat it all. Then we walked over to the cathedral. I got some very good photos in there. There were tombs all along the walls and floor at the back and I nearly fell over one of them and when I looked at it, a lot of people had obviously walked over it.

When we had finished there, we walked back to town and got on a bus in search of Media Markt. I had only a few clues as to its location. “It’s near the freeway, I think around here.” (pointing at top right part of map). So I made a wild guess and we got on a bus – going the wrong way. Luckily it was only going two or three more stops, then it went in a circle and went the right way. Obviously it was completely the wrong bus, but we did get to see some parts of Lausanne we wouldn’t have done otherwise.
We were back by 6ish to watch England v Argentina in one of the pubs. We met two other anglophones there, Sam from Leeds who sounded completely foreign, and Katie from Canada. They’re both working as au pairs around Lausanne. The waitress was American and when I spotted salt and vinegar crisps, she was so pleased to be able to make my evening that she gave them to me. Katie scored a point for Canada on the board by funneling a beer.
I’ve never really been interested in football, but it was very entertaining, especially when the players fell over – they do it so dramatically! And eventually we won, although it took a long time. Afterwards, we had to leave, Peedee had drunk too much. We went up the hill again and along the road, then decided to jump on a bus. When it reached the end of the line, the driver was confused and dumped us out, so I poied by the road for twenty minutes and Peedee put flowers in everyone’s hair and we got the next bus back. We got dropped off in the same place again so we walked down the road towards the station and soon encountered a very bright green light. It was a bit scary, it looked like a man crouching by the road holding a very powerful torch. When we got closer…

We looked for somewhere for another drink and came across an arcade instead. Peedee was over the moon to find basketball and she played. Then Jemma challenged her. Peedee accepted… in her words from her blog.. “Just looking at her and her girlie style I thought, oh yeah right princess..” and Jemma won.

They played several games and first one would win, then the other. We played a few games of air hockey too. It’s meant to be for four players, but it works very well for two players two handed. Then Peedee went on the shooting games and I tried driving. It’s hard – I still can’t drive video cars but I was beginning to get the hang of it. The gears feel really different from a real car, but I’m not driving any automatic, even if it’s not real! When we’d all run out of tokens, we went back to the station and came home. Jemma went to bed and me and Peedee played computers for a while before we went to sleep too.