Flying over the Swiss Alps

Jess and I reluctantly left Grindelwald and took the train down the mountain to Interlacken. The hostel was the worst one we've stayed in so far, ok maybe not as bad as the one with the dead bugs. It's called Balmers and is clean enough and has a big kitchen, both very important. But it had so many rules that I heard more than a few people comment it felt more like a boarding school than a hostel in the Swiss Alps. But I won't dwindle on that.

While in Interlacken, I finally got the opportunity to get outdoors, but not in the way I had originally planned. I went hang gliding right off the side of a mountain. The instructor picked me up at my hostel and I think he was a little nervous when he saw my crutches, but after I did a few acrobatics for him he was satisfied that I would be ok. We drove up a nearby mountain for about 20 minutes, and stopped three quarters of the way up. We walked a little ways across a field until we came to a clearing. There were other hang gliders and paragliders taking off from there, so we got in line and waited for the wind to shift directions. We were harnessed in and with a few running steps we glided off the mountain. The instructor held the front bar and steered and I hung above him enjoying the ride. I thought while we were flying about how I would decribe it. When you look up at a bird circling above and think, "Wouldn't that be amazing to fly." That's how I felt. Like I had finally been given the opportunity to fly above the city and mountains from the point of view of a bird. It was very surreal.

The next day we took four different trains to reach Venice. On our third one the train stopped in a tunnel for over an hour because there were problems with train navigation functions all over the area. The couple seated directly across from us was Maria from Italy and her Swiss boyfriend. They had met in Sudan where they both worked for the Red Cross, Maria as a doctor and her boyfriend as an architect. They spent over a year working in Sudan and seeing first hand the atrocities of the genocide going on there today. They had just recently returned and Maria was going to Italy to visit her family. So her boyfriend took the train most of the way with her and then went back to Switzerland, just so they could spend the afternoon together. They were so adorable together and he kept saying what a wonderful doctor she was at the hospital in Sudan. Maria had me turn my ankle in different directions and she said she was pretty sure it would heal fine once I could finally rest it. Maria was the second doctor to look at my foot, excluding the Greek one. The other was a Japanese orthopedic surgeon on the top of the mountain in Switzerland. With the language barrier though it was a bit hard to understand the diagnosis.

I've got to leave now to catch my overnight bus to Prague, but I'll finish tomorrow!